I rather enjoyed the Doctor Who Christmas special. Although I’m a bit behind on the latest season, I’m a big fan, and I knew I could watch the special without having seen the previous season. For me, the best part of the Christmas special is the episode within the special.

In the middle of the special, the Doctor is stuck in 2024 in a hotel room for a year and has to offer his services to Anita, the hotel manager. He’s working out a problem, but he’s also doing odd jobs and hanging out with Anita. It’s a lovely sequence where we see him sitting in one place and living out a life one day at a time. It’s been done before, but we don’t always see the “time.” It’s mostly presented abstractly when the Doctor has to live “normally.”

Surprisingly, we see the year unfold as he gets to know Anita better, learns what it’s like to live day to day, and enjoys his new friendship. When the year is up, he leaves Anita, which feels like the departure of a traditional Who companion. It was wonderful.

I would have loved just an episode of that chunk of the special. It could have really been fun as an expanded piece of timey-wimey-ness.

The holidays ring differently when you’re nearing your 60s, and everyone is sick but you, and you’re doing your best to hold down the fort. This is my 57th Christmas morning, from a toddler barely understanding what’s happening to today with a wife and family. Life comes at you real fast.

Sitting alone while everyone else is resting from the stomach flu, I wonder how many Christmas mornings I have left? 30? That looks weird when I write it down. 20 would be great, but who knows? Maybe it will only be 10. Maybe this was my last Christmas. That’s the adventure, right?

It’s dreary outside, but that’s all we got. I’m hoping for a good tomorrow, a good day after that, and as many good days as I can muster in a row.

It’s nice to have a little hope on Christmas.

JayByrd Films, which creates incredible drone videos, filmed a drone tour of the White House on Christmas Eve, documenting all the wonderful holiday decorations.

The drone footage was accompanied by a heartfelt Christmas greeting by President Joe Biden.

The holidays have always held a special place in our hearts, and we’ve loved opening the doors of the People’s House wider and wider each year, continuing the spirit of goodwill and gratitude.

It has been the honor of our lives to serve as your President and First Lady, and we wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. May our nation be blessed with the peace and light of the holiday season.

Take a long look. It will be more than four years before we have something as beautiful and elegant as this again.

This man hit the nail squarely on the head.

Regarding [@realDonaldTrump](https://micro.blog/realDonaldTrump):
"He understands not the rules of reality, but the rules of fiction. So for him there's no such thing as lying, because there's no such thing as the truth."

👇👇👇👇👇👇👇 pic.twitter.com/9sbv1qSEAm

— Gene Trevino (@GenoVeno73) December 23, 2024

Perfect encapsulation.

This website allows you to customize and create mazes in various shapes and sizes. I find maze puzzles to be a mindfulness practice and very soothing to get lost in.

The generated mazes can be exported as PNG, SVG, or PDF files. They are free to use in any non-commercial way.

Craig Calcaterra, writing at his site Cup of Coffee News, has a note on Ricky Henderson’s passing.

To say this is a massive loss is about as big an understatement as is possible. Henderson was the biggest and brightest star of his generation. There may not have been any player in history who was better at more things than Rickey Henderson was.

Henderson was, without question, the greatest leadoff hitter of all time and the greatest base-stealer of all time. He, arguably, possessed the greatest combination of power and speed of any player in the history of the game as well. Perhaps the best characterization of Henderson’s career came from Bill James who once wrote that, “if you could split Rickey Henderson in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.”

My favorite is Henderson’s speech after breaking Lou Brock’s stolen base record.

Brock was arguably my favorite baseball player growing up, really, until Ozzie Smith. I had this Brock poster when I was little. I wonder where it is now…

Seth Godin on tools –

Lousy tools are dangerous. They endanger our safety (physical or emotional) and undermine our work. Lousy tools are pretty easy to avoid, because they reveal themselves whenever we use them.

Great tools are magical. They multiply our effort, amplify the quality of our work and delight us, all at once.

It’s mediocre tools that we have to watch out for. They quietly and persistently corrupt our intent and force us to work harder on the parts that don’t matter as much.

Erik Stix verbally mashed together the inimitable words of “The Night Before Christmas” with the melody of the classic Cake song “The Distance”. The cadence of the poem worked very well with the half-spoken meter for which the band is famously known.

Funny.

Jason Kottke linked to the 25 most popular recipes published by NYT Cooking in 2024. Includes a link to the full top 50.

I’m going to have to pull some of these recipes for 2025.

Patrick Rhone on year-end wraps and the like –

You don’t need an algorithm to tell you what music moved you most this past year. I’m sure, if you took the time to think about it, you could fire off the same ten songs/artists/albums it can.

You don’t need an algorithm to tell you your top photos or moments. I’m sure you can go through your roll and chose a better reflection of what was really special about this year.

Any list you do yourself would be better than any algorithm as it would likely not be based on numbers or stats or engagement. Instead, your list would be based what you care enough to remember. How it made you feel. The algorithm can’t know what matters. The algorithm can’t give you the why.

The most anticipated superhero movie of 2025 is James Gunn’s Superman. This movie must succeed for the rest of Gunn’s new DCU to take off. Obviously, it’s just a teaser, but the style, tone, and joy of the DC universe come through.

I have heard that Gunn was greatly inspired by Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman and Mark Waid’s Birthright. Both of these stories are precisely the right narratives to use to create a Superman for the 21st century.

Also, do you want random people to connect with the movie? Put Krypto, the super dog, in the first few moments of the trailer. Brilliant.

Ed Zitron has written a tremendous manifesto railing against the tech industry. Carve out some time in your day to read the whole thing.

The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years.

Now, some of you may scoff at this a little — after all, you’re smart, you know about disinformation, you know about the tricks of these companies, and thus most people do, right?

Wrong! Most people don’t think about the things they’re doing at all and are just trying to get by in a society that increasingly demands we make more money to buy the same things, with our lives both interfered with and judged by social networks with aggressive algorithms that feed us more things based on what we’ll engage with, which might mean said things piss us off or actively radicalize us. They’re nagged by constant notifications — an average of 46 a day — some useful, some advertisements, like Apple telling us there’s a nailbiter college football game regardless of whether we’ve ever interacted with anything football related, or a Slack message saying you haven’t joined a group you were invited to yet, or Etsy letting you know that you can buy things for an upcoming holiday. It’s relentless, and the more time you invest in using a device, the more of these notifications you get, making you less likely to turn them off. After all, how well are you doing keeping your inbox clean? Oh what’s that? You get 25 emails a day, many of them from a company owned by William Sonoma?

As I understand it, people don’t really block ads or delete spam emails? This is madness.

He then goes into excruciating detail about his experienced with an $238 Acer computer.

On November 21, I purchased the bestselling laptop from Amazon — a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage (which is, and I’m simplifying here, though not by much, basicallyan SD card soldered to the computer’s motherboard. Affordable and under-powered, I’d consider this a fairly representative sample of how millions of people interact with the internet.

I believe it’s also a powerful illustration of the damage caused by the Rot Economy, and the abusive, exploitative way in which the tech industry treats people at scale.

It took 1 minute and 50 seconds from hitting the power button for the laptop to get to the setup screen. It took another minute and a half to connect and begin downloading updates, which took several more minutes. After that, I was faced with a licensing agreement where I agreed to binding arbitration to use Windows, a 24 second pause, and then got shown a screen of different “ways I could unlock my Microsoft experience,” with animations that shuddered and jerked violently.

Now, why do I know that? Because you’ll _never guess who’s a big fan of Windows S? That’s right, Prabhakar Raghavan, The Man Who Killed Google Search, who said that Microsoft’s Windows S “validated” Google’s approach to cheap laptops back when he was Vice President of Google’s G Suite (and three years before he became Head of Search).

To be clear, Windows Home in S Mode is one of the worst operating systems of all time. It is ugly, slow, and actively painful to use, and (unless you deactivate S Mode) locks you into Microsoft’s ecosystem. This man went on to ruin Google Search by the way. How does this man keep turning up? Is it because I say his name so much?

Throughout, the laptop’s cheap trackpad would miss every few clicks. At this point, I was forced to create a Microsoft account and to hand over my cellphone number — or another email address — to receive a code, or I wouldn’t be able to use the laptop. Each menu screen takes 3-5 seconds to load, and I’m asked to “customize my experience” with things like “personalized ads, tips and recommendations,” with every option turned on by default, then to sign up for another account, this time with Acer. At one point I am simply shown an ad for Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage product with a QR code to download it on my phone, and then I’m told that Windows has to download a few updates, which I assume are different to the last time it did that.

It has taken, at this point, around 20 minutes to get to this screen. It takes another 33 minutes for the updates to finish, and then another minute and 57 seconds to log in, at which point it pops up with a screen telling me to “set up my browser and discover the best of Windows,” including “finding the apps I love from the Microsoft Store” and the option to “create an AI-generated theme for your browser.” The laptop constantly struggles as I scroll through pages, the screen juddering, apps taking several seconds to load.

When I opened the start bar — ostensibly a place where you have apps you’d use — I saw some things that felt familiar, like Outlook, an email client that is not actually installed and requires you to download it, and an option for travel website Booking.com, along with a link to LinkedIn. One app, ClipChamp, was installed but immediately needed to be updated, which did not work when I hit “update,” forcing me to go to find the updates page, which showed me at least 40 different apps called things like “SweetLabs Inc.” I have no idea what any of this stuff is.

I type “sweetlabs” into the search bar, and it jankily interrupts into a menu that takes up a third of the screen, with half of that dedicated to “Mark Twain’s birthday,” two Mark Twain-related links, a “quiz of the day,” and four different games available for download.

The computer pauses slightly every time I type a letter. Every animation shudders. Even moving windows around feels painful. It is clunky, slow, it feels cheap, and the operating system — previously something I’d considered to be “the thing that operates the computer system” — is actively rotten, strewn with ads, sponsored content, suggested apps, and intrusive design choices that make the system slower and actively upset the user.

It is an incredibly long way of saying buying a $250 computer will result in you owning a shitty computer. I haven’t owned a non-Apple computer in so long I had no idea. A shitty Windows computer or a shitty Chromebook does nothing for me or really anyone.

Not to take away from his point, but if you can afford a $250 computer, just save a little more and get a refurbished or pre-owned MacBook Air for about the same price. It won’t have the latest technology or features, but it will be infinitely better than a Chromebook.

I believe billions of people are in active combat with their devices every day, swiping away notifications, dodging around intrusive apps, agreeing to privacy policies that they don’t understand, desperately trying to find where an option they used to use has been moved to because a product manager has decided that it needed to be somewhere else. I realize it’s tough to conceptualize because it’s so ubiquitous, but how much do you fight with your computer or smartphone every day? How many times does something break? How many times have you downloaded an app and found it didn’t really do the thing you wanted it to? How many times have you wanted to do something simple and found that it’s actually really annoying?

How much of your life is dodging digital debris, avoiding scams, ads, apps that demand permissions, and endless menu options that bury the simple things that you’re actually trying to do?

You are the victim of a con. You have spent years of your life explaining to yourself and others that “this is just how things are,” accepting conditions that are inherently exploitative and abusive. You are more than likely not deficient, stupid, or “behind the times,” and even if you are, there shouldn’t be multi-billion dollar enterprises that monetize your ignorance.

There has always been a business to exploit the naïve and stupid. There’s a sucker born every minute.

I don’t feel in “active combat” with my computer or my phone. I can turn off notifications. I’ve never had a computer “break.” I’ve downloaded apps that have micro-subscriptions attached that I didn’t want to opt-in and so I simple deleted the app. I have ad blocking software everywhere. I don’t experience this “trauma” that Zitron espouses.

Maybe I’m in a bubble?

“If you’re not paying for the product, then you’re the product,” is one of the most repeated quotes from the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. I fully understand this concept. Do you?

Tech companies and platforms only exist to make money. They continue to make the lives of those who participate in their platforms, who are too stupid, tired, naïve, or ignorant, terrible. Everything is bad because of obnoxious, vicious and malicious digital manipulation. It’s why the next four years in the United States and maybe the world is going to be objectively bad and why I’m actively pulling away from these platforms.

You probably should too.

Drew Magary, writing in his Funbag column for Defector, has some smart insight into how things are and why.

…growing up in the analog age meant that I was forced to interact directly with people to get what I wanted. If I wanted a pizza, I had to call the restaurant and talk to a teenage idiot manning the phone. If I wanted to hook up with a girl, I had to ask her out on a date (terrifying). If I wanted to bully someone, I had to physically pick them up and hang them on a door hook by their underwear. Not all of these interactions went smoothly, but that’s how you learn to be a social animal. You fuck up a face-to-face exchange, you learn from it, and then you handle the next exchange better. You don’t learn all of this in a straight, upward trajectory. This is because people are messy, so you have to learn how to deal with each person in your life a certain way. No one starts off a master schmoozer. That takes experience.

So what happens when tens of millions of people grow up with that experience reduced to a bare minimum? Well, you get a world where people don’t know how the fuck to talk to one another. Everyone you deal with is just a faceless Seamless driver, or a chatbot, or some stranger on social media whom you’ll never have to meet. You learn nothing from any of these interactions, which makes you a less capable socializer. This is no longer a generational issue. I now use food delivery apps, I’ve put randos on blast on social media, and I’d rather cut my arm off than take a voice call. If I don’t have to deal with another person, I won’t. And you know why? Because dealing with people is fucking hard. So millions of Americans, young and old, have skipped out on doing that work. It shows up in our electoral choices.

There’s no going back from this.

Will Leitch, writing on his Medium blog, talks about advice for your journalists. However, this bit about writing stuck out to me.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, when I told people I was a writer, they usually asked some variation of “how do you make a living at that?” But as I, and they, have hit our 40s, and our lives have played out, they’ve started saying something different. They pause for a second, and their eyes get a little dreamy, and they say some variation of, “Man, I always wanted to do something like that.” I always tell them they still can. And so can you. There is no greater feeling in the world than making something, than taking a blank page, or a fresh canvas, or an empty lot, or an unadorned room, and filling it with something that you made. It’s something you’ll never, ever regret. So go do it. Go make stuff. Make the world a little bit different because you were in it.

I need to figure out my stuff, but I’m getting there.

When most Americans think of “comic books” and “graphic novels,” they think of one of the two “major” publishers - Marvel and DC. But outside of manga (becoming by far the largest visual art segment in the US), Scholastic is the largest publisher of graphic novels - and it’s not even close.

And this revolution is in large part due to one man - Jeff Smith, and his determination to bring out his fantasy opus, Bone, on his own terms.

HT: Metafilter