If Twitter implements this, the few Twitter feeds I pay any attention to will be deleted from my bookmarks and I won’t go back there again.

An algorithm-tampered timeline is completely useless and is another concession to the moron contingent — the same ones who can’t stay off Facebook — and not something that I’ll find usable even as an observer (I do not and never will have a Twitter account myself).

Like Firefox, Twitter seems hellbent on destroying its one (in this case, small) advantage over other services.

Good luck to them with that.

For reference, this is how goddamn clueless the Twitter engineers are about their own product. Comically idiotic.

I dug up a copy of my high school transcript from 22 years ago.

Looking over it, it made me recall my English teacher in 11th grade who was an intellectual Lilliputian but presided over us like some sort of combination of Socrates and Dolores Umbridge.

Near the end of the first semester’s final grading period she and I got into a huge falling out over various things related to my supposed use of verboten materials in writing assignments (none of which was true — I just intimidated her intellectually) and other issues, and she told me in class and in front of everyone that no matter how well I performed or what I did, I’d never get more than an 85 in her class again.

I said, “Do I strike you as someone who is concerned with my grades? Did I really make that impression on you?”

Of course that didn’t help matters. But she kept her word; I never made above an 85 again in a grading period that she controlled:

Note the 87 on the final exam (she did not grade those so she couldn’t fudge them) and that I somehow got an 81 average despite 85, 85 and 85 and 87 actually averaging to an 86. That’s because she didn’t grade and report my exam, but she did report the final grade — so as some final slight, she reported it as an 81.

Normally I’d ace an English final exam but did the minimum possible on that one as I knew no matter what she’d destroy my grade so I spent about 10 minutes on that one and left. Still got an 87, so eh. Not bad for 10 minutes of work.

Damn, she was a terrible teacher. Yes, I was an arrogant prat but I was honestly interested in learning. That was what my crack about my grades was all about. And why I trashed her and the class leading to the result of “you shall pass, but only with an 85.” Because there was no learning going on in that classroom of any kind and I was angry and disappointed about it.

But she was a cloven-footed demon, truly, and there was nothing I could learn from her.

Light travels one foot a nanosecond, or thereabouts.

One day we should talk about how that places hard limits on computing. And why.

One day.

Where did this idea come from that every device and computer must have the same interface?

That sounds like prima facie a bad idea. Actually thinking about it deeply only makes it fare worse.

I know! I want to fly a 747 with the interface of a Yugo. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Why would I ever want to use a 27-inch monitor with a phone interface? It amazes me what some people think is tranformative that is really just fucking stupid.

Someone at work was listening to the radio today. I could barely hear it but an ad mentioned that they had an “authentic impersonator” of Michael Jackson.

Ah, Baudrillard, you should have been there.

What would be the difference, one wonders, between an authentic impersonator and an inauthentic one? And what then if the inauthentic one were closer in manner and affect to the real person but the public image as with Elvis had skewed so much that the mimic who was a veritable doppelgänger came to be perceived as inferior and bearing no likeness? (Yes, I know the story about Hemingway entering the Hemingway lookalike contest and losing.)

Anyway, I don’t know how to tell an inauthentic impersonator from an authentic one, that’s certain.

NSFW if you click the link below.

Never in all my days have I found the desire to lick a wall.

I think they have special schools for people who do that sort of thing.

Is that supposed to be sexy? All I can imagine is how bad it would taste and the 37 kinds of ebola I’d die from.

Still, you could say she’s wall-mounted.