The first ten on today’s playlist:

Remember to set your hard drive BBS priorities or you might find your SSD is dialing into the Farmer's Daughter BBS when you meant to be connecting to Software Creations BBS. pic.twitter.com/OQqx3Bl4oj

— foone (@Foone) April 29, 2022

The “Farmer’s Daughter BBS” produces barely any Google results at all, and none relevant on the first page of results if you search without quotes, but this BBS was extremely popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was a porn-sharing BBS. I dialed into it a few times, mainly to get things for friends who knew I was computer-savvy (they paid me for it). I had not heard or thought of that name in nearly 30 years.

In the course of searching for that, I found this book that looks interesting: The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media by Kevin Driscoll.

A few weeks ago, as the "new phase" was being discussed, I suggested we should look for a couple things happening in the east and south of Ukraine.

We're very early in that new phase & there are indicators those things are happening.

Let's review what we should see. 1/12

— Mark Hertling (@MarkHertling) April 29, 2022

Basically my assessment too, so no need to write it up separately. (And as usual, Mark is correct and Ian Welsh is wrong, wrong, wrong.)

Giving up ground to an enemy that is not well-led and not well-supplied but has a lot of firepower is exactly the right thing to do. That enemy cannot hold it even if they can take it.

Gonna be hard to care about 900 genders and if you’re “valid” or not after Putin nukes us.

So there’s that, at least.

Elon Musk is one of those people where hatred of or love for the person says far more about those doing the worshipping or the loathing than it does anything about Elon himself.

To me, he’s a dude that does some cool stuff sometimes and acts like a big baby half the time. I don’t love him or loathe him. He exists within the exploitative hypercapitalistic system we’ve allowed to fester here, so it’s not surprising he is mostly a product of that. Within that system, he’s better than others because he actually achieves real things in the world sometimes rather than just financial engineering.

I bet the primary animus by those who deeply hate him though is just anger that he does anything in the real world rather than fucking around with spreadsheets. That causes some true rage among the PMC type libs.

mar 2020, two worlds:

world 1: only comments, urging people not to get masks, spreading WHO misinfo

weirdos on twitter: worked tirelessly and has mass N95 production ready, understands information complexity

world 1 is the one that gets to head the Disinformation Board 🤡

— suzuha ⚡🌙 (@dystopiabreaker) April 28, 2022

Most of the tweets have been deleted now, and articles, but it was also fun when in February and early March of 2020, it was “racist” to social distance and wear masks.

Biggest problem with this Guardian piece and others promoting the idea of ending mil support for UKR and pushing them to make a deal with Putin is the idea that the West (as represented by views of ppl arguing for this) somehow knows better than UKR what’s in their best interest https://t.co/V6a0zQaAAN

— Dmitri Alperovitch (@DAlperovitch) April 28, 2022

Yeah. It’s fucking bizarre; the “lie back and think of England” approach to your country being destroyed.