alluring heian courtesan

Deeply dispiriting post: testimony from a DOJ antitrust action reveals the entire book publishing industry is celebrity memoirs, established franchise authors like James Patterson, children's books, Bibles, and back catalogues (e.g. Lord of the Rings). Publishing new authors is not even a rounding error; you get the sense it's only done anymore out of a vague sense of obligation, and the moment one of the Big Five decides on the defect strategy, and stops doing that to save a few more bucks, it will end entirely.

It turns out taking good pictures with a Nice Camera is in fact quite hard. I took maybe 500 shots at Gas Works Park yesterday and-- in a totally coincidence that certainly means nothing whatsoever-- the only ones which came out looking at all good were the homoerotic ones of a shirtless guy who looked like Toguro from Yu Yu Hakusho doing handstand pushups on a railing.

In my continued descent into middle age I have purchased a Nice Camera, so expect this to become a photoblog for a bit while I convince myself it was not a waste of money.

I bet if I printed a bunch of “I can tolerate anything but the outgroup” stickers and put them on streetlights/phone poles in the CHAZziest parts of Seattle, I could bait The Stranger into writing an irritated column about it.

I got a promotion at my megacorp on the same day I re-encountered Sarah Constantin’s “Ra” egregore essay about the destructive chasing of legible rewards instead of actual goals, just so the universe could make sure I didn’t derive enough satisfaction from it.

Automated vulnerability scanners have their place, but they're kind of stupid because they can't understand context. Today one started yelling at us because it detected instances of piping curl to bash, and we're like "yeah, because the whole friggin' point of this product is to be a developer workspace, and that's what all the tools like npm install do now. Take it up with the world." But either for some corporate mandate or because of FIPS 140-2 compliance or whatever there's going to be a lengthy bunch of headaches to get that across.

Amazon has realized what's going on and has started putting pleated skirts with 39" waists in my recommendations.

— Lee Sandlin, Losing the War

Matt Levine just launched a new podcast and Christ I forgot how hot his voice is. It’s deep but also with a specifically-male vocal fry.

I'm feeling somewhat better, not 100% back to normal but better, so the Tumblr break (which has been leaking anyway) will probably officially end soon.