After WhatsApp’s threatened change to their terms of service, which may allow them to leak information to Facebook, many people are moving to Signal, a tool which purports to be more secure. If you want security which is not at least partly theatrical you should not use Signal.

Or: things you do to distract yourself from watching an attempted fascist coup.

Or: how many people will be needed to vaccinate enough people? How many people will keep on being needed?

Or: should you keep that tape?

It is the Abomination of Desolation, not seen by prophecy far off in some fabulous future, nor remembered from terrible ages by the aid of papyrus and stone, but fallen on our own century, on the homes of folk like ourselves: common things that we knew are become the relics of bygone days. It is our own time that has ended in blood and broken bricks.

Or: you can’t buy history, however much money you have.

Or, a theory about the mess we’re in.

In the old, more innocent days of the internet — the days when people naïvely assumed that nazis were figures from a dark past, fading slowly into history — people who were very pedantic about prescriptive rules of grammar were often called ‘grammar nazis’. We did not think, then, that grammar nazis might be unconsciously encouraging actual nazis. But I think they were, and are.

MIME, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, seems like a good idea: what’s not to like about being able to send arbitrary data by email? In 1996, when I wrote the below, I didn’t think it was.

Duplicacy is a backup tool. It may possibly have good uses, but if you are using it on a Mac it is probably not actually making backups.