Yay! [DOT 24/3/23]

24/3/23 MegMegMcGee 36

Hope you’re having a great week. Sorry today’s DOT is a little tweet heavy; I was super busy yesterday.
Feel free to fill out the DOT in the comments…

Well this could be interesting!

Thanks I hate it

Sprots!

Best time of year to come see me! I’m taking my friends on a pedicab tour next Friday; hoping there’s still some blossoms!

Washington’s cherry blossoms are in peak bloom
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/23/cherry-blossoms-peak-bloom-dc/

I thought this was fun and interesting:
Henry Rollins: ‘I wouldn’t go back on stage with a band for anything’
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/mar/23/henry-rollins-i-wouldnt-go-back-on-stage-with-a-band-for-anything

Cute?

Have a great day!

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36 Comments

  1. Jeff Thomas’s death received a lot of local coverage, and I didn’t understand why, since he was LA-based and met his end in Miami. A brother almost immediately issued a statement saying he was having addiction and emotional issues. Others said he was perfectly content and at least one speculated that he might have died while taking a selfie. Now we must ask ourselves, “How many of these friends and family members got Trump-level sums of hush money from Peter Thiel to create this fog of uncertainty around a death which, while tragic and somewhat unusual, really would have otherwise passed without notice?”

    In unrelated news, high culture is thriving in New York, as the arrival of this traveling exhibition will attest:

    https://museumoffailure.com/

    Google glass! Remember that?

  2. Correct me if I am wrong (quite often) but tiktok is no more of an issue than Facebook or Instagram, in that they track information to make money. Are they not making a villain out of TikTok because it is from China?

    • My understanding (which is limited) is that TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is based in Beijing, and that the Chinese government has certain…requirements for companies doing business in China.  So, there’s a level of paranoia that TikTok user info can simply be collected by the government.

      Now, for my part, I’m not a social media user in general, and I sure as shit wouldn’t use TikTok just based on knowing how much actual information the app collects on its users.  I’m not worried about the Chinese government–I just don’t want these fuckers at Bytedance making money off of my data, and opening me up to fucktons of spam.

  3. I saw Rollins once and he must have some kind of Mr. Hyde thing going on when he gets on stage.  This girl was crowd surfing and got dumped on the stage and he kicked the snot out of her.

  5. When I went to my parents’ house this past Sunday, my mom commented that my sister was taking a business trip to Bethesda, Maryland, and I was vaguely jealous because I’d love to hang out.

      • Hell, I still have my SmarTrip card from the two visits that I’ve made to (what I finally sussed out that people were talking about when they talked about) the DMV, and the public transit obsessive in me recalls that I can take the MARC train from BWI to Union Station in DC and then hit the Red Line ’til I get up there. That’s at least doable in theory, right?

        (And not to leave Dear Cousin out of this, because I’ve pondered taking the M60 bus from LaGuardia and then the 6 train from 125th Street for similar purposes.)

        • How thoughtful! You’re always welcome. I live on the west side so you will be spared the 6 train, which is my least favorite of all of New York’s 29 or 33 or however many subway lines there are. It’s way too crowded and freaky, despite serving, somewhat, the easternmost Upper East Side. It always has been, at least since I moved here during the La Guardia administration.

  10. soooo…whats your take on this one then?

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/23/utah-social-media-access-law-minors

    i mean… not allowing without the parents consent…and forcing a block  between 10:30pm and 6:30 pm

    i can see some merit to that….

    but you lost me at the and parents will be able to see all messages and private messages tho….i mean…i get wanting that shit for the very youngest…but man…. over..like…twelve?….thats a huge invasion of privacy

    • I think it’s great that parents have access. But that power has to be coupled with trust and a spoken agreement… Like I promise to never look at your msgs without letting you know and without just cause. My eldest is 5. I’ll let you know how that plays out in seven years from now.

      • when ours was 10 and got her ipad for school.. we had an agreement with her that we also got the pincode and full access

        we never actually used it… beyond checking the pincode still worked

        one day she changed it on us…. so she got into a load of shit for breaking the agreement

        no idea what she was hiding…dont care

        figure by then she was probably just bashing us…but rules is rules

        cant really do much but hope we raised them right

        the access was never more than a make em think twice thing

          • im fine with the parental controls…but i think having access to everything should stop once they hit their teens… i mean… exactly when they become independent little humans in need of their own little private space to rant and rave and be who they want to be without parental oversight is up for debate i guess…

            but it is well before 18

            granted… the interwebs is a little more dangerous than the private diary of old…. but its our job to prepare them for that…not police them…no?

    • …I think I’m with hammerzeitgeist on this, more or less

      …it’s pretty clear we’re rather imperfectly navigating out way towards understanding this stuff at what you might call an etiquette level…but for the function to be available seems like a legitimate ask?

      …kids are plenty different…but in some cases I can see a case I’d have a hard time denying in terms of what might seem way over the line in principle?

      …I never had to deal with a severe eating disorder directly…but I know a family with a daughter who’s well past 12 but has such severe issues with food that it’s distorted their whole life…not to mention put it at severe risk…at one point they were told the only recourse they have since she’s old enough to refuse treatment is to allow things to get so bad she passes out & parental consent is sufficient to resuscitate her…I know these folks & I can still barely imagine what that is to contend with

      …& I’m familiar with the pernicious effect social media in concert with a variety of algorithms can have on young girls…if they’d had that kind of access when she was younger they might not have been able to avert all of what brought them to the place they find themselves but they might at least have been able to intervene earlier…when things would potentially have been more tractable…less entrenched…& saved all concerned a lot of heartache

      …it’s clearly at risk of being abused…& I don’t know that (to take a recent extreme example) that a household which allowed their 6yr old to end up shooting a teacher is going to be one that could navigate that line…but in a world where older kids have been known to take out their frustrations by taking guns to school…I’m back to finding it hard not to see the argument for that being something available to parents?

      …I guess ideally I imagine it might work on a similar principle to a panopticon…it’s not that there is constant surveillance…it’s that at any given time things could be observed…which would hopefully keep the kid in question a little nearer to the straight & narrow without stripping them of privacy in the general scheme of things?

      …in that respect it isn’t so different from parental controls for other stuff…like youtube having a kids app…or being able to fence off what can be accessed on various devices to keep things age-appropriate…& I’m inclined to think something along the lines of training wheels for the internet & such is probably something it would be helpful to a lot of parents & kids to have

      …whether this specific proposal would actually do that stuff…as opposed to give a different sort of parent an ability to make life hell for a non-cis &/or non-hetero kid…or one that found themselves in need of an abortion…is maybe a whole other bunch of difficult questions?

        • …I think you’re right…in the vast majority of cases…the family I mentioned is what I’d think of as an edge case…though I can’t help thinking from some of the stuff I read about teens & the post-lockdown era perhaps not as rare as I’d wish it to be…& I could see the right/ability to retain a different sort of access…or something like a power of attorney for consent stuff…might be a thing it would be good for those in those sorts of circumstances to be able to call on

          …whereas if you don’t have any of that on your plate then you’d probably be content to step further back sooner…I know a fair few kids who are more than savvy enough that I wouldn’t worry about what they’re up to being any worse than what we were at their age

          …less in some ways…this pics or it didn’t happen thing broke in our favor, the way I see it…in a landlines-only world parents had to find you first…& that omertà business had nothing on the no-snitching stance I remember the kids “in my day” practicing?

          • there is no perfect solution here….every kid is different..every situation is different… you really cant make a law that doesnt somehow work out badly for some

            on the average tho…..i lean towards they need their privacy

            • …very much with you on that part…the trouble with some of this stuff is that it’s hard not to want to make things better for the extreme cases…but legislating based on edge cases is almost always a recipe for shitty laws

              …if I had the answer to that one I imagine I’d be in enough demand to not have time to spare for shooting the breeze with you fine folks, though

              …swings & roundabouts & all that?

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