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Things you should not think about if you want to enjoy “It Happened One Night,” a classic 1934 romcom starring Clark Gable as Peter Warne, a streetsmart newspaperman, and Claudette Colbert as Ellie Andrews, an heiress:

  • That time Ellie’s father slaps her in the face.
  • That time Peter spanks her (without permission or a safeword).
  • At least two references to men having to hit women to keep them from getting out of line.
  • No Asian or Black characters, except for one Black man who has two or three lines, which is actually a lot for a Golden Age Hollywood movie.
  • The oligarchy.

I did enjoy the movie, which we watched again Saturday. I enjoyed it a great deal. I’m just sayin.

Social media and other apps glue people to the screens using features derived from video slot machines in casinos, writes Michaeleen Doucleff at NPR.org.

“People struggling with gambling addiction often cite video slots as their game of choice, studies have found. Some people gamble on these machines for extraordinary periods of time, [NY anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll] found in her ethnographic fieldwork. They can play for 24 hours, even 48 hours straight. Some people even told Schüll that they wear adult diapers to the casino so they don’t have to stop gambling to use the restroom.”

Three of the features are solitude; bottomlessness, or the never-ending feed; speed — new content keeps coming at you fast; and teasing, where the feed never gives you quite what you’re looking for, but it comes close.

Another conflict roils the Middle East. A Marine warns that the war will come home

Travis Veillon at the Times of San Diego:

We just closed more than 20 years of fighting under the banner of the Global War on Terrorism. Nearly 7,000 American service members were killed. More than 50,000 were wounded in action. Those are the clean stats, the ones that fit nicely on a quick-moving chyron. They don’t capture the moments that stay with you.

I saw men in the dirt, covered in blood, watched friends die, and knew in real time that nothing about that moment would ever leave me. The news shows don’t capture the blown knees and backs that ache every winter, the blast-induced traumatic brain injuries that never fully heal, or the marriages that shattered under the strain

And they don’t tally the deaths that happen long after the war is supposed to be over.

At least 30,000 GWOT veterans have taken their own lives since 2001. I don’t see a number, I see people I knew. More than one from my own unit. That number dwarfs battlefield deaths, but barely registers in the conversation about starting the next campaign.

I’ve been a trade journalist for decades but I only have a vague idea what “go-to-market” strategy is. Whenever I hear the phrase, I visualize an anthropomorphic goose in a gingham dress with a wicker basket over her arm, going off to market to buy groceries.

I accidentally kicked the dog — we were in the kitchen and I did not see she was underfoot — so now I need to find a tall building and throw myself off it.

For me, Micro.blog is a good, but not great, hosting platform. I see Manton Reece, the proprietor of Micro.blog, focused on making the platform into a suite of products — RSS reader, note taker, book tracker, podcast platform, etc. — and I am not the customer for those products.

Micro.blog is a very small, gated community. I like the broader community of Mastodon and Bluesky.

And Micro.blog has a steady stream of trivial bugs and quirks that can sometimes make it difficult to post.

To use a syntactical trick that was popular recently in the internet: I’m not planning to migrate off Micro.blog, but I’m not not planning on it.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be an alternative to Micro.blog for easy personal blogging.