Good Posts - 2025-10-07
Bit late with this one - would love to give an elaborate excuse but tbh I've just been struggling with focus lately. Work is a little funny and I have a bunch of logistics to plan for some upcoming breaks, so my avoidance is extremely high. Better Tuesday than never, though!
Posts
Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation - Thom Holwerda (OSNews)
Thom's recounting of events here is so darkly funny and relatable. He perhaps foreshadows a little too clearly, but the outcome is just such Microsoft Design™ that it's hard to be truly surprised anyway.
Retro Debacle - Retro Heart
A great summary of the nonsense going over at Retro Achievements - a website/platform for adding achievements to pre-internet games to give them some renewed replay value and interest. RH goes into some real detail about how the site is structured, their own dealings with it, and how this kind of inevitably led to the tacit acceptance of racist troll media by the moderators.
Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause - Ta-Nehisi Coates (Vanity Fair)
Coates is just very readable and to the point. He gets straight to the heart of the devastatingly weak response to Kirk's shooting from the liberal media, clearly incapable of honestly assessing the life's work of a bigot who died badly. The article is substantially Kirk's own words and paints him in a terrible light.
Distinct Food Triggers for Migraine, Medication Overuse Headache and Irritable Bowel Syndrome
SO IT TURNS OUT RED GRAPES INTERACT BADLY WITH IBS. THAT EXPLAINS SOME RECENT STUFF.
Anyway between that and the vast list of foods shown in the absolutely unreadable Migraine and IBS network charts (fig 3.a and 3.c) gives me something to work with. They align pretty well with what I intuitively felt already, so it might be of use to you if you have either issue?
Videos
Charlie Kirk and the Empathy Paradox - Rebecca Watson
The first of two videos that I consider kind of the definitive takes on the discourse following the assassination of Charlie Kirk alongside Coates' article linked above. Rebecca covers the attempts by right-wing and centrist media to cast Kirk as a political "good actor" (as Coates does) and pushes back at the hand-wringing over observation that his advocacy for gun violence is directly linked to how he died.
The Assassination of Charlie Kirk - Misinformation as it Happened - Sophie From Mars
The second of those videos. Sophie focuses on the general practice of people on social media of all political bents jumping quickly to misinformed conclusions and spreading that kneejerk misinformation.
The War on Science - Shaun
Shaun YouTube remains the GOAT of methodically dismantling lazy rhetoric, but good grief this whole thing is embarrassing. I went into more detail on some of the points around this video in my post about New Atheists last week, but the whole book just reeks of a sinking ship. Good riddance to these losers.