"Death by Lightning" on #netflix is really good... This 4-part miniseries charts the parallel lives of James A. Garfield and the mentally unbalanced man who would assassinate him after only a few months in office in 1881. Really interesting portrait of a US government that was, at the time, plagued by corruption due to the fact that the majority of Federal revenue was from tariffs... Also, to quote the #mst3k joke structure... don't miss Nick Offerman AS Ron Swanson AS Chester A. Arthur 😁

> This explains much of the drive to transform Facebook from a platform that shows you the things your friends post to a platform that mostly shows you things that "content creators" post. Your friends aren't motivated by the dangling possibility of viral dollars if they get you to "engage" with their posts, but for content creators, your engagement buys the groceries and pays the rent. By swapping out your friends and replacing them with people who are highly motivated to "engage" with you, Zuck gets a lever he can yank to get his users to arrange their conduct in ways that goose his growth.

Pluralistic: Social media without socializing (19 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

TFW when we made it through the whole weekend without the Emperor deploying his Sadaukar Legion to either Greenland OR Minnesota 🙂‍↕️

OK crazy theory but hear me out: Greenland push is about alien tech. (See below)

#nostr Web client gripe: Don't create some "curated" section for users. (A) it's a black box algorithm and (B) there isn't enough content on Nostr anyways to have a "sports" section or whatever you're trying to do with it. You know who you are... Just give me (a) a following feed and (b) the ability to compose lists of npubs and/or topics. That's much easier and much more powerful at the end of the day than whatever you're trying to do with your "curated" or "for you" sections...