Jason Pettus @jasonpettus@mastodon.cloud

#introduction

Indie-lit veteran and former owner of a small press, now a freelance book editor for self-publishing authors.

Web veteran (first website was 1996) and hobbyist front-end developer, STILL grieving the demise of Geocities.

Fiftyish disabled (deaf) Generation X survivor, living in a Chicago co-op full of Woke twentysomethings who won't stop talking about Taylor Swift.

I'm on social media mostly to make snotty Tumblr-style jokes about things that piss me off. You've been warned!

Read my ★ review of the 2022 film "See How They Run," which wants to be a clever and metafictional murder mystery (set behind the scenes of a stage production of a murder mystery, get it?), but is instead plodding, obvious, treacly and terribly acted. UUUGGGHHH. https://boxd.it/3vqXml

#movie #film #review #seeHowTheyRun #1star #bad #terrible #treacly #boring

Never a dull day at Upwork

#TodayILearned that, similarly to how the beginning of a letter (like "Dear sir or madam") is called a "salutation," the end (such as "Regards" or "Sincerely") is known as a "valediction." Makes me curious to know why the former is still a commonly used term that most Americans know, while the latter has been almost completely forgotten. Maybe because of the extremely common conversational phrase "Greetings and salutations!"?

Another great piece by @ernie. One quote that really struck me here: When the Industrial Age transitioned to the Information Age, all those abandoned factories were eventually replaced with office skyscrapers. Now that the transition from the Information Age to the Digital Age is maturing, what will replace all those abandoned offices? https://midrange.tedium.co/issues/monday-hybrid-work-culture

I can always tell when the scam organization known as "Fiction Profits Academy" has "graduated" a new cohort (i.e. cashed their checks), because Upwork suddenly becomes flooded with posts from brand-new romance publishers looking for editors, saying the same exact thing in each ad and offering the same exact insulting rate of 0.3 cents per word. (I charge 1 cent per word, to give you a comparison.) I'm being forced to deal with a whole new group of them this week, which always bums me out.

Theoretically it sounds great that Robinhood has started offering IRAs, but is there even a single person on this planet who seriously believes Robinhood will still be around in another 40 years, when it's time to cash that IRA? https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/06/fintech-robinhood-banks-on-retirement/

A tough one today!

Framed #269
🎥 🟥 🟥 🟥 🟩 ⬛ ⬛

https://framed.wtf

Thinking a lot this week about how the 12-person original staff of the Dot Com-era company Pyra Labs ended up going on to found the world's first blogging software (Blogger), Flickr, Twitter, Slack, MetaFilter, Kinja and Medium, essentially a Web 2.0 foundational list; then once they were popular, sold all their companies to marketing-bro corporate assholes, and thus are also responsible for the downfall of the Web 2.0 era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyra_Labs

Read my ★★★★ review of the 2022 film "I'm Totally Fine," mostly a dreary indie dramedy about a young woman trying to process the unexpected death of her best friend, but endlessly elevated by an Oscar-worthy performance by Natalie Morales as a space alien who has taken on her friend's appearance and memories as a way of conducting field research on humans. https://boxd.it/3vfX1F

#review #movie #film #imTotallyFine #jillianBell #natalieMorales #indie #dramedy #4stars #oscar #performance

There's an exquisite, unique kind of pleasure in reading a movie review when you're high, downloading the movie from The Pirate Bay, then a week later completely forgetting what it was that inspired you to download it in the first place, allowing you to approach the movie from a place of complete ignorance and surprise. The latest example is "I'm Totally Fine," which I'm about to watch now. No spoilers, please! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZB43BPAfA

#TodayILearned that the recently passed Bob McGrath of Sesame Street (my favorite cast member as a kid, because I looked just like him back then) first gained fame as a featured singer with Mitch Miller, and that when the group toured Japan in the early '60s he became a teen idol there, leading to him recording nine albums that decade singing in phonetic Japanese. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/04/arts/television/bob-mcgrath-dead.html

Man, the amount of ink being spent on NASA's sad, pointless, obscenely expensive Artemis program is unbelievable. HEY, LOOK -- WE FLEW NEAR THE MOON! HEY, LOOK -- WE TOOK A PICTURE OF THE MOON! HEY, LOOK -- WE JUST SPENT $93 BILLION TO DO SOMETHING WE ALREADY DID 60 YEARS AGO! https://www.inverse.com/science/artemis-return-powered-flyby

Want to keep drinking gin cocktails through the winter? Try adding cranberries, smoking your martini glass with scotch, or sprinkling in some bitters. https://lifehacker.com/winterize-your-gin-cocktail-1849855357

Jesus Christ, I'm 53 years old, and only today did it occur to me for the very first time in my life that "airports" are like boat ports but for airplanes