Nuclear Monster

  • Keycap aesthetics and ergonomics are so incredibly subjective, but my absolute favorite are MiTo’s SA Laser set and they’re finally up for order again on drop. The color scheme is very bold, but I fell in love with the mix the first time I saw it and that’s what got me into really custom mechanical keyboards. The SA keycaps feel great to me, though they are tall, and it can be difficult to find a board that really compliments this color scheme.

    Like most custom keycaps, the SA Laser keycaps are sold in the “group buy” format where you’re pre-ordering them before they are made. They’re at a special pre-order price for the first 30 days of the group buy. Drop and MiTo have a history of delivering quality, so I am not concerned about recommending them for that reason but it is important to keep in mind that there have been massive delays to all production so the expected shipping date for these isn’t for over a year in March 2022 which is hopefully just building a lot of slack in.

    The good news for MiTo’s sets is that he has been working towards making them more available on an in-stock basis, but I suspect that has been hampered by the pandemic as well.

  • Last year I was happy to receive a gifted subscription to The Athletic, a subscription-based sports outlet. It has some fine writers. Now they’ve partnered with a sports gambling company, BetMGM. Nando Di Fino:

    From the day we started the fantasy sports section, I’ve gotten one question, repeatedly:
    “Why Chris Vaccaro?”
    But a close second is, “When is The Athletic going to get into sports betting?”
    My friends, the answer is … “today.”

    You might think that just means they’ll provide coverage targeted towards gambling, but no, it’s worse:

    As you may have seen pretty much everywhere, we’ve partnered with BetMGM. This was not, by any means, a short process — I think it’s been about eight months in the making. I want to assure you that your overall experience on The Athletic will mostly remain unchanged. And in most cases, it’ll get much better and deliver way more value.

    […]

    So whether you want to tinker with our models before you place a sizeable wager, read some columns and simply enjoy the insights because it makes you a smarter fan, or maybe you’re like me and want to try a $3 longshot parlay across a few sports that will pay back $213.10 — we’re here for you. And we’ll be here in the comment sections for your feedback, questions, concerns, or general razzing of bad advice. (Try as we might to avoid it, there will be bad advice. That I can promise.)

    I don’t doubt that most, if not the majority, of money that funds publishing is corrupt because it is impossible to earn a dollar under capitalism without stepping on someone else, but it is difficult to imagine a more brazen hijacking of the process of reporting than explicitly joining, and thus foisting your readers directly into, gambling.

    Incredible but maybe not entirely surprising for an outfit that was originally born out of the notoriously libertarian Y Combinator start-up program.

    I’m very curious what writers for The Athletic who aren’t making bank on this deal think about the situation.

  • Toho looks to be doing for Ultraman what it did for Godzilla and I could not be more excited. Shin Ultraman is coming out in Japan early this summer.

  • One of my favorite things to watch is other people dealing with problems. They can be out of this world science-fiction problems or they can be terrestrial problems and All is Lost is more of the latter. Robert Redford plays an unnamed (“Our Man” in the credits) sailor on a solo sailing voyage. Unfortunately everything goes wrong. 

    The hull gets a big hole. 
    Our Man’s patch job kinda works? 
    He hits his head.
    The supplies are running low.
    …and on and on.

    This is a beautiful struggle and there isn’t much else to say. Redford does a terrific job in the role, and it is truly painful to watch him struggle to get out of the situation. 

    Perhaps then the question is: Who gets to sail? Our Man’s boat isn’t the fanciest ship, but maintenance is clearly expensive, as are other fees, and Redford’s character could easily be a millionaire on his little voyage out of his element, but he clearly seems to know what he is doing.

    I’ll never be rich enough to sail like this, unless some stroke of luck changes things, and I’m not sure I’d want to. So maybe this is a kind of voyage-fiction. It is alien to imagine myself on a boat at sea.

    If I had to compare All Is Lost, it’d be to The Martian, but without anyone backing the protagonist up, it’s almost more dangerous to be on the open ocean than on Mars.

    In that we can thank Redford for pretending to go out to the open sea so we don’t, and I sure wouldn’t want to after watching his struggles.

    Rating: 4 out of 5.

  • (content warning: the death penalty)

    ProPublica’s Isaac Arnsdorf on how the murder factory at the combination White House/Justice Department that Trump and Barr are operating is hurrying through as many murders as it can before Biden takes over the murder factory and moves operations more exclusively overseas:

    The Justice Department has killed 10 people since July, with three more executions scheduled before Biden’s inauguration. Most every federal agency is rushing to wrap up unfinished business, cementing policy objectives in ways that will make them harder for the incoming president to unwind. But the Justice Department’s pressing forward with executions, even after the election of a new president who opposes them, is uniquely irreversible.

    This article goes into much more detail about what the government is using to kill, who is doing the murder for cash, and gives us details about the career staff that support the death penalty but as with all bad news lately, and if you’re like me and don’t get Trump’s emails you’ll find out this also serves to partially fulfill our national embarrassment’s ego and campaign.

    The murders and other violence at the Capitol took over the news, and some Republicans may well be done with our national embarrassment over that and because there isn’t any functional process today that let them proceed with overturning the results of the election, but this kind of murder that is legally justified by a crooked set of Supreme Court Justices rushed through before a change in power is essential to the operation of the Republican party.