Scripting News: Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Programming note: Fixed a bug in our nightly email service. If you've had trouble subscribing or unsubscribing please try again. #
My long-overdue review of Don't Look Up. I know people say it's a bad movie, but I love it so much and it's so incredibly watchable. I could watch the whole thing from beginning to end for the fifth time and still find it entertaining. So many good jokes, and it's got the best actors and acting and best of all Jennifer Lawrence is one of the stars, and she plays a very unlikely JL character, but then she can play any character. Here's she's a totally nerdy PhD student who gets a comet named after her. She has a boyfriend who dreams of being an influencer. They laugh at everything that's so stupid about our civilization, and its downfall, and near the end of the movie Leonardo gets the line that makes it so sad. We did have everything and we keep blowing it, over and over. We haven't evolved enough to use the greatness we inherited. #
Robert Eickmann: A Go implementation of RSS Chat — distributed social networking over RSS feeds, with real-time WebSocket updates.#
You only have one mortal body. There’s only so much one body can use. After a certain point you either realize this and adjust as best you can, or you make a big mess of everything.#
I didn't follow baseball this year, I couldn't get it up for the Mets while I was trying to process what the Knicks did for NY in June. The Mets did something like that in 1969, but they couldn't unite the city the same way the Knicks did, because the Mets have always been the second team in NY, sort of like MLB's apology to the city for moving our two National League teams, the Dodgers and Giants, to California. I never saw it that way, but my parents and grandparents probably did. I was too young to remember anything but the Mets, and they were my family's team, and that's the great thing about sports, your team is your chuch, it's a cultural heritage passed down through time. My family were National League fans. Anyway, for a while, the Mets winning in 1969 did unite the city. I was commuting to school in the Bronx at the time, the home borough of the Yankees, and man everyone was smiling on the subway after the Mets did the impossible deed. In Queens, Manhattan, even the Bronx. They were lovable because they were such losers, and it felt totally like an act of god, who after all must be in New York City. Lovable winners? That only lasts a while. #
- Today is the day we on the web remember Om Malik. September 29 is his birthday. Om died on June 24 at the ridiculous age of 59. #
- I knew Om for many years, he was an early blogger, a user of our software who stayed close, and gave us great advice about where to take it. #
- Later he helped found Automattic. Matt Mullenweg, founder of the company, says "All roads lead to Om." His story of Om, filled in a lot of pieces for me. We were even closer than I knew.#
- Om was a NY sports fan, he lived here many years ago, he was a Yankees fan, and I of course am a Mets fan. #
- Om and I got sick for the first time in a major way around the same time. I had bypass surgery in 2002, he had a heart attack in 2007. After recovery he visited me in Berkeley, and we went for a walk in the hills where I lived. Two veterans of tech who were so immersed the new life, and we were smokers, didn't eat well, didn't exercise enough, and worked too hard. We were both lucky that we had time to reflect on this, and that perhaps is the biggest thing we have in common. We got the disease early in life, in time for it to make a difference in how we live. #
- When I was thinking about what I wanted to write here today, I came across a short tweet he wrote in 2014. #
- "The obsessive coverage of Ello is less about Ello. Instead it really is about our growing dissatisfaction with the state of social networks."#
- Perfect, simple and true.#
- Today, the problem is much worse. The crisis Om explained in 2014 was real. Two years later we would elect a president on Twitter. Anything we could have done then or could do now, to add more human intelligence to the social networks, and that's something a writer like Om would be sensitive to, would give us a chance to organize without having to copy/paste the writing into a dozen different tiny little textboxes. #
- By 2014 it was obvious what we lost when we reduce writing to 140 characters, no editing, no titles, no links or MP3s. How could we capture the whole web in such a severely limited space. I used to joke on my blog about Microsoft wanting to lock us in the trunk in the 90s, and now here we were, in the teens having been locked in the trunk by Evan Williams, Fred Wilson and Jack Dorsey. These were supposed to be the good guys!#
- Ello was the thing that was meant to give us our freedom back. It didn't. But a lot of people who believed in the open power of the web wanted it to be.#
- We did elect Trump with social media, and the web had been turned into a burned out mess. That was the contribution of a tech industry that now is concerned that they might be the source of the end of our species. I would take that seriously. It's not just about this one thing, but the whole way it toxifies every good idea to emerge from creativity and broaden it so much that all you're left with is grunts and snorts. #
- All that is my way of saying what Om said. We're not happy with social media. That, to me, is still the big agenda item.#
- And thank you Om for sharing yourself and your ideas and observations, and good common sense with courage, and facing the future with both awe and fear and adding a balance to the mindless greed of tech.#
Linkblog items for the day
The fatal mistake that just blew up a decades-old Republican strategy.
alternet.org
We really did have everything, didn't we?
m.youtube.com
Bill Gates warns of ‘a billion’ deaths if AI goes wrong.
wapo.st
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