This is some positively amazing reporting from an organization called Forensic Architecture: In 2020, a 60-year old woman named June Knightly was shot with five other female traffic safety volunteers by a right-wing extremist. They were preparing to protect a peaceful protest march in Portland, which was happening blocks away, when the man approached them and began a confrontation. The events leading up to the shooting, her death, and the terrible response by the Portland police and local news media are all recreated in a harrowing but exceptionally well-produced video, with interviews from most of the people who were there.
It’s important to note that all of the local media channels characterized the murder as “a confrontation between armed protestors and an armed homeowner,” all of which is not true: All of the women were unarmed and trying to de-escalate the situation; the shooter instigated the attack, was known to the FBI as an extremist dating back to 2006, and was renting an apartment down the street. He was shot by an armed bystander who arrived moments later and is now serving life in prison. He’s actually responsible for two murders that day: a second volunteer, who was paralyzed in the attack, requested to be taken off a ventilator and died in 2024.
Propaganda kills.
I set up another account for the Travelall on Instagram last night, wrote an entirely new post, picked a completely different picture, and added completely different links to the profile. It wouldn’t let me use the account name from my first try, so I used a slightly different one. I wrote a long description for my second post and put it up with a new picture this afternoon. Checking the account later, I got an ominous notice from the app that said they noticed suspicious activity on my account that may have come from a bot, or something. So I’m fully expecting to have the fucking thing shut down a second time.
I mean, fuck’s sake, I’m not selling meth or boner pills; I’m posting pictures of a rusty truck. What the hell?
I had the opportunity to buy a piece of hardware for the office that I’ve been looking at for a long time and figured I’d write up an initial review of it here. We’re on a Microsoft tech stack at work, and most of it works well enough. However, we’ve been fighting against Sharepoint’s inexplicable habit of corrupting media files larger than 1GB, which makes any kind of file sharing useless for my team. I’ve been a Dropbox advocate for as long as I remember, and I’ve threatened to quit if they took it away from my team. But Dropbox is a cloud-based service and relies on your local hard drive for local storage; when you have ~10TB of working video files, you can’t fit that all on a laptop.
Because my team is half-remote, I need to have a central local file server with media files available for people to check in and out when they get to the office, backed up to Dropbox seamlessly. So I bought a Synology Diskstation DS1522+, which is basically a box with four hard drive sleds and an operating system. With five 8TB drives the whole bundle came to about $2,300, which is not cheap, and which is why I don’t already have one of these sitting in the basement.
Setup was easy. I’m used to pulling/swapping hard drives, so the new units went into the box pretty quickly, and after I buttoned it up I found an out-of-the-way counter to hide it on with power and a network drop. Once it booted up I followed the quick start instructions to find a web interface and stepped through account creation and basic configuration of the box. Within about 10 minutes I had it formatting the drives into a hybrid RAID configuration, allowing for 2-drive fault tolerance and netting 20TB in total storage. It was easy to set up SMB and AFP services for sharing, build out user profiles, and add a cloud services package to connect to Dropbox. From there I set it up to sync with our huge video folder overnight.
This morning I logged into the box as a network drive and all of our stuff is right where it’s supposed to be. Instead of dealing with hours-long download times via the cloud, our files now take minutes via the local network, and it’s much easier to dump folders back to the local drive instead of uploading via a web browser and bogging down a working machine for hours at a time.
Overall I’m really impressed with it so far, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it over the next year to see how well it holds up. Eventually my ancient Mac Pro towers will need to be replaced, and a simple box like this looks like a great option. I’m glad to be able to test-drive it here.
Well, I suppose this was inevitable. Then She Did… was the song they were playing the other day when the show blew up, and I was thinking to myself as I watched the footage, “damn, that sounds good.” And then it got stuck in my head. Long ago, when the album first came out, I used to play along to the second side under the influence and this was one of my favorite grooves.
This is a reasonably good live recording from 1990 when the full band was still together and playing tight. What I would give to have seen them at their peak.
An article on a completely different website brought me to this one, and I could not have been happier last night. This is a reconstruction of the history of the Millennium Falcon, from the earliest days of Lucas’ scripts through Ralph McQuarrie’s original sketches, a pivot in the “Space Pirate” design after Space: 1999 hit TV in 1975, and the birth of the now iconic shape. The author sources multiple books, articles, websites, and photos to piece together how it evolved. I remember seeing some of these paintings over the years in different books and magazines, and now I know why they were different than what we saw on screen.
By all accounts, the recent Jane’s Addiction tour has been canceled after Perry Farrell attacked Dave Navarro in the middle of a song, and had to be dragged off the stage. Reading some first-hand accounts from fans who posted video of that show, the consensus is that the band sounded fantastic but he sounded like shit, was drinking heavily through the whole show, and was dropping verses in the middle of songs. His wife immediately went on social media to attack the band, and today they announced the tour was dead.
Having read about him and his treatment of the rest of the band I can’t say I’m surprised, but I’m bummed out for them. I would love nothing more than (and would, frankly, be more interested in) the three musicians touring together with a guest vocalist, just to hear them play live together.
Saturday morning I drove down to Lexington Park with the OG-V packed to the gunwales with tools; we’re in the middle of a long-term project at the FiL’s house to replace the garage door original to the house with a modern mechanized version. This began two weeks ago with the drywall project, and after we got the go-ahead from the installers, it was time to move to the next phase: moving the Chrysler out of the way.
When last I left the Chrysler, I was looking at the brake system. Because it had been parked in the garage with the emergency brake on, three of the four drums were frozen to the pads. I’d put the front passenger wheel up on a stand and commenced to whacking it with a sledgehammer, but couldn’t get it to release. This was after several heating and cooling cycles, and at the end I’d actually taken a chunk out of the edge of the drum. So I bought and brought a set of four heavy-duty wheel dollies on Saturday, figuring they would be better than nothing. After hoisting the broken door up and out of the way, I moved stuff around and swept around the car. I had all four wheels up on the dollies within an hour, and moved a bunch of stuff out of the way before breaking out the tow strap.
I was a little nervous about using the OG-V to pull with, but the Scout is down with some unknown leakage (more info on that to come) and the new CR-V doesn’t have a trailer hitch yet. I had Jen’s sister come out and keep an eye on things, and after a lot of starting and stopping we got it out of the garage and onto the uneven pavement where it began to jump off the dollies when they got bogged down in divots and sand. The Honda did fantastic pulling the heavy beast; I never should have doubted it. The Chrysler is now far enough away from the door that there should be room to make a mess without coming near it. Then we used leverage and gravity to move his other disabled car, the Escort, down to the bottom and up behind the Chrysler, leaving a wide lane on the left side.
Humorously, I brought a car cover I was using for the Travelall, which fits with room to spare. It will not fit the Chrysler. It’s not long enough. So I rigged it up with a tarp in back and a box in front (to keep the radio antenna from poking a hole in the cover). With that done, I moved everything in the front of the garage to the back, clearing out the space for the installers to do their thing, and closed the door. After taking care of some other housekeeping, I hit the road for home.
In two weeks, I’ve got to head back down with another car full of tools, put the Chrysler up on jack stands, and beat the shit out of the three bad drums with a sledgehammer. At this point I don’t care if they split in half; I need them off to free up the wheels, because the dollies will not work going back into the garage—it needs to be on its own wheels. Beyond that, I’m going to have to buy a winch and anchor it to the floor with some beefy bolts to get the car back inside.
They sound awesome, but good goddamn, we’re getting old.
Well, that was short-lived. After setting up a second Insta account for the Travelall, and having it deactivated for “violation of community guidelines” with no further explanation, I couldn’t find a way to either contest the deactivation or restart the account. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t get back into the account at all through Instagram’s backend, and it didn’t recognize my cellphone number as a valid cellphone number (?). This could be because I don’t share my cell number with Facebook, which owns Instagram. Maybe the robots decided I wasn’t me, even though they probably know more about me than I do. So I deleted the whole thing, and I’m going to try to build it again.
What is still unclear to me is why it was deactivated in the first place; neither of the images I shared there had appeared in my main feed, and the text in the description was new. Did someone flag my account? Did the robots decide I was a clone of myself? Have I pushed humanity one step closer to the Singularity? We will never know.
I’ve had the groove to How to Handle a Rope going through my head for the last four days. It’s a great groove—tons of low-end bass matched with a filthy guitar sound that’s perfect for driving a car very fast down a lonely stretch of highway. This tune was on my “Driving” playlist across multiple long-dead iPods back when we ripped our own CDs and made playlists. I miss this era of QotSA very much: guitar, drums and bass in a room thick with bong smoke and few fucks to give.