By Endeavorance in News — Jan 8, 2024

I Am A Smug Newsletter Publisher

Substack is having trouble explaining why its okay to host Nazis. An airplane decided to express itself mid-flight. Tetris has finally been bested by human hands. The documents around Epstein's case have finally released.

Substack Doesn't Understand Why Nazis Are Bad

If you're not familiar, Substack is a popular newsletter hosting service. Stuff Keeps Happening does not use Substack thankfully, as they seem to be pretty confused about why people are so upset with Substack hosting Nazi newsletters.

Recently, Substack has been dealing with outcries from authors on their platform after basically saying "yeah I mean, Nazis seem pretty bad, but it would be uncouth for us to not let them spew their hatred on our platform," positioning themselves as an agnostic infrastructure provider. Or, said more plainly, positioning themselves to continue to profit off of disseminating Nazi rhetoric.

Substack is a paid newsletter platform, and they take a 10% cut from sales of newsletter subscriptions. They directly profit from the newsletters they host, and seem to think that "oh, well we wish they weren't so mean" is enough of an answer to "hey, why are you allowing Nazis to publish content on your platform?"

Going a bit further, Substack uses recommendation algorithms as most social platforms tend to do. Because of this, they go beyond "basic infrastructure" and into being a curator. Even while the infrastructure argument already falls short, that's not even what they are.

Anyway, if you use Substack, maybe don't do that anymore. Stuff Keeps Happening runs on Ghost, an open source newsletter publishing platform with managed and self-hosted options, while also not taking a 10% cut of your sales. You can even import your subscribers and existing paid subscriptions, because Ghost uses the same payment processing company (Stripe) to manage them.

I'm super looking forward to a day where I wake up without a headline about a tech CEO talking about how its a moral imperative to let Nazi's have a place to feel safe to spread violent hatred due to a fucked up sense of moral absolutism.

Airplanes, Am I Right?

I mean honestly you've probably already heard about this, but an Alaska Airlines flight had to make an emergency landing recently after a giant fucking hole was ripped in the side of the cabin.

Airplanes have things called "plug doors," which to my understanding are basically optional removable doors that come built in to airplanes but aren't necessarily used. When they're unused, they're supposed to just remain a part of the side of the aircraft, not… come off mid flight.

Thankfully nobody was dead-ified, though I would bet that most people aboard the craft would not particularly identify themselves as "doing well" right now.

The FAA has since grounded over 100 of the type of plane that had the malfunction, the always-in-headlines Boeing 737 MAX 9. You may recall a few years back where the 737 MAX airplanes just kinda… crashed themselves a few times before Boeing came out and was like "uh, oh, yeah we kinda fucked up the physics on this one." Boeing has had a steady decline in the quality of their products over the years as they have tuned their business to be more about maximizing profits rather than making capable machinery.

13 Year Old "Beats" Tetris

Alright so you can't really "beat" Tetris, right? Well, kinda. You can "beat" it by getting into a game state where the game breaks itself, crashing. Put simply, you can play Tetris in a very specific way that the code running the game gets all jumbled and just kinda kills itself, essentially marking a "victory" against the game.

Up until now, this has been theoretical, with only computers being able to accomplish it. But now, 13-year-old Willis Gibson has become the first human to make this happen after just two years of training.

Gibson saw some cool high level Tetris play on YouTube, said "oh, I wanna do that" and then TWO YEARS LATER set a world record and a world first.

I should play more Tetris, is what I think the takeaway is here.

The Epstein "List" Is Out

The documents known as Epstein's "List" are out, and to be clear, it is not a list of names of pedophiles. It is instead hundreds of court documents that have been unredacted. A name appearing in these documents doesn't necessarily indicate that they were absolutely at Epstein's island or whatever, as a lot of it is just court transcripts. So, anything at all that was said is in there, regardless of context.

That said, it is still pretty damning, and gives a lot more details about the gross shit that Prince Andrew was up to, as well as many mentions of the Clintons, and even the likes of the late Stephen Hawking, who had previously been implicated after being photographed on Epstein's island.

This is both a big deal and not really a big deal, but people are pouring over the docs to figure out exactly where on the "not a big deal" to "actually a big deal" spectrum this lies.

If you'd like to see for yourself, here ya go.

Here's a Challenge

If you're out and about today, keep an eye out for a really cool stick on the ground. Perhaps it'll make a great walking stick, or maybe it is just covered in knots and wild patterns from bugs chomping at it after it fell. Either way, get yourself a cool stick on this most 8th of January's.

Here's the Weather

Source: VentuSky