The big and scary news about the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, is that she died first, and suddenly, of hantavirus, which kills up to half the people it infects—often quickly. It’s bad shit—or from bad shit: from rodents. Hackman, who had advanced Alzheimer’s, died later of his wife’s absent care. Their poor dog died in the crate he was in when Betsy brought him back from the vet. The deaths of both Hackman and the pooch brings to mind what apparently befell the young male lead in the movie Ex Machina.
Sara Watson: “I believe more than ever we are approaching the Troy-is-falling moment.” Bonus Sara link: A People’s History of Tech.
I never had Facebook Messenger on my computer, just on my phone. But we’re buying stuff on Facebook Marketplace (which seems to have moved past Craigslist to become the Web’s classifieds section), and it will be handy to correspond with sellers on my computer and not just my phone. Gettng it going on the computer, however, was a fuckng ordeal. Natually, to start, Facebook required a password change, with pin codes sent to “your devices” or “your chat” that also failed to appear, far as I could tell, anywhere. Additionally confusing is that I made the huge mistake many years ago of adding a second Facebook account for David Searls, just for dealing with relatives and old friends who knew me before the world nicknamed me Doc. Confuses the shit out of both accounts. Also messing up the Doc Searls account was that I got it back in ’06 when Facebook was only for university folk, using a university address I haven’t had since 2010. I have another address associated with it, but that sometimes seems not to help. Anyway, that was just a half hour of my life, wasted. Okay, here’s a link, to Jamie Smith’s newsletter. Somewhere in there he says “Password reset is the new login.” Too true.
We save daylight tonight by losing an hour. Here in Indiana, where we should, and used to be, in the Central time zone, we are at the far western edge of Eastern, which means the Sun comes up in the afternoon. I’m only half kidding. It rises at 8:04 AM and sets at 7:48 PM. In other words, at 3:56 minutes before Noon, and 7:48 after noon.
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