Look: I’m not going to claim I agree with him on everything. Though there are a satisfying number of "fuck"s.

But he does research so I don’t have to, and I enjoy that.

One thing Ed does is use my cadence, so it comes across as very natural. It’s kinda like how dogs sniff each other and feel comfortable.

He was right.

Yeah, a good writer will reduce things to this size of a sentence. Now, this requires skill … three random monosyllabic words and a period gets you nowhere. It’s a bit like comedy in that the setup is required for the punchline.

I mean, yeah, he sounds like he’s yelling at clouds, but he brings the receipts.

My ex had an uncle with exactly my voice. Cadence, accent, inflection … it was uncanny.

This was infuriating to me when I started college as a CS major. I dropped out after Intro because they weren’t giving us anything worth remembering.

I had no connection to him, nor do I truly care, but … really? Ferrari in the hed? Holy framing, Batman. A simple “car accident” would have acquitted itself just fine.

This is like the hyperdetailed “get the name of the dog” that a certain generation expected. Fluffy doesn’t matter, and neither does a Ferrari.

I’m going to disagree here. It must have two wheels. I get the reference, but you didn’t nail the landing.

Nah, the crosswalk ones are still worse.

The push to re-physicalize interfaces has even led to an unexpected side gig for Dr. Plotnick, the academic authority on buttons. Companies are tapping her to consult on how to improve their physical controls.

Well played.

It was my first reporting job. Yeah, at 44. And short of a few interviews, I was just rewriting shit.

I’ve been an editor for decades and have had to deal with plagiarism (thankfully, nothing too significant), so as a guardrail, it made sense. Editors approach writing with a far more critical eye than a recent J-school grad.

My god; they’re robbing us!

Honestly, I found value in asking an LLM to paraphrase press releases I was rewriting. It just saved me from accidentally plagiarizing. It was pretty grueling, as I quickly learned that feeding in a full story yields wildly inappropriate results, so I reverted to a graf at a time. Within that scope, one can check against errors; asking it to paraphrase entire DOE releases was worse than an abject failure.

It’s a tool. You aren’t using a hammer for a situation that calls for a screwdriver. People are being stupid about this basic understanding.

Popular? I mean, really? Quark wasn’t even popular, but at least you could get shit done with it. Then, of course, InDesign swooped in (Adobe gave us free copies at the 2003 SND conference … they weren’t fucking around with trying to change the software we used). But no one liked Quark to start, and it was expensive as fuck, so everyone was like “let’s switch to a different monopoly, as it will be better.”

What puzzles me is why MS made Publisher in the first place. It was less capable than fucking Aldus PageMaker, arrived at the wrong time and was never widely adopted. This is more like putting your dog down after it started running into walls.

Don’t geographyshame!

Inflation is a bitch. That’s tame compared to, say, beef.

I fully agree. Industry is simply not set up for a sustainable model in which price-conscious consumers can stay in the game.

To a certain extent, this is the equivalent of being shocked that Intel discontinued 386 production. Or that Google is no longer manufacturing Pixel 3s. It’s the nature of the industry.

That’s a wildly incomplete list. I guess if you’re out east, that might feel like a full list, but if you’ve ever lived somewhere with arroyos, you’ve never experienced brooks or runs. I mean, short of Mel Brooks and having diarrhea.

There’s an old joke about growing up in Phoenix: That one does not associate rivers or bridges with water.

Oh, that isn’t remotely why we had the baseball bat.

OK, I was really hoping someone would make this opening.

The paper in Port Angeles, Wash., is the Peninsula Daily News. They ran a special section decades ago with some … unfortunate folios. The whole thing ran with Penisnula Daily News.