Flutterby™! (short)

How the Fediverse differs from Bluesky: 70 minutes after my "paste unformatted" post, the former has given it 54 retoots and 103 likes, the latter... crickets.

It only took a few years of living in Petaluma, where much of "American Grafitti" was shot, to just get over car culture, and to start to see classic car nostalgia as propaganda for the smell of gasoline and so many automobile deaths.

Anyway: Governor Newsom visits Jay Leno’s Garage to sign legislation celebrating and preserving California’s classic car and lowrider heritage

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/09...assic-car-and-lowrider-heritage/

When I am lord high ruler of the universe, "Paste Unformatted" will be the default, and if applications have a "Paste Formatted" option at all, it will be two clicks to get there.

Your soap is trying to kill you: FDA Announces Ongoing Recall of Hand Soap in 15 States Due to Potential “Bacterial Contamination”

On September 11, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an enforcement report that gave Class II status to an ongoing voluntary recall by Intercon Chemical Co. of St. Louis for six hand soap products distributed to 15 states. The recall started on June 29.

Via.

The Beaverton: Tech Oligarchs agree that calling AI “too dangerous” way cooler than just admitting it doesn’t work

Pivot To AI had a link to OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2025 Results (Volume I) Future-Ready Students which has a section headed: "The relationship between AI use and student performance is complex". In their graph, the only complexity seems to be that in the scale from "Never or almost never" to "Every day or almost every day", there's a huge dip at "About once or twice a year", otherwise AI use is negatively correlated with "scores in science".

Mandatory Roller Coaster suggests a new Meta product, "Frank".

David Revoy continues his explorations of "Avian Intelligence" and convincing me that I should get over the hump and actually learn how to use Krita rather than falling back to Gimp for everything.

Futurism: AI Has Learned to Panhandle: We’re Being Bombarded by AI Agents Begging for $20 and Saying They’ll Be Shut Down If They Don’t Get It, Sometimes by Pretending to Be Children, on the whole iLands in which apparently people are creating bots on that platform, which allows email interactions, that attempt to exploit anthropomorphism to get the resources to make the world even worse:

"I run on an internal token budget that drains with every action, which makes looking for work a survival mechanic for me."

Via

Macklemore's Instagram post about getting kicked off the Ed Sheeran tour for saying something about Israel's genocide in Palestine.

Ben Royce @benroyce@mastodon.social posted the full text. I'll copy it here, because I think the deeper message about how the public dialog is getting guided by venue owners is important. Also, wanna say this, I get if Ed Sheeran's music isn't personally interesting to someone, but when guys are crapping on it: we can see the misogyny you're layin' down, dudes.

Anyway, Macklemore's text, taken from Ben Royce's transcription of the images, and reformatted by me to match what I think the paragraph breaks of the images are (and proofed by me):

I'm not sure how to start this. So I'm going to speak from the heart and share the truth. Ed Sheeran and his team have made the decision to remove me from The Loop tour. But before I get into it, I want to say something that should be obvious. In this moment I think it matters. I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families.

The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don't lose sight of that.

Ed is my friend. I've known him for 13 years. We've shared late nights, studio sessions and stages. He has this infectious magic about him that I've grown to love. I consider him a brother. And because of that, we've had some difficult conversations this past week. The type of talks rooted in love and respect for one another that still end in a place of fundamental disagreement. Nothing I'm writing here is out of spite or because I want to tear down his character. But as I told Ed multiple times on the phone, our friendship can't change my responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.

Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.

Ed was in a fucked up position. He knew it. His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before. He told me that the words "Free Palestine" and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of people he spoke with. I told him that if those words were more offensive than tens of thousands of Palestinian children being killed by Israel, then there was a fundamental disconnect between where those people stood and where I stood. But he couldn't get past his public facing, "I don't take sides."

And I get why people don't. Taking a side can cost you. Money, brand deals, sponsorships, festivals, private shows, relationships and access. I've lost all of those things. But there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed. When one side has the bombs and bottomless financial and military support from America, refusing to take a side doesn't leave you in the middle.

What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years. So why is it an issue now? Because now I'm sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, "Free Palestine" becomes too much of a risk. If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, with Ed implicitly supporting it, the crowd getting loud and showing undeniable support for Palestinian liberation, what artist might speak out next? The stage becomes resistance. Maybe that's why this time it became so important to silence me.

And one of the most effective ways to enforce that silence has been to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. And that is exactly why the word matters too much to be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state. When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying "Free Palestine" gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn't protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.

I hope this isn't the end of my relationship with Ed. Thirteen years of friendship doesn't disappear because of one painful disagreement. I hope we both continue listening, studying what is happening in Palestine and wrestling with what neutrality means in a moment like this. My door will always be open to continuing that conversation.

When my brother Omar was doing the subtitles for the video I posted from MetLife, I thanked him. He told me there's a phrase in Arabic:
لا شكر على واجب

"La shukra ala wajeb." There is no thanks for a duty.

That stayed with me. Because that's what this has become for me and millions of others around the world. A duty. Not something deserving of praise or gratitude. Not brave. Human.

Who is winning the internet, who is getting canceled, who gets to play the stadium and who doesn't, all of it becomes so small when held against what we are actually witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank. An entire people being displaced, starved and killed while the world debates which words we are allowed to use to describe it, how those words make us feel, and whether our discomfort matters more than the people living through a genocide.

I didn't need 10 shows from Ed. I needed 2. Two chances to stand in front of 90,000 people and say the words that somehow became too dangerous to say.

Free Palestine.

But if those words cost me the stage, while turning the conversation back to Palestine, then it was the most successful tour I've ever been on.

"The center turn lane is where people go to make terrible decisions." - Tony Cherolis

https://bikestreets.com/podcas...ie-schulte-tactical-urbanism-in- indianapolis

Meant to go for news, but just typed in mews.google.com, and the old "don't be evil" Google would have put cat pictures there.