Monthly Archives: February 2025

Today in “Horrifying Cyberpunk Dystopia”

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I sleep in a loft bed, to make more room for my computers and one of my 3D printers, which I keep under the bed.

I needed a new floor lamp, and because I’m lazy, I wanted something I could turn on and off remotely without climbing out of bed. So I found a floor lamp on Amazon that advertised remote control capability.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the box and found no remote, just a QR code to download a smartphone app.

Buckle up, because this story is about to take a turn that would make William Gibson cringe.

My first hint something was wrong came when the app forced me to create an account on the manufacturer’s server before I could pair pair with the lamp.

But hey, I wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole went, so I made an account. The answer is “pretty deep.”

Once you pair over Bluetooth, the next thing you do is download your WiFi password to the lamp. You also must enable location services, so the lamp knows your location. (The software won’t work if you don’t.)

Once the lamp knows your location, you have a choice to make. It asks if you’d rather use the microphone in your phone, or the one built into the lamp.

Yes, you read that right. The lamp connects to your WiFi and your phone, knows where you are, and has a built in microphone.

Once you’ve made that particular Hobson’s choice, the app asks you to upload a selfie, so it can—get this—run facial recognition and AI expression analysis.

Why? So it can suggest a lighting scheme based on your mood.

The Terms of Service allow the manufacturer to store your face and do both facial recognition and AI analysis.

I uploaded a photo of a cat rather than my selfie.

You’re then connected to a community of other lamp users, so you can exchange lighting patterns and such…because, of course, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a floor lamp must be in want of a way to exchange lighting suggestions with complete strangers.

Here’s the light it suggested based on AI analysis of a cat.

The lamp was originally slated to arrive from Amazon on Monday, but when Monday came I got an email telling me that delivery was delayed and it would arrive on Tuesday.

Were I of a paranoid bent, I might believe that the delay allowed a government three-letter agency to intercept the shipment so they could do a supply chain attack, rerouting the lamp’s connection to the host servers (which is a really weird thing to say, if you think about it) through them as well.

George Orwell believed in a future where the government constantly watched the citizens, recording every detail of their lives. George Orwell didn’t know about outsourcing.

Adventures in Drug Addiction…and not even the fun kind.

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Ever since I was in high school, I’ve suffered severe allergies, a trait I inherited from my dad. Pollen, ragweed, animals, dust mites, you name it, I’m addicted to it. For most of my life, I’ve had a persistent low-grade cough from about April to about October.

And nothing I’ve ever tried has worked, except Benadryl, which knocks me out for 14 hours. Not Allegra, not Claritin, not fexofenadine, nothing.

In 2018, I discovered Xyzal (levocetirizine), a once a day antihistamine that, by some miracle, actually worked. For seven glorious years, I’ve been mostly allergy-free, mostly.

Fast forward to last month, when out of the blue I started getting hives on my arms and sides out of nowhere. Careful, systematic experimentation revealed the culprit to be levocetirizine, which still works but makes me break out.

So I quit taking it.

Big, big mistake.

It turns out levocetirizine is physically addictive. And I’ve taken it every single day for seven years.

It also turns out that you’re not supposed to discontinue long-term use abruptly. Apparently once daily for seven years qualifies as “long-term use.”

The withdrawal from levocetirizine is absolutely brutal—anxiety, insomnia, headaches, difficulty breathing, nausea, fatigue, irritability, shortness of breath…I got the whole package, including some of the withdrawal effects WebMD calls “uncommon.”

I’ve been off it for a month now. According to WebMD, I have about 2-4 weeks of withdrawal left.

But hey, at least I’m also having allergy attacks again.

Shoot me now.

New sticker available

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Price: free (donations accepted but not required). I only have a few, but there are more on the way.

The Resist stickers are also back in stock, though I expect to run out of them quickly again.

Get them here!

Update on the Resist stickers

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I had no idea, when I designed the Resist sticker, that it’d touch such a nerve. My first shipment disappeared in less than two hours. I’m getting messages and emails every day asking when there will be more, so here’s an update:

The first batch have now all been shipped out.

If you ordered five or fewer, you’ll get them soon. You should’ve received a confirmation email in the past few days that your stickers shipped, but unfortunately some of the confirmation emails bounced as spam, so they may not have gone through.

If you ordered ten or fewer before the shopping cart showed zero left, then you’ll also have them soon.

If you ordered more than 10, you will only get ten in the first mailing. If you ordered more than ten after the shopping cart showed zero left, I’ll send some out when the new ones arrive.

Yes, there are more on the way.

The second design will be here next week. Alas, I had no idea what to expect, so I didn’t order very many, only 175. I expect it to be gone the same day it’s available. I’ve ordered more of that design as well.

I’ve made changes to the shopping cart.

My shopping cart fell over under the load. People were seeing weird error messages, or couldn’t check out, or the cart wouldn’t load at all. I’ve completely rebuilt it from the ground up; it still looks the same but it’s running new software underneath that should be a lot more reliable.

Dozens of people asked if there’s a way to tip me.

I’ve added the ability to include a tip in the new shopping cart. For free stickers this is 100% optional, but it’s there if you want it.

I’ve also received a number of donations on PayPal and Venmo. Thank you all so much, it’s been incredible to learn how many people want to support this idea. All of the donations I’ve received, every penny, have gone into ordering more stickers. I have about 1200 stickers on the way that should be here by the end of the month.

Many of you, like over a dozen of you, have messaged to ask if there’s a way to get the stickers in quantities of 100 or 200 or more.

I didn’t make any provision for that because I honestly had no clue so many of you would get behind this project. So, I’ll be making changes to the shopping cart to add a provision to order in bulk. I plan to charge my own cost for this and ship the stickers to you directly from the company that makes them. The price will likely be around $35 for 100 or $45 for 150.

I will need to limit quantities for free stickers.

I’m really sorry. I had no idea this was going to blow up. The Resist stickers will be limited to 10 at a time for free orders or 3 at a time for the first batch of the new design, which I’ll post here and on social media when it arrives.

A bunch of people have asked me if I can make the design available in pins or clothing or other formats.

I’m looking into doing this. I won’t be able to offer free pins and such, so what I’ll likely do if I can find a good vendor is make things like pins, clothing, and holographic stickers a nominal charge (I’m not looking to make a profit from this project), but continue to keep the vinyl stickers free.

Thank you all so much for the incredible support. I can’t tell you how deeply gratifying it is to know I’m not the only one who feels the way I feel about what’s happening to our country right now.

Resist

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I’ve been having trouble sleeping.

It’s heartbreaking to see the country gutted and its values torn apart by a fat psychopath in bad makeup, and even more heartbreaking to know that a third of the country voted in favor of hatred. There was a time when we could believe that people on both sodes of the political aisle wanted what was best for the nation. Now we cannot.

So I’ve been having trouble sleeping. And when I wake at four AM with that despair in the pit of my stomach, I sit down and design stickers. In the past few weeks, I’ve ordered hundreds and hundreds of them.

The first design just arrived today. I have more designs arriving in the next few weeks. I am giving them away to anyone who wants them for free, and when I say for free I mean I will even cover postage in the US (international is $2).

Here’s the first design:

These are four inches by two and a half inches. To give you a sense of how big they are, here’s one on a 15″ laptop:

Want one? Order them for free on my site here. Want a bunch? Let me know and I’ll have 100 of them shipped to you at my cost. Got an idea for a design? I’d love to hear from you.

New designs will be coming soon, so stay tuned.

[Edit] Wow. Um, I didn’t expect that to happen. It took two hours for my entire first production run of Resist stickers to disappear.

To anyone else trying to get one, I’m really, really sorry. I’ve ordered more. It usually takes about two weeks for them to be produced.

If you ordered multiple stickers, I may send you less than you wanted, to make sure there’s enough for everyone else. I’ll let you all know when I have more. In the meantime, I’ll have some new designs soon as well, they’re already in production.

Pop Science Bingo!

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I’ve long had a list in my phone I call the “Dunning-Kruger List.” It’s a list of pop-sci arguments I see over and over and over and over again from people with poor science education: Creationists, homeopaths, and so on, all of which are based on a deep misunderstanding of science.

I’m not sure where these pop-sci ideas come from, but they’re all totally, completely 100% wrong, as in the opposite of true. Generally, hearing any of these in a conversation, especially in the Internet, instantly activates my “you’ve never seen the inside of a university science classroom, so you’re so far up Mount Dunning-Kruger it’s not worth the effort it would take to talk you down from its icy slopes.” So that that point my eyes glaze and I route everything further they say directly into my intellectual /dev/null.

This morning, I saw this on Quora:

Since this is officially the 17,000th time I’ve seen a Creationist make this argument, I decided it was time to Do Something.

So I made a thing.