One of my favorite aspects of this Alien: Earth show is how it treats corporations and their leaders.

For decades, we have gotten sci-fi dystopias in which mega-corporations rule the world, but they have always tended to be depicted as these soulless but hyper-efficient engines of commerce and profit run by evil, calculating supergeniuses.

In this show, though, while the corporations are soulless and extremely powerful, they are depicted as kind of a mess, run on the whim of insanely wealthy idiots and assholes making all sorts of foolish decisions and catastrophic mistakes. That seems a lot more relatable and realistic to me.

I got the head and carriage off without too much difficulty:

More importantly, I confirmed that I am also able to get them back on.

The carriage moves back and forth pretty easily, although something seems to be up with the mechanism to advance it with each keystroke. I think the gears for the type wheel are kind of janky, too, as it tend to stick in the down position.

I took the kids to see Jaws in the theater today. One of them had seen it before, the other hadn’t, and I have seen it a bunch of times (although never on the big screen). We all loved it.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a perfect movie, but no matter how many times I watch this one, I am always astounded at how well crafted and constructed it is. For such a simple story, there is a lot going on in this movie and I would be hard-pressed to point to a better example of visual storytelling.

🔗 You do not need “analytics” for your blog because you are neither a military surveillance unit nor a commodity trading company – This day’s portion:

I ditched analytics quite early in this blog’s history when I realised that knowing about my website visitors had zero effect on anything in the real world. For example, when Smashing Magazine linked to a WordPress theme I’d published I got thousands of visitors over a couple of days. The only practical outcome was that a couple of people approached me to redesign their websites. This would have happened regardless of whether I knew that I’d been linked to, and how many clicks this link had generated.

🔗 Classroom Technology Was a Mistake - by Paul Musgrave:

For every minor friction that technology has removed, a giant weight of superfluous expectations has been added. If the net impact is still positive, it is much less so than the boosters promised—so much less so that one wonders whether we would have gone all-in on this. And I also find myself wondering if at least some of the lack of grit that many of the younger generations display when confronted with an obstacle has to do with being raised in an environment in which everything just works—where you never have to slap the side of a TV to fix the image, or when you never have to parse “Abort/retry/fail” when trying to load a program. To the extent that computers do make everything “just work”, they do so by bounding the ability of users to ask for anything — limiting their requests, and their imaginations, to what’s easiest to deliver. But that is far from what’s possible and often remarkably distant from what’s desirable in any given case.