Photographic Eye

I started re-reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld series in December as a distraction, but decided I needed a break. Hench was recommended to Russet a while back, and it sounded interesting. I was fortunate to be able to snag a copy in my ebook sales within the last week or so and read it.

The book follows perhaps about a year in the life of Anna, who at the beginning of the book is getting short-term jobs at a temp agency doing various jobs for supervillains. They're called Henches, doing things like filing, data entry, driving (bonus if you're a certified stunt driver), etc. Muscle roles are handled through a different agency and they are called Meat, and are paid more and get free medical - if you don't mind the medical care being provided by veterinarians and medical school dropouts and doctors who've lost their licenses.

Anna is excellent with spreadsheets and data analysis and lands a pretty good gig that looks like it might go long-term, maybe even permanent!, until a superhero casually back-hands her across a room and her leg gets multiple compound fractures. While she's recovering, she starts thinking about ways to add up the damage and lives lost that the "heroes" cause with such casual and callous disregard - and planning how to make them pay!

It was an excellent read, and I came very close to finishing it in a day. Had I only known that I had about four pages to go....

Anyway, interesting perspective on the hero/villain situation. The book contains a short story titled Meat, and a sequel to Hench is coming out in early May, titled Villain. I'm quite looking forward to it. I haven't pre-purchased it yet, but am thinking about it. The short story distorted the apparent page count of the main story, or I would have finished it in the same day that I started it.

I found it to be well-written and very engaging. She has an excellent style for illustrating area color of The Big East Coast City. Her descriptions of some of the violence, especially Anna's final revenge may be somewhat disturbing, but that's also the point of the book - it's intended to illustrate that full-power superhero/villain fights cause a lot of carnage, and bystanders are injured or killed in gruesome ways.

This is Natalie's first novel. She's previously written two books of poetry, one of which has won a prize. She's a Torontanian. I'd love to see some of her poetry, but those books are not available through the Apple Bookstore, I'll have to check other sources and see if I can get ahold of them.

EDIT: big shout-outs to the book being very inclusive on LGBT and neurodivergency. This is something that the author is very involved in.

Moderna developed a new flu vaccine using RNA technology that was going to be the framework for a combined Covid/flu shot - a twofer. Which would be really nice as a lot of people still die from both flu and covid, getting both shots at the same time would literally be a real life-saver.

From the article: "Moderna said the move is inconsistent with previous feedback from the agency from before it submitted the application and started phase three trials on the shot, called mRNA-1010. The drugmaker said it has requested a meeting with the FDA to “understand the path forward.”

Moderna noted that the agency did not identify any specific safety or efficacy issues with the vaccine, but instead objected to the study design, despite previously approving it. The company added that the move won’t impact its 2026 financial guidance. (Moderna stock fell 7% in after-hours trading)

Moderna’s jab showed positive phase three data last year, meeting all of the trial goals. At the time, Moderna said the stand-alone flu shot was key to its efforts to advance a combination vaccine targeting both influenza and Covid-19."

What I absolutely love is that The Orange Idiot launched Project Warp Speed which spearheaded the development of RNA vaccines during Covid and saved untold lives, ignoring the irony of his quack treatment musings on live TV. This is an extension of that. And now people think that RNA vaccines reprogram their genes, and science is being overridden by what these idiots have done to the country.

I expect Moderna will just go to their European branch and have them give it to the EU vaccine review board, and tell the USA 'No vaccine for you!'

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/10/moderna-fda-flu-shot.html

https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/02/11/1219230/moderna-says-fda-refuses-to-review-its-application-for-experimental-flu-shot

I started collecting these decades ago. Amazing how apt many are and from people who have been dead decades, if not centuries.

* * * * *

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. -Frank Wilhoit

They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery. -They Live (movie), 1989

We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. -- Ray Bradbury

The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray. -- Robert G. Ingersoll

We all live in a state of ambitious poverty. -- Decimus Junius Juvenalis

Many more under the cut...
( Read more... )

In 2022, the bill that funded NASA extended funding for the International Space Station to 2030, and that was it. NASA started researching ways to end the life of the ISS at that point, and decided that a controlled deorbit was the best bet: lower it to a planned orbit where the increased friction with Earth's atmosphere will eventually cause re-entry and for it to crash into the Pacific Ocean's "space graveyard". That way it's controlled and theoretically won't hit land, potentially causing some really significant damage. The station would be shut-down in 2030 and the deorbit burn would happen in 2031, I'm a little unclear when it would actually re-enter the atmosphere.

Well, that plan might end up being scratched because of an effort being led by California Democratic Representative George Whiteside.

He's on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (vice-ranking member) and on the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics (according to Wikipedia). His career has involved a lot of the space industry, and he's worked at NASA, but the roles seem to be in management and as a director. His Masters degree is in GIS and remote sensing, not in engineering.

He attached a rider to the new NASA funding bill, currently in committee, for them to study boosting the ISS to a parking orbit rather than deorbiting the thing. He thinks it can have a longer life.
( Read more... )

The internal classified version was started in 1962 as The National Basic Intelligence Factbook. It was a resource that gave you very detailed information about countries around the world: form of government, economic information, population and make-up, etc. Very useful information. It went public in 1971 as the World Factbook and later joined the World Wide Web in 1997 in an unclassified version. It was available between '71 and '97 in print form and on CD.

And now it's gone. Any page for any country that you may have had linked now redirects to the closure notice. Everything's now inaccessible. Of course, you can still look into it via archive.org, but the information was updated regularly when the site was live, and it will now grow increasingly stale.

No reason given. The CIA was subject to the same chainsaw-trimming that most other government agencies were given courtesy of DOGE and the Muskbrats. We also have the intense administration's dislike of facts. Either or both could have contributed to its demise.

But with a little luck, in a possibly truthier future, it could be resurrected. There's no doubt that the CIA found the resource useful, so it may again become available to the public in a better tomorrow.

https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/the-cia-stops-publishing-the-world-factbook-184419024.html

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/05/187252/cia-has-killed-off-the-world-factbook-after-six-decades

EDIT: added Slashdot link.

On Tuesday, after suffering a day of blowback, Adobe rescinds its kill order and announces the program is going into maintenance mode. The original email sent to registered and paying users apparently said "We're contacting you to let you know that Adobe will be discontinuing Adobe Animate on March 1, 2026. As an existing Animate user, you may continue to use Animate, but please note that technical support will no longer be available after March 1, 2027."

Animate was, more or less, the successor to the Flash development package which was killed ages ago in favor of HTML 5. And apparently much more used than Adobe thought.

Reactions to the Monday announcement: ... were swift and angry on social media. "Adobe discontinuing Animate out of the blue is nuts," writes artist and animator Julia Glassman on BlueSky. "Many television productions, games, and all sorts of animated media still rely (on) Animate/Flash pipelines. They're all supposed to just...pivot to entirely new software and pipelines?!"

Animator Christopher Linoleum brought up how many big-name shows utilize the program: "Adobe Animate remains an industry standard for TV animation. Star Trek: Lower Decks was made in Animate. Haunted Hotel was made in Animate. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was made in Animate. And because you can't buy a permanent license anymore, it'll just be gone."

YIKES! So a pretty important program to the entertainment industry! The original kill date was announced as March 1, 2027. But a bigger problem was that apparently either cloud storage is required or a major component of the program, and that would be shut down at the same time, so users would lose all their assets and data! Remember, folks - all the cloud means is that it's somebody else's server. The "Cloud" isn't anything mystical, it's just someone's server.

After getting bombarded with hate and flamed to cinders, Adobe "... now says that Animate will now be in maintenance mode going forward and that it has “no plans to discontinue or remove access” to the app. Animate will still receive “ongoing security and bug fixes” and will still be available for “both new and existing users,” but it won’t get new features."

There's one unmentioned problem. With no updates and it being in maintenance mode, it will eventually be bypassed by operating system changes. It may take 5-10 years or more, but it will happen. And it may become glitchy before it dies. Smart production houses are going to start looking for better alternatives now and start planning migrations and new work flows soon. Sadly, apparently Reddit threads say there's no real alternative for professional production. I'm not familiar with that field so I have no idea.

The article that I saw yesterday announcing the original kill order:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/adobe-is-killing-a-popular-animation-and-game-development-program/1100-6537851/

Adobe backing away:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/873621/adobe-animate-maintenance-mode-reverse-course

Slashdot mocking the back-off:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/04/0730222/adobe-actually-wont-discontinue-animate


EDIT: I should have checked Ars Technica. Their article on all this was quite informative, telling me that Animate is actually the original Flash, but renamed! I was unaware of this, I've never been involved in creating things with Flash.

Some comments in the Ars article had a very cogent observation: there's no AI assistant in Animate, and it's probably based on a very old code base, so it would be hard to retrofit it. Which means Adobe can't realistically increase its current price of $23/month. If they can't make more money from the product, kill it. Occam's Razor that's a pretty good guess.

And yes, people are already thinking Adobe cannot be trusted and are rethinking their production pipelines.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/adobe-reverses-decision-to-discontinue-animate-after-a-lot-of-confusion-and-angst/