I have a confession. Every single photograph before this one was captured on either an iPhone 6+, or an iPhone 11 Pro Max.

For a very, very long time, I had justified to myself “oh, I don’t need an actual camera, my phone is just as good.” However, three weeks ago I picked up a DSLR for the first time and I fell in love with the sheer power and expression such a tool has.

So I got a small one, a baby, a Canon Rebel T7. After a bunch of crappy shots because I was still getting used to it, I think this one is good enough to share. It doesn’t meet the par of my previous work, but it feels like I have much more control over what I create now. This is magnificent and wondrous.

Thank you for seeing me make art with actual relevant tools!

• Source.
  > In the background is a store with a window display, slowly revealed as the comic progresses. From right to left: Close-ups of enormous fruit (berries, a banana, a kiwi) sitting or floating over a bed of ice, with water and juice splashing dynamically upwards.

A closely-cropped image of a woman’s face, so we just see one eye and the corner of her mouth. One hand is on her cheek. Her lips and nails are icy pink. The transom above the door has an exotic flower decal.

On the front door, in an artsy font treatment, it says: “Are we a smoothie shoppe? A NAIL salon? A DISPENSARY? YOU DON’T KNOW!”

• Source.
  > In the background is a store with a window display, slowly revealed as the comic progresses. From right to left: Close-ups of enormous fruit (berries, a banana, a kiwi) sitting or floating over a bed of ice, with water and juice splashing dynamically upwards.

A closely-cropped image of a woman’s face, so we just see one eye and the corner of her mouth. One hand is on her cheek. Her lips and nails are icy pink. The transom above the door has an exotic flower decal.

On the front door, in an artsy font treatment, it says: “Are we a smoothie shoppe? A NAIL salon? A DISPENSARY? YOU DON’T KNOW!”

• Source.
  > In the background is a store with a window display, slowly revealed as the comic progresses. From right to left: Close-ups of enormous fruit (berries, a banana, a kiwi) sitting or floating over a bed of ice, with water and juice splashing dynamically upwards.

A closely-cropped image of a woman’s face, so we just see one eye and the corner of her mouth. One hand is on her cheek. Her lips and nails are icy pink. The transom above the door has an exotic flower decal.

On the front door, in an artsy font treatment, it says: “Are we a smoothie shoppe? A NAIL salon? A DISPENSARY? YOU DON’T KNOW!”

Donald Trump has lost his latest legal attempt to challenge the $5m in damages awarded against him for defaming E Jean Carroll, the New York writer who a jury found was sexually abused by the president in the 1990s, before he embarked on his political career.

A US appeals court in New York City on Friday denied Trump’s request to reconsider its decision in December to uphold the jury’s award of $5m to Carroll. The court was divided in its opinion, with two Trump-appointed judges, Steven Menashi and Michael Park, dissenting.

Carroll, a former magazine columnist, accused Trump of attacking her around 1996 in a department store dressing room in Manhattan. In 2023, a civil jury trial concluded that Trump did sexually abuse her and then defamed her in 2022 when he denied the allegations as a hoax and said that Carroll was “not my type”.

Trump fails to overturn $5m damages award to E Jean Carroll for defamation

US appeals court denies challenge after 2023 civil jury trial found Trump sexually abused Carroll then defamed her

^{Oliver Milman (The Guardian)}

A four-panel meme [annoyed bird]:

[Panel 1]: A pigeon says, “Here is why that game was nothing for me:”

[Panel 2]: The pigeon states well-argued criticism. Someone interrupts, “Skill issue!”

[Panel 3]: The interrupter is a raven shouting over the pigeon, “There are settings and mods for this”

[Panel 4]: The pigeon is annoyed. The raven shouts a clown-face emoji.

Smartphones are making us unhealthy, miserable, antisocial, and less free. If we can’t yet nationalize the attention economy, maybe it’s time to abolish its primary tool — before it finishes abolishing us.

For All That Is Good About Humankind, Ban Smartphones

^jacobin.com

Sections from the video:

• 0:00 -d flag
• 1:56 factor, nproc, tty
• 3:09 numfmt
• 4:21 rm -rf .
• 5:27 env

Good news in privacy for ActivityPub. The first early draft of the MLS over ActivityPub specification went out this week. It’s been part of my work on our E2EE for ActivityPub project at the Social Web Foundation.

Messaging Layer Security (MLS) is an IETF standard for end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging. It lets people on laptops and phones communicate with each other in a secure way that no one in between can see.

MLS is designed to use pluggable lower-level protocols. This specification defines an envelope format for distributing MLS messages through the network, and an Activity Streams 2.0 profile for the packets of application data stored inside the messages.

This specification is ready for review from both ActivityPub developers and security analysts. It’s time to start making proof-of-concept implementations and testing interoperability.

The best place to make comments or report problems is on the ActivityPub E2EE GitHub repo issues list. I’m looking forward to these next steps!

End-to-end Encryption (E2EE) over ActivityPub

Encrypted direct messages supply the confidence that people need to connect with family, friends and colleagues privately over a social network. As part of the Summer of Protocols 2024, we explore …

^{Social Web Foundation}