Mostly signs (some portents)

Things Cory Doctorow saw Don't send me Tumblr messages if you want a reply. Use email. My pix CC-BY-SA http://craphound.com http://boingboing.net @doctorow GPG key ID: 0x1FC237AF GPG key fingerprint: 0BC4 700A 06E2 072D 3A77 F8E2 9026 DBBE 1FC2 37AF src="http://codysherman.tumblr.com/tools/infinite-scrolling/code">

[transformativeworks]

The OTW is Recruiting for Open Doors Technical Volunteers, Tag Wrangling Volunteers, and Translation Translators

Do you know programming languages like SQL or Python and want to help rescue at-risk fan archives? Want to wrangle AO3 tags or translate them into English? Are you fluent in other languages? The OTW is recruiting: https://otw-news.org/2p94jnbf 

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

[germanpostwarmodern]

Former Our Lady & St Francis Secondary School (1964) in Glasgow, Scotland, by Isi Metzstein and Andy McMillan of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Object permanence: PoGo v binding arbitration; Trump beat some absolute losers; Public interest internet; "Close to the Machine."

#10yrsago Pokemon Go players: you have 30 days from signup to opt out of binding arbitration https://web.archive.org/web/20160715142246/https://consumerist.com/2016/07/14/pokemon-go-strips-users-of-their-legal-rights-heres-how-to-opt-out/

#10yrsago Trump makes it easy to forget what a dumpster fire all the other GOP nomination hopefuls were https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n15/eliot-weinberger/they-could-have-picked

#5yrsago Interop and the Public Interest Internet https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/16/pidgin/#splicers

#1yrago Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine" https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/16/beautiful-code/#hackers-disease

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gerontocracy’s failure mode

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/14/designated-survivor/#actuary-incoherence

The "designated survivor" is one of the weirder aspects of America's (very, very weird) political system.

Each year, during the State of the Union address, when both houses of Congress and the President are all under one roof, a single political figure, in the line of succession for the presidency, is spirited away to a hidden bunker, just in case the US legislative and administrative branches are decapitated in a single, spectacular terrorist strike:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_survivor

Initiated during the 1950s, designated survivors are a paranoid relic of the Cold War, but they're also a relic of an era when America was a less chud-dominated, more technocratic land. It's a longtermist sort of procedure, in stark opposition to vibes-based MAGA chaos in which the Mad King makes daily announcements of new wars, tariffs, monuments, and existential threats to the nation.

America's ruling class have always sought an equilibrium between its pure Id of hatred for labor, autocratic yearnings and apocalyptic fantasies, and its patient, scheming Ego, the author of endless FedSoc judicial nominee listings, Projects 2025, and decades-long schemes to overturn Roe and reverse the New Deal.

(Democrats have their own version of this, of course – the endless contest between the McKinsey wing of the party's right and its infinitely embroidered Machin-Synematic Universe.)

The problem is that once the atavistic, impulsive elements of your project escape containment, the resultant turbulence sucks everyone else into their chaotic vortex. How can you plan for anything when you're buffeted by endless stunts, feints, and distractions?

Nowhere is this failure to plan more vivid than in the age distribution of both chambers of the US legislature, its presidential candidates, and its judicial appointments. What's more, this is equally true of the Democrats and the Republicans.

The equilibrium of all of America's key institutions is brittle: legislative majorities are often just one or two seats wide. Key federal circuits and the Supreme Court are knife-edge balances. We keep getting presidential races between septuagenarians and octogenarians.

The question here isn't whether old people can be good at those jobs. They obviously can be. The problem is actuarial: old people are far more likely to die, or suffer severe medical episodes, than younger people. This is a fact of life that every person understands, and the older you get, the better you understand it.

I'm 55. 20 years ago, it was unusual for just one of my peers to die in a given year; now I lose a couple every year. It could be me next (my doctor just informed me that I am cancer free, following excision, radiotherapy and immunotherapy). Anyone who pretends this isn't true is setting themselves and the people around them up for terrible things.

If you're a writer, this means making plans for the smooth management of your literary estate. For the past couple decades, John Scalzi has been my anointed literary executor. He's a great choice: a fabulous writer with a good head for business and a strong handle on my politics and artistic sensibility, whose personal ethics are above reproach. The only problem is that John is a couple of years older than me, which means that he'd be a great executor if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, but not if I keel over with a heart attack in 20 years.

So this year, I added a second executor, Molly White, who is also a fantastic writer, also extremely ethical and also very attuned to my politics and literary sensibilities. Molly is 20 years younger than me, and she has relevant experience: she's also the executor of the literary estate of her great-grandfather (EB White).

In the unlikely event of my untimely death, Molly and John will do a great job running the estate (which mostly will consist of reviewing my agents' recommendations). And if John keels over right after me, Molly will be fine on her own.

Of course, the only reason I need a literary executor is that my kid is only 18. At 18, she's a remarkable, level-headed, ethical young person, but she's not yet fully formed. Literary history is filled with descendants who take over a literary estate and run it in terrible ways. The most notorious example here is Stephen Joyce, grandson of James Joyce and a colossal asshole:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_James_Joyce

The most likely destiny for my literary estate is that I will grow older alongside my daughter, who will mature in ways that make her a perfectly suitable literary executor (in addition to being the beneficiary of my literary estate) and in a few years I'll send a note of thanks to John and Molly and change the paperwork. But in the unlikely, awful event that my kid runs into serious challenges that make me question her judgment and probity, I'll be covered.

That's what planning is all about: thinking through various scenarios, including low-likelihood, high-salience ones that have easy mitigations, and taking appropriate and proportionate steps to avoid disaster.

You know: like squirreling away a designated survivor in a bunker far from DC during the State of the Union.

This is what makes America's political gerontocracy so weird. In their true hearts, the nonagenarian (1), octogenarians (5), septuagenarians (27) and late sexagenarians (7) in the US Senate know that they could keel over at any moment, and that in a 53:47 Senate, this could spell doom for their political project.

Sure, Mitch McConnell might be secretly dead and that's bad and weird. But it wouldn't be exceptional. We're talking about a legislature whose members sometimes disappear for months, only to be discovered in care homes with advanced dementia, while still somehow holding office:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/14/kay-granger-dementia-dc-media-00210317

It's a legislature whose most prominent grandees cling to power at the very brink of death's door, long after they can be effective leaders, just so they can anoint their successor during the next election:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianne_Feinstein#Personal_life

Elections have consequences, but special elections, called after the sudden death of an elderly lawmaker, have wild consequences.

Of course, anyone can die suddenly. 15 years ago, one of my dearest friends, a contemporary, went to bed in seeming perfect health and never woke up. He was only 44. I still miss him, every day:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/06/28/eulogy-for-erik-possum-man-stewart/

But the likelihood this happening goes up the older you get, and once you cross a certain age threshold, odds rise sharply. If you're part of a political project that's laying and executing long-term plans whose outcomes turn on hair-fine majorities, this should factor into your thinking. The failure to do so can throw everything you've worked for into disarray:

https://prospect.org/2026/07/13/budget-consequences-of-lindsey-grahams-sudden-departure/

It's not limited to the legislature, of course. The Supreme Court's slide into its role as handmaiden to totalitarianism began when the dying Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to step down, because she wanted her successor to be picked by the first woman president:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/magazine/ginsburg-successor-obama.html

The amazing thing here is that RBG made her name as a master strategist, but when it came to this incredibly consequential matter, she set strategy aside for hubris:

https://radiolab.org/podcast/more-perfect-sex-appeal

Security practitioners know that anyone can be hacked or scammed, and that the biggest vulnerability of all is to be so confident in your own procedures and discernment that you assume it could never happen to you. If you think you can't get scammed, you are a danger to yourself and others:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

By the same token, any politician in their 70s or 80s who thinks that they can't suffer a stroke or heart attack or the kind of lapse that makes you freeze up during a presidential debate is a danger to their party, their politics and their nation:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jill-biden-joe-biden-stroke-2024-debate-sunday-morning-interview/

This isn't about how healthy or robust any given politician is or feels; this is about the cold reality of actuarial tables. The older I get, the more those actuarial tables factor into my own decision-making. The fact that our political classes seem to think that they can choose the time and manner of their passing is baffling.

[cake-crumbs]

A pair of moth dice I did a little while back. The commish was for a death's-head hawkmoth and a rosy maple moth, each perched upon a silver ring. The dice were to be a wedding gift for the couple. Definitely one of the more unique and fun commissions I've gotten to do! Custom commissions are currently closed. They'll be open again in a few weeks once I get on top of my current queue of orders.

[vintagerpg]

Michael Newton’s Monsters, Mysteries and Man was a bit of a mystery for me for many years. I remembered it from my local library (it was at the Main, which I didn’t go to as much as the closer, smaller Branch). I had gotten it out before a trip to my grandparents' house and I distinctly remember reading it in bed there in almost one sitting. I remembered that it had a garish monster head on the cover and that the title reminded me of Richard Cavendish’s Man, Myth and Magic series, but that was all I could remember. Searching, for years, on the internet, turned up zilch.

And then, sometimes, I find that magic combination of words on the right site and boom, there it is, the thing I was looking for all those years. The site in question was Archive.org, so hey, you can read it too. The dust jacket is magnificent, isn’t it?

The text was a bit less noteworthy all these years later. It’s a general survey of crytpids — Yeti, Sasquatch, surviving dinosaurs, sea and lake monsters, Kraken, Nessie, UFOs — and the efforts to find and study them. Two more chapters cover vampires and werewolves, but they are half-hearted because there’s no meaningful chance that they are real. And that’s what Newton wants. He’s the opposite of skeptical Daniel Cohen; the whole book is arranged around finding the small holes of doubt in the skeptic’s argument and filling them to brimming with the hope of the believer. Considering not much has changed on any of these fronts in my lifetime, I don’t expect they ever will. Sorry Mike.

Still, that cover art is an all-timer.

[ilovedamsels1962]

1924

[publicdomainreview]

Before Cousteau, way before @Octonauts, explorer Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez was bringing images of the undersea world to the surface, from his artist’s sketch pad inside a glass and steel diving bell: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/underwater-landscapes-of-eugen-von-ransonnet-villez

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

[dangerthrillryanson]

Loused Up In Space from MAD Magazine #104, July 1966.

When June Lockhart read this story, she got the cast together to take this picture…

And then sent it to the MAD offices. They loved it.

[fuckyeahanarchistposters]

Anti-racist poster designed by Rafeal Pereira

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

[publicdomainreview]

Illustration from Nonsenseorship (1922). In this “levititious literary escapade” — as publisher George P. Putnam describes his anthology — some of the wittiest writers of the Jazz Age lambaste the nonsensically censorious atmosphere of prohibition-era US: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/nonsenseorship

[pulpcovers]

Midgets of Monoton https://pulpcovers.com/midgets-of-monoton/

[pulpcovers]

The Alien https://pulpcovers.com/the-alien/