hello may we please see the frog or perhaps the website? (if you donât want to share thatâs totally okay) thank you for the story!!
Alas, this occurred in 1995 and the company is long gone.
The demo was actually conducted using his laptop browser opening his site off-line; no webserver involved. Just a collection of pages stored on his drive C: that frog-guy created using notepad.exe, an impressive feat at the time. Once he onboarded we let him host his frog menagerie on the corporate LAN but I don't think we ever gave it public access.
Our project manager (also at the interview) nabbed the computer-frog instantly and I haven't spoken with anybody from that organization since 1998, so... yeah.
If I had the froggy I'd show y'all. And yes, itâs all true.
(If youâre wondering what the heck this is about, itâs about this.)
Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail thatâs stuck with me this time is the set design.
The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but itâs all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Trumanâs life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic theyâve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesnât the modern day suck? Letâs go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.
And itâs a lie. Trumanâs life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia theyâve presented is a lie. Itâs an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory thatâs comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but itâs also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. Itâs a lie. It doesnât exist.
I donât know. Iâm spitballing. Iâm biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but itâs very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.
Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a "master-planned community," constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.
Seaside, FL
Seahaven
And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don't exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.
Every single house is pastel with white trim and a white picket fence with the family's name on it in a handwritten font. The streets are paved with red bricks and lined with palmettos, and families bicycle past. The streets are clean, the lawns manicured, the sidewalks pristine.
Soon after we arrive my friend says as we walk, "God I wish I could live in a place like this. Imagine having the money to live in a place like this." I reply, "I don't actually know for me...it's gorgeous don't get me wrong, but there's no grime, you know? Where's the grime? I'd feel uncomfortable. It feels like there's not a dive bar for a hundred miles."
We reach the town center, which is a wide square lined with shops on one side, food trucks on the other. We have a lovely time looking through the shops, though I start feeling kinda weird, and I'm not sure why. Probably the extreme cleanliness of the area is making me feel off-kilter. And the surreal feeling of walking through areas I recognize from The Truman Show only adds to the weirdness.
We go into a clothing store, and it's crowded with people who appear to have stepped out of a Land's End catalog. It sells boring tshirts, shorts, and sundresses in whites and blues, all needlessly expensive. Employees walk through, refolding already-pristine shirts. So perfect. "Anyone buying from here is so rich they can probably smell the poor on us," my friend jokes, "that's why they have so many employees refolding things, it's to fix anything we brush against." "Or even breathe on!" I add.
We continue on to the grocery store where, in the movie, Truman finds Marlon stocking the vending machine and first tells him he suspects his world is wrong. I buy some pasta salad there to eat for lunch (all the cafes are quite expensive), and we find a place to sit and eat. As my friend finishes up her food, I write a postcard to my sister, telling her about my trip overall and my day in Seaside, describing the town as 'vomit-inducingly picturesque.' (It has been weeks since my visit and she still has not received that postcard)
Lunch done, we decide to walk down to the beach and have a swim. And I realize something about the surreal feeling. "Weird question," I say to my friend, "have you seen any non-white people here? Am I imagining that?"
She pauses. "The lady cleaning the bathrooms?" she asks.
"No I mean vacationers. Guests, customers. Other than you, I haven't seen a single one who wasn't white."
"...No. I haven't either."
And now that we see it, we can't unsee it. It's a wealthy area, so I had been expecting it to be pretty white, but the fact that there is not a single nonwhite person who isn't working a service job feels so gross. It's as though the place is somehow still segregated, like we have stepped back in time, but not to the fun, fake, rock-n-roll-and-soda-parlor-nostalgia version of the fifties, but to the real racism-and-repression fifties.
It is so fucking weird and sinister. I feel I have stumbled into another realm. All these people giving us sideeye, riding around on their golf carts in their pristine $45 seaside-branded tshirts, taking pictures of the perfect houses all lined up in perfect rows. A whole town of Meryls wearing lulu lemon.
We walk on. It's hot, and a swim is exactly what we need. Surely they can't ruin the ocean. I myself am extremely excited to swim, because now that we've spent a few hours among the pompous populace, I want to piss in their perfect ocean more than anything in the world.
We walk along behind the beachfront bar patios that line the beach toward the access point, and the ocean looks so blue and inviting. Although the hedge growing between us and the dunes is strangely tall. "Huh," I think. "It's weird that they'd grow it like this, it blocks the view for everyone sitting on the patios."
We arrive at the boardwalk, and there is a man standing there. He says "Hold on! Do you two have a beach access pass?" I look at him in disbelief. It's a public beach, but the sign behind the man says you have to rent a beach chair to use the beach, and it's $35 per person. We glance at each other, turn wordlessly, and head back to town.
I seriously consider trying to sneak onto the beach somehow, because at this point I am very invested in the idea of pissing in their ocean, but I realize that with the tall hedge it would be nigh-impossible.
We went home after that.
So many reviews for Seaside on travel websites mention how they love to visit Seaside because they feel transported, they feel it reflects a "simpler time" or a "peaceful life." It's been weeks and I can't stop thinking about my experience. It really drove home how...complicit people can be in their own ignorance. A lot of people want to live in that perfect bubble, and especially if they have the money, they can maintain that barrier. It reminds me that part of the reason I often have trouble persuading these types of people is because they simply do not want to be persuaded. They're so proud to be the place where The Truman Show was filmed, but I rather doubt they really think about what it means that they live on a movie set, in a surreal dream.
Honestly visiting Seaside was a 10/10 unique experience. I would highly recommend it as a place to go for a couple hours if you're gonna be nearby and want to feel like you've been kidnapped into The Truman Show and/or your brain has been put in an easy bake oven. It's like a zoo for superrich WASPS. We had a really good time loudly making fun of how insane it all was, invading their little paradise with our riffraff energy. Treat it like an excursion into the jungle; you're gonna have to park a half mile away minimum, and bring all your food and water with you so you don't have to buy anything. You don't want to give them any money. They have enough.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, next time I go to the panhandle, I will be going to the nearest free public beach access to Seaside, and I will walk to the Seaside area of the beach, and I will piss in their ocean.
Can confirm. My dad used to live 20 minutes away from Seaside and I'd make it a point to take out of town visitors there. Especially if they'd seen The Truman Show. Guaranteed to blow their minds.
But then we'd drive someplace else to eat, since we did not want to give Seaside any of our money.
canon is what happens in the text. e.g. merlin tries to poison morgana
a headcanon is a fact that you have personally made up as an elaboration of canon. it is your invention. e.g. i think morgana and gwen had a teenage lesbian situationship before the events of canon. or, i think modern morgana would love evanesence.
an interpretation is how one reads the existing text. it is not an invented fact nor is it a headcanon, it is a reading. e.g. i think merlin tries to poison morgana out of misplaced self-hatred. or, i think that one line was delivered with suppressed malice and shows a nuanced relationship.
fanon is the general fandomâs accepted headcanons and interpretations that elaborate or recontextualize canon. e.g. merlin is a badass waif and morgana is a bitch.
these are all different words with different meanings.
also Neal Stephenson wrote a literal head cannon into his novel, The Diamond Age, in which a character has a tiny cannon surgically implanted in his forehead
The prescription drug benefit is used by millions of seniors.
The Trump administration is ending a key health insurance subsidy program that aimed to keep premiums for seniorsâ prescription drug plans in check, claiming that it benefits corporate insurance companies, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz.
Medicare Part D â the government health insurance programâs prescription drug benefit â is used by tens of millions of older or disabled beneficiaries.
The programâs subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year, the administration announced Tuesday.
That move will likely result in higher prescription costs and increase premiums for about half of recipients, according to an administration official.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo - PHOTO: Mehmet Oz
Eligible seniors can get GLP-1s for $50 a month for weight loss alone
The changes are anticipated to happen in 2027 and enrollees will find out the new monthly cost later this fall, administration officials said.
Currently the government pays billions of dollars to insurance companies as a subsidy to keep prescription drug insurance at an average of $36 per person per month, according to KFF, a health policy nonprofit.
Ending the subsidies may increase premiums for some by as much as $20 a month, according to KFF.
The move comes as Affordable Care Act subsidies have expired and health care costs remain a top issue for voters ahead of the midterm elections. The ACA subsidies helped lower the out-of-pocket costs for monthly premiums for people who purchased health care through the health insurance marketplace.
As it is food drive season I'd like to remind people that while food might be edible past these dates, food banks and food pantries will not use food past those dates, so please don't waste their time by donating things they will not use
âThe plates on this car are stolen,â Officer Ganshyn said. My face mustâve twisted in disbelief because he continued, saying they werenât sure whether the car itself or just the plates were stolen. This made absolutely no sense. Car companies keep meticulous track of the fleets they loan out to the media. The vehicles all have special manufacturer or dealer plates that are logged every time one enters or exits. The officers eventually ran the Range Roverâs VIN, and it came back clean, but in their view, the plates were definitely stolen.
Before I could even process that, another officer dropped the big surprise: theyâd actually been tracking me around town for days via Flock cameras. But they kept losing the trail, so when a camera alerted them that the Range Rover had been spotted turning into Kohlâs that morning, they quickly set up their ambush and waited for me and my wife to walk out of the store and get into the SUV.
[âŚ]
One of the officers pulled out his phone, opened the Flock app, and showed me two photos: a wide shot of the Range Rover going through the intersection and a zoomed-in shot of the New Jersey license plate, which clearly reads 34 10 DTM and says VEHICLE MFR along the bottom. Critically, the number 10 is in a much smaller font than the rest of the tag, which is the non-standard structure New Jersey uses for manufacturer plates.
[âŚ]
The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flockâs system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flockâs AI tech wasnât registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLRâs media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structureâ34 ## DTMâand Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flockâs system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.
Still, he warned me to drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, Iâd probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: âYouâre lucky weâre in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely wouldâve come at you with guns drawn.â
The answer is that John W. Campbell, Jr., was a lodestar for everyone who sold science fiction for three decades in the middle of the 20C. If you sold SF at any point during his tenure as editor of the one of the primary SF magazines, you knew what he liked to buy. And SF writers like to write things that sell.
And Campbell was a nut for "psi". You put telepathy and other psi powers in your stories, you could sell to Campbell.
That's how we got telepathic superteen Telzey Amberdon. That's how we got telepathic dragons on Pern.
Read any one-year stretch of Campbell's magazine and you'll likely get at least a couple of installments of continuing series about psi or psi-adjacent protagonists, like Randall Garrett and Lawrence Janifer's FBI agent.
Even if you weren't selling directly to Campbell, you were still likely inculcated; regular Campbell author Robert A. Heinlein built "Time for the Stars", one of his original juvie SF novels, around twin telepathy.
I'm reading three stories from the 1950s, selected because they have parallel universes as a major plot point; all of them also include telepathy. It's barely even relevant to the plot, it's just there.
ESP was all the rage up through the 1970s. There were board games & TV shows. It was just assumed to be the next scientific breakthrough next to UFOs, pyramids, and dolphin communication. Ghost Busters made fun of it in 1984. ESP was everywhere.
The Brits put Prince Andrew to the sword for his involvement with Epstein. How is it that Epstein's best friend, frequent Lolita Express flier, and a man who wired money to him thousands of times...is still President of the US?
