WesternInfidels

I was profoundly skeptical when someone in my household brought home some “Cheese Storage Bags” that appeared to be made of wax paper. They cost around a dollar apiece, and since there’s really no way to clean them, they’re pretty much disposable. Insane scam, I thought. Someone just loves shopping, I thought.

But no, they absolutely worked, hard cheeses keep in the deli drawer way better in those bags. In the past I had tried wrapping cheese in wax paper or parchment paper, with little success. The stupid cheese bags were so much better. I can’t explain. Still mad about it. Also we need more cheese bags.

Feels like there should be a Minecraft mod to do this.

I don’t know how many Hark, A Vagrant strips featured the Straw Feminists, but here’s their introduction, I believe.

Edit: The dangerous time-suck rabbit-hole-o-matic website, TVTropes, has a page for “Straw Feminist,” which links to Hark, A Vagrant.

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Painesville is a real place

I feel like this is ripe for an “Autotune The News” treatment. I’m thinking Eminem’s “Without Me:”

🎵

I have two Microsoft Outlooks, Outlooks
Neither of 'em works
Neither of 'em works

🎵

I have a Uni Kuru Toga mechanical pencil that I bought perhaps 20 years ago. For about $7. And it still works great.

Somehow, it’s still $7? How?

Sumatra PDF Reader is no-frills and distraction free. Even on my ancient PC, it’s fast as heck. I have rather rudely installed it on other people’s PCs, because their slow all-singing all-dancing PDF readers drove me up the wall.

RawTherapee converts “RAW” files from digital cameras to friendlier image formats, and pretty often RawTherapee’s edit is all I need. It’s feature packed, it can do film simulations, image de-noising, tone-mapping, and now it has the ability to do some local adjustments, too. I have several “RAW” converters, including a commercial one, but I keep coming back to RawTherapee as the mainstay, the most productive for me.

I’ve got foobar2000 set up as a pretty plain-looking, non-distracting music player. It’s got great library features, it has a wildly customizable interface, it’s got a plugin architecture to extend its abilities in many ways. It has stayed on my PC for years because of its quiet competence, always serving without demanding my time or attention.

I used to keep my password file and other confidential stuff inside a TrueCrypt virtual volume. Now I use the successor, VeraCrypt. Both have always worked flawlessly; in fact, TrueCrypt is way smaller and I’m not aware of any security issues with it, it’s just not actively developed anymore.

These are actually blog posts that list such things:

A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites (Updated 2026)

No Logins Required: Alternative Interfaces To YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram

I am an American and I completely agree, the flag is everywhere. You would think it was required by law, like portraits of Dear Leader in communist totalitarian states, but no, the flag cult is voluntary. “Cringe” is exactly right. Some people just plaster the flag on things as a substitute for any sense of style or design. We’ve been indoctrinated into the flag cult throughout our childhoods, where there was a flag in every room in our schools, and a coordinated prayer-to-the-flag moment every morning.

I went to Canada in the summer of 2025. In reaction to the insanity from Washington, Canada was experiencing a possibly-unprecedented wave of nationalism, businesses were advertising that they were proudly Canadian, there were even “flag stores” just like we have in the US, but with Canadian flags. In spite of this, Canada had something like 5% as many flags flying in public as the US does. It was possible to be out in public for many minutes at a time without seeing any flags at all. That doesn’t happen in the US.

Americans don’t understand how propagandized they are.

Edit: Cringe example: The Boulevard of 500 Flags. The notion that it’s a memorial to 9/11 is a modern revision, the “Boulevard” actually dates back to the 90s. That is, this ridiculous array was built, by a large group of supposedly grown-up men, before the wave of post-9/11 nationalism.

The way I see it: Corporate web apps (like Microsoft’s) are evidence that the maker is putting administrative concerns ahead of user experience concerns. They’re catering to the people who actually pay for this stuff, not to the users.

Years ago I when I wrote software for a living, I had an argument with a colleague, and I tried to explain to him:

The “supported” closed-source library he wanted to use was pretty popular because it was marketed by a huge company with a marketing department, or because it had a first-mover advantage, or because there were training events and books built around it, etc.

The unsupported free open-source library I wanted to use was the most popular library of its kind in the whole world. And it got to that position without any of those advantages.

What does that suggest about their relative usefulness? The world of open source is closer to being a real meritocracy. The number one app or library is probably number one for non-structural reasons.

I don’t know about paint exactly, but

• Control uses yellow markings, like tarps, in some places to offer some hints about which ledges the player can reach
• Wolfenstein II uses yellow markings to indicate surfaces that can be destroyed
• Doom (2016) uses distinctive lights (green in this case) to give the player a hint about which jumps are safe

On one hand, I would guess the current talk is about newer games, but on the other hand, it’s not a brand-new innovation, either.

No one becomes a billionaire by accident. People who have an insatiable urge to dominate are hugely over-represented in the Epstein class, through their own efforts.

If you’re going to sneakily change what the creator drew or wrote, why stop at the creator’s name? Why not fix up a dull punch line or tidy up a drawings weaknesses?

How would we know you aren’t doing that already?

Oil wrestling shows up in the classic heist film Topkapi.

I had a visit with a PA who pantomimed the use of an inhaler she didn’t actually have on hand. The note-taking robot decided that was a “demonstration” with a billing code, and that it should be billed as $800.

You’d never really get those ducks in a row, but it would be entertaining to watch you try.

John Bistline, whose name appears on the bottom right, posted this chart to Twitter.

There’s a pretty similar data series charted at ourworldindata.

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