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I often see conservatives say that they see individuals where liberals see groups. But it doesn’t track. Conservatives are regularly willing to exclude whole groups of people, then allow exceptions. On the same issues, liberals often allow groups, then exclude individuals.

Put another way, liberals want to ensure everyone eligible is allowed access, and conservatives want to ensure everyone ineligible is denied access.

Voting rights, immigration, social programs… Even if they agreed on who should be eligible, the priorities are different.

Of course, we don’t agree on who is eligible, for a lot of issues. And some of those issues are who’s eligible to be treated humanely.

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I suggest that a deep orange moon right before Christmas be called a Pumpkin Pie Moon.

Orange moon in a night sky above a darkened horizon with city lights.

I suggest that a deep orange moon right before Christmas be called a Pumpkin Pie Moon.

I was coming home shortly after sunset, got to the top of a hill and saw this deep orange moon, flattened near the horizon. By the time I found a place to stop, it had risen high enough that it was mostly round.

Composite of a background shot (the moon was waay too bright!) and a zoom photo of the moon. I apparently moved a little bit, so the wire passing in front of it doesn’t line up exactly.

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Twitter is like a train crashing into a burning dumpster, and the railroad owner won’t let firefighters in because they’re doing such a brisk business selling marshmallows.

Facebook is like a large family gathering where you can’t quite get away from your racist uncle/in-law’s soapboxing, and the TV keeps interrupting with commercials for things related to your conversations.

Tumblr is the weird coffee shop you used to hang out in but you’ve outgrown. You stop by occasionally for old times sake, but now it’s been bought out by a national chain and homogenized.

Mastodon is like a small party: not as many people as Facebook or Twitter, but you can actually hear each other talk.

Instagram is like checking out your friends’ vacation photos, but after a while you start noticing all the product placement.

Of course, all of them have people who will Judge You because You’re Doing It Wrong.

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Anyone familiar with what Facebook Pages considers to be a “business?”

Facebook decided to group my “business pages” (two blogs, neither of which is a business, one of which I had already marked for deletion a few days ago) into a “business account.” I thought maybe they’d flattened their definitions, but another page (for a long-defunct user group that I also marked for deletion this week) didn’t get lumped into it.

“Help” hasn’t been terribly helpful.

Knowing Facebook, I half-suspect it’s some weird “Oh noes, he’s deleting pages because he thinks he doesn’t have the tools he needs! Let’s change his settings so he’ll see that we do offer the tools!” I deleted the pages because they’ve been inactive for years, not because I don’t have advertising tools for them.

I don’t need a “Facebook business account,” but I’m reluctant to delete it unless I can be sure I won’t lose access to the active blog’s page. And again, “Help” has been spectacularly unhelpful.

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I never thought I’d see Microsoft throw in the towel on their browser engine. Or that, by the time it happened, I’d see that as a bad thing.

But it’s true: like Opera did a few years ago, Microsoft is dropping not only the old Internet Explorer engine, but the newer Edge engine, and will be building Edge on Chromium going forward. That means Edge, Chrome, Opera and Safari are all built on the same codebase. (Chromium split from Apple’s WebKit a while back, but they still have a lot in common.)

Monoculture is still a problem, no matter who runs it. We’re already at the point where webdevs are treating Chrome like the defacto standard, the way they did IE6 back in the day.

Firefox is going to be even more important in the future, ensuring that the web continues to be built on interoperable standards instead of one stakeholder’s goals.

Mozilla is a non-profit organization, and like many, they’re running a year-end donation drive. Now is a good time to contribute to their mission to keep the internet and the web open. (I’ve already made my annual donation to them.)

I think I may want to finally shut down or retool that old Alternative Browser Alliance site I ran during the Second Browser War. The last time I made a significant update to it, Chrome was the new upstart.