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Records of Enemy Surveillance:

The red squares are Flock cameras. They are networked devices with cellular radios and solar panels which read license plates via machine learning algorithms. Police have access to the full network of cameras, and have used it to stalk women, detain immigrants, and enforce anti-abortion laws. [...] In some images, the photographer is visible; she is also under surveillance.

Interview:

My first thought -- and this is a crime, so I didn't do it -- but my first thought was I'm just going to follow some cops around with a drone and do glitch art videos. And I quickly realized after doing the tiniest bit of Googling that I could not. So I was like, alright, well, I'm going to examine some other kind of surveillance, and the Flock thing had sort of been in the back of my mind. [...]

Many people don't want to interrogate their desire for surveillance. They just want to check a box: This makes me feel safe, or this doesn't make me feel safe. Because you go to something in Piedmont and say, "Dude, you have a border set up around your little exclave city that is surveilling everyone who goes in and out. What in your heart of heart makes you think this is OK? What is your goal with that?" And if they interrogate it, it makes them feel horrible. But they don't want to do that.

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Pete Reynolds:

The miraculous Shit-Raining Machine, from which there will be NO HOPE OF RELIEF, promises to unlock PREVIOUSLY UNIMAGINABLE AND CURRENTLY VAGUE BENEFITS FOR HUMANKIND, such as:

• Business things
• Other stuff
• WE MUST CREATE IT

Could the Shit Machine END WORLD HUNGER? It's NOT IMPOSSIBLE in the most LITERAL SENSE, which is all the justification we need to invest an AMOUNT OF MONEY that would OTHERWISE BY ITSELF END ACTUAL WORLD HUNGER.

Could it CURE CANCER? We DON'T KNOW, which is the same as: YES. [...]

I asked everyone I know at the BIG TECH HUMAN CENTIPEDE ROUNDTABLE, and we all agreed that UNCONTROLLABLE SHIT-RAIN IS USEFUL AND GREAT, and that EVERYONE WANTS IT. Also, that it was IN RETROSPECT A GREAT IDEA TO PUT EVERYTHING ON COMPUTERS.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Hey! Are you a fan of DNA Lounge? Would you like to help us stay alive? There is a thing you can do that will make it easier for us to book better shows, receive grants, and avoid harmful interference from our local bureaucrats. And even better, it only takes a minute of your time, costs you no money, and only involves clicking some links!

How, you ask?

Vote for us as "Best Nightclub" and "Best Live Music Venue" in this year's Best of the Bay poll.

I'm not exaggerating: being able to brag about winning popularity contests like this has proven to be extremely helpful to the business over the years. So won't you please take a minute out of your busy day and vote for us?

Categories for your consideration, in the order you will encounter them:

• Best Pizza: DNA Pizza
• Best Overall Bar: DNA Lounge
• Best Live Music Venue: DNA Lounge 👈👈👈
• Best Dance Company: Hubba Hubba Revue
• Best Theatre Company: Hubba Hubba Revue
• Best Performance Space: DNA Lounge
• Best Nightclub: DNA Lounge 👈👈👈
• Best Dance Party: Death Guild, AniCLover, Why 2K, Sorry For Party Rocking, Harder Better Faster Stronger, Vital, After Life, Dark Sparkle...

How does this help? Let me give you an example...

Let's say some City agency has a dumb plan that will damage our business. One of the few things that can discourage them is the knowledge that if they go through with their plan, people will notice that they did; and then their boss (or their boss's boss) will be dragged through the press, because the business that they're harming is well known and liked by a lot of people. People who vote.

Hypothetically. If something like that was in progress and I wasn't ready to talk about it yet. Just as a wacky example.

San Francisco has lost an absurd number of independent venues over the years, and DNA Lounge is still here: one of the few remaining large nightclubs in the city that is actually independently owned and operated. No corporate mothership, just us continuing to make the questionable decision to keep a giant nightclub running in San Francisco.

That independence is what lets us give a home to local bands, DJs, promoters and communities that don’t necessarily fit anywhere else. We can book the weird stuff, take chances on new events, and provide a stage for scenes that are too small, too niche, too loud, or just too strange for the corporate venues to care about.

Places like DNA Lounge only continue to exist because people decide that they should. If you are one of those people, then vote for us, ok? Thank you!

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

UN General Assembly votes against the Mercator Projection:

The UN General Assembly has voted to replace the traditional world map with one that more accurately reflects the size of Africa. The "Correct the Map" resolution, sponsored by Togo and backed by African Union members, passed with the support of 164 nations, including France and the UK. The United States was the only nation to vote against it.

The US voted against it because of woke, obviously.

Fortunately for you, XScreenSaver can accurately reproduce a Mercator Globe, amongst other cursed projections.

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Waymo has been slapped with more than 8,300 parking tickets since January 2025, with fines of nearly $1 million for various violations.

Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli told Gazetteer in an email that the company pays parking tickets "like any other driver". [...]

The SFMTA data between January 2025 and July 2026 shows that the most common infraction for Waymos in the city, with 2,038 tickets, was "parking in stands," aka taking up a space intended for a specific type of vehicle such as a tour bus. The other top infractions were parking in a prohibited space, obstructing traffic, double parking, and blocking bike lanes.

The single most frequent location for a parking ticket was 85 North Point St. -- a block away from Pier 39 at Fisherman's Wharf -- where Waymos were cited 577 times. Coincidentally, the second-most common address (with 369 citations) was just two blocks away at 150 Beach St., outside a parking garage. Waymos also got hit with 288 tickets on Drumm Street, a 1,300-foot stretch in the Financial District adjacent to Embarcadero Plaza. [...]

"The amount of money for a ticket is nothing to Waymo. So jumping through the hoops to assess a fine will not change their behavior," Koopman told Gazetteer.

In theory, the state now has more power to regulate Waymo's driving, thanks to new regulations adopted on July 1 that allow California law enforcement officials to issue "notices of noncompliance" to robotaxi companies for moving violations; previously, only parking enforcement was allowed.

The infractions will be tracked by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, and the state has the right to suspend or revoke a company's driverless car permit if there are repeated or serious noncompliance problems. Unlike human drivers, Waymo does not have to pay fines for moving violations, Koopman said.

"I have a hard time believing any plausible number of notices of non-compliance are going to cause Waymo's permit to be revoked," Koopman said. "It's a step in the right direction, but I don't think this step does very much on a practical basis."

I was gonna make a joke about how many parking tickets you thought a regular meatsack Non-Corporate person could get and still keep their license, but it turns out that the answer is infinitely many as long as you pay them.

It used to be that if you got too many unpaid parking tickets you could have your license suspended, but even that's not the case any more since 2017. (And with a good motivation: that it primarily harmed the poor. But to the rich, and to corporations, a fine is a price.)

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XScreenSaver 6.16 is out now for MacOS, Android and Unix.

Four new hacks this time, two by me: floppy, graphstat, amigajuggler and polarnight.

There is no iOS version because, though it compiles and runs just fine, Apple recently began rejecting App Store uploads that do not use the iOS 26 SDK. It is impossible to target that SDK with anything earlier than Xcode 26, which requires macOS 15 or 16. Since I am staying on macOS 14 for the foreseeable future, there will be no XScreenSaver iOS release for the foreseeable future.

Boy, I sure wish Rockbox didn't just... completely fuckin' suck.

When it does this, the only thing you can do is reboot, and that means "hope you didn't want to listen to any music for the next 15 minutes."

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Previously, previously.

Periodically, the "d" key on my keyboard stops working. Always and only "d". Power cycling the keyboar█ █oesn't fix it. Plug the keyboar█ into a █ifferent computer: works fine over there. Rebooting the Mac fixes it. An█ I have now █iscovere█: the mere act of launching NoMachine (without typing anything) fixes it -- for a while.

It just █i█ it again, 5 minutes later, go█ █ammit.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.