jon, lol! He was incredibly good looking once upon a time.

@daniel So I have an Instagram account dedicated to board games. Occasionally small board game companies send me games to play with the understanding that I’ll play the games and post about them. Because modern board games are a fairly niche hobby, it only takes a few thousand followers to become enough of an “influencer” for companies to partner with you. Larger accounts (many still under 10k followers but some of the super popular board gamers influencers that I follow have over 100k followers on instagram ) will be paid to make content about games, sometimes for social media or for Kickstarter campaigns. They get invited to try games before they are released and get lots of free product. And these folks definitely influence purchasing decisions amongst fellow board gamers so they are a huge part of a game company’s marketing budget. Every hobby has their own group of influencers. In niche hobbies they may only have a few thousand followers. But in areas like makeup and fashion they may have millions of views on TikTok. It’s a really bizarre landscape. There is a woman, I believe in China, who shows each product for 1-3 seconds before moving on to the next one. She’s a big deal - though I don’t really get why. But companies pay her to show their product, just for a moment.

Computer hacking is typically a slow process. Lots of things to test and check to find vulnerable ways to gain access to private areas. Guess what? Using AI to look for many more ways in - all in the blink of an eye... What could go wrong?

Realtor.com on X: "Corporate investors are increasingly buying up mobile home communities and raising rents, leaving residents with few options since moving a mobile home costs $4,000 to $10,000. In Clinton, TN, one retiree saw her lot rent jump from $275 to $650 a month under new corporate https://t.co/WfYWAjabgF" / X https://share.google/UJkPuOXkc5TaLmYNJ My lot rent is $890 in '26. It increased by $75 after only $50 in '25 and $25 in '24. It was below $550 in December, 2019. This is a private owner in his '80's squeezing every last dollar he can out of his business by increasing rent and cutting services. People who know (this is second hand) know that his children hate the business and want nothing to do with it. I told the manager I was leaving and why. She said she wished I'd stay but will give me a landlord recommendation for these years when I asked her if she would do this. The worst way to go about it (although I suppose none is good) is when private equity simply declines to renew the leases, renovates every unit to a uniform standard, and re-opens a park, with all the units being rentals.

Anyway, yikes!!

I looked into Optery, which is a similar service. I did the free plan, which provides a report that lists where your info is stored. It originally located 60+ sites, and I manually submitted requests to a bunch of them, requesting deletion of my info. Optery still sends me occasional emails and now it says I'm only on 30 sites. I may do some more manual deletion requests; I haven't pulled the trigger on a paid subscription. PC Mag does a comparison: https://www.pcmag.com/comparisons/incogni-vs-optery-which-data-removal-service-comes-out-on-top

Good lord.

This is a great story. Dr. Druker is still here in Portland, with the Knight Cancer Institute. (Named for Phil & Penny Knight of Nike.)

It's a feel good story. Fine. The problem is still a system that created this chasm of a wealth disparity and it's attendant societal evils.

A New Orleans house the way it should be. Link to video

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Block Communications had announced it would permanently shut down the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on May 3; the paper enjoyed a last-minute reprieve, sold last month to the nonprofit institute that created the online Baltimore Banner. But the local news guild says that the new owners have cut 40% of the newsroom, including the vast majority of those who served as union organizers during an extended labor dispute. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/11/nx-s1-5818208/ajc-andrew-morse-leaving (The article also talks about changes at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Wisteria can be a vigorous pain... I'd drill into and add poison to the very short stump.