First Looks category archive

Off to drink liberally.

A con artist’s best friend? From El Reg:

Aviva (a UK insurance company–ed.) and its wider brand portfolio received an estimated 18,400 plus fraudulent claims in 2025, backed by doctored evidence includeding AI-generated car accident scenes, fake official documents, and fabricated images exaggerating damage.

If approved, the sum of these claims would have amounted to £233 million ($310.3 million) across the year, or roughly £638,000 ($850,000) per day.

Fun fact from the Las Vegas Sun:

After one of the warmest, driest winters on record and a historically arid quarter-century, the (Colorado–ed.) river’s two biggest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are at 29.5% and 23.5%, respectively, of their capacities.

How about some sauce for the gander?

Via Job’s Anger.

Via Job’s Anger.

According to my old Philly DL friend Noz, that’s something that the American Stasi seems to have forgotten (if they ever cared in the first place).

Off to drink liberally.

Things to do.

Methinks Atrios makes a good point.

Even if it’s called “social” media, there’s nothing particularly “social” about jumping up and down while shouting “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” all the time.

The Professionals.

The best way I can describe it is to say it’s sort of a Britinh Man from U.N.C.L.E.

You should be able to find it streaming somewhere.

Off to drink liberally.

I’ve added a new link to the OTR category on the sidebar: Radio Echoes.

The dialog: Two fifty.

The closed caption: Two each day.

H. Rider Haggard:

I do not believe in violence; it is the last resort of fools.

When I started this in the early days of the blogosphere, comment spam was a thing. Then, as “social” media began to attract everybody’s eyeballs, as the saying goes, the amount of comment spam died out. It never went away, but it became relatively rare.

There’s been a sharp uptick in comment spam the past few weeks (indeed, I deleted over two dozen spam comments yesterday). Fortunately, thanks to Akismet, almost none of it makes to your screens.

It’s almost all for on-line gambling sites and apps.

This is not a good thing.

Via Job’s Anger.

I’m watching an episode of Midsomer Murders which involves what the British refer to as a “heritage railroad” (we’d call it a steam line). In it, an actor playing the part of a railroad employee repeatedly steps on rails.

I worked for the railroad for many years. Railroad workers do not step on rails.

Rails, at least those frequently traversed by trains, are slippery.

You can slip and fall and, in the worst case scenario, get run over by a train.

By the way, you can catch that episode on Tubi. If you like mystery shows, you will like Midsomer Murders.

And, if you like Midsomer Murders, you will really like Caroline Graham’s Inspector Barnaby novels, which inspired Midsomer Murders. (I can’t call them mystery stories. They are truly novels that just happen to involve murders.)