Following up from last week, I’ve set up a new website for The Casefile of Jay Moriarty! The first story and two interludes can be read for free, and subscribers can get access to the full Casefile for as little as $1 USD/month.

This is a webspace I own and control myself, which should help me avoid a lot of the pitfalls that come with using somebody else’s platform. If my host goes down or decides they don’t want my business, I can switch to another one. If Jetpack (the service I’m using for subscriptions) succumbs to whatever the hell is happening at Automattic right now, I can export my subscriber list and switch to a different provider.

And the fact that I fully control the page structure and layout of the site opens up some fun opportunities, so stay tuned.

This Week’s Links

We Talked to the Inventors of the “Tamagotchi” Vape That Dies If You Stop Puffing

In the first iteration of the project, hitting the vape would actually murder the digital pet, and thus would ideally work to guilt-trip the user into not inhaling. … But then, explained Xun, Camacho “found this Stupid Hackathon. And we were like, it’d be kind of funnier to be evil.”

Don’t go putting our ants in your pants

The Belgians described themselves as ant enthusiasts and claimed ignorance: “We are not criminals … we are naïve and just want to go home,” they told the court last month.

Samuel Mutua, a wildlife crime expert at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, was not buying this defence. “Irrespective of their age, they were able to get a lot of ants,” he told Reuters.

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As a counterpoint to my friend Ian’s insistence that I have dark reality-warping powers, I would like to posit another possible explanation: I am a null pointer. I repeatedly point into the void, and sometimes it turns out there’s something there.

-K