Author Archives: Freeman Ng

Social butterflying

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Starting in 2023, I'll be expanding my social media presence to include two promising would-be Twitter/Facebook replacements: Post and Mastodon.

I'm especially interested in the potential of Mastodon. You can read my thoughts about it here.

Here are all my social feeds now:

PERSONAL: Mastodon, Post, Facebook, Twitter

HAIKU DIEM (my daily haiku feed): Mastodon, Post, Facebook, Twitter

TRUMPBERT (my Dilbert parody that I'm starting up again in 2023): Mastodon, Post, Facebook, Twitter

Hope to see you out here somewhere!… [more]

The Company We Keep: Abortion

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This is the first of a series of posts I'll be making about how political positions we hold compare with the policies of the other countries of the world. Often, the propaganda of the political parties within this country can give us a distorted view of what's normal, and the "echo chambers" that we create for ourselves through our social media circles and our choice of news sources can distort that view even more.… [more]

Twin Monarchs Chess Problems

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I've invented, or maybe just reinvented, a new kind of chess problem that is (I hope) immune to being solved by chess engines. It involves one or both sides having two kings!

Other than that, all the other rules of the game stay the same, so these problems still feel like normal chess problems. They just involve these two extra rules dealing with the new situations that can arise when you have two kings:

  1. The only way to checkmate a player is to checkmate both kings simultaneously.
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What We Can Do, 2021

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I normally post these guides to political action in election years, but the lesson of the last four years is that there are serious problems in this country that require ongoing action. So here are my recommendations for groups to support and — perhaps even more importantly — actions that we can take to continue mending the fabric of our society.… [more]

What We Can Do – Georgia 2021

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As you probably know, the 2020 elections are not over yet. Two contests remain: the two Georgia Senate seats, which will determine which party controls the Senate for the first two years of the Biden/Harris administration. In those two years, we can either witness actual grownups begin to govern this country again for the good of all, or watch Mitch McConnell obstruct everything we need to be doing.… [more]

What We Can Do – 2020 Homestretch

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In a previous post, I listed my recommendations for the most critical campaigns and organizations to donate time or money to in order to affect the 2020 elections, but now we're less than two months away from Election Day, and the priorities have changed. In the current environment, in which both sides are about as motivated to vote as they can be, the airwaves are saturated with political ads, and the GOP is making active plans to bypass the democratic process entirely, the most "bang for the buck" now lies in making sure every vote is counted as early and as securely as possible, to give the GOP the smallest window possible for an autocratic takeover.… [more]