Why is every single emu in the entire world a monsterfucker? They're all more into heir human zookeepers than other emus? How? Why‽

I think society would be better if more people dressed like Pokémon gym leaders more often.

sheesh, the only thing worse than getting kicked out of the polycule is finding out via jira ticket 😣

Elim Garak invented Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss

I aspire to one day offer a player or reader clues revealing an insight with one hundredth as much bone-chilling horror as when the Alvarezes finally understood the implications of the worldwide layer of iridium at the K-T boundary after the peak biodiversity of the Permian.

Don't tattoo "DNR" on your chest. Nobody is going to delay CPR for even a second unless you have the state-specific signed, dated, & notarized paperwork handy, and even then it's probably not going to be noticed unless someone is waving it in the rescuer's face and advocating for you.

Can you imagine what it would be like if the Federalist Papers constantly nagged you to subscribe so that you could receive Publius' latest newsletters right in your mailbox with bonus content for premium subscribers, and were interrupted by mid-essay ads for Better Help and Squarespace?

I keep telling myself that I'd be happier if I used a "real" scripting language rather than just banging out everything in shell.

Financial, medical, & insurance companies force a false choice between receiving stacks of paper statements (yuck) and paperlessly getting vapid emails which don't actually include the records which they're telling you now exist for you to manually sign in and download.

Utterly terrifying nightmare in which some sort of bundled crapware sneakily made its way onto my machine and uninstalling it involved completing a series of increasingly unhinged and downright psychotic CAPTCHAs.

I am fascinated by the legal theory that Congress cannot delegate any authority to executive *agencies*, but absolutely _can_ delegate everything & the kitchen sink to the "unitary executive".

I feel embarrassed that every time I want to compare strings or numbers in bash or zsh, I have to look up the extremely fiddly syntax to make sure I don't dig myself a new grave. But really, the shells should be embarrassed to be so unintuitive about this stuff.

I'm not a huge fan of the military in general, but I have incredible respect for the brave aviators of the crow early warning & air defense network which keeps our neighborhood free of raptors and safe for our pet parrot. Thank you for your service. o7

There are no wikis or forums any more — if you want information about a project, you need to join one of two chat clients. Slack, the corporate one owned by Salesforce, will sometimes send you a surprise bill for like two hundred thousand dollars. Discord, the gamer one, is microtransaction hell.

42 years ago today, on September 26 1983, Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces made the incredibly brave choice to disobey the letter of his orders and ignore the early warning system he oversaw.

I'm enjoying The Pitt — very much the prestige TV successor to ER. But they just featured a spider bite. My suspension of disbelief is forever ruined.

Why should resistance be constrained by non-violence when oppression has no such limits?

I hate when tech tells me to check with my system administrator. It's just rude (and often lazy). It's like a plumber asking "Is there a man around I could talk to?" because they don't want to have to explain themself.

OH via the Frontline Fifth Podcast: > People think that th Pulitzer Prize is the highest award in journalism. Incorrect! The highest award is getting killed by the CIA.

My favorite sailboat racing class has got to be “Use as much contemporary sail theory and engineering design as you’d like, but your vessel has to (1) be *assembled* with materials and processes in use before the 20th century*, & (2) carry at least this much simulated cargo.

In a show I'm watching, a supernatural entity just prophesied a divine weapon "more powerful than ten thousand swords", and this monologue is superimposed over apocalyptic imagery which resembles the aftermath of a nuclear war.

My favorite way to enjoy excellent art is by looking at screenshots of screenshots of it without any links back to the original. That slaps actually and is very healthy.

Go off, I guess, but I would simply not attack Poland even if I was planning a dead-eyed denial hours later.

People criticize the Star Wars prequels for heavy-handed writing about oblivious idiots, naïve caricatures, and unnecessary obsession with a couple of families and some marginal institutions. But have you seen the news? Those bland scripts and often-wooden performances look sparkling by comparison.

It is truly amazing what you can achieve when you work hard and believe in yourself instead of actually checking your work.

Based on the magnitude of the manosphere's freakout, I was really expecting Superman (2025) to be much woker? Just felt like basic bog-standard by-the-numbers Superman with a bit of Gunn flair and a perfect sublime impeccable Luthor.

Being unemployed gives me much more time do deal with the day-to-day administriva which so often gets put on the backburner. But coping with my own personal tech debt really makes me miss working with specialists who can work through this stuff ten times faster than I can.

I'm gad to see that Sam did, in fact, finally get the horns.

Remember when you were a kid and you learned about Superman and thought it was totally ridiculous that Krypton was going to be destroyed but nobody did anything about it? I miss feeling that way.

It was DNS. And — worse — it was mostly my fault.

Samalamadingdong!

Sure, sex is good. But have you ever spent a beautiful day cycling around listening to books while you acquire additional library cards? Seven. I have *seven* different ways to place holds on Libby now. And I received no less than four (4) unprompted compliments. What a day!

Lizard! Lizard! Lizard, lizard, lizard! Lizard, lizard! www.instagram.com/p/DNWCqadTDh7

It's always a good day when you're recompiling ffmpeg from source.

EFF's hiring a tech support role at the intersection of Apple devices and Microsoft services. Bay Area hybrid, unionized workplace: www.paycomonline.net/v4/ats/web.p...

I got to bring out the full bisexual lighting rig for the portrait booth at a Locked Tomb larp yesterday. I managed to sneak in a few selfies at the end because of course I did. It was perfect timing, because I also just had my hair recolored last week. Yay for my new profile pic!

Is Rhys Darby playing his exact character from Our Flag Means Death as Q in Strange New Worlds? 🍿

TIL that the Sunday Times can't spell "enshittification" right. archive.is/BtZD0

I regret to inform you, but I did a poll over here, and the results are very clear: both Zords and EVA Units are classified as Gundams.

In the beginning, Wizards released a new Magic set every eighteen months. Then twelve, then six, then every quarter. These ones have been every other month. In six months we could see a new Magic set every week until they're arriving every day. We could witness a double event by 2026.

It's an unpopular opinion but I'm just going to come out and say it. I don't think I should have to pay the soda tax on LaCroix just because someone once whispered the word "grapefruit" somewhere near it.

Forget straws, please stop including cables. I don't mean if your thing has weird pogo pins or a magnetic whatever, you're fine keep it up. But if your gizmo has a standard USB port, there's no need to include a six-inch flimsy cable with a micro/mini/C one one end and USB A/C on the other.

Y'all probably know some of the more popular administrative antigenders. Things like "prefer not to disclose", "none of the above", "tax entity only", "APO/FPO mail". Well, I raise you: "reserved for official use only". Dang, if that isn't me, I don't know what is.

Forget namby pamby Eurotrash wands made from the heartwood of an ancient oak and the mane of a majestic unicorn.

Victim blaming is wrong and bad. Unless you were bitten/scratched by an animal or a child, in which case it was entirely your fault and you should think long and hard about what you did to provoke it so that you can avoid being a bad mean jerk like that ever again.

So sad that Netflix cancelled the sequel to the fun queer action movie *The Old Guard*. Too bad we'll never get to see Uma Thurman & Charlize Theron's witty banter during their climactic battle, or finally realize the onscreen chemistry between Theron & her long-lost wife Veronica Ngô.

Next time someone tells me that they asked an LLM, I'm going to tell them that I received an obscure prophecy from a divine oracle which disagrees. I think that this will be more effective than just giving them facts — **which I also have** — because clearly that didn't work the first time.

Serious question: do any of the current Civilization or Civ-like games have rules/mechanics which might be a reasonable model for any of the following? I'm not looking for precise simulation — I'd just like the system to support these sort of dynamics & the possible ways they might play out.

Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.