Reading Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend, I ran across a surprise. The 17th century Nahua historian Chimalpahin hypothesized that the Aztecs came from the Baltic countries.

They make great pets. #arabianmau

The headline begins innocently enough and the spirit rises a little but as one reads on, it swiftly turns to horror. By the gods, this is madness!

Wow, the case against Bolton is so much worse than the case against Trump or Biden for that matter.

Experiments with Sora 2

What’s the Polymarket on how long Markel has before she is arrested for being a Russian proxy?

Jack Ciattareli’s pal Trump just terminated the Gateway Project just like Chris Christie did beforehand. It’s time to terminate his candidacy! Let them run real republicans who care about New Jersey not MAGA cultists of they want to win.

We should start a political movement to either make the schwa the 27th letter of the alphabet or eliminate it without prejudice.

László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes were Hungarian avant-gardists, key figures at the Bauhaus before fleeing fascism. In the U.S., they reshaped visual education, but their ideas also influenced wartime strategies in camouflage, aerial reconnaissance, and psychological warfare. 2/6

If I were to build a new national party in the US or EU, it would be abundance-based—and begin with a merciless assault on administrative burden and bureaucratic disentitlement. @ezraklein is right that bureaucracy blocks progress, but it also disenfranchises.

If you are on Sora 2, I encourage you to follow me at sora.chatgpt.com/pro... for experimental video art, plus experimental slop.

So, we are told that through Yarvin, Vance has become aware of Nick Land. NRx is now the operative philosophy in the Trump Admin they say. Meanwhile Land lives in Shanghai with no clear income stream but "studies China." And we still *worry* about being played by the Chinese?

What? A month to file the story?

Berenstein Bears moment: didn’t John Searle die a few weeks ago?

Today, Donald Trump decided to give the New Jersey governor’s race to the Dems. I’m OK with that. I don’t want another trumpenprole in office.

Finally got access to Sora 2. It’s much, much worse than I ever imagined.

Even though the shutdown hurts the Dems, the Trumpen threat to kill the Hudson tunnel may be enough to win Sherrill the governorship. That won’t play well in the state. Not at all.

Nettle infusion is the best restorative tonic.

Mikie Sherrill should attack the NJ Affordable Housing Law. It destroys the environment and believe me, it’s not affordable unless you want studio apartments you can’t afford. Total scam to let developer win big.

Cryptid energy.

So Meta makes the cringeworthy Vibes, and just one week later, having learned nothing, OpenAI decides to follow up with Sora 2, a social network for creating short-form video slop nobody needs.

Now that’s commitment.

FYI if you liked Mare of Easttown, Task is even better. Harrowing though. Need to lighten it up by alternating it with Alien Earth.

Slop at work is an act of self rebellion against bureaucracy and must be defended as a basic human right.

Cat for #caturday

If the Dems shut down the government, then the GOP is going to win New Jersey

The more I think about it, already 25 years ago we academics all knew identity politics was going to fracture society but we were all afraid of saying anything. We thought we were right. And so now the mess we are in.

It breaks my heart when you hear an actor you’ve never heard of from an American show in an interview and their accent is British.

What happened to the Rapture? Did they confuse it with the early release of Silent Hill F or something?

SpaceX’s mantra of “move fast and break things” is way too slow by the standards of the 1960s. Mercury took 2 years 7 months to fly (from announcement), Gemini 3 years 3 months. It’s been 7 years since Elon announced Starship and it has yet to complete a mission, let alone a crew rated one. Sad.

So Silent Hill F comes out in early access at midnight EST but ChristianTok says it’s coming tomorrow so the potential to be really bummed for eternity is there.

Spent much of the day learning about the Edicaran. I’m shook.

Spent much of the day learning about the Edicaran. I’m shook.

“the ISS has remained continuously inhabited for 24 years and 321 days, the longest continuous human presence in space. As of August 2025, 290 individuals from 26 countries had visited the station.” - wikipedia

The Franceville biota, if actually a biota, is fascinating as is the Edicarian. The origins of life are truly Lovecraftian.

So, has anybody read Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation of the Odyssey? Did he get it right?

By ousting Jimmy Kimmel and taking over CBS, the Right has irreparably lost their message that “Main Stream Media” is against them. They are now the MSM. This may prove fatal.

What will historians of the 2700s say about all these academics and commentators writing about “late stage capitalism?” Will they be seen as akin to the 10th century millenarians?

In this weird time when the Right is panicking and declaring that it is time for war in a way that previously the Left did, it’s even more important to read Adam Greenfield’s post on the concept of the enemy.

Am I the only person on social media who was barely aware of Charlie Kirk before last year week? And am I the only person who has never watched Jimmy Kimmel?

Mexico City is like a much better version of LA. You wonder what the US’s problem is?

Having utterly failed to develop an elite, the Right has recently been working very hard on the triumph of the midwit mindset.

Slop is the most human creation.

The killing of Irnya Zarutska symbolizes US inaction on Ukraine. GOP needs to rise up and help the country that wants to be like us, not the county that wants to turn us into glass.

It’s fine to teach a child how to use a gun and how to hunt. It’s asking for trouble to take them to gun shows to play with submachine guns.

Not one person on the Right acknowledges that Iryna Zarutska was in the US was because she was a refugee, forced to leave her country because of lack of support of Ukraine. The GOP is weak on Russia, a country whose leadership daily vows to destroy the US. Why so weak, why so goddamned weak, eh?

The icons in iOS 26 are unbearably ugly. They look like a mashup of the worst design decisions of the 60s through the 80s, a time warp of failed modernisms, each decade’s worst idea frozen in an app icon.

To have a stair like this makes one feel alive. It's a tragedy that this is forbidden in some countries.

For those of us outside tech, the amount of slop companies is often shocking. Yes, there is OpenAI, Meta, Netflix, whatever, but there are also many more companies that specialize in tech that nobody on earth cares about, just utter scammy garbage. Hard to fathom how many of them there are.