The funniest part is that the whole point of funding the crusades was to send your potential sources of domestic political instability (loud, violent lunatics) off on a mission where, worst case scenario, they were out of your hair for several years or, best case scenario, they died.

there have been multiple stories of middle school girls getting harassed with generated CP of themselves over the past few years and somehow the only AI fear that seems to stick is the fucking water if i was more conspiratorial i'd think it's a psyop

as someone who generally can’t do audiobooks for serious works, I gotta say: the reader on this one is great, and Caro’s writing is so crystalline and character-focused that the only time I wished for a print copy was at Chapter 33, when he schematically delineates how Moses ran the table

when you get isekai'd into somebody's first half-life 2 mod

you know, if you repeat the word “abstract” enough it starts getting…uh…you know…it’s on the tip of my tongue…

tbf I get where the “AI is alive” people are coming from, as it’s the same force that makes me unable to mute the announcer in Sonic Racing Transformed

These folks seem nice 🙂

These folks seem nice 🙂

A visual depiction of the week between Christmas and New Year's:

127 Minutes (2025) In this terrifying real-time sequel, Buddy Toledo (Jesse Fuchs) must play Disgaea on his Switch until the batteries run out or the cat he is trapped under wakes up

One corollary to this is that Avatar/Alyx might actually have been more successful in hardware adoption terms if, like King’s Quest IV (MIDI soundcards) and Myst (CD-Rom), they left enough room for improvement that everybody else’s follow-up didn’t feel anti-climactic to the median swing consumer.

you know the prompt

WWE Presents: Hell in a Cell (feat. Bill Frisell)

The thing is, there *is* a historical archetype of the (RIP The Dissolve) “Forgotbuster”: Alice in Wonderland, The Great and Powerful Oz, Hancock, and the first Narnia movie all qualify. But as Sam indirectly points out in the next post, the difference here is that the sequels aren’t dropping off.

90s perfection dept.

Given both the current interest in related fields and the last 50 years of the digital humanities as a discipline, it feels like 2026 would be the right time to resurface Dave Hickey’s never-submitted dissertation and give it a legitimate tire-kicking

shit like this is why when i was unpacking my library yesterday, i put "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" in with psychoanalysis and literary criticism

see, this is the problem with LLMs: they just gravitate towards the most statistically likely answer, instead of evaluating the specific facts of my actually *being* the avenging sword of God whose every action is imbued with cosmic significance 🙄

Phrenology, Myers-Briggs, Euclidean geometry: many such cases

Avatar-sized budget and production but instead of about problematic space cats it’s about the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.

Kevinismus

you have my attention

Just heard Duke Ellington use a magnificent phrase in a 1974 BBC interview with Stanley Dance. Asked whether he regrets never having received a grant to sit at a university somewhere and compose in peace, he says he has no interest in such a stretch of “ornamental stagnation.”

Putting an LLM up against Komar & Melamid’s Most Unwanted Song “John Henry Style”, and while I do not think this is actually possible in any known audio format, I do grudgingly admire the intentless gusto

My Xmas Message To The Videogame Industry: Bring Back The Paddle, You Cowards

Komar and Melamid present: The Most Unwanted Bird

play me like one of your pianos, H. Jon Benjamin

Bing exists in an interesting superposition of being un-canceled due to a combination of 1) the people who care being aware of Giddins’s research, which debunked the most lurid claims and complicated the rest, and 2) the other 99.99% of humanity just not giving a shit what Christmas Guy did or was

Spoiler: it’s not “how to write great hit songs”, although it would be pretty cool if that’s how it worked.

I mean, sure, if you’re a famous billionaire. Luckily, most of us do not have that problem.

Watching a video ranking the 50 some games a person finished this year and I get that playing videogames is a full-time job for some people but it struck me how incidental finishing a game is to my experience. I play until I get bored and then repeat that every couple years. See you in 2028 LA Noire

Tom Waits talking to a puppet named TB who's a worm dressed like a newsie with tuberculosis. "WeLl if iT iSNt BeTtE mIdLeR" and she's dressed like a sexy 30s fallen woman. They sing White Christmas with a bunch of junkyard dogs roaming around. It writes itself

For about ten years I've thought about what a Tom Waits TV Christmas special produced in the early 80s would have been like. It's almost real to me. The set is a Depression-era shack he built and a stream of celebrity hobos keep knocking on the door and Tom goes "I wOnDEr WHo tHaT cOuLd bE"

Merry Christmas from Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet

RIP to Jerry Kasenetz, who if I'm being honest had just as much influence on my musical taste in college as Brian Eno

The Card Players, 1892 https://botfrens.com/collections/43/contents/12991

This is a very good thread that also reminds me of one of my favorite songs off of 50 Song Memoir, although of course Grace Slick was infinitely less culpable here

🎄🐱

He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

i think you can do this but have to design the game around it. you have to have enough hypersurfaces to pen the pointer in to the space of things which might be fun to do. but nobody knows how to do this, quite, and this is a type of constraint, not a type of freedom.

keeping this around for the next time i'm asked what Bluesky is

JIMMY CORRIGAN: GOD'S VENGEANCE ON EARTH

The whole essay is a real banger- unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-...

Reminds me of: "Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one." - "The Social Ideology of the Motorcar" by André Gorz (1973)

That’s a good point—even in 1982, the salient question is whether this handheld computer is a tool this go-getter acquired to stay one step ahead of his business rivals, or something the company he worked for imposed on everyone in order to further blur their work/life divide. Could go either way!

an interesting mental exercise is to separate all technologies into “things that become infinitesimally better every time someone else acquires one” (e.g. a deck of cards) and “things that become infinitesimally worse every time someone else acquires one” (e.g. a car)

genuinely life-changing moment was when one of my former students, who was now teaching game design to 12-year-olds, told me that her students’ most common and beloved insult was “bozo”