Curious bit of philosophical history: a young Nietzsche and his (awful) sister ran into Mazzini on a trip to the Italian Alps, and they spent a day traveling with him. From Sue Prideaux's biography:

"I'd find a way out of the thought experiment"

Watching some of South East London's Facebook users get massively radicalised over ULEZ was wild, and I think it's a way more interesting case study in social media and political vandalism than any of the lamppost flags

You can watch Up Helly Aa live the nicht. Its always a sight when they set fire to the boat. #UpHellyAa #Shetland

do these firms have any customers or do they just do it for the hell of it

The Nobel Peace Prize becoming so prestigious that wars are fought over a head of state coveting it is some real monkey paw stuff for Alfred Nobel.

Seems unfair that you only get to use the bouncy slide to get off a plane when things have gone wrong. The bouncy slide should be a treat they give to the best passengers who did the flight correctly.

Today is the 5 year anniversary to when I slowly started losing my mind during the pandemic and began dressing up as works of art. As my Twitter account has long been abandoned, why not make a thread of my madness on BlueSky? This was “The Maid” by Wilhelm August Lebrecht Amberg, from 1862

He's with the a̶n̶g̶e̶l̶s̶ spaceships now www.independent.co.uk/arts-enterta...

How 👏 many 👏 shrimps 👏 should 👏 your 👏 fund 👏 include 👏 Before 👏 your 👏 customers 👏 are 👏 screwed 👏 Keep 👏 your 👏 beta 👏 low 👏 and 👏 fixed 👏 Shrimps won't make you rich www.refire-online.com/opinion/the-...

I'm not shomer Shabbat, but being at Limmud and having that cross-communal buy-in (at least for using phones publicly) was so surprisingly refreshing and felt so much easier with everyone else joining in

The thing I like about Jesse is that he's a proper old school conspiracy theorist. Yeah, he believes in Bigfoot and UFOs but he never went down the QAnon rabbit hole. Sure, we're hiding aliens at Area 51, but the Democrats being run by Satan-worshiping paedophiles at a pizza restaurant? Fuck off!

I get that she's no longer frontbench, but it's weird to see Emily Thornberry become "senior Labour MP" after being one of their big names on camera

With Bardot's passing, the only named individuals in Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire that are still alive are Bob Dylan, Chubby Checker, and Bernie Goetz. The last one standing will claim The Prize.

Hate freeloaders who join in the New Year's Eve countdown for the last 10 seconds. I've been doing this all year. Where were you back in May

My kingdom for a British Nordsee franchisee

Family have finally decided to try Minhag America and have Asian food for Christmas

Tiny Tim did not die... that day. He died three weeks later in a bizarre accident involving a spooked horse, a cart load of barrels and a stained glass window, because Death's plan will not be denied.

We never see evidence that the rumors about Old Man Marley are false. what we DO see is him using the shovel as a deadly weapon, then deftly slipping away before the cops arrive.

Latke? I hardly know 'er!

A fine cat harvest coming down from the tree this year

gonna repost this old livejournal post about tom bombadil as a lovecraftian entity again km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html

we are going to need better language for talking about AI use, because it is entirely possible to "use AI" in the development process in a way that results in zero AI running in production

I once had a bag of beans that claimed to taste of "purple jelly babies", which feels like some sort of Baudrillardian Simulacrum

> looking for a new ghola > ask the Tleilaxu if their ghola is creepy or Duncan Idaho > they don't understand > I pull out illustrated diagram of what is creepy and what is Duncan Idaho > they laugh and say "it's a good ghola sir" > buy a ghola > it's Duncan Idaho

Sing of the dreidel, o clay-made spinner of heritage ancient Rounding circuitous, dry and ready for gambling cocoa. Dreidel, o dreidel, o clay-made spinner with which I will gamble. So say the Muses, it has thin legs but I haven't seen them. When it gets tired, it drops; upon said fall I'm a winner.

Sorry your pet is catslop. You only like her because she's small and very cute with big eyes and soft fur and delightful sounds and behaviors

I still think a lot about this one Bulgarian restaurant in London who used grated Sirene to make cheesy chips. Possibly the best I've ever had

I heard that it's really difficult to imagine an education system other than your own, and Americans having to carry on with some A-Level (GCSE?) subjects at uni entirely wigs me out

people are understandably dunking on this but the undergraduate degree as practiced in US universities *is* in fact pretty incoherent *given that it costs so much money.*.

Los Angeles, 2019. I am a courier, delivering important materials by hand. In order to navigate the dirty, crowded streets better, I glide through them on a pair of roller blades. I'm what's known colloquially as an ANDROID MURDERER. (There was a mix-up at the job name factory.)

Some of the best content on the FT.com is not being produced by FT journalists, but by below-the-line commenter Winter Cruise Allowance. Here's their take on the new taxes on cash held in stocks-and-shares ISAs:

I'm so glad that my early TTRPG experiences came from GMs with a very clear sense of what they wanted to run and a Fate-based system

1. Use a password manager to create unique, complex passwords 2. Don't use SMS for 2FA if at all possible: use an app or a hardware key 3. Never type your password into a site that's been sent to you as a link you weren't expecting 4. If your phone number stops working, go straight to your provider

oh, that's... that's not... you can't call it that

"Greeks living in Afghanistan were Buddhist 500 years before China and a thousand years before Southeast Asia" is one of those things that sounds made up but is in fact true

This has brought up a question I actually don't know - when did the specific form "the fae" become so popular in English? OED has "Faerie" going back to Spenser, "fey" as "fairylike" in 1823, and there's obviously "Morgan le Fay" from French, but can't find much for "the fae" til quite recently!

It's a bit funny that Japan uses red when stocks go *up* (and green when they go down), making this picture look way worse if you're just scrolling by

Really fabulous Festival of Economics/British Academy lecture from John Muellbauer! Featuring social housing, land taxes and an abiding sense of Millennial Terror

#3157 A helpful tutorial

MISSIONARY: And he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword. GERMANIC CHIEFTAIN: So you’re saying keep it up and I’m guaranteed a warrior’s death? MISSIONARY: …You know what? Sure. GERMANIC CHIEFTAIN: This Josh guy fucking rules.

Businesses abdicating their brand identity to baseline ChatGPT almost makes me miss when they'd just use Papyrus over a textured background

I think brand identity might end up being the final boss for gen AI. You need to be both clearly distinctive from your competitors and ruthlessly consistent in your own content. Until image gen can do that, the business use case is limited to "bakeries who think photoing a cupcake is too hard"

Your weekend Umlaut: a single piece of neon divided in two with the help of black electrician’s tape.

I've been collecting pandemic era signs that nobody can be bothered to take down or remove. There's something grimly fascinating about this. Putting them up was urgent and important; removing them is nobody's job. How long will some of these hang around?

Yes … meow meow meow … YES! Happy Friday from Dottie. I’ve always believed cats were Sickos … @theonion.com

Frantically googling "US soldiers UK bases", "MoD pay US soldiers" and "third amendment UK"

I'm posting this on BlueSky to (hopefully) disprove a theory I have about this platform. Do people on here understand this is not 'pro-Palestine' activism, despite this individual describing her output as such? That this is in fact the Great Replacement theory so beloved of White Nationalists?

"Dear Sir, Your good name has been bought to my attention as a trustworthy man and a believer in God. I am the son of the late Queen Elizabeth II, ruler of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. My mother left me forty-five million pounds and the city of York but I am unable ..."