10. Despite the fact that Nathaniel Hawthorne inexplicably slandered the ancestor of Thomas Pynchon, the two novelists actually have much in common: both are "Heritage Americans" for whom a distinguished ancestry is not a point a pride but a reason to grapple with their nation's dark history.

folks gotta know that the point of flock cameras is ultimately not to scam city governments to pay for them, though that’s nice while it lasts. the point is to put them up everywhere & keep them running as a nationwide surveillance network & database, even after the checks get stopped

“the laws on AI-generated fetish content involving minors remain blurry” is a sentence that really speaks to the insufficiency of our legal system to deal with both this immediate threat & the wider ongoing epistemic threat of AI content

Apartheid activists in the NJ State Assembly are exploiting the Bondi Beach murders to accelerate passage of S1292/A3558—a bill to redefine antisemitism under the AIPAC/ADL-approved “IHRA” in order to criminalize criticism of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide. Call via link below:

With little public discussion or media attention, a company that uses AI technology to collect data on millions of people and wants to be a leader in the "recognition" economy, just took over our two city parking garages. Thanks to those here who weighed in! open.substack.com/pub/charlott...

While the international community has largely moved on, Palestinians are still living in a nightmare world. www.bbc.com/news/article...

this one’s gonna be a banger, if i were still a science fiction academic i’d be using it to build out my history of the editors & agents of the new wave (very often the same group of people)

Profoundly disappointed in all of you who did not inform me Blue Prince was finally out for Mac.

Sony’s Japanese MiniDisc ads with Jamiroquai

man I love avocados but I really wish they weren't so hard to cut

The story is insane. The acting head of cyber security, a Noem crony, repeatedly demanded to see highly classified information he didn’t need access to, and when staff set up a lie detector test as a condition to grant him access, he failed it. So DHS suspended the staffers.

This makes me so angry. I'm disgusted that the premier is claiming that the 300,000 empathetic people who marched over the bridge because they were sick of babies being bombed (with our help!) are in any way responsible for the terrorist attack in Bondi.

always nice when the kernel panic blooms just in time for christmas

HYPNOSPACE CHEAP GO BUY IT 💲4.99 on Steam!* Check out them bundles too!! 💲5.99 on Nintendo Switch! Plays great on Switch 2 as well!! 💲4.99 on GOG!* No DRM, and no download client needed!! *Windows, Mac, & Linux :D

I don't need ChatGPT, I can just type any prompts to these two and I can rely on them to kick me out regardless

working at cbs has to be hell right now & it's incumbent on all of us to make it worse

I watched AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH in Portugal today and I just want everyone to know that the entire movie was subtitled in English in Papyrus. The entire movie.

NEW #VentureBros holiday song from @jacksonpublick.bsky.social & @doc-hammer.bsky.social! For 2025, Dragoon and Red Mantle dug deep into the holiday songbook for a Guild Gala performance of “I Like Life”! Go get it (& all the rest) at bit.ly/venturebrosholiday

guys i'm sorry i take it all back, tim kaine is doing very important work & we should send him back to DC every 6 years till he dies in chamber

Remember kids electricity will kill you ⚡⚡⚡

please let “bugs bunnying” become the slang for manipulating an LLM into ignoring its guardrails, i have never seen a more succinct and evocative term for it

the vice president is a klansman

last day open for the year at the campus gym is one of the very best vibes

maybe big universities would be able to close their budget holes if they didn't pay sex pests millions to coach sports that concusses students into early deaths www.espn.com/college-foot...

beardsley was consulting in belgium on telecom throughout the 90s & i suddenly have a *lot* more questions about a lot more things

minaj is on the verge of having her $20M home forcibly sold by the court to cover a $500K debt, in case you wonder what’s going on here

I wrote about the conservative quest to restore the "true" Constitution, the Antebellum Constitution, shorn of the egalitarian nonsense in the Reconstruction Amendments, a document that replaces equality with a society of dominators and the dominated. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Can somebody put the green lines on this

before everybody gets to sharing this, the only source seems to be this tweet from a youtuber. Nobody has it posted or shared anywhere with a link to the files or file name, and nobody else has reported on it that I can find? The other pic of Trump made the news pretty fast

WELKER: Massie and Khanna say they are looking at options including impeachment and contempt for DOJ officials. Would you support those steps? KAINE: I think that's premature

Tim Kaine sure does love greasing the rails for immiseration & fascism

the amount of damage tim kaine has done over his career is honestly staggering, not just being the VP candidate on the ticket that fucked up against maga to begin with, remember he was DNC head during the utter disaster of the 2009–11 cycle where they failed to convert on any of the obama wave

this quote comes right after frodo says he wishes none of this happened in his time, & gandalf says all folks wish that. implication is university leadership is immense painful burden that can only be carried by "nontraditional" leaders (hobbits/consultants)...

Nothing to see here, just a right wing hyper-nationalist government going to their party’s youth event sponsored by a group with a martyred leader they’ve pledged to avenge, recruiting people to join their masked police force devoted to removing auslanders from ze homeland.

As a public service, I am reading Scott Beardsley’s book on higher education. Just as Beardsley sacrificed a lucrative career at McKinsey to take a $700k a year job as Dean of Darden on his way to the very sketchy appointment as UVA president, I paid $12 for the kindle edition of “Higher Calling.”

“The last-minute christmas rush at the bookshop.” - my latest cartoon for @theguardian.com books

Welcome to Unite the Right attendee and torch carrier Craig R. Meyer from Muncie, IN, previously in the Seattle, WA area. #IgniteTheRight ignitetheright.net

So reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) can't fly, but they are VERY MAGICAL. For example, their EYES CHANGE COLOR during the year & they're one of the few large mammals that can see UV. Golden brown in summer, deep blue in winter. Let's talk about the unique visual adaptations of Rudolph and company.

Makes me proud every time! Did you know we’re shipping whistles anywhere in the US? Email whistlerequests [at] proton [dot] me for your free 3D printed whistles. We’ve sent over 30,000 so far in December!

It’s the “season of love and giving”…but this year, doesn’t it seem more like a “season of fear and taking”? Like many of you, I’ve been saddened by the human impact of draconian government budget cuts and how angry many housed Americans are at unhoused Americans. 🧵 1 of 9

rolling up on frosty the snow hound any minute now, further festivities to follow wavestagetv.com

I need everyone to look at the height markings in this image

dish soap rat slide

More of the Kuso Advent Calendar! Starting off with Toobin' for GBC, and it's not gonna get much better twitch.tv/brossentia

This is inexcusable. Full stop. But we also can’t have this convo without talking about predatory academic publishing at large: pay-for-play journal mills that exploit those desperate for publications to convert desperation to revenue. We’re not talking PMLA and Critical Inquiry here— (yet?)