Muppets Christmas Carol is the best Christmas movie bc it includes a song with the lyrics, "your future is a horror story written by your crimes" & nothing says Christmas cheer more than that. Also Michael Caine deserved all the awards for that performance. Perfection. No notes.

I'm getting a late start on Xmas gifts and thus everyone's getting bulk knits... was looking at getting multiple needles so I can work on several projects and DO YOU KNOW WHAT KNITTING NEEDLES COST THESE DAYS? $160 for a good set from Knit Picks or Lykke. TARIFFS!

the people of this great republic yearn for locomotive transport

When you can’t say “sorry we capitulated to bigots” because you’re afraid the bigots might hear you, so you just throw some glitter around and hope for the best.

Comics are the best thing. The culmination of hundreds of thousands of years of advances and mental leaps. A strange and wonderful technology of informational/emotional storage and retrieval. It took mankind so long to think of it and it's so GOOD.

Houston's Ismaili Center is officially open to the public. 🎉 https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/ismaili-center-houston-opening/

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”

Me when my student asks me what a shilling is while reading A Christmas Carol:

US politics make more sense when you recognize that a lot more people are susceptible to delusions than most folks probably assume.

“I miss blockbuster video” the library has every dvd totally untouched and I never see you there

these mfers love talking about God while radiating evil like an unshielded reactor core

“talking about god while radiating evil” is the load-bearing concept undergirding the evangelical-industrial complex

lord of the rings: the two towers at midnight on opening night, 2002, at the regal westgate. i had just moved to austin and fucking WILLIE NELSON was in line with everyone else. my roommate introduced himself and said “this is gonna be a great movie, willie” and he said “yup, looking forward to it.”

Pulled some books back from the brink with book tape - can we get an amen in the chat please?

Oh wow, absolute power corrupted you absolutely? That’s so weird, I got absolute power last year and my subjects say I’ve only gotten wiser and more virtuous

It's so fucked up to have been a kid during the D&D is the devil freakout and the Tipper Gore dirty lyrics freakout and live to see the teen suicide machine get such a pass.

This is fucking crazy.

The United States government is being dismantled and instead of treating this like a goddamn emergency and putting it on all channels all the time like people need to know their house is burning down, Dems are giving mealy mouthed statements about bipartisanship. But then they want us to care?

"call me please" I don't want to tho

No prison job has ever stimulated me as much as Braille transcriber.

It's remarkable how perfectly this awful story is similar to The Dreyfuss Affair, from the banishment to a cruel tropical prison to the world's worst and stupidest people refusing to let it go even for decades after he was freed.

so many of our current problems stem from americans not being able to comprehend that a guy they know from tv might actually be stupid

The people who support $12B in corporate welfare to farms and forgave $80B in auto bailouts and forgave $700B in bank bailouts and forgave $755B in PPP loans want you to know that forgiving medical debt and student debt is socialism😐

Books are power charges for your brain.

Every legal story now is either Ancient Circuit Judge Delivers Crystal Clear 100 Page Rebuke To Trumpist Overreach or In Unsigned Shadow Docket Decision, 6-3 Majority Declares Trump Can Hunt People For Sport

Pickup Murderbot and donate to a good charity at the same time!

A brief return of the Murderbot Humble Bundle! The charity is still World Central Kitchen.

SKULL OF THOMAS AQUINAS: TAKE A LEFT NOW PRIEST: No, the GPS says we have to keep going— SKULL: I KNOW A SHORTCUT PRIEST: Do you remember the last ti— SKULL: FOR THOSE WITH FAITH, NO EVIDENCE IS NECESSARY; FOR THOSE WITHOUT IT, NO EVIDENCE WILL SUFFICE

I say this as someone whose entire job is finding the narrow use cases in which AI is actually useful: All the fear about AI, all the reluctance to adopt it, is entirely legitimate, and a product of the fact that it's been foisted on the public with no consideration of its negative externalities.

i am begging publishers to bring back mass paperbacks. i am not in the income bracket to buy sprayed edges. i am not in the income bracket to buy.... regular edges. i can afford 0 edges. a circle book. 95% of the books on my shelves are either borrowed from the library or ARCs.

there's like a curve graph for how the badness of UI relates to consolidation and competitiveness in the market. is there like a named law for this yet

When I read the essay, I suggested an Em dash in one sentence & kid says to me, no I can't use that or it will be flagged for AI. Same goes for an essay too well written. So now, for kids who are anti-AI (they exist!), calculated mid-range striving is the bar to avoid such accusations.

Me; a hater! 😭

"i wouldn't wish ____ on my worst enemy" not me... i "be" wishing it

~Inquiring minds want to know~

The threatening nature of AI being dropped by its evangelists is, and always was, a sales pitch aimed at the people who had money to invest. Now that that phase is drying up, and the tech requires end users, they now need the support of the people they alienated with that same pitch.

Preference for text is quickly morphing into a super power.

Thinking back to how people were "hysterical" for calling trump white supremacist and now he's doing nordic theory on the campaign trail

then why aren’t you supporting your members who are trying to impeach him

Wtf

Me to Sony and Netflix regarding the upcoming Horizon adaptation:

It would be one thing if the CEOs behind AI companies were trying to pitch the public on its potential to improve your life but anytime they do an interview or post online it’s “AI is coming for your job—also we will use your data and our ai war machines to keep you complacent.”

Now large swathes of the Department for Homeland Security (DHS) have been diverted to help, harnessing a vast data collection apparatus originally designed to monitor and locate suspected terrorists, drug kingpins and child sex rings.

Oh my god the horror

Last month, a growing coalition of Massachusetts-based LGBTQ+ organizations sent a letter to @warren.senate.gov and requested a meeting with the Senator to discuss her previous support for #KOSA given the Trump admin's weaponization of the FTC to target trans healthcare. The office ignored us.

And Boolean in the 2010 Google search was like actual magic.

like nah man I read really fast and I know I’ll be right the first time, this tool does not have utility value for me for the purposes of “extracting useful bits from PDFs” control F is faster and more trustworthy

All travelers from ESTA countries (yes the ones on visa waiver programs) will have to disclose 5 years of social media + huge amounts of personal data to enter the US now. All US academic associations should now meet outside the US if we want to meet our international colleagues.

I like Pritzker but I ain't voting for no billionaires in 2028. He can earn my vote by writing a gigantic check to not be a billionaire anymore.