working up "democrats must embrace war mindset" rn, but one of my beliefs is this: dooming is itself a reaction to the fear of responsibility. if all is lost and nothing matters then you can't be criticized for your choices. it's not "cold eyed reason." it's an easy escape. comforting

This only happens to you once

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Especially not those of us who learned Greek with Hansen & Quinn…

Expert here: We were not, in fact, ever puzzled. It has been and always will be a writing tablet. www.indy100.com/news/ancient...

Des Moines has you all beat

dudes rock

There was an American red-brown party that was ended by an event known as The Night of The Wrong Wives. Don’t sleep with your step-mother-in-law.

Happy birthday to J.R.R. #Tolkien’s The Hobbit, published #OTD in 1937, with a gorgeous dust jacket and illustrations by Tolkien himself! @tolkiensociety.org @tolkienwonder.bsky.social @uofgfantasy.bsky.social #Hobbit 🐉

The person being quoted is shitty but he is not wrong; I did not work in tv for 45 years, but I’ve worked news/mag advertising and/or digital marketing for 25 or so - and if you want to grab a media company’s attention by the short hairs, yes: bitch to their advertisers, not their inboxes.

IT IS EXACTLY ONE MONTH UNTIL THE BIGGEST PROTEST IN US HISTORY! Pass it on. #NoKings

Might just start spamming “you can’t vote/peacefully protest/etc. your way out of this” doomers with pictures of it happening, help me curate a thread

I came of political age hating the Bush guys and now I have to get in the trenches with them against the guy from the apprentice I would like to file several complaints

look, Karl Rove and Tucker Carlson can join the resistance, but are you familiar with a penal battalion is?

To be frank, the fetishization of protest tactics and personal/information security theater (theater is a load bearing word) is the leftist version of the Cult of the Operator

this cat looks like one of the Old Master painters who's just slept with three servants, argued viciously with his annoying patron about the inferior ham he receives, and then painted his masterpiece out of spite

I guess this has probably already gone viral somewhere but I am simply dying at this picture of a bear that looks like it hired a photographer to do a glamour shoot

Toad went back into the house. He got into bed and pulled the covers over his head again.

This frontispiece in my book just made me laugh a lot. Is this Buddhist reincarnation, or some other form of afterlife?

I think the amount of work China had to put in to find a unit willing to gun down protestors in 1989 is instructive. They brought in the 27th Army to do the killing and then had to get them out of Beijing really fast before other units could kill them in revenge (and some of them tried).

wowowow wake up nerds, new JWST image! This gorgeous image is of the star cluster Pismis 24. It’s approximately 5500 light years away and is home to some of the most massive stars known—66 and 74 solar masses. 📸: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; A. Pagan

in a bid to avoid doomscrolling on my lunch break i made a menu for my cat

“Even the most well-conducted school will have a few incidents every term. Falls off cliffs, floods, laboratory accidents, kidnappings, conspiracies, high-stakes gambling, gladiatorial combat, video game releases, whatever." #writing

Scary Story Night, ft. An-An Lee, Jessica, Tuesday, Blonney, and (on sufferance, apparently) Horrorpedia.

Every lawyer should get the day off in observance of the fact that they actually failed to indict a ham sandwich

I've been sitting on a story about the absurdity of author income for around two years. I think it's time to tell it.

"Algo" is short for "Al Gore" who invented the algorithm

Congratulations to Grant Erickson, the winner of our Rivers of London caption competition and the owner of a brand-new copy of Rivers of London: In Liberty's Shadow! The content was judged by line editor Lynne Hardy, and author Ben Aaronovitch himself!

Maybe this will be good eventually, maybe we will pass through this transition and come out to something good on the other side, but whatever this is, it is definitely not an increase in productivity

I think llms are kind of amazing, it is cool we built a thing that can do that, but it is also definitely the case that as a teacher what they have meant so far is that I can cover significantly less material in a course, and also have to give students significantly less undirected independent work

We should not have borders to immigration anywhere on the planet, they are fundamentally illegitimate.

the discovery that it is possible to generate coherent, grammatical text without a thinking mind behind it was a shock to everyone, but it might have come as slightly less of a shock to anyone who's edited think tank policy proposals.

I probably would not have liked what would have been the result of that thing working BUT I also think it was probably better than what came before and superior in at least some respects to what we ended up with instead, so a lotta respect for the attempt.

In my mind Auden, Robert Frost, Rawls, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien (slight edge case cos he was Catholic) and Mr. Rodgers are all part of the same early-mid 20thC. cultural movement which was trying to synthesise this genteel version of WASP culture, and it didn't quite work so now their hegemony is over.

🏛️The so-called Tellus panel of the Ara Pacis🏛️ The Ara Pacis Augustae was one of the significant structures that emerged under Augustus’ rule and the highly allegorical ‘Tellus’ panel is a testament to the artistry that went into the construction. #AncientRome #AncientBluesky🏺

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me” is one of MLK’s more underrated quotes because it’s a very good observation about the limits of politics.

simple solutions to big problems do exist

Kid headed back to college? Are they living in off-campus housing? See it before you sign it.

I’ve been critical of Schumer’s social media. But this—& the procedural moves that triggered Trump—is outstanding.

All the sketchiness of self-help gurus, only with added misogyny!

If you want to know what our geese are saying, feel free to use Gaggle Translate.

I suspect I could be a pretty good monk.

Tigers are solitary animals, they love huge personal space. Lions are clingy and social animals.

very funny that this has already been reposted by at least one blorbo, a lieutenant x-man, and a tom 17

If you loved an author’s book, tell them! They will completely ignore it because they’re fixated forever on the anonymous person who once gave them two stars on goodreads but it’s probably good for your karma

UK users when the website asks them where they're posting from today.