The Just City, my fun novel about people and Greek gods setting up Plato's Republic with 10,000 ten year olds, is on;y $2.99 as an ebook right now, probably just US www.amazon.com/Just-City-Th...

NEW: The Jester King's Dance, a solo mystery journaling game of a dark forgotten soul, from @pandiongames.com You, dear player, are not the Jester King. You are not playing as them, but watching them and documenting their journey. Write more of their story after each step, dice roll, and card flip.

we need so many more lefty adjacent cultural spaces that aren’t politics-first because frankly that’s not what most people want. we are the antisocial outliers who think about politics every waking moment but most people just want to hang. it sounds silly but it’s true.

Eastern Germany is completing the transformation of former coal mines into the 144 km² Lusatian Lakeland, Europe’s largest artificial lake landscape, with Lake Sedlitz opening this month. buff.ly/39IIpcD #ShareGoodNewsToo

I read a history of early 20th century socialism and it's crazy how much of it is just clubs doing art or reading books and trying to get miners and factory workers to do art and read books.

I want a culture that regards a certain amount of reading and learning as a part of performing citizenship and - if we're honest - performing social class. I want it to be gauche to sneer at the working class but OK to sneer at the 'trousered ape' who holds reading and literature in contempt.

You may have heard that the Banach-Tarski paradox is a consequence of the group of spatial rotations SO(3) having a subgroup that is free on two generators. But what does that look like? Answer: Roughly like this! kyleormsby.github.io/F2-in-SO3/ 1/n 🧮

May Day Sale - 26% off on every PDF - starting on, well, May Day. Working labor drones of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your digital footprints, which will be reprocessed for your own greater satisfaction and your corporate overloads' profit. itch.io/s/185255/may...

Press sale! (Note: sale is a good way to buy the physical book, but not the ebook, it only lets you buy it in a weird proprietary ebook format not compatible with most e-reader software)

in this week's newsletter! I'm starting a new series on agency, as a concept, and the first essay is on the fact that the internet used to be high effort/high reward and is now mostly low effort/low reward (and obviously I think that is Not Good): youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/we-all-hav...

Good piece. Especially the point that three quarters of degrees are already “vocational”

Listen to the podcast for this and other incisive, learned, deep observations like, "they really are going ham with it." 😁

Recording this podcast was a blast! The First Punic War is often neglected in favor of its more land-based sequel, but it was an enormous conflict with earth-shaking world-historic ramifications - all the more interesting because it was a (as Hoyos puts it) an 'unplanned' war that got out of hand.

The Witch Hat Atelier anime is goooorgeous and I will praise Shirahama as a master of her craft till I die. But I only discovered it when s3 of TOH was being made. Any similarities are entirely coincidental! If you want to read something that inspired me for TOH, China Mieville’s Bas Lag series!

i cannot stress enough how thoroughly stupid it is to let great books become right wing coded

Okay, this isn't a live-service game. It's a small, $15 regular 5v5 multiplayer game. The only DLC is a $5 'supporter pack' that gives every character one more skin and the soundtrack. It's exactly what people have been demanding because they HATE live-service games. And then gets punished as one!

It’s a hard time out here for anyone who cares about anything

New Absolute Units is out now! We're joined by the fantastic author and campaigner @guyshrubsole.bsky.social to explore the question: who owns England? We travel as far back as the Norman conquest, through to the Tudors, Brexit, and right up to the present day. merl.reading.ac.uk/explore/abso...

New feature alert! TinyCat libraries can now enable a Restrict Catalog Access mode. If enabled, all visitors need to enter their credentials to view or search your catalog. #BookSky #libraries #💙📚

youtu.be/V_lcNt_2kw4?... Hey, they asked me what makes a good fight scene! (I was having an absolutely poopy ass hair day)

The infinite growth model is one of the worst things to happen to journalism/media. At some point you reach the ceiling of people who want to read your magazine! You can just make enough money to pay people well and publish things and not grow forever!

Your regular reminder 👇 🏥 81% want publicly owned NHS 🏫 78% want publicly owned schools 💧 73% want publicly owned water 🚂 70% want publicly owned rail ✉️ 70% want publicly owned mail 🚍 67% want publicly owned buses 💡 65% want publicly owned energy

In @404media.co, @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social looks at @whitneyphillips.bsky.social's Data & Society report "The Oxygen of Amplification" and the lessons it holds for dealing with extremists and manipulators in today's "amplification renaissance.” www.404media.co/we-have-lear...

cant get good answers from Google: Why does philosophy still focus so much on primary texts (e.g. Plato’s Dialogues, A Critique of Pure Reason, etc) whereas other fields tend to update/change their sources? I believe when it comes to History while primary sources are useful they act more like

We just released a blog post about something I'm very excited about: Great Docs. Post is in the *new* Posit Open Source site: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04... Great Docs is a #python pkg for creating beautiful Python package websites. We make it easy to use but also give you lots of options.

Calling all kung fu/animation/Shihad fans! The fab Ant Sang is crowdfunding to support his latest animation. If you can afford to spare a few dollars please consider donating (it’s tax deductible in NZ) and if you can’t, please help spread the word!

What would social media look like if it were designed for sensemaking rather than just engagement? Excited to be presenting @semble.so & @cosmik.network at @stamina-workgroup.bsky.social on April 28 @ 11am ET! The seminar is open to the public so feel free to join at www.complexdatalab.com/stamina/

Vote Restore to kill more people. Really?

I can’t believe that Labour has taken electoral reform off the table. This is a nightmare we can all see coming from years away and they’re not going to do anything about it.

Scottish Labour manifesto is out, don’t vote for them

Now that everyone is talking about Hungary, may I point out that the *really* interesting phase of Hungarian history - the ‘great power in the region’ phase - came before the early modern period? Here’s the book on the subject that I edited 25 years ago; still readily accessible and fairly priced. 😉

It was a very wrong societal decision to have generative AI art APIs coincide with this particular presidency.

Over 1,000 Jews in the UK have called on our institutions to name Israeli apartheid for what it is and take a stand against its injustices. Join them and add your name to the open letter. forms.gle/JDHQorh6Ypg5...

It'd be like that gif of a baby bird trying to eat a caterpillar by opening its mouth at it and constantly getting surprised that the caterpillar doesn't jump in. They'd die of dehydration in your apartment because they couldn't figure out how to drink water like a normal person

if you made a CEO work as a dishwasher for one week they would go mad like a Lovecraft protagonist confronting an unnameable entity in the cellar

Idk man. Maybe we should invest all the bombing schools money into cool science shit instead.

Tonight in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square, a sea of young Hungarians—who’ve only ever known Orbán’s corrupt, suffocating regime—are packed together, singing, chanting, and daring to dream of freedom again. Their hope is raw, their courage is real. The heart of Europe is beating in Budapest tonight. 🇭🇺❤️🇪🇺

Gizmodo says 'poems' but I think it's lines. The press release says 'verses' because there aren't any spaces in ancient Greek, and the meter is how you figure out where the line breaks are

Just an absolute vacuum cleaner, sucking cash out of the company while leaving its creative teams and executives begging for scraps. Zero added value to one of the greatest brands in Hollywood history.

Japan’s marriage equality fight is heading to the Supreme Court, putting legal recognition for same-sex couples before all 15 justices for the first time. A ruling is expected in early 2027. Washington Blade buff.ly/5xgSsM4 #ShareGoodNewsToo

After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. 🧵 (1/5) www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Why mothership works

Putting aside Sam Altman just continuing to emit huge lies constantly, this is an amazing example of what I mean when I talk about how GenAI is replacing *extremely low energy* digital tasks with *WAY WAY HIGHER ENERGY* replacements that *do not even work* Why TF is anyone using ChatGPT as a timer!

Aaron Swartz was hounded and persecuted by overzealous prosecutors for a mass JSTOR download until he committed suicide. Sam Altman says that he deserves to violate copyright law in perpetuity because otherwise he can't make a fortune from a large language model. We are in the wrong timeline.

Hey if you still have an Angelfire or Tripod site, or if you like one, now is the time to back it up, like, urgently

I highly recommend that everyone follow artists. If you do, your feed is filled with art every day. Real, original art. It's bonkers that you can even have this. Amazing. Undeniably cool. And then support those artists, when you can, because that helps the delight continue.

Please please PLEASE show support to all of the Iranians in your life right now. Here’s a starter pack of all of the amazing Iranian artists and creatives I know!! bsky.app/starter-pack...