The world may be... <gestures broadly...> BUT, I have this year at least found out about FOUNTAIN PEN HIGHLIGHTERS. So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.

As Upton Sinclair said, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary — or, as in the case of David Brooks, his entire career, social standing, and self-image — nay, his whole goddamn Weltanschauung — depends on his not understanding it. (www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/o...)

Pace Niemöller, "First They Came" is given a meta level of irony by the fact that Aktion T4 killed Gerhard Kretschmar two and a half years before the Wannsee Conference, and that the Sterilisation Law preceded the Nuremberg Laws by about the same. Just something that came to me on my morning run.

How long until companies start charging a premium for "locally grown, organic, Fair Trade" versions of their AI models - trained on fully licensed datasets, powered by 100% certified-renewable energy, with some guaranteed percentage of all net profits going back to the creators of the training data?

"It is a truth universally acknowledged by the media, that a twentysomething man in possession of a podcast, must be in want of a platform. However uninterested the public may be in the hurt feelings or uninformed views of such a man, he will nevertheless be presented as an authority on some issue."

Welcome to my Thursday-morning TED Thread! Rick and Morty S01E05, "Meseeks and Destroy", is a surprisingly lore-accurate Gnostic/Kabbalistic retelling of the Apocalypse of Moses!

The whole "the Space Shuttles' dimensions were based on dummy thicc Roman horse booties" thing turns out to be an urban legend, but the dating system used by Oracle, among other software suites, really does go back to three praetors under Claudius in the first century AD. (I.e., the Julian period.)

There are a whole lotta reasons why you shouldn't do this, but if you query the raw data for a market from the Submission Grinder, you can automatically: - Notify yourself when response velocity picks up; - Given that it's been N days, estimate how likely it is your story will be accepted; - Etc.

"The Long Walk" trailer just dropped and I gotta be That Guy[1] and wonder why they dropped the pace to 20'/mile. To avoid a Fujis-to-Bramleys comparison with [Big's](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big%27s...) and other backyard ultras? Maybe 15' looked too anxious on screen, and they wanted a slower burn?

How it started (December 7, 2024):

#40kproblems: black templar bros being like "my skull-in-a-maltese-cross shoulder tattoo has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my 'suffer not the unclean to live' chest rocker" with subzero awareness of why either one might be cause for concern irl poe's law doin' WORK here

While researching the alt-text for my previous post, I came across the fact that there is an entire genus of goblin spider species, every single one of which is named after the movie Predator, as is the genus itself - Predatoroonops. The type species is "Predatoroonops schwarzeneggeri".

Context: My house holds roughly 4x 180-225gal tanks' water-weight worth of books. (Local building codes specify 30-40psf live loads; however, like aquaria, the loading from bookcases is concentrated across rectangular regions, which is why I confirmed my plans with a professional prior to closing.)

45 years after GySgt Hathcock pioneered use of the .50 BMG round, the record for longest confirmed sniper kill had increased by 579 yards. Two years after DARPA successfully test-fired EXACTO and the project immediately went dark, that record jumped up 792 yards. 🤨🧐🤔 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXACTO

REALITY: [Is... <gestures broadly> ...the way that it is.] WRITERS OF FICTION:

Dune is even freakier in French.

"bene gesserit": Latin for 'well-behaved'. "Bene Gesserit": Sisterhood who manipulate galactic politics & religion and backdate prophecies (the Missionaria Protectiva) in order to control the course of human events. They are "well-behaved women" LITERALLY making history. Well played, Herbert.

People who scoff at the theory that, even with its droids and spaceships, the Star Wars galaxy is functionally illiterate (reactormag.com/most-citizen...) have obviously never had to wade through pages of video results searching for the location of the air filters on a 2016 Mazda 3 hatchback.

PSA: You can get prohibitory orders that will stop the vast majority of junk mailings just by signing a form saying that you find them (e.g., pre-approved credit card offers or a sheaf of carwash coupons) to be "erotically arousing or sexually provocative" - about.usps.com/forms/ps1500.... (1/3)

Feeling original, might delete later, but after a few minutes of Googling I'm surprised that "Dickhead" doesn't seem to've ever been used as an anti-Ricardian epithet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardi...