All Swinton edition

I don’t mean to sound extreme, but I don’t think we should have torture camps for people with criminal records either.

This is just a note to say that I have eaten the falcon in a widening gyre and that you were probably saving for anarchy Forgive me it was delicious so rough and full of passionate intensity

I think we need a mega thread of everyone's craziest archive stories.

So many people posting end-of-year recs, so many new TBR-tagged books in Libby, y’all, I think the whole world should just stop until I’ve gotten to read a few of them, I’ll compromise on ten or twenty, seems fair

Worth noting, I guess, that inside of a year we've gone from administration officials taking selfies of themselves at CECOT and bragging about how it's hell on earth to now getting their horrible little media worms to kill stories about it

I'm still looking for examples of this kind of mechanic out in TTRPG-land. Let me know if you know anything!

I like that mistletoe increases the odds of being kissed. More plants should offer temporary environmental status. Brawling under lingonberries. The soft yearning of a love that dare not speak its name beneath the nightshade.

A reminder: Bari Weiss signed the Harper's Letter.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

Ranganathan’s little-known sixth law, Every Book Its Table

I wish we pushed for research on the political economy of academia more. It's what takes us beyond "oh why did this one person cite a fake journal article?" into "why do we have a system that rewards people who do not engage with prior research and simply churn out pubs?"

got my adhd upgraded to ad4k

Strength training is political. We have a right-wing which has taken over physical fitness spaces, and hijacked “warrior culture”. We need a muscular progressivist visions. We need to be strong to build the world we want. Building my guns for the revolution. 💪🏾✊🏾 #Swoletariat #ResistanceTraining”

my kid doesn’t really understand the central premise of Rudolph because he’s like, why are they so mean about him looking different. the woke indoctrination is working. my children will defeat Christmas once and for all

A fun thing about running is when you do enough of it to need technical gear but it turns out not being tall and flat-chested is illegal

In the new year I want to do a series on HanksChannel called “find the papers” where I take a fun science fact and then actually find the papers that established that knowledge. Anything you want me to dig up? I’ve already done “Male anglerfish are sexual parasites.”

It’s wild that voice assistants use women’s voices but the name conventions for coding agents doesn’t follow the same pattern. Human behavior is so wild.

My neighbor told me pro boxers keep pummeling his douchebag influencers so I asked how many influencers he has and he said he just goes to the internet and gets a new influencer afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding influencers to boxers and then everyone's daughter started cheering.

THE SOLSTICE OCCURRED @ 20251221 10:03 AM UR ASTRONOMICAL WINTER HAS JUST BEGUN THO UR METEOROLOGICAL WINTER BEGAN 12/1 BUT UR DAYS WILL NOW BEGIN 2 GET LONGER CONGRATS U MADE IT

When viewing the fake article in Google scholar on my university network, there is a link to access the article via my uni's library. That link sends me to a library page that makes fake article appear real... Turns out library page is made programmatically from info on Google scholar 🤦

www.masslive.com/boston/2025/... Some of the photos here are so moody and vintage-y it’s hard to believe they were taken days and not decades ago.

Rare footage of St Paul’s Cathedral testing its giant flamethrower

It all started in 1955 with a misprint in a Colorado newspaper and a call to Col. Harry Shoup's secret military hotline. Shoup played along with the tiny voice who called, and a tradition was born. From the NPR archives.

Systems thinking is, practically, about tracing connections between diffuse effects and obscured causes. Anyway, two items for your consideration: talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/private-e… warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-r…

@warren.senate.gov just co-sponsored KOSA again 🤦🏽‍♀️ You CANNOT claim to be an ally to the LGTBQ community and support this awful bill. Your office blatantly ignored our Boston coalitions pleas, so let’s see how you feel about those phones being melted. CALL HER!

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

the analogy I use with friends and family all the time is the jump from collegiate to professional sports. as soon as I explain it that way, it clicks in their brains what the academic job market is like.

A tow truck driver who towed an ICE SUV that was blocking a driveway while the agents kidnapped Angelanos back in September was just found NOT GUILTY on the only charge against him (theft of government property). THAT'S ANOTHER WIN FOR "FUCK YOU; MAKE ME"

The UNC system just released its final policy on mandatory syllabi disclosure, stating that syllabi are university (not faculty) IP and certain course info must be posted on new, publicly searchable databases before every semester. A thread about what's changed from the draft I reported on earlier:

I cannot tell you just how *tremendously hard* various volunteers have worked on this massive @unbreaking.org update: sifting through awful, terrible news every single day, identifying connections and themes, all to build a clear picture of the harm the federal government’s caused.

December has come around fast! As promised, I'm going to try and post a daily advent thread of my top science fiction, fantasy, horror and spec fic books published in 2025 🤞 The bookshop gets a bit mad this month, but I'll try my best to keep up 🎄📚🪐 #SFF #Booksky

The most quietly savage put-down I’ve come across from Venezuelan Spanish is la inteligencia los persigue, ellos son más rápidoso. It means “intelligence is chasing them, but they are faster.”

You might be thinking, "CPSC, does a dry Christmas tree really burn that much faster than a well-watered tree?" Friend, let's find out together by watching this PSA.

I love my two blackout drunk Minnesota sons

NEW: They kept saying they were gonna do it and now they've done it A group of clowns (Senators) have introduced a bill to FULLY REPEAL Section 230. No reform, no replacement, just utter destruction of all online free speech. We can't let this happen. Share & take action www.badinternetbills.com

My response to anything over the next two weeks

FOUR new deaths in ICE detention. That puts the total this year at 30 people dead; the highest in ICE's history and worse than even during the COVID years. It's clear that the system is breaking down. Many of these are preventable deaths.

Absolutely nobody asked for this BUT English Anglican cathedrals that have burned down, fallen over, and sank into the swamp: a thread.

I spoke to people who are standing up to ICE - from a real estate appraiser chasing ICE on his bike to a fetish shop owner distributing whistles and an undocumented social worker putting money in detainees’ commissary accounts

Gift link, probably the funniest thing the Wall Street Journal has done this year.

CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER

People who aspire to be academics: I wish to live a life of the mind Actual academics:

if the mta sold F/M swap merch they'd be funded for the next decade

The thing that really gets me is back in 2014 I think bigots in NC tried to pass a bathroom ban & it blew up in their faces & when these same people came back with "fairness in sports" too many people took them seriously when it was an obvious change in tactics!

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and a duck that does crimes

Finally figured out that on ONE specific mobo/BIOS combo, under WInNT 3.51 ONLY, datetime would reset the time to zero at midnight BEFORE incrementing the date, so any sales happening at midnight (Kinko's: open 24 hours!) would time travel a full day into the past, ROYALLY fucking the database up.

I stumbled onto a small herd of Icelandic ponies near Gimli yesterday. They were a bit far from the road and the weather was nasty, but I managed to capture this lovely moment.

Lord, please never let me be hated by someone as skilled as that Vanity Fair photographer. Let all my haters be incompetent.

I asked @aoc.bsky.social about why she posted this tweet, and she said “because JD Vance is a goober, man.”