Indeed, I don’t know how you grasp what’s happening in America now without knowing something about the Gilded Age and labor history

Consummate Vs

Today has been a cavalcade of Wrong Textures

Missed that just last week, Americans were eagerly sharing the “feminist” work of a disgusting transphobe who has helped the UK get to its current state of anti-trans hostility. This is part of the problem, too - normalising bigots and - consciously or not - minimising the impact of their harm.

Consistently solid this week #LetterboxdFriday #LastFourWatched

Roses are red Stem held between teeth I ordered us takeout but it's

sport depression™️

Race-swapping *is* the Betty Boop story. Max Fleischer hired Mae Questel to voice Boop in '31 cuz she cd imitate the mannerisms (scatting, "boop!' sounds, etc) of then-hot singer Helen Kane. Kane sued for stealing her style. The trial proved Kane copied her mannerisms from black singer Esther Jones.

It’s encouraging to see a court censure a person for transphobic comments in court and clearly state that routinely misgendering someone is not “free speech” but is a demeaning act. It’s an apt rebuttal to transphobes who like to caricature trans people as fraudulent and dangerous for just existing.

If you mean GOFAI: yes, so like basic programming. Automate away. Fabulous. If you mean AI like an LLM: no, it will get people killed. It's not able to do anything with basic guarantees and will do things like get people of colour and women killed by removing them from the list, for example.

To keep people up to date: six people who exercised their first amendment rights had their lives overturned and were forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys fees because of clear prosecutorial misconduct.

I don't think it's a good idea to legally privilege someone else's discomfort over another person's rights.

good morning! I had the chance to (google-docs-)chat with two smart people about how we handle spoilers as reviewers. as you will see, I am Alien Confused by Cat when it comes to spoilers. what is spoiler. how to comprehend.

This, from Amnesty International, tells you all you need to know about transphobic bias in UK mainstream media.

Onigiri: a perfect food

I pretty much always say "possiblye" because nothing can possiblye go wrong

The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectation that writing from the South should sound opaque, excessive, and primitive. africasacountry.com/2026/05/how-...

The 10yo: "It isn't propaganda if we all agree with it"

It finally happened

Granta asked AI if a story was AI generated, copy pasted what the regurgitron told them, and then mused on how it might not be reliable. They could have cut the two middle paragraphs and all but the last sentence of the third para of this statement and it would have said exactly the same thing.

WE SHOWED CLAUDE.AI THE STORY(!!!!!!!!!!)

Whaaaaaaaat theconversation.com/scientists-m...

Earlier this year I switched over to Proton. While it's a pain in the arse to change my email address everywhere, I have zero regrets. Their inbox management tools are great. Being able to make my own highly customised sieve filters is AMAZING. I can set it all up in a very ADHD-friendly way. 👍 👍

"The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I." 🫠🫠🫠

I feel like every article I could possibly write about reader culture is: - we need fewer monopolies in media production, from publishing to film, so the average viewer has access to a wider selection of media - we need more paid professional criticism - we need more funding of public education

Being a humanities guy in IT has its quirks, like finding narratives in the past to explain the present. Recently, I've been seeing managers and executives going wild over AI because it lets them build stuff which impresses them, and I realized I was having a Henri III in Venice moment. 🧵

sharing with the specific sadness that comes from robbing yourself of the chance knowledge that results from looking up what songs or movies were in the air in your subjects’ lives (browse old movie ads for your nonfiction! see what else was in that day’s paper!)

I’m at the point with [sport I’m into] where I needed to make a custom stats spreadsheet because none of the online resources were comprehensive enough for my purposes. Not sure how to feel about this.

Something I flagged in AI-assisted essays on Caribbean lit last year that also shows up in this story: probably bc of training data bias, it can't even start to produce a faux-Trinidadian (or Jamaican, or Bajan) idiom, and so drifts toward still implausible but Black-US-sounding phrasing instead.

so it appears that the Commonwealth Short Story Prizewinner for 2026 may have been AI generated. You can read it here.

The Eisner-nominated anthology with the AI story (Michael Todasco) gets pulled just as the Commonwealth Prize nominee with the possibly-AI story (Jamir Nazir) is announced

Inserting things that are plausible BUT NOT TRUE is like, the worst possible failure mode for medical transcription. Literally would be better off with nothing and *knowing* you have nothing

My dad said he's got a doc friend using for transcription bc they're overworked and I had to explain that a) ai is often an indicator for where a system needs more actual humans & support b) og transcription that gets some words wrong is not the same as software that *makes up things nobody said*

also to remind people to mute 'Gaiman' if they need to, don't feel that you need to give him and his problems any more of your attention or time

Reminder that if you block someone on bsky, it doesn’t unfollow them for you. Your friends may not be truly following him (and you may not have spared yourself the wrath of people unfollowing anyone who appears to follow him). Unblock, unfollow, block. He’s a weasel.

walking in the woods with werner herzog, acting like i don't know about nature's cruel ambivalence just to piss him off

if i was going to give a college commencement speech i would make sure to start with something the students could rally behind. something like "we will mechanically suck the youth from your bones to feed a mechanical eschaton, which my generation will use to climb heaven and become new gods"

I just finished Lord of the Last Heartbeat and loved it. Truly the whole spectrum of human emotion in that book.

our system of knowledge production is under attack from an extraordinary array of forces and if the people putatively on the side of maintaining it cannot commit to the most basic standards (not using fake citations, writing your own words, etc) I fear there is no hope

Short thread but I 100% agree with it. Sexual harassment by a person in power shows that person is an abuser of power.

YES these books are SO GOOD

10yo, out of the blue: Dad, what's The Wu-Tang Clan?

Jez just got the first issue of his Onion subscription and our 10yo is DEEPLY confused by the concept of a physical newspaper. ‘Mum, the pages are all loose! They forgot to staple it!’ [I, an elder millennial, crumble into dust and blow away in the wind]

I will never stop talking about this: The lovely and profound "If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known" is from an NYT article about the author accidentally being CC'd on an email where his friends were making fun of him for renting goats.

This is how you do it:

Results Age xkcd.com/3245/

Just the usual indignity of doing edits.

She was sitting on the stage! We live in a society!!