Something Flickers in the Shadow. Female Anna’s hummingbird, mid-hover. San Diego, CA. #birds 🦅🪶 #photography 📸

I have managed to give myself writer's crap by writing with my fountain pen too much and need to type instead. That's a first.

…..this was something that (fictional) newly-elected Mayor of Baltimore Carcettii did in THE WIRE, damn it actually works.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Angel Babylon 5 Six Feet Under Farscape Spartacus Black Sails Futurama (a couple of times now)

WELP just found out that I'm 50% furloughed for at least the next two weeks because *my project's budget* also still hasn't recovered from November's shutdown either, so WHEEEEEEEEEEE that's fun. Please keep things like this in mind when you start demanding "SHUTDOWN NOW."

Mads Mikkelsen, Alicia Vikander, and Margaret Qualley are all trained professional dancers who nearly did that instead of getting into acting, and so help there is an unrealized movie in there. Two sisters competing for control of their dad's ballet troupe or studio. Something.

Balboa Park & the San Diego Zoo are two of the easiest places in town to get to on public transit and it's weird how infrequently that comes up in discussions about visitor access.

Excellent film.

Astonished to discover that I might have few thousand dollars just sitting in one of my cabinets. www.wsj.com/style/fashio...

I Am Small, But My Voice is Large Female Anna’s hummingbird, San Diego CA. #birds 🪶🦅 #SciArt 🐡 #photography 📸

Can...can I just float in a tank of this stuff for a long weekend? Please?

Hit Send too soon, one for the #SciArt 🐡 feed. (Allosaurus fragilis replica, San Diego Natural History Museum)

A quick visual demonstration on how even minor changes in focal length can alter a photograph: the image on the left was shot at 25mm, the one on the right at 35mm. All other settings are identical.

It's the first new book Tuesday of the year, and if you're feeling down & helpless, maybe go ahead and treat yourself to a new book and a couple of hours to read it.

Speaking as someone who has repeatedly gotten so frustrated at a game he nearly hurled the controller at the TV: NO THANKS.

ONCE MORE FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK: the Nov. federal shutdown occurred at the immediate expense of approx. million furloughed or partially-furloughed federal workers (myself included), *absolutely none of whom volunteered for that*. It is not a bad thing that Dems are hesitant to inflict that...

Reskeeting this because it was honestly just a tossed-off comment aimed at someone trying to dunk on the wine moms, and I think without meaning to the last line might have nuked the dude’s soul from orbit.

The humble No. 2 pencil is one of the most important but underrated technological breakthroughs and possibly the most egalitarian writing implement ever created. It’s cheap, easy to maintain, and versatile: you can effectively write or draw with it.

This is *exactly* why the cockroach/exterminator rhetoric over the weekend bothered me (on top of it literally being genocidal language). Talk like that, when put into action, only ever leads to one place: lots of dead people.

Pretty much every successful act of obstruction you remember Mitch McConnell for (like blocking Garland's appointment to the Supreme Court) happened *after* the GOP regained a Senate majority and he became Majority Leader, not while they were a minority.

Jesus fucking christ, I am tired of ppl saying the Shoah was based off what the US did. Literally going to ignore the long fucking history of antisemitism that fucking existed prior to the US even being a thing. Literally look at what Martin Luther wrote about us Jews.

The idea that Mitch McConnell was a successful obstructionist is a pop-culture myth that needs to die. He largely failed; the ACA passed, Obama became a two-term POTUS. Where he DID succeed, it was because he had *bipartisan* aid from the anti-Obama centrist Blue Dog Dems — remember them?

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN — AT WORLD’S END: a supporting henchvillain is present in the opening sequence in Singapore. In literally the next scene, he’s back in Port Royal, Jamaica. In 1720 it is AT LEAST a six-month sea voyage between the two locations.

Coffee shop bird.

Visualising a fun fact. #sciart

Last year we got a new "authentic" Robin Hood TV show (cue: massive laughter by historians) and now this...I kind of feel like there's a Robin Hood bubble every 10 years or so (see also: the overlap between the BBC Robin Hood show and Ridley Scott's film with Russell Crowe).

Yeesh, where to start? CHINATOWN (Roman Polanski) TRANSMETROPOLITAN & PLANETARY (Warren Ellis) THE PRICE OF SALT (aka CAROL) (Patricia Highsmith) SIAMESE DREAM (Billy Corgan) Any Werner Herzog film featuring Klaus Kinski as lead (AGUIRRE THE WRATH OF GOD, FITZCARRALDO, COBRA VERDE, NOSFERATU etc.)

Someone is molting in this house, and it’s not me.

ahhhhh goooood morning bluesky ! i see it is time for another fun filled day of "taking axios anonymous quotes at face value" ! i love that ! it is my favourite game ! let us all have a great fun today

The big upside to working through most of the holiday break is that I'm ~2 weeks ahead on all my deadlines *at least*, so while my coworkers all scramble to catch up on stuff, I'm just sitting here casually scrolling through my email and sipping my coffee. Ah.

@kwertzy.bsky.social *excited muppet arms* you’re back, yaaayyyyyyyy!

Update: he appears to have (finally) gotten suspended.

Please tell me he thanked Sal Sapperstein.

One thing that I’ve discovered is that there’s a kind of leftist that believes anyone who contradicts what they say should be first against the wall for slighting their ideology and it’s made me better understand how revolutions end up like that once in power

So hey, Sad Trombone Karl is currently is currently attempting to brigade a queer person whom he is also misgendering. If you aren't hip to his bullshit and still follow him, now would be an excellent time to cut that chord.

I, uh, have most of these songs in my iTunes and/or on my phone.

yep. i can identify any number of structural issues but at the end of the day the basic problem is the republican party. this has been apparent for at least 20 years. it is also an incredibly unpopular observation to make among “serious” people.

And now the conundrum: do I spend the rest of my gloomy, drizzly Sunday afternoon evening playing one of the 8-10 purchased but unplayed games I own, or start another playthrough of WITCHER III (which, tbf, I've only played on my Switch, and not my PS5)?

Also today I opened Photoshop for the first time in like a year (Lightroom has improved so much lately that I seldom need PS these days) and I was not prepared to be hit by a prompt to use an AI tool every time I tried to make an edit.

It is January 4th, 2026, and I have just finished editing, exporting, and uploading the last of the photos from the trip I took to New Zealand in September 2024 to my Flickr account. I fairness to me, managing my day job & health took up a lot of my time in 2025.

A distressing number of my mutuals on here still follow Lorenz and consider her to be a reputable journalist.

Seriously, y'all, this shit is massively dehumanizing to just about everyone. I realize everyone is pretty upset right now, but c'mon.

the terracotta warriors are literally painted, by the way, it's why most of them remain in the pits - they lost their color when exposed, and Chinese archaeologists and other scientists have been trying to figure out a way to excavate the rest while keeping the paint intact

Well, I see the last 17ish hours have not fixed the phantom disappearing replies issue.

Genuinely bothered by the number of people reposting this skeet as though it's smart & clever and isn't just very literally repurposing the actual rhetoric of the Rwandan Genocide to recapitulate Murc's Law yet again.

See also: chronic pain.

As I said yesterday: Oil is the excuse, not the reason.

Well yeah, Trump *did* have Maduro hauled there by the military and announced they’ll be prosecuting him in the Southern District, this is all happening under Mamdani’s roof and area of authority.

Also there's the thing where teenagers don't get exposed to art-house cinema looking for late night nudity but I don't think the iPlayer can help with that right now.

Anyways BABYLON BERLIN is now on Kanopy, and I'm going to go watch an episode, because somehow a TV show about living in the Weimar Republic under the shadow of rising Nazism is more relaxing than our present circumstances.