kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life

Working in tech support has really brought home how ubiquitous the intentional stance is in ordinary talk about machines

still thinking about my first meeting with a psychiatrist last week who asked, when I said I am an atheist, "but what does that do for you? like does it make this life more important?" and I was blindsided that apparently the obvious way to think about religious belief is whether it's useful

Rock over London, Rock on Chicago---Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions

fondly recalling a time in grad school when, at a beginning-of-the-year dept party, the professor hosting the party had me demonstrate how i eat a cocktail shrimp, so as to confirm that i would not waste any of the tail meat

I havent read such a banger of an essay in a very long time. This is so well-written!

LED headlights are out of control. it beggars belief

Been listening to this again recently and after nearly 10 years it still has new details for me to discover. Crafty, twisting riffs and figures, callbacks in unexpected places. sumac.bandcamp.com/album/what-o...

I love whatever is wrong with them 🙂‍↕️

Pack it up folks we’ve got the answer

sometimes I still get upset about 'classical logic'

Jesus fucking christ

Remembering when a prominent GOP politician lost all hope of being taken seriously because he misspelled ‘potato’

XTC is so, so good. Wish I’d listened to them 30 years ago

thinking now about how the "soft bigotry of low expectations" applies to journalists covering the trump admin far more than anything else

remembering the infuriatingly lazy/propagandist GW Bush claim that terrorists "hate our freedom" and thinking about how the current republican party (theocratic, fascist, white supremacist) does in fact hate our freedoms

LLM discourse needs a fat Robert Brandom tome to the head

the university of austin thing has the same energy as one of the crotchety asshole pipe tobacco reviewers i encounter

can't believe i'm boosting bill kristol

The actual male power fantasy is a friend or neighbor needing to borrow a specific and uncommon tool and you have one.

Only dialetheism can explain why it’s desirable to be both hot and cool

Mixed some kimchi into my bbq pulled pork and let’s just say I will be doing it again

I despise “Halleluah” in all its versions and would pay $200 to ensure i never hear it or am reminded of it again

artwork in the 2024 D&D PHB is really lifeless compared to any previous edition i've seen

Ancient Greek guy constantly getting in my way: obstacles

Sometimes I wonder whether Richard Dawkins is seething about how we say ‘mind virus’ for memes and ‘memes’ for text/image templates

"is shoegaze noise rock?" the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator etc

One fascinating thing about the most self-serious newspaper in America with its staff of the winning journalistic meritocrats is that it routinely, institutionally publishes completely made-up bullshit speculation about pure abstractions, based on zero reporting, written as if it were plain facts

at a cookout yesterday the subject of god's existence came up. about 6 people involved in the conversation—3 christians, 1 atheistic satanist, 1 agnostic (?), and regular atheist me. fairly long discussion, alcohol flowing, nobody getting too angry but everyone engaged.

I’d like to see fewer phones out at urinals

weird al stone temple pilots d&d rogue-themed parody "dex type thing"

Rümeysa Öztürk describes the library in the prison where she was held for 45 days for co-authoring an op-ed

etched in my brain permanently youtu.be/lStcwT_RGrQ

Via @corymassimino.bsky.social.

As a large language model, you know what I mean // and I do my little turn on the catwalk

“America needs a party that claps on the 1s and 3s!”

Trump is “theater of cruelty” for an electorate whose only joy in life is imaginatively aligning with the carceral state- we can’t afford housing or healthcare anymore so the only thing left to hope for is that some racialized “other” definitely has it even worse than you. This country is depraved.

I had not realized it's possible to use only the antecedent of a conditional as a normal conversational move until hearing a coworker on the phone say "If you could please read that number to me"

Libs' goofy notion that Republicans are actually talking about reality is what leads them to spend a decade "reforming welfare" in response to GOP criticisms, only to find themselves with a) a shitty welfare system and b) GOP criticisms absolutely unchanged.

how do they manage to update firefox so damn frequently

You wanna see something really scary? open.substack.com/pub/amandagu...

here's a way i've found it useful to think about AI's current cultural impact (at least in my neighborhood): before, there was (very roughly) a linear relationship between effort and quality of output. the main effect for consumers so far has been to break the bottom chunk of that correlation.

I have come to believe that it’s possible to have the form of being hot but not the matter

my "don't worry i'm not contagious" shirt has a lot of people asking etc.

had a coworker yesterday ask me (in the context of emails from some Canadian customers) "what's a liberal?" this person is 33 years old.

too many parking lots IMO

Beautiful.

Strikes me as pretty silly that I am (a) in my 40s and (b) apparently, a Steely Dan fan now

struck me that 'lo and behold' is still a reasonably common thing to say despite the fact that neither 'lo' nor 'behold' (in this sense) are almost ever used at all, and also they basically mean the same thing