Today I learned that pseudoephedrine is a) not easily available in the US anymore and b) is experienced by some people as an actual upper??? This is wild news to me

Well, I got my picture in the (student) newspaper! Can't say I'm thrilled as to why. theconcordian.com/2026/02/conc...

It's the Shein-ification of output. It looks like a shirt or a document, but it's shoddily-made and will fall apart with any use. Then we'll just all end up walking around with holes in our clothes and reading things that are only 90% correct, and trying to figure out why we feel like life sucks.

The year is 2045. Nurse is the only job left. It has been hastily retconned to a male coded job and every nurse now wears tactical combat gear and has a gun.

The disaster bisexuals and the disaster biathletes should unionize

hi hello happy tuesday, it is very important to me that everyone is made aware of possibly the most unhinged story to emerge from these olympics: www.reddit.com/r/olympics/s...

The idea of China's ultimate goal being the destruction of The Stanley Cup is so, so funny to me. Was there a three week tactical assault on the Vezina Trophy? Did they annex the Ted Lindsey Award? Oh God, sir, a second plane just hit the Clarence S. Campbell Bowl!

It's genuinely kind of funny that people were mad about Bad Bunny not singing in English when the first song Kid Rock played begins as so: Bawitdaba, da-bang, da-bang, diggy-diggy-diggy / Said the boogie, said up drop the boogie / Bawitdaba, da-bang, da-bang, diggy-diggy-diggy / Said the boogie, sai

This is the ur-grift: it’s not the get-rich-quick scheme that makes you rich, it’s teaching other people how to sell it to someone else.

I wonder if stuff like this is going to swing the pendulum back in the other direction. It's one thing to take a chance on a book that's possibly okay and possibly bleh, but it's another to know that 99% of the books available are garbage. Why would anyone take a chance on a new press or author?

Extremely weird when stuff happens in places I have been. This was at the old Rathskeller, it seems? The new place had that nice courtyard area the last time I was there. It didn't have jaw punching vibes imho, but I guess you never know with State College.

Calling on my ancestors for guidance but the only one who answers is a weird eutherian rodent-mammal from the early cretaceous period. "EAT BERRY SLEEP UNDER ROCK" it says. Pretty good advice

Is Homer cancelled over his DEI woke inclusion of Memnon?

i've been watching the coyote on Alcatraz's progress with great interest. a week-ish ago, a coyote SWAM to Alcatraz for the first time and looked fuckin rough after the dangerous swim. but the coyote is doing fine now, gorging itself on unprepared birds & rats who are dealing with a sort of Godzilla

On the one hand, yes, absolutely! On the other hand, the existence of our programs and departments are depressingly uncertain right now. I will grovel if they will let me teach next semester tbh

Life be like: La vie en un résumé:

Looks like Newsmax just used AI to grab a random quote about someone else and put it my mouth. www.instagram.com/p/DTIvkQeiawS/ Thanks to @bungdan.bsky.social for the find.

I know there are bigger things going on in the world but, gosh, it really fucking sucks to not only be losing my job in slow motion, but also to know that that very job loss is going to fuck up my program so deeply I don't think it can survive. And the admin seems just fine with that.

I am begging people to just imagine for a second talking as if the lives of the people in Greenland are an important part of what is happening in Greenland.

Shouldn't use 'Achilles heel' to mean 'salient weakness'. If one thing is your Achilles heel, that means that you are basically perfect at every other thing. If you have several weaknesses of which one is worst you don't have an Achilles heel. You are not Achilles. You are Bob.

This is genuinely funny. I guess you can't criticize the university for being a flawed employer if they no longer employ you!

One of the things I find fascinating is how much impact individual motivations and animus can have on world history (in systems that allow it.) To be fair, I'm used to that meaning, e.g. Cicero just truly fucking hated Clodius rather than that a US President is a wildly self absorbed idiot, but

Heated Rivalry episode: youtu.be/tXbfe-8Z4zQ?...

!!!!!!!

UNC secretly recorded a professor because of “concerns over class content” and then fired him www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Next Thursday in Los Angeles, @ologies.bsky.social & I are hosting an evening of activism art! We'll be creating art that communicates important messages & learning about work happening in your city. RSVP here: luma.com/fp919u5x Poster by the amazing @nicolegoux.bsky.social! Please repost, LA!

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato." surreal times dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

This is deeply upsetting. I read the essay and the feedback from the TA - it was perfectly appropriate. We've all had these essays where it's like, how do I even start to respond? The TA did a great job and it didn't matter. This could be anyone in the US system (except only if you're trans I guess)

As I wrote today: www.readtpa.com/p/watch-rep-...

Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, and Vicente Gonzalez joined Republicans in voting to criminalize trans health care. The bill passed only 216 to 214. 4 Republicans voted no. If they did too, it would have failed. clerk.house.gov/evs/2025/rol...

I just listened to this and it was so depressing. I usually really like Front Burner but there was so little pushback and so little attention to how this entire issue is being disingenuously framed.

very grimly ironic that our government run by podcasters sucks at true crime

Roman............ typefaces?????????

I can't tell you how difficult it is to work at 100% capacity all the time (as I really need to by the end of the semester) while simultaneously being told that my job is disposable.

"I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it" Stunning investigation of how slop merchants are getting work into established media outlets thelocal.to/investigatin...

Looking into changing careers and becoming a hermit who never leaves my mountaintop. Key sticking issues are whether I can heat my cave to 25° C and how good the WiFi is.

Big news: I’m writing a book!! I’ll be writing & illustrating a beginner’s guide to appreciating wildlife in cities/suburbs, & how all of us can make our neighborhoods better for those animals. Thank you to my book agent @ericsmithrocks.bsky.social & the folks at Storey for believing in this book!

Can’t believe the whole country has to suffer through the return of Dickensian childhood diseases because the worst, most ignorant attention-demanders decided other people’s expertise makes them feel bad

I did not realize how much of my life at this point would be spent explaining that ChatGPT is not a search engine

So has anyone written the article on Trump's ballroom and Nero's Golden House yet?

Just absolutely bonkers to really see this in the course of my day-to-day life

The extent to which I would believe this about any given population

Huh, you know I had never actually watched the sketch before. It really is specifically about that very same skull! What a world

Look I know we're called Skype a Scientist but this semester the reality has been Zoom an Archaeologist lmao

I genuinely couldn't tell at first if this was retitled as a joke about fandom discourse

Reading about Hep B in preparation for discussing it in my class sure is extra fun right now! It seems in ~2016 there was cautious optimism on eventual elimination, partly hinging on the US helping developing nations do vax at birth programs. And now it's on the chopping block in the US. Ha ha ha

Autism Has Always Existed. We Haven’t Always Called It Autism. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/o...

It's just so weird to be teaching a class on how much diseases sucked in the ancient world, answer the "what changed?" question from a student with "understanding and vaccines" and then read about anti-science vaccine rollbacks.

it's so funny to see America's health insurance companies be like "look. If there's one thing we love it's denying you care. but we ran the numbers - and we cannot BELIEVE we're saying this - and it's cheaper for us to just pay for the vaccines than deal with you going to the ER."