This is why I’ll never accept AI art. A whole industry just to recreate & reorder reality. Yet the beauty of human emotions don’t need enhancement. We’re doing it every day. Look at Alysa Liu's face. The JOY. Fuck off, AI. Credit to human photographers: Matthew Stockman/Getty & Christophe Ena/AP

Watching ice skating: Me: Holy shit that was wonderful. Flawless. How do humans even do that? Commentators: Well. They fucked it.

It’s Sidney Poitier’s birthday. Here he is in In The Heat of The Night delivering the most satisfying & thrilling slap in cinema.

Important news! I am delighted to announce the launch of my new podcast: The Untitled History Podcast. It's me, and guests, falling down all the history rabbitholes you can imagine. Please, please spread the word, subscribe and listen. Because... SHIPS CATS!! cms.megaphone.fm/channel/the-...

"If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear." ~ Gene Roddenberry

Whoever runs Bedford’s socials isn’t paid enough. This is perfect.

If you’re going to be required to use a digital robot butler then surely you want that to mean that it will do work while you’re frolicking in meadows or relaxing with novels and tea, not that it will do work while you somehow go out and find other, harder work to do even more of, for the same pay

Fully agreed with this. I’m on at least one Bsky ‘AI haters’ list which assumes people who dislike AI “just don’t get it.” And it’s like… no, I 100% get what AI is, what it does, and how it does it. And that’s what makes me so skeptical of any current ‘AI’ tool being sold to replace human effort.

The reporting of this did the rounds a week or so ago but I think it’s nice to hear it from the horse’s mouth if you will. What a great and warm thing for him to have done. I hope people who might not have ever considered the importance of learning about others take something from it.

“I don’t think, therefore I’m not getting any value from my degree in thinking.” Yikes.

Advertise your account with a gif

"Is AI the future of Y?" Unless Y is medical diagnostics, deciphering dead languages, or modeling/analysis of other complex data, the answer should be no. "Should we destroy the planet so Janet can make AI images of her favorite 90s cartoon characters as if they were real?" Jesus Christ, Janet.

Book club scams are now threatening authors who don't fall for their BS. In December, I received an email from Herry Sharp, so-called CEO of "Super Book Lover Curator" praising my novella We Who Hunt Alexanders. Totally AI-generated and a scam so I didn't respond. Now Herry is threatening me. 1/

i keep banging this drum but the shift away from forums and chat rooms (heavily moderated for bullshit but leeway to actually call people out) to social media (policing tone not rhetoric) has been one of the biggest factors in unleashing a machine on the public that overloads them with shit.

The complaint to Ea-Nasir, the world’s oldest complaint letter. Something that ancient, and that mardy, deserves to be saved.

This isn't a purely philosophical or semantic argument about what "British" means. Once you accept different tiers of British citizenship you gain a way to formally discriminate. USSR documents famously had a "5th line" denoting ethnicity. Stalin's nationalist repressions used this as their basis.

This is blackout poetry to me

How many times, in how many contexts, in how many ways am I going to have to say that this is what "AI" does— what it fundamentally *is*— before it sinks in? That all Bullshit engines do is statistically correlate training data & inputs via their weights to produce outputs you are likely to accept…

RIP Hideki Sato. Former Sega President (2001-2003) and father of Sega's consoles, including my favourite one, the Mega Drive, has passed at the age of 75. The legacy he leaves behind is immense and cherished. 💜

Happy St. Valentine’s Day, all! May yours be happier than the people stood in front of this wall in Chicago in 1929. Theirs wasn’t so great.

“Violence never solves anything.” …means you’ve not applied a proportionate amount of violence, in my experience. I don’t like it, particularly. But sometimes, some people just need a swift punch in the face. It’s the wake-up call they need. Or a reminder that further punches may follow.

My school only opened the year before I started, so not much history there. That said, a girl in my year was infamous online for a while in the mid-00s. She and her then-boyfriend produced and published a lot of… well, amateur porn. Infamous as a kid in our school found it, and word spread fast…

A UK student in the US went to a protest for five minutes. ICE subpoenaed Google for his private details. Google complied. theintercept.com/2026/02/10/g...

allllll together now: BAN THE PERVERT GLASSES

Oh hey, a touchdown. I forgot they were allowed to score those in the Super Bowl. It’s going to be a long final quarter for Drake ‘Drake Maye’ Maye and the Pats’ O-line. Seahawks absolutely in control at this point.

i feel compelled to remind everyone that chatgpt/LLMs are functionally the *opposite* of an actual expert. the more your problems are unusual or novel, the more likely LLMS are to be wrong. they are least helpful when it's most important

Blessing your timelines with the opening from The Muppet Show revival special, because we all deserve a little happiness right now.

This is a great story, and very odd. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

psyduck repost

There were a flurry of "spontaneous" replies last month to various posts i made. All written the same way. All trying to link to the random substack about how innocent he is. My first thought (after blocking) was: "Oh i see someone's publisher has hired a bot farm."

A peek inside one of the earliest Gundam fanzines: Gundam Fun Club's The White Base Editing Room. Created by a mostly female band of high school students as the series aired in 1979, it's full of technical information, carefully written speculation, drawn illustrations, and character profiles.

i hate how she loves the book in a way that massively undermines what Nabokov was actually doing with it. other people have covered how and why she's misunderstood it so hard, but that misunderstanding and misinterpretation does the author a massive disservice.

Emma Monk is an essential public service.

This is the first time I’ve read details about a bomb that was set off in residential London street, destroying cars and sending shrapnel into kids’ bedrooms. Young people are considered vulnerable online, but the actual radicalisation of old generations is given a free pass by the press.

Hang on. Hang the heck on. First it’s announced that the new Hathaway movie is getting an original opening song by SZA. Now it’s announced that the ending theme is freaking Sweet Child O’Mine, and the original Guns N’ Roses version to boot?! My interest, it is piqued.

Buying stickers for my new work laptop, and discovered stickers based on the faction logos from Colony Wars: Vengeance. Which is amazing. More amazing is, 28 years after first playing, I’ve just noticed the detail in the Navy logo. It’s got the nine planets of Sol in the middle! I never realised.

You shouldn't be doing any of that even with good books

You Matter*

I'm A Fucking Moron Who Did An Incredibly Stupid Thing

HOW IT WORKS IN MOVIES: 1. Government lies 2. Brave heroes release video showing the truth 3. Press says “the government is lying!” HOW IT APPARENTLY WORKS IN REAL LIFE 1. Brave heroes release video showing the truth 2. Government lies 3. Press says “Oh no, what now? So confusing! So hard!”

Related to that last repost, and continuing a ‘Trek against tyranny’ theme - some wise words from Captain Picard, from Insurrection:

Welp, turns out I hadn’t added any Rage Against the Machine into my Apple Music library, somehow. Fixed that pretty swiftly. Not that there’s any particular reason to be raging against any particular machines right now, of course…

An excellent thread, and a great call to action.

when Spock does the neck pinch, even on bad guys, he always catches them and sets them down very politely. letting this guy fully just drop, leaving Jim to try to awkwardly scramble to catch him, is Vulcan for "it is always morally right to punch Nazis"

As an economist, and fan of intelligent and articulate political leaders, I’m very glad to learn this Instagram account exists: www.instagram.com/markcarneyth...

Bustards

If it ever seems like GenX and elder Millennials are obnoxiously loud about queerphobia and, specifically, trans rights, you have to remember we grew up in a society saturated by homophobia and decided "never again". This shame and hatred must not simply be redirected. It must end with us.

Mark Carney has delivered one of the most important speeches of our era. There is a better future waiting for Britain if we dare to follow his example. inews.co.uk/opinion/trum...