Turkey day success

Knew there was a reason Almodóvar speaks to me

Gonna try to do more food posting here Treviso salad with parm — dressing is nectarine vinegar, lemon juice, garlic, anchovy, mustard, lots of black pepper, olive oil. Bitter veggies + assertive dressing is extremely underrated!

Having a David Sylvian moment

So far my experience of California surgical providers is choosing between (a) surgeons who suggest switching insurance to get access to better, more specialized surgeons and (b) surgeons who evangelize lifestyle changes like eating more turmeric and other anti-inflammatory foods

Instagram is so cooked, I keep getting served bizarre AI slop of Slobodan Milosevic trying to sell ramen or jerk seasoning or any number of other weird products

Bluesky not passing the vibe check today, yeesh

We are going to fucking win

New peak embarrassing moment: nightlife activists accusing Israeli DJs living in Germany of being complicit through silence, and putting at the top of the list of corrective actions to materially support Palestinians “publicly renounce their settler citizenship, passport and identity”

@maxread.info made an excellent point in his podcast about how elite perception of AI molds the decision-making ecosystem, and that elite perception includes memes that define trends in the business landscape. I think this points to AI being more meme than transformative.

So we’re now up to a 5-way collaboration between Fox, Dell, Oracle, Andreessen Horowitz, and Silver Lake? This feels like too many cooks in the kitchen to be real.

Was reminded today of how much speed people were taking in the Netherlands in the 90s

It’s like stealing a Ford and converting it into a Mazda from a spec sheet, getting it maybe 80% right but at a massive cost, replacing parts that break or prove incompatible over the years, until it’s like 30% Mazda but you keep the emblem on for fun

“I had enough of his hatred” is NOT an ideology, anyone that says otherwise is inferring a coherent world view from one sentence without any good reason to

Oh man RIP Hermeto Pascual, what a legend

Watching all the extremist experts try to explain the differences between online factions is like me in 1998 trying to explain why jungle is different than DnB and it has nothing to do with house or trance and then they said fuck it and called it all edm

This also applies to having to explain to my parents what “notices bulge OWO what’s this?” means in the context of Charlie Kirk getting murdered

Charlie Kirk was a man so deeply committed to freedom of speech and enlightened, reasonable debate that you are not allowed to quote anything he said ever again.

counterpoint: these exact same losers say the exact same thing every time anybody talks back or puts a girl in a video game or whatever so i don't think the liberal urge to performatively flinch at the canned backlash is a useful reflex in 2025

I am sympathetic to the general sense of doom but it is idiotic to just say Trump is going to end mail in voting, or send troops to every polling place in a state to do voter intimidation, as though these are simple commands without massive logistical burdens or consequences

I am a mountain dog through and through

This has the wheels turning in my head about public jobs programs but for internet archival work — organizing a neutral secure repository for our collective memory of key figures and moments of history so that we safeguard against the “flood the zone” strategy of information warfare

Corrupt politicians sure do love to be late to their own press conferences

“Milton Friedman observed during his visit to China in 1980 [that] even leading experts and bank directors were ‘unbelievably ignorant about how a market works.’” Pot, meet kettle

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win

I think this is an underreported but very prevalent experience of bisexuality if my friends and I are any indication lol

We need cheap rent so idiosyncratic weirdos can make a living pursuing their passions.

Let’s see if I can finish this before Thursday (when I need to check out the book I let go overdue without finishing)

I am really bewildered by the number of people in the comments responding to the phrase “during COVID” as if it’s a dogwhistle of antisocial values. This is not Holocaust denialism. We know some people are still living through it. But we are not in the period of mass isolation that we once were.

Since we're discoursing on bluesky culture: the worst posters on here aren't those dogpiling somebody with a heterodox (for bluesky) centrist or conservative take. It's people like this who are flippantly insulting and better-than-thou towards people who just said something *they 100% agree with.*

If the choice is • spend time with people who share mutual respect and courtesy, or • spend time with an uncle that calls restaurant servers homophobic slurs The choice is obvious to me!

There is a real epistemological problem presented by organizations like 764 and The Com, in that you have to have the FBI terrorism or cybercrime pages primed to demonstrate in conversation that you are not having an episode of psychosis describing what they do

I think at this point I really gotta dedicate some time to reading Gramsci or some of his acolytes

Paul Krugman on Trump's attempted take over of the Fed:

Frantically clearing my cache / using incognito browser / cross-referencing with google flights to see if Delta is dynamically pricing me, cuz holy hell airfare is expensive right now

The median voter isn't a pureed balance of elite centrist takes, they're somebody who has a passionate opinion about vehicle registration fees but couldn't name the current vice president.

Capital deciding to back fascism out of fear of communism was stupid in Weimar Germany, where the KPD polled around 15%, and it’s even stupider now.

rich people cheat the tax code by borrowing against those same unrealized gains, with assets marked to market for collateral, because the loans aren't taxable as income.

Anyway now that I’ve published my rant for the day, very much looking forward to this new Ishibashi / O’Rourke EP

Expanding on this: I think people in the USA in particular have a tendency to atomize prominent race and ethnic groups as static cultural units in a way that does not reflect real life. Obvious example is the reductive catchall of “hispanic.” But less prominent groups are less scrutinized.

This is a perfect example of why democracy cannot and should not be equated with just chasing polls/popularism. This is just complete bullshit and the (British) electorate are acting like morons here.

Observing the Atlantic Blackrock article debate is hammering home that most people commenting don’t seem to actually understand the PE business model

I missed the boat on the High and Low restoration screening, so I decided to give it a watch at home — so so good. The jazz club scene was masterful.

You are presuming Mamdani is “lying” about state capacity when the whole point is he wants to deploy it in new ways. People get excited when you tell them the government can shift priorities and do things that help them!

There is a fundamental disjuncture between the animating voices in a left liberal big tent coalition and a right wing culture war coalition. The former still has some semblance of commitment to political decorum, and etiquette, and a constructive ethos, while the latter does not.

The remake of The Crow was atrocious — bad dialogue, poorly developed characters, bonkers CGI. fka Twigs acting career is dead on arrival unfortunately.

You do not get to be paid tax dollars and expect that if your position involves doing something contemptible, you get to walk away with clean hands. You have to live with the consequences of your actions — whether that’s being refused service, screamed at in public, or otherwise inconvenienced.

This is the kind of comically ridiculous news story that gets used by historians 50 years from now to illustrate how principally bankrupt a government is

A thing that strikes me about the congressional figures that bubble up in popular history (Charles Sumner, William Jennings Bryan, etc) is their willingness to put forward clearly defined, forceful visions for the country. I think it’s telling that congressional democrats have little to offer there.