still my favorite christmas post

Me and my friends would have beaten Uncle Billy with hammers I can tell you that much.

First gift opened is a Balvenie 14 and I’m now good for the World Juniors.

Listen I love you all dearly, but for the love of god don't follow that Slop Detected account, it's literally asking for trouble since they already had to delete something purely for giving "bad vibes" and just reheats old talking points and/or sensationalized articles like they're new discoveries

Meet the man hunting the spies in your smartphone: a profile of @rondeibert.bsky.social www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/24/1...

Starting the day with pita and fresh Bulgarian feta and why don’t I do this every day?

Picard invites the senior staff to take part in a holodeck murder mystery every year, often drawn from his library of old earth dramas. The year Gowron found out about this and invited himself for the first time was... interesting.

Targeting a religious gathering because you believe that all Jewish people are responsible for the actions of the state of Israel is center-mass antisemitism.

Everything Harry Potter got should have gone to Discworld instead. I don’t care that 41 is a lot more movies than 8.

"The Lion in Winter" is the best Christmas movie.

Thanks to @coffeeeeee.bsky.social for this perfect essay about It’s a Wonderful Life. “It’s a Wonderful Life is, in part, the story of someone becoming, kicking and screaming, against all intentions and desires, a big man. Mary sees the big man in George from the first, because she is a big woman.”

Essentially, I think that LLM-generated dialogue only makes sense if you believe that the product of writing is words. But the product of writing isn't words, any more than the product of justice is prisoners, or the product of love is weddings. The product of writing is meaning.

watching my favorite christmas movie and what is possibly the great american comedy about class and race

I ran out of clever and thoughtful gift ideas years ago. Very close to just passing out gift cards or donations to the Human Fund.

Study of over twenty five million people over almost four years finds that COVID vaccines reduced COVID deaths by 74% and increased all-cause deaths by zero. I don’t know how much clearer it can get than that. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

New @fangraphs.com: my last Hall of Fame candidate profile of the calendar year, not to be confused with my last of this cycle as I’ve got 8 one-and-done guys to cover in January. Once the Blue Jays stopped making Edwin Encarnación play third base, they had themselves one hell of a hitter.

250,000 civilians were killed during the Philippine–American War.

This post caused my family to watch this and it's such a banger. I know people want the R rated version but it's such a good family film for somebody who is just starting to get science fiction.

New from me: The storied fiddler Ashley MacIsaac wanted to play a show at a Nova Scotia First Nation. It got cancelled because Google's AI search summary incorrectly called him a sex offender. Now he's worried for his safety www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/arti...

Have you noticed shots on goal vanishing from the scoreboard in the middle of games this season? You’re not alone. NHL goalies are noticing it too. Why is it happening? My story, with @mirtle.bsky.social ⤵️

It is 1:45 AM and my brain is being stupid. I’m on vacation! Let me sleep! I’ll worry about my life choices in January!

by far the funniest use case for AI is “I use it for powerpoints because I hate making them and nobody looks at them” because it kinda sounds like the real workflow savings would be to stop making powerpoints

Trump is reportedly designing the look of the new ships himself. Anyhow, the Vasa Museum is pretty cool if you’re ever in Stockholm

Galaxy Quest - a perfect movie, just a wonderful love letter to actors, sci-fi, Star Trek in particular, and to fandom - really deserves a proper physical release with decent extras. Think Weaver's right that releasing a R-rated cut would be fun, too.

“The children refused to disbelieve in the monsters because, frankly, they knew damn well the things were there. But she’d found that they could, very firmly, also believe in the poker.” Terry Pratchett _Hogfather_ Believe in the poker.

Ingram hasn’t really been challenged tonight, but he’s looking steady in net.

So many things to add to this, but I’ll just give the example of the Mark Twain Project, which has been digitizing for nearly three decades, fairly well-resourced, with a sizable full-time staff. And they are, optimistically, maybe half done.

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

After getting wrecked by the Wild yesterday, the Oilers off to a much stronger start against Vegas tonight.

Pirate the series. Make your own physical media. That's the only answer when this happens and they haven't put it out any other way.

Every so often, AI boosters will say their products are or soon will be capable of “Ph.D-level work” and then it becomes clear that they at a very basic level do not know what Ph.D level work is

I was just at the gym watching a The Wire s2 episode, and came back to this awful news. Ransone was incredible in that season — so believable as the screw-up determined to live down to everyone's low opinion of him. And great in almost everything else I saw him do. RIP.

Drove into a small snow squall and it was like a video game map transition from Normal Zone to Snow Zone. Not looking forward to the water level.

minaj is on the verge of having her $20M home forcibly sold by the court to cover a $500K debt, in case you wonder what’s going on here

That's not a "fake debt collecting business," that's a "debt holding business." The difference is negligible but the former implies someone committed fraud. He didn't. His business has the right to hold whatever debts it purchases and may act or not on those debts for whatever reason it chooses.

people who are new to academia tend to find its obsession with sources and citations a brake on their "i'm just trying to be CREATIVE, man" mindset. but it turns out the relentless obsession with accuracy, citation, and *provenance* is a load-bearing pillar of the whole enterprise

I would like to see just one journalist quote Charlie Kirk’s problematic comments to Matt Shaw and ask him to respond.

Once when we wanted to show the ineffectual dithering of The Good Place Committee, we had one of them say, "There are rules, procedures. This is The Good Place -- we can't just *do stuff.*" We almost didn't include it, because we thought it was a little on the nose.

Just read this today and I’m, of course, glad that the Economist reached out to two people I would have shortlisted to talk about how EU5 fits in the history learning space.

@bretdevereaux.bsky.social and I lighting up the world with our erudition about video games in the economist (though Bret made out better than I did; but then again, Bret plays a lot more EU than I do) www.economist.com/christmas-sp...

Talking bad dining experiences with @jenncutter.bsky.social and she says “Have you ever been angry at a salad?”

I genuinely wanted to give Carney’s Liberals a chance. But the two things I care most about, human rights and the environment, are not being protected by his government.

I just spent six years writing a book. I learned how to use archives, how to handle secondary sources, how to structure a 140k-word argument. I fell so hard in love I went back to school for a PhD. Now people ask how I use LLMs to write or summarize and I can only think “You don’t value what I do.”

“The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort” - Terry Pratchett 💙 Winter Solstice ❄️

Weekend in the city I love was what I needed even though you can’t say I did a lot. Ate some good food, wandered around downtown, closed it out last night with Chinese food and old friends. Today, specialty groceries and the long drive home.

legitimately love this guy.

another example of AI as tracer dye, exposing an already existing problem (and, of course, significantly worsening it)

If this is already the normal procedure everywhere, i.e. a google scholar import, universities’ library catalogues will be useless tomorrow.