The richest man owns X. The second and fourth richest men control Google. The third richest man owns The Washington Post. The fifth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

Nederland verzuipt letterlijk in de koeienstront, maar gelukkig is de innovatie op het gebied van (checks notes) kruisraketten springlevend.

This was quite a challenge. One face in shadow, the other in direct sunlight. Overall I’m pleased with how this turned out. Glazed grisaille, acrylic on canvas, 14”x11”. More at art.monospace.com #art #artSky #fineArt #acrylic #grisaille #glazing #portraitPainting

Caption this.

Satire is dead, and the new Onion has helped kill it. All this does is keep Alex Jones in the spotlight, however indirectly. Bury the goddamn domain name already.

Adding “substack.com” to your muted words list is a great way to clean your feed of posters who have no problems monetizing Nazis if that means they get a cut as well. Trust me, you’re not missing anything.

Do not come here for the World Cup, or for the Olympics. It’s not safe.

The Senate is such a democratic disaster. We could get to 2/3 of Americans favoring impeachment and removal, but over 1/3 of the states (esp those with less people than just ... Brooklyn) are deep red. So frustrating.

Cold-blooded murder. Everyone giving or carrying out these orders must be prosecuted, full stop. Trump may enjoy executive immunity, his accomplices do not: the depraved disregard for human life exhibited by those perpetrating these murders must not go unpunished.

Look, I’m not naive, and healthy skepticism about politics is a virtue, but seeing these two guys interact with a room full of toddlers is balm for the soul. Let’s all make sure to vote out the current crop of ghouls, have them face the consequences of their actions, & never speak of them again.

Instagram is hot garbage and always has been. No links, no sharing of other posts, and no zooming in on images (it’s supposed to be an image sharing platform!) As an artist I’m told it’s where I need to be, but as a former UX developer I absolutely detest it. Worse still, 75% of the feed is ads.

I can’t think of a single noteworthy thing Tim Cook did at Apple, aside from going to Trump’s inauguration.

Sure, OpenAI/ChatGPT is terrible, but not more so than their competitors in any meaningful way, and Rutger Bregman knows it. This is meaningless grandstanding. Either delete ALL your LLM chatbots, or shut the fuck up.

You still can’t fucking pay me to use that on anything. It’s like that crossed-out swastika: I get the point, but it’s still a swastika.

Obscene

Whatever you do,

I’m a visiting artist at the Garden State Art Weekend open studios in the Neumann Leathers Building, 333 Newark Avenue, Hoboken. I’m in Tim Daley’s space on the fifth floor. Galleries are open tonight from 5 to 9, and tomorrow from 1 to 5. Stop by to say hello if you’re in the area!

Huh, I was told it was because y’all are using AI.

Maar wel de Paus aanvallen op zijn theologische kennis. We leven in een tijd van monsters.

Exactly one year ago today:

The internet has been dealing with infrequent outages long before AI coding. It’s almost as if people pride themselves in not understanding either.

I have no idea why Bluesky is so sluggish today, but I’m old enough to remember internet outages and server connectivity issues before the widespread prevalence of AI assisted coding.

What’s frustrating is that all of this was eminently predictable, especially after the disaster that was his first term. But our billionaire controlled media were, and still are, hellbent on pretending this grossly incompetent and revolting charlatan was just another choice in the voting booth.

M and M. Grisaille underpainting, work in progress. Think I’m getting the hang of this. Acrylic on canvas, 14”x11”. Check art.monospace.com for more.

Self portrait, acrylic on panel. 9”x12”. art.monospace.com

a lot of people whose work I like is substack, and they'll never get a dime from me until they move somewhere else.

We need to talk a bit about how utterly absurd the March heatwave was in the USA. This heatwave would have been impossible without a boost from climate change, but even with climate change it remains a deeply unlikely event. A thread looking at some of the numbers. 🧵

In our hypervisualized world of ubiquitous networked cameras, we expect to immediately see perfect images of whatever is happening. #AIslop delivers. Regardless of the existence of actual footage, the AI versions are often more dramatic, cinematic and optimized for social media clickbait 2/

Just because the pope is Trump's newest enemy does not mean we need to idealize the Catholic Church and it's role for liberal democracy. It is a central organisation in the global diffusion of anti-LGBT rhetoric and ideology. It thereby provides a key building block for far-right authoritarianism.

Hey, look at Substack promoting Andrew Tate as the #1 new bestseller. The company's amoral leadership & backers will platform anyone, even ludicrously toxic rapists & human traffickers.

Viktor Orbán created the global blueprint for authoritarian populism and became a MAGA hero. Today, Hungarian voters sent him packing after 16 years in power. There is nothing inevitable about these guys. Organize. Vote. Fight back. It works.

Viktor Orban accomplished so much of what the Trump movement wants to accomplish here he ruled for 16 years and rewrote the rules in his favor and still, they threw him out and you know what? they did it by voting don’t let anyone tell you voting doesn’t matter

Orban's inability to prevent last year's Pride protests—attended by 300k despite being banned—was a turning point in his authoritarian grip of the country. Queer people are always leading the fight against authoritarianism, as we are often its first targets. Never cower to fear.

A milestone in March: for the first time ever, renewables provided more power on the US grid than natural gas.

This. Jon is absolutely right.

#column #varagids

Het is blijkbaar weer een dag om luidruchtig transgelieerd te zijn. Dus voor de mensen die het nog niet weten: Transvrouwen zijn vrouwen. Transmannen zijn mannen. Transrechten zijn mensenrechten. Transzorg is noodzakelijke gezondheidszorg. Als je dit anders ziet, blok me gerust 🖕 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️

AI slop is overtaking news events even when superior real images are readily available.

Cats do not belong outdoors. BILLIONS of birds are killed every year by them If you let your cat out, you are contributing to species extinction.

Melania: I never cut child in half with sword. I never do this. The entire USA: what? Melania: not me.

something that wrinkles my brain every time I remember it is the fact that total eclipses are only possible on earth because the moon and sun appear to be the same size in our sky, due to the insanely, astronomically unlikely fluke that the moon is 400x smaller than the sun but 400x closer to us.

I often find Arendt’s more pithy observations more relevant than her more well-known works.

OPINION: "The flawed American Experiment in democracy, and maybe the world as we know it, cannot survive if the mentally and physically deteriorating Trump is allowed to serve out the final 1,017 days of his term." — Inquirer columnist Will Bunch 🔗 www.inquirer.com/opinion/tr...

We should not move on from the President threatening to annihilate a civilization.

It’s deliriously desperate when you’re trying to distract from the war in Iran by going back to the Epstein files.

It's wild that the media hasn't caught up to the fact that Trump has lost this war and we're in the stage of managing how badly (which ranges from "very badly" to "world historically")

“We have normalised genocide, total annihilation of entire people, the systematic destruction of the biosphere which we are all depending on to survive, and that corrupt, racist war criminals can act with complete impunity … it is not too late to say stop.” Greta Thunberg

Only a master deal maker could achieve the status quo of 5 weeks ago in exchange for accomplishing nothing of value and turning his country into a global pariah. Thank you sir

Whoa 🤯 The Moon, in full eclipse, with the #Artemis II Orion spacecraft. Part of the Moon and spacecraft are lit by Earthshine, and both Saturn and Mars are visible to the lower right. Incredible. Details: images.nasa.gov/details/art0...