Adolescence on Netflix is stellar in every respect. Brilliant writing, acting, and cinematography (each episode is one uninterrupted take). And the kid, Owen Cooper, gives the best child actor performance I have ever seen.

Too late, Batman. Once this Tylenol floods the city's water supply, my wiki won't run out of editors ever again

The Walt Disney Company in a new statement says the move was made "to avoid further tanking our subscriber base at an emotional moment for our bottom line."

Well, there's at least one thing I have in common with the Looney Tunes wing of the evangelical movement. I also hope that these people are going to leave this planet and float up to Eternal Sunday Mass in large numbers on Wednesday.

The canonically accepted MAGA copium for the discrepancy is apparently "the big city libs are faking the numbers by vastly underreporting crime."

So when the Rapture doesn't happen on Wednesday, the people who believed it whole-heartedly are going to admit they were wrong, and then they'll engage in some self-reflection by asking themselves what else they may have been wrong about. Right?

Under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart

Toto's "Rosanna" is just an exceptionally well mastered song. I use it to test new speaker/audio setups. (It's also a banger even on the 10,000th listen.)

Another day, another ChatGPT-written "fan mail" that is almost certainly the preamble to a review/PR scam.

It's not only a perfect movie, it's also one of the handful of sequels that handily surpass the original movie. (It's interesting that James Cameron directed both this one and Terminator 2, another entry on the "perfect movie/superior sequel" shortlist in a span of just four years.)

What movie do you consider perfect?

Yeah man we should really fight back by staying on X

This is something that I’m helping to run this fall: the Green Mountain Book Festival! This year’s headliner is @scalzi.com, and it will take place in Burlington VT on October 18th.

Had more thoughts on why AI can't translate fiction well, and it boils down to this: 1. Good translators must be fluent in both cultures to understand nuance, connotation, and context. 2. Machines do not have the capacity for reliable disambiguation, which is an essential skill for translating.

Project 2025 was public well before the election. Blame the voters all you want (and I do), but I'll also never absolve or excuse Biden and the Garland DoJ for their failure to treat the insurrection like the coup attempt it was and address it with the severity needed to preserve our democracy.

AI cannot translate fiction competently. It doesn't do idioms or slang well (if at all), it doesn't understand cultural nuances or context, and it tends to translate too literally. To native speakers, AI translation of prose is obvious. It reads "off", like a print version of the Uncanny Valley.

Bye now.

The Third Reich had an agency called the Reichskulturkammer, "Reich Culture Chamber". All singers, writers, musicians, journalists, and actors had to apply for membership and were ideologically vetted. Expulsion or failure to gain admission resulted in an occupational ban. Jews were not admitted.

"To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights." --Timothy Snyder, "On Tyranny"

Keep talking, motherfucker. It'll all be evidence at your tribunal at The Hague one day.

One day everyone will have always been against this.

How I feel when trying to explain current events to my normal person friends.

If there's anything I've learned in this life at all, it's that almost everyone you meet has expert knowledge in a very specific field you'd never expect.

I've always thought that "colleges indoctrinate our kids" is a self-defeating claim. If the conservative values you instill in your kid for eighteen years can be overcome that easily by a single semester of engineering college, maybe they're not as compelling and enduring as you think they are.

Imagine spending your entire adult life in full-time support of a guy who gives a four-word answer about his emotional state two days after your murder and then starts talking about his awesome new ballroom instead.

The power company crew is fixing lines right in front of our fenced-in back yard, and our fluffy little ten-pound doggo is in full "DO YOU NOT KNOW DEATH WHEN YOU SEE IT?" mode.

And the rifle had a gun store receipt taped to the stock that said PROPERTY OF JOE BIDEN.

New writers: if you are contacted about marketing your book, and the person either claims to be me or uses me as a reference, it's a scam. The impostor/scammer goes by Edith M. Hicks, but they may use other names as well. "[email protected]" isn't my email, and I don't hire book marketers.

4 American Presidents, 12 Congressmembers, 4 federal judges, 4 state governors, 22 state legislators, and 9 mayors have been assassinated while in office. "Political violence has no place here" is an aspirational sentiment, but honestly, political violence seems to be as American as baseball.

They pirated 29 of my works, everything I've published until 2022, including 13 novels. As Harlan Ellison would say: Fuck you, pay me.

Another round of legal Calvinball. Right now the score is Q to 12.

Got my updated COVID shot because I am not an anti-science idiot who thinks that Dunning-Kruger is what those gold coins from South Africa were called.

Eventually you have to accept that no matter how many different notebooks you buy, they won’t make you a better writer. For that, you need to spend a lot of money on the right pen.

🎵 it's the i of the tiger, with a g to the right Risin' up to the challenge of a vowel And the last two letters are an e and an r And a t is in the front of the iiiiii of the tiger🎵

Renaming the DoD the Department of War is the administrative version of putting angry headlights and a Punisher spare tire cover on your Wrangler.

There's another guy who once said he has the absolute right to kill suspected drug dealers, and he's locked up in The Hague right now, waiting for his tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.

"Tepid legality"

A speedboat running drugs with 11 people on board? Sure, yeah, makes total sense.

"You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords."

FIVE seasons of Only Murders In The Building? The tenant turnover rate must be crazy high in that place.

Every time I see a right-winger with one of those MOLON LABE Sparta fetish stickers, I want to share with them the story of the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, where those Spartans got their asses kicked by the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite heavy infantry unit made up exclusively of gay couples.

Anyone else getting a lot of publishing PR spam with obviously AI-generated openers lately?

There is no ethical, legal, or moral difference between a missile strike on a civilian boat in international waters and a missile strike on a civilian vehicle on I-95.

Rudy Giuliani was HEROICALLY TEARING A WOMAN AWAY from the CLUTCHES of a WOLFMAN MOTORCYCLE GANG when FOREIGN TERRORISTS CRASHED his CAR and SHIT in his PANTS

The MAGA Cinematic Universe is one hell of an exciting place.

Whenever I hear one of the '80s songs from my poor-kid radio mixtapes, I can still remember not only exactly where I had to cut the end off to record over the radio DJ's end-of-track talking, but also which song came next on the tape. (If you understand this, remember to schedule your colonoscopy!)

This is unethical and creepy as shit but very much on point for a company that its weirdo CEO started as a website for the purpose of rating female students "hot or not".