Meanwhile, teaching is being undermined and devlaued at our institutions in a frankly historically dangerous way, and as an underpaid contract instructor, having to spend more time and emotional energy finding ways to get through to my students for the same low pay is not sustainable. /8

chat are we cooked

One of the giants. I’d just reread Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead for roughly the hundredth time. The thing that struck me is his work is never diminished by familiarity, that on the hundredth read I’d still gasp, stop breathing at the wit and depth. www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/n...

Day two of my holiday movie journey this year takes me to Humboldt Park on the west side of Chicago, a city I love. Did I love Nothing Like the Holidays, though? Alas, this was a bumpier ride than yesterday: find out more on my blog. :-) filmfortheholidays.com/2025/11/29/n... #FilmForTheHolidays

Starbucks employees escalated their strike on Black Friday, expanding to 120 stores and 85 cities. Their CEO took home $96 million while refusing to negotiate a living wage for workers. Boycott Starbucks. Stand with the employees. Support local independent coffee shops:

Five Points on the Gradually-Emerging Picture of the Post Shutdown U.S. Economy talkingpointsmemo.com/fivepoints/f...

Every single congressional Democrat needs to be out there, right now, insisting that Pete Hegseth resign right now and announcing that he will be held accountable for committing war crimes. If you do not demand accountability here and now, they will only become more emboldened.

You're not seeing the defense and international conflict experts disagreeing because if the facts are true, it's one of the most basic things in the law of armed conflict: You cannot kill people who are "hors de combat," taken out of the game by injury or attack. This is Geneva 101 stuff.

The president is such a bumbling idiot he thinks tweeting out the word "hereby" a couple times on his white supremacist social media site is the same thing as making an actual law. The only story here is the one about a mentally diminished, increasingly erratic president who thinks he's a king.

Perfection in the details 🤌

Multiple surveys are telling the same story: AI adoption has stalled. Census data shows ~11% of workers use AI, with rates falling at 250+ employee firms. Surveys show usage spiked then plateaued. Meanwhile Big Tech is planning $5T in AI spend by 2030 that needs $650B/year in revenue vs ~$50B today

Folks, I'm back at my holiday movie blog dropping a review every day from now till Christmas Eve. I hope you'll drop by to see what I'm up to, since I'm covering another wild array of films this year, both the obscure and the classic (like today's): filmfortheholidays.com/2025/11/28/m...

truth coming out of her cup noodles to shame mankind

This rhetoric is indistinguishable from the stuff you hear coming out of white nationalists. Completely identical language.

Hey @nature.com, have you got an explanation for how the hell THIS happened? & especially why you accepted a paper with such a bizarre piece of genAI slop in it?! & more to the point, why we should take you seriously at all going forward? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Indigenous actress Elaine Miles of "Northern Exposure" was detained by ICE at a Redmond bus stop. When she showed them her Tribal ID, they told her it was fake

It will never cease to amaze me that so many tech bros read Lord of the Rings, decided the hobbits were the bad guys and Sauron and his forces were the good guys, and have built their entire personalities around being corporate ring wraiths.

A genuine delight, and one I wrote about admiringly last year on the blog. Well worth your time! filmfortheholidays.com/2024/12/07/t...

These guys are great! I donate every year and may I suggest that some of the crafts they sell on behalf of the elders make great Christmas presents?

Chihiro from SPIRITED AWAY is the most millennial-coded character in fiction: - forced to beg in order to get worst job in the entire universe - incompetent at work due to being coddled by pig boomer parents - immediately starts dating her manager - quits after two days to move back home

you just can't have a meaningful conversation about the potential benefits of "AI" while this stuff is happening. it's like trying to talk about how useful an airplane might be during a hijacking

Today on Volts: I've had more requests to cover this than almost any other topic in the pod's history, so now, at long last, balcony solar! We dig into how "plug-in solar" took off in Europe & how it's making its way to the US, starting in Utah. Backyard DIY types rejoice!

Annnnnnd now the West Virginia governor says he's not sure about the condition of the National Guardsmen. Maybe best to not tweet out that they are both dead until, you know, you KNOW that is absolutely the case...

To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.

And the folks who are actually writing full-time generally only got there after years of day jobs, family support, or both. The point of sharing this is not to demoralize anyone, but to let emerging writers know they're not failing if they can't make a living off writing alone. Almost no one can.

Let me fix that for you: Texas A&M is limiting how instructors may discuss gender identity and race in classrooms in an assault on academic freedom unseen in America since the Red Scare.

I once asked a bookseller at a large indie store how many people would have to buy a book for it to get the attention of the store buyer and cause an additional order and they said: Three.

I see some book piracy discourse, and, to make a positive argument in favor of buying books, your marginal ability to influence what books get published and support the careers of writers you like is massive compared to most other forms of media.

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

Very grateful to have been part of this wonderful show over the years! ❤️

Just realized I hit two years of covering local politics, specifically the Spokane City Council! Here’s a few things I’ve learned: 1. Everyone hates declaring an emergency to bypass the regular public process until it’s for a thing they personally like.

I have long had an obscure, complex theory about Susan Collins that explains these things. Susan Collins is terrible and anyone who ever suggested she is a moderate is a liar or a rube. That's it. That's the whole thing.

just incredibly thrilled to announce that after months and months of uncertainty over the future of the game, and several I have bought Zombies, Run!, the game I co-created and have been making for the past 12 years: zombiesrungame.com observer.co.uk/the-critics/...

Starting the Ken Burns American Revolution doc, and going to track my thoughts here. I remember little of this era from AP US History, and mostly focused on the Black loyalists during the class on this for my Master's in US History, so I'm excited to learn.

The time's drawing near for my holiday movie blog, which will post one review per day from next Friday to Christmas Eve. I don't tell you which movie is on which day, but if you want to see the array of selections I'll cover this year, I've updated my list: filmfortheholidays.com/what-films-w...

This is very cool. Often food pantries need to spend their money making sure everyone has the basics to keep them fed and healthy, but not on the spices and flavors that make an enjoyable meal. www.burlapandbarrel.com/products/don...

you know, while we're not sure of all the differences in women's hockey, we can say that one thing we notice watching the PWHL vs the NHL is absolutely nobody is mentioning odds or trying to advertise a sports betting website or associated crypto scam. absolutely none of that shit. and it's good.

I think it’s bad that ai allows people to pretend to live in completely separate realities so they don’t have to process news and events that make them uncomfortable. I think that is bad for the health of society!

this is your brain when your entire politics is just a set of aesthetics

New post at CAMPAIGN TRAILS on the incredible shrinking Speaker of the House.

TRUMP [after spending 5 minutes with Zohran]: surplus value, it’s a very wonderful thing, very wonderful, and they’re stealing it. Can you believe that? We’re going to be looking very strongly at the bourgeoisie, what they’re up to

re: roblox dude's interview crashout. the thing he wants to say but can't is "at scale, kids are gonna get hurt. that is the price for scale." the thing nobody wants to say out loud is "maybe scaling to a level where harm isn't manageable is bad, and scale should be contained"

Literally Reb and I had a whole ass conversation about this a couple weeks back and both felt so so strongly that it’s a hard no. If I could use my video game ✨expertise✨ and motherhood status to impart any sort of advice on fellow parents, it’s keep your kids off Roblox

Let's hear your program ideas! Fill out the form, then let us all know about the panel you're pitching! I wanna know!

I think this has to be the best auction lot ever: J R R #Tolkien owned this desk. Just imagine the #Writing he did here, the imagining he did, as Middle Earth came into existence. www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6...

"kid gambling"

New from me: I talked to CDC staffers about the new vaccines and autism page. They said things like: “The best way I can put it is it feels like we’re on a hijacked airplane.” “I think people are starting to see that we can’t fulfill our mission here.”

Since everybody will name the Baldur's Gate series (correctly) & probably Planescape: Torment too (also correct), I'll throw Wildermyth into the mix. It's deeply addictive & I've played hundreds of hours.

This Way Madness Lies is a great game and barely anybody bought it. It should be played by more people. If everybody here on @bsky.app banded together and bought a Steam copy and played it, well, that'd be a miracle and I would be forever grateful. store.steampowered.com/app/1318970/...