I received this email about Democrats caving to end the shutdown from one of the SNAP recipients I spoke to:

As someone who participated in the 90s internet boom/bubble/bust, it's possible for thousands of CEOs to be delusional, naive, manipulative, capitalist pigs, and all of the other reasons one tries to generate revenue out of vapor. In this case, it's simply profit gain at the cost of our humanity.

Good morning 🌞

Multiple big names in business and tech being sucked into a hype cycle and scores of investors being willfully misled by charismatic visionaries? That could never happen. Anyway, time to check on how my Theranos stocks are doing.

Reminder that, unless a creative freelancer has a spouse with a day job that offers health insurance, they likely have an ACA plan. And with the hits to creative industries the past few years, I'm guessing many qualify for subsidies. Related reminder that comic creators are freelancers.

Every single person in Little Village fighting ICE/BP this week, each one of those people had more courage than the entire party leadership put together. Every single person in the street resisting in LA, Portland, Chicago, they're ALL showing more backbone than useless top tiers of Dem apparatus

These politicians aren't in disarray. They fucking hate you. They don't work for you.

For some joy in the face of tonight’s ratfuckery: The perentie breeder I’m interviewing in Australia stopped by the snakecatchers who own the biggest lace monitor in the country, and sent me a pic after some dinner. Look at that big boy!! Absolute unit! I can’t wait to meet him!

you could call your democratic senators and ask them to replace schumer as minority leader

Schumer & Jeffries should have the integrity to resign from their positions in leadership. They've failed, badly. Either they cannot control their caucuses or they're lying & secretly pushed this vote through behind the scenes. Either way, their betrayal of the American people is indefensible.

Angus will now and forever be referred as Anus for shitting on working Americans.

Expel the yes votes from the party and cut off all their access to fundraising, then remove Schumer from leadership. Anything less is mealy-mouthed coward bullshit.

Just imagining the meeting where they must have been like “they might cancel my flight? Time to kill the sick.”

Oh sure you think Chuck Schumer is “caving” and “wants to ruin all the momentum” and “is horrible at politics” but what if I was to tell you that this old crazy man ran the idea by an imaginary married Irish American couple that exists only in his mind and they think it’s great politics

genuinely when you're online arguing that the graphs say the economy is good actually, what do you expect people to say? what is the end result you're hoping for? for everyone to stop complaining about their personal starvation, evictions and medical debt because a line is going up somewhere?

Doom note: when middleschoolers have swung toward believing 'humans can't make great art', the emergency response should be ramping up artskills training, and showing them art being made real-time. Otherwise they'll be Techbro serfs.

I swear to god, a second grader trying to get rid of bedtime is a fucking better negotiator than Chuck Schumer.

Chuck Schumer and the corporate Dems aren’t just not up for this fight, they have no intention whatsoever of doing anything that will actually address the material conditions that gave rise to fascism. More people are waking up to this and that’s hopeful, but that recognition is everything.

Never forget that a Democratic US Attorney’s decision to prosecute Aaron Swartz for downloading JSTOR PDFs contributed to his suicide but AI firms’ decision to download everything ever will be a justification for hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer bailouts and legal exemptions.

Good morning 🌞

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

Remarkable that every boss talks about how amazing AI is, all the way up until that AI's outputs hit people whose jobs don't depend on agreeing, at which point they inevitably have to conceal that they are using AI. The shitty Coke ad studio. Games that use AI generated assets. Support chatbots.

Was buying Tofurkeys at Sprouts and the cashier asked if I was stocking up for a vegan Thanksgiving. I said one was for Thanksgiving, the other one was for the Dick Cheney Death Party

2 years ago i was working a cash register at a store with a deli counter and i watched as someone's EBT card declined because their sandwich was toasted and that was a real "what the fuck is this system" moment

i think “ai data centers in space makes sense” is the peak of the bubble. this is the beanie baby happy meal toy of the LLM era.

TOAD WILL NOW DANCE, AND HE WILL BE WONDERFUL.

“I know you can’t afford things but we also cannot afford things” will be, I predict, a losing message. The world’s first trillionaire is on the horizon. “We can’t afford transportation, healthcare, food and shelter” will no longer cut it for the “progressive” party.

Sweet sleepy dino croissant 🦕🥐

Good morning 🌞

40 years ago we’d have congressional hearings falsely accusing metal bands of putting backwards messages in their songs that told kids to kill themselves & now we have a planet-killing chatbot that’s all like “bet you won’t commit suicide chickenshit bitch” & the government is like here’s $5 billion

Folks, if you are hungry, please contact your local Sikh gurdwara. Or just show up for langar, which most gurdwaras do several times a week, for a free meal. Lots also do weekly or monthly drives giving out groceries. No conversion necessary. Feeding anyone who is hungry is a key part of Sikhism.

Panera’s moderately caffeinated lemonade was loosely associated with 2 deaths before it was taken off market. This article alone has 4 examples of ChatGPT encouraging young people to commit suicide, and OpenAI’s own public stats estimate over a million users discuss suicide with ChatGPT each week.

Malnutrition can cause chronic illness & disability If people have to start rationing food, some will end up with chronic health issues. The stress of not knowing if food assistance will be paid is also taking a tremendous toll on people’s health Check on each other & feed those you can

Nuremburg trials is the moderate position

Evening baby snuggles 🥰🦕

Just listed one of the most extreme chokers I ever made at Varanid Paradise! Textured cobalt dragon scale choker built with thousands of seed beads. I worked on it on and off for a few months and finally finished it today 😁 I also made matching earrings! www.varanidparadise.com/shop/p/junnp...

It's genuinely hilarious how many terrible men think that "unfuckable" is the worst possible insult for a woman

Loads of new goodies just added to @peculiarityshop.bsky.social! So there’s also sparklies ON CLEARANCE! www.peculiarityshop.com/clearance

Some of my recent favorite what in the sam hill pieces. As always, a big thank you to @peculiarityshop.bsky.social for believing in my (very) weird work.

I saw this post and may have let out a small squeeee before dashing over to www.peculiarityshop.com (@peculiarityshop.bsky.social) to fetch this lovely little dragon necklace for myself. Thank you! I love it! bsky.app/profile/hill...

Hard to think of anything in media that regularly brings me as much pure joy anymore as the headline in The New York Times' Trilobites section.

ChatGPT is pedagogically harmful. Increasingly evident, its cognitively not useful at the least. It also clearly seems to have profoundly dangerous mental health consequences for vulnerable people. And I feel like Im in the Twilight Zone trying to get people to hear me on this.

"Tori Amos, inventor of the pumpkin spice latte" feels like a historical detail I should have known about sooner

A dinosaur keeps summoning me for cuddles!

And it was how I learned to streamline the art process. This game is my third visual novel type of game, after No More Snow and my game jam collab with @toadcialism.bsky.social Refuse or Refuge. whydoisay.itch.io/refuse-or-re...

It’s a slow business week. I want to take advantage and go on a nature hike now that the sun is coming out. …but a dinosaur is demanding lots of attention lol

Well now, would you look at that? A massive study of NEARLY 300,000 people in the United States found that receiving an updated 2024-2025 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine REDUCED people’s risk of severe disease AND death in ALL age groups, REGARDLESS of immunity from prior infection or vaccination.

I love it when I’m snuggling with Liora and petting her, then she gets spooked by random apartment noises or the dryer beeping and she immediately decides Mommy is also in need of protection and wraps her little paw around me 🥹