Robert Redford playing a gentle incarnation of death, coming for a frightened old woman in The Twilight Zone episode "Nothing in the Dark" (1962). An extraordinary performance then, terribly bittersweet today

If you like selkie stories (and who doesn't?), I hope you'll enjoy my new story, "I Would Breathe Water," in Club Chicxulub vol. 4, "Limbo." clubchicxulub.com/club-chicxul...

Now more than ever we need The Middleman!!

If you've been wanting to read a chapter from "San Francisco's Forgotten Cemeteries," now's your chance. "Historians aren’t certain how many graves remain at City Cemetery. Researcher Alex Ryder believes it’s at least 10,000 but is probably closer to 20,000 or more."

Certainty is halfway round the world before curiosity has got its boots on

It has been suggested to me that these sound like band names.

Best glory I’ve ever seen from a plane! It’s an optical phenomenon that occurs when light interacts in and around tiny droplets of water in the clouds, in the direction opposite the sun. More complex than a rainbow. Here’s a link to some more info: www.zmescience.com/science/phys... #optics #physics

🎵 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🎵

Been reading Wodehouse's corpus start to finish and this is the first truly great short story. Read to the end, would you? www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/10/at-g...

I enjoyed this. And what an infectious laugh. ❤️ "Reporter left speechless after witnessing Japan's new $70 million Maglev train in action at 310 mph"

Alright, you all have to stop and appreciate this stunning little dude. The blue eyes, fuzzy sideburns, and cute little bee feet. These longhorn bees are typically energetic and skittish, but Mr. Handsome must've been napping. A great opportunity for a nice portrait. (Melissodes denticulatus) PA

Inside you there are two wolves. One is active, the other one is on hot standby and becomes active if the first one fails or is taken down for maintenance. Add more wolves as necessary for increased redundancy load balancing. A quorum badger can be added for environments with multiple active wolves.

SOMEbody deployed to production on a holiday weekend

When the asteroid struck, much of the world died. Burnt wood, bone, and ash scattered under darkened skies. Fungus spread over the decay, lives that also fed surviving ants. Ants who began to farm the fungus, inventing agriculture long before we did. I’ll tell you more at Smithsonian. #InvertFest

If old sysadmins are known for keeping a loaded gun ready to shoot the printer if it ever makes an unexpected noise, perhaps you can imagine how we feel about "agentic" "AI" controlling the web browser.

Timeline cleanse (wash car later)

In the coming few months I'm going to be talking a lot about the way we treat indigent and unclaimed people at the end of life and in death. Here's a video I made about Colma's Sunset View Cemetery, where markers were removed and people played golf on the graves for 20 years:

I miss the time when AI was a weird, kinda esoteric research subject that I mostly learned about from goofy Janelle Shane blog posts, rather than a venture-capitalist nightmare of misinformation, phony science, illusory relationships, layoffs, cultishness and resource depletion

We made you a rigorously cited timeline of major moves, cases, changes, and other wildass developments in the immigration system since January 20. This is one of the most complicated things I've ever worked on, but we think it needs to be done. The thread breaks down the kinds of things we found.

I recommend this delicious hopepunk novella ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

check out my new piece, "Endoplanetary Ecologies" video of slime mold created via analog glitch video microscopy, presented in a custom designed + 3D printed housing wrapped in gold leaf

Weavings by Marilou Schulz (Diné) on view in “Once within a Time” at SITE Santa Fe.

unironically, marketing psychology is the real life version of the necronomicon. everyone who studies it should be sworn to secrecy unto death and their sole role in society should be to recognize if someone else is about to discover it and stop them

A blue bee! This is the blue carpenter bee, Xylocopa tumida. I was SO excited to find this animal just before dawn at Trus Madi Entomology Camp in Borneo. So full of beauty.

My amygdala kindly requests that all existential threats queue neatly and wait their turn so they can be processed efficiently. Thank you.

I love saying something "gets my goat" when I'm pissed off. Never fails to distract me, and before I know it I'm not mad anymore, I'm imagining my goat and what adventures he's off on, living deliciously

Fig. 1

Lightning strikes occur on Earth more than a *billion* times per year. What triggers it? Turns out, exploding stars. Yes, seriously. And also, black holes. badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/what-trigg... 🔭🧪

getting deeply alarmed at the combination of: - right wing anti-fat + anti-woman cultural moment - cultural pressure to take semaglutides - AI porn where everyone is IMPOSSIBLY SKINNY ...and the effect it's going to have on women over the next 5-10 years

After the rain

Sorry, there is no RETVRNING. Not to 1860, 1933, 1950, 1979, 2015, or any other of your favorite years. Nostalgia is an opiate. "Simpler times" are a lie. 1/2

Parable of the Sower really messed with me, but one of the ways it MOST messed with me (in a good way) was its insistence on the inevitability and persistence of change. We're never going back, but also we never WERE going back. This rollercoaster never had a reverse button. Time never does

NOAA alert levels are confusing, e.g., Tsunami - watch, advisory, warning www.weather.gov/safety/tsuna... Tornado - watch, warning, emergency www.weather.gov/safety/torna... Wind - advisory, watch, warning www.weather.gov/safety/wind-ww

Motherfucking wind farms…

If I say I'm on my way, I am. If I say I'm on The Way, I am not.

The brain-immune axis at work. Just photos of people with infections (using VR, avatars) activates the immune system (vs controls) www.nature.com/articles/d41... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We talked about this back when the first trial for lenacapavir first said the magic words everyone wants to hear, "halted for efficacy"(*), so a recap: this is not a vaccine or a treatment. It's PrEP aka "pre-exposure prophylaxis": you take the drug so if exposed to the virus, you will not catch it.

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

If you meet the Buddha online, block him.

They stored a PNG on a bird. youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?...

when they close it all up, I do believe this will go down as the funniest video on the internet

This is pure joy. Get it! Ew, It's Beautiful: A False Knees Comic Collection by Joshua Barkman app.thestorygraph.com/books/cc5b60...

Okay, ew, but SUPER USEFUL. Thank you @scrippsocean.bsky.social

The September issue of Highlights magazine is out, so I can finally talk about my article about Sea Angels. They're sweet and pretty, quietly flapping through the sea... until they detect prey, their head splits open, and the tentacles come out.

Very nice summary of our recent paper on emergence and LLMs: bdtechtalks.com/2025/07/14/l...