I knew about Ezra Pound working as a propagandist for Mussolini but hadn't yet been conscious of this as a whole genre of thing (Wikipedia excerpt about "Quo Vadis")

Musk is a parasite on the future; he preys upon the imagination of others, taking any vision of a better world and depreciating it by hawking options on a transparently fake facsimile. He is capitalism's full-throated assault on the utopian imaginary.

Bride of Frankenstein's utility monster

Grok true to its name now seems to talk like a 90s Usenet libertarian or something?

Made a site where you can practise Old English scansion. You get given a half-line and have to select which of Sievers's five types it belongs to. Just Beowulf for now, but that's 6364 half-lines to be getting on with: dgplacenames.github.io/scansion/ [Data: clasp.ell.ox.ac.uk/]

someone is talking about "category theory and structuralism" 圏論と構造主義 live on youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr8U...

The shape of its kanji name 嚻 looks very interesting (I’d never seen it until I read Shanhai jing. It seems there is no Japanese word using this character), so I designed the bird based on the kanji itself. The four 口 shaped wings, and an eye (目) at the center of the body.

⛰️山海経5：嚻。意外と漢字を表示できる！　古代中国サイクロプスバード。嚻という字の形が面白いので、４つの翼をそのまま四角い「口」型にして「目」を中心に置きました。 🌊Shanhai jing 5: Xiao. The four-winged, one-eyed bird with a dog tail. It reminds me of Cyclops. The meat cures stomachache. (idk how to hunt them tho) #山海経の怪鳥30羽描く #30WeirdAncientBirds

Vote! Already did? Text or call your friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers. We can win this! #thisisyourcity

Here's my second story for @theworld.org about elephants moving into Andhra Pradesh and the consequences of climate change + habitat loss on these communities and this amazing species. Photos by @justinnisly.bsky.social. Huge thanks to @earthjournalism.bsky.social for the support!

Yeah that's silly but I do wish I saw more people view this through the lens of "natural language vs constructed/formal language" rather than somehow "automated vs manual"

(hey a line of code can even call into an LLM API to generate some more code and execute it ... checkmate vibecoders😏)

Like people will contrast using AI to writing code "line by line" as if a "line" of code were something that does a fixed amount of work, rather than something that can call into arbitrary other code, use language features to adapt to context, etc., to do arbitrary amounts of work

Something I find very strange about AI in programming discourse is how much of it seems to proceed as though the previous 70 years of accumulated languages, libraries, tools etc to automate programming didn't exist.

Here is my “Abolish Confidence” presentation from Season 1! I hope it earns me your vote!

【生存報告】最近は絵心経タオルをアイスまくらに巻いて寝ているので毎日が昇天です

evergreen epigram

ice chuds gassing up a neighborhood again

operator

「青森県がリンゴを普及させてきたのは、キリスト教の神を冒涜するため」という陰謀論が流れてきました。

“YOU hit HER.” CHICAGO - Trump’s ICE goons ram into a passing car after snatching someone, then brutally drag the female driver of the car they hit out of her car with guns drawn and arrest her too. (Her brother says she’s a citizen)

果物スタンドで手伝いをしていた自閉症の子供がトイレ休憩から帰ってこず「行方不明」になっていた事件、１週間経ってその間ずっとICEに拉致監禁されてた（親への連絡なし）ことが分かったという。

Love this from @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/emily613...

the man'yōshū seems brilliant, beautiful, and kind of evil?

The federal government as ordained and established by the Constitution has ceased to function, and what has replaced it isn't our government under our Constitution. That's not flippant rhetorical hyperbole, I don't say it insensitive to what the consequences are. But it's the grim reality we face.

They are, and the consequences are extremely dire, but that pales in comparison to the much bigger problem: we don't have a legitimate president of the United States right now. What we are to make of his enablers and supporters who have thereby also delegitimized themselves is a secondary problem.

Donald Trump is breaching the Constitution and breaking the law. A show of force so he can militarize our cities because of the 2026 elections. We need to stand up together and speak up.

Attorney says video shows 'CBP agent taunting her—“Do something, bitch” before "steering unmarked vehicle into hers and opening fire." "“La Maggie” Martinez survived a federal shooting in #Chicago, [h]er attorney says body-cam footage shows agents provoked it." migrantinsider.com/p/chicago-la...

Streets are still closed off in front of the Portland ICE facility at 8:30pm. Protesters have gathered on a side street. Dance party in progress.

something is up with those Mechanize boys

Here's the complaint relating to the alleged ramming, followed by the shots in Chicago earlier. Just one of three Border Patrol Agents turned their bodycam on, and the BWC only corroborated: 1) That they shot 2) The timing 3) What one of the cars did afterwards www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/me...

I though the Greek connection was regarded as dubious, and must have gotten that idea from here -> en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Etym... . I promise I didn't get it from an LLM :) But since this is from 1891, maybe research advances have solidified the connection now?

Mmh, that's not what the literature says. The verb 'stimmen' was derived from an ancestor of the noun 'Stimme', and that word does have an etymology and is related to Ancient Greek 'stóma' (mouth) among others. Here's the relevant entry from Kroonen's Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic:

wow seems the etymology of German "stimmen" and friends is murky and we don't even have an accepted PIE root for it or cognates in other IE families?

there's a weird blank space in my taskbar which made me go "ugh what now, does windows have another dumb taskbar bug again, quelle surprise" but it turned out to be my own app I haven't bothered to make an icon for yet

I spoke to a Venezuelan woman who was arrested in this raid and later released with her 4yo son. She said agents broke down their door, pointed guns at them and made sexualized remarks about Venezuelan women. When she returned to her apartment it was boarded up and all her possessions were gone.

shocking details out of an ICE raid on an apartment building in South Shore area of Chicago on September 30th abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chi...

Write a letter to your lawmakers using our action center tool urging them to vocally oppose journalist Mario Guevara's deportation. Guevara could be kicked out of the country as early as this week. He is legally authorized to work here and is not charged with any crime.

I talked to staff members who work near where federal agents were seen on video choking a Black man on the West Side. thetriibe.com/2025/10/vide...

Terrorizing and wrecking an entire 150-unit apartment building--hundreds of people, mostly legal or citizens--to detain 37 people. This should be a much more massive story.

“It was heartbreaking to watch,” said Watson. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”… “Stuff was everywhere…people’s birth certificates, and papers thrown all over. Water was leaking into the hallway. It was wicked crazy.”

“ABC7 spoke to Pertissue Fisher, a woman who lives in the building. She said ICE agents took everyone in the building, including her, and asked questions later….’They was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other.’” It can’t happen here, you say. But it is happening.

NEW — An estimated 40 people were taken by federal agents in an overnight raid in South Shore, a predominantly-Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. A couple who live nearby said they were shocked to see the enormous militarized raid in their community. thetriibe.com/2025/09/feds...

They need to invent an "excuse me" that can't be interpreted as passive-aggressive or as asking the target to do something

embodiment has a missing mood problem. I like embodiment if it's yi sang

一度削り、メディウムの粘度を見直してようやくゴッホっぽいテクスチャーになってきたな。某美術館の紹介文で「筆を叩きつけるような荒々しいタッチ」とかいってたが、とんでもない、毛先の動きを感じながらゆっくり筆をひねるように使わないとこうはならん。彼の人生の結末から「キルティング」して狂気と情熱の画家みたいな売り込みがあるが、むしろ理知的な勉強家だと感じることが多い

Was the Nation of Epyx the first Network State? Discuss amongst yourselves

"transgender people are dishonorably obsessed with changing their own bodies," says the man whose inability to live with his natural zero level of ethnaol in his bloodstream has led him to tell decorated 50 year old men they're not buff enough

working on a (for now at least) LLM wrapper thingy for a use case I often have. at the stage of "the basics sort of work but it's hideous"

I like abstraction, and I like concretion, but I dislike the abstract idea of "concretion" ...