The average hellboy comic is like “hellboy meets with his old friend Professor Cornelius Bottomsworth of Oxford University to discuss an Assyrian artifact..something something something, Hellboy gets pummeled within an inch of his life by Pazuzu. Small inset panel showing two lilacs.”

I've just published a report sharing the findings from a survey into the prevalence and effectiveness of different organising structures for content teams. (Thanks if you took part!) lapope.com/2025/09/22/u...

not many people know this but if the play doesn’t list an end time it means the actors just have to keep acting until one of them passes out

rozencrantz and guildenstern are dead but it’s bob the tomato and larry the cucumber

So there's a ~thing~ on the socials now, where a few extremely online evangelicals have decided Sept. 23rd is the day of the Rapture. @kristinrawls.bsky.social and I did several podcast episodes on the whole cultural phenomenon (podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c... but this is an interesting point.

Tragically, Will Stancil is actually the closest thing this age has to a moral paragon because he was exposed to people being mean to him on the internet without becoming a Trumpist out of spite, a test which seemingly every other major Discourse Generator online has failed.

Hm. Waking up and reading The Site That Gives You Ulcers seems to be giving me ulcers

How to make complex data accessible for users with disabilities? I love that the first step is defining purpose. Too often, we want charts on a page without knowing why. Accessibility means designing for diverse users, not the mythical “average.”

Folks (especially in media) have gotten the idea that, since we have YouTube and TikTok, we don't need websites except as a place to do commerce. I don't agree with that — a website is one of the most powerful marketing tools a business can have, and I wrote about why for @bitsandletters.com:

It should be needless to say, but it is perhaps at this moment worth saying, that transgender individuals have the same right as anyone else to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

not gonna lie, i think i am going to have to make a movie night out of this. www.imdb.com/title/tt8064...

Gamergate was the moment when the political right finally figured out how to harness the roiling, nihilistic energy of transgressive memeboard culture to attack a broad but shallow progressive cultural consensus that constrained its extractive impulses.

Hi I’m so serious , I made a video because I think this is REALLY important so I’m subjecting you to my face But this is a critical point and letting the desire to be perceived as good rather than to listen is gonna destroy a lot more than ya think

How to stand out, when anyone can use AI to build anything? For @antonsten.comSten, most people go for “how do we build this”, instead of asking “what should be built that people actually want?”. This leads to a situation, where, most new apps and products, solve, fake problems.

“I lied, put your clothes back on, we’re playing the Bay Area Regional Planner board game”

Just a few pages in and already loving Jillian Hess’s “How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information” — its relevance to content architecture and editorial affordances in web and content management tools is pinging around in the back of my mind.

As much as I love Ian Banks and Folio editions, I can’t help but feel that tracking down original trade paperbacks of all the culture novels would be truer to the spirit… www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-cult...

A permanent out-of-office email reply reading “you look down and you see a tortoise; it’s crawling towards you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. You’re not helping. Why is that?”

/3 I am no longer inclined to spend time tinkering with the machinery of bigotry. It would be trivially easy to explain under a rules-based system how SCOTUS could come out one way on race in admissions and another in race in detentions. But it's still not worth the effort or the implied respect.

This is really critical: answer-shaped text is just statistically the most likely text to follow question-shaped text. I don’t mean that dismissively. It is an example of just how profoundly amazing “language” is, as a technology. Even just mimicking its patterns can produce useful outputs.

One of the greatest inventions of the last 48 hours

One of the things that keeps coming back to me is the idea that fascism is colonialism turned inward: all of the brutality, exploitation, theft, gaslighting, etc.

WHAT IS UP, CHICAGO??? Iron Circus Comics is up and running at Printers Row Lit Fest! Drop on by for a huge selection of our most popular titles, and a FREE ZINE by @meganpiont.bsky.social about how to protect your neighbors from our bullshit federal government!

The problem with letting incels run the government is that every interaction with a normal person is a potential honey trap.

The modern right loves retributive vigilante violence — stories of good, decent folks fucking up evildoers that “the law” couldn’t reach. That isn’t because they care about injustice: It’s because they love a story that lets them fantasize about morally justifiable violence.

never change, tracts from the 1950s

i mean, its fair, we describe all kinds of degenerate, amoral quant-brainery as “silverism”

The GPL philosophy of morally-necessary open source (in particular) is an artifact of comfortable, individual developer/users. It’s looking increasingly difficult to sustain in a world where software businesses aren’t sloshing in easy money.

extremely jazzed to see @jamellebouie.net pulling from debord's The Sociecty of the Spectacle when dissecting the current societal moment www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/o...

I wanna start doing an “ending explained” series for movies that absolutely do not need their endings explained like BMX BANDITS and MAC AND ME.

not all the ideas can be good ones. back in the early days of drupal, before we had consistent configuration management apis, i wrote a minimally-documented automation mechanism called `drupal_execute` that let us simulate user configuration form submissions. god, did we all regret that

The refused to listen. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”

Alternately, I think “scope-slumped” is now a go-to label for a lot of regrettable things

I like how “AGI” scope-slumped from “build and shape the acausal robot god in whose memory we all live” to “automate a measurable number of tasks to a level of quality that is not unjustifiably shittier than currently performed by humans”

Each semester I have to clear away the fog of the tech that students are swimming in (CMS, registration software, etc.) to remind them that what we are doing is just reading shit, talking about it, and writing about it. That's it...but now to do that we all have to wade through a thicket of tech.

genuinely amazing

It’s very easy to make a nice diagram that shows the difference between a data model, a content model, and a domain model. Really, though, it’s a big ol’ smear and nobody can quite agree on the location of the edges.

if a right-winger kills somebody with a car because he disagrees with them, the right spends a year talking about how he was pushed over the line by radical leftism. the center, on the other hand, talks about how he was pushed over the line by radical leftism

morning read

Watching the NYC race has felt a lot like the moment AOC hit social media and clearly understood it, was comfortable with it, in a way a previous generation of politicians wasn’t.

The @unbreaking.org team just launched a new timeline of the administration’s attacks on our immigration system, and I don’t have the words to describe just how much work went into creating it. It was a hell of a thing to witness. Congratulations to everyone involved, and thank you 💜🏆

I believe we need to be able to understand what is happening to us. That's the sole reason for my work on knowledge ecosystems over the years, including Covid Tracking Project. A lot of things *can* be known, even in this political blender. We deserve real knowledge, not close-enough flyby guessing.

Anyways, that last thread was surprisingly difficult to write. There are a lot of raw memories about the shockingly toxic memespace of that culture, and how it demanded not just external compliance but wholehearted surrender, 1984-style, to the *idea* of its goodness.

Also, uh, I talk a lot about structured content and digital publishing

There’s a lot of talk going around about Dobson and the ugly trail he left through evangelical Christiandom. He taught generations of Christian parents not simply to physically abuse their children, but to do so with the intent of “breaking their wills.” Believe it or not, it gets worse.

Literally just the “Asking me to call a woman Ms instead of Miss or Mrs is a shocking, baffling affront to language, how can anyone be expected to understand these strange new rules” conversation.

One of the interesting things about "Generative AI is just as good as humans" discussions is that they often use what we consider *failure modes* in human learning and communication as the point of comparison for AIs. Like, yes. Lots of humans write emails that are vacuous and content free!

nothing quite like the comforting crunchy noise of rsync'ing 8TB of files from one HDD to another