there’s a weird vibe to all these “successful” use cases for AI chatbots where it’s like the person is telling you this dream they had where everyone voted them King and then they look at you meaningfully

There was a nice spherical boulder sticking out of the side of a rock wall beside a rural road that I would drive past sometimes in the '90s, and I loved it enough to pull over and take a picture once.

…and no one ever needed to travel between Seattle & Tacoma again 🤩

I die ... surrounded by people that don't season their food

Fifth, the equivocation of human-human & human-AI relationships; a slip that is so ubiquitous that most seem to ignore it, but it's harmful and even probably illegal or against codes of conduct in many settings that involve professional psychologists. See section 7: doi.org/10.31234/osf... 9/

what it looks like when the Eagles are winning

Here are four of my most popular cartoons on 2025

though some searches reveal disturbing news of human remains found in a freezer in Tempe, Arizona, which is unrelated to standard appliance use but highlights extreme scenarios

“Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience. It is a participatory arena.” —Sven Birkerts, ‘The Gutenberg Elegies’ (1994) Birkerts was thinking about networks at the same time as Manuel Castells: ‘The rise of the network society’ (1996) 🧵

“No lowballs, I know what I’ve got”

Seahawks defense Seahawks special teams Seahawks offense

two conversations happening all over oklahoma this week: 1. hottest christmas week in living memory, 30 degrees over seasonal average 2. hey hey, gas under two bucks a gallon

When the light hits just right you can see why they're called Green Heron! Union Bay Natural Area, Seattle, WA #birds

🎶 Despite all my rage Parsley, thyme, rosemary, and sage 🎶

Why is it Snake Enclosure and not Wiggle Room?

A cartoon by Niall Maher, from 2024. #NewYorkerCartoons

“help, i got the wrong dog and it transed me”

In the film 2012, Roland Emmerich consigns 7.5 billion people to death so that John Cusack can reunite with his ex-wife without killing her current boyfriend personally…1)

What’s very trenchant about The Day After Tomorrow is that it suggests it would take a global apocalypse for the average husband to pick his kid up from the library on time…1)

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Jeremy Nguyen. #NewYorkerCartoons

It's finally here! Remember that weird group of Emirati influencers you keep seeing online. Well I've done a VERY deep dive, & the story is even weirder than you can imagine! "Amjad Taha, Muslim Brotherhood Maxxing & the Emirati #Dysinfluencer Factory" open.substack.com/pub/marcowen...

so this is Jane Roberts, the world’s leading Guðlac-ologist, legitimately frightening erudition Dorothy Whitelock you of course know from her paper locating The Dream of the Rood in the classical tradition of prosopoeia BUT she had more to say later about speaking objects as embedded in culture

Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme are back in their chosen home of Seattle for "The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show."

Wrapping presents? Why not listen to me witter on about early medieval poetry while you’re at it?

Our friends at @nws.noaa.gov are predicting high winds for our region. Reminders: -Watch out for possible downed power lines & trees -DON'T drive through downed trees/lines/road closed signs -Treat dark traffic signals as all-way stops -Make sure your loads are extra secure

still plenty of plague in the 15thC, I think this version would have been huge

fixed

when It Happens

WSJ’s “single-handedly” makes writing rx sound like a gas station stick-up 🙃

Did medieval people buy each other Christmas gifts? New Year's Day was the main gifting day, but little is known about everyday people's present giving. Our project on London's customs records has uncovered a wealth of affordable items imported around this time: gloves and hats to toys and rattles🧵

Here it is: my annual re-posting of the only Christmas comic I will probably ever draw. Happy holidays to you and yours. I hope Santa brings us something really great this year, you know, maybe that thing we've all been hoping for.

I was literally just thinking about this cartoon re: citation because academic field knowledge is often like this, you need to know if everyone’s arguments for the past 20 years have the same dependency on someone’s MA thesis translation of a rare work

“right,” sure, where that’s possible but academic citation is also a mapping of state-of-knowledge flows, it’s a history of transactions in a way—imagine if someone said it was cool to introduce hallucinations to the blockchain because it was faster this way

also this tribute to the compassionately sororal eye of Helen Hokinson by @summerpierre.bsky.social is really delightful my parents had a few @newyorker.com cartoon Treasuries lying around so I sort of grew up with Helen and Gahan rather than Kirby & Lee

panel from “Roz Chast on Gahan Wilson,” perfectly Wilsonian

just saw Garland’s “Annihilation” (Paramount) for the first time WHAT ON EARTH it’s Heart of Darkness & To the Lighthouse (here, the lure of Woolf-ean self-destruction) & Ovid’s Metamorphoses in a Prismatic (tm) blender? (Huge missed opportunity not using The Cure’s Disintegration imo)

just saw a game theorist On Here downplay GPT-style fake citations bc academics currently make mistakes/embellish and I am struggling with, “yes, and this is worse” not being the first thought? “but what if you could put the demon of inattention to work FOR you?”

“Teach us, Good Lord, to dunk and not forget the clock; to no-look and not to lose it out of bounds; to pick and roll and not to settle for an off-balance jumper; to assist the lay-up and not to ask for any reward save that of knowing the basket counted.” —Ignatius of Loyola, probably #seattleu

I don’t know who needs to hear this but here goes: In high school my art teacher told me I didn’t know how to draw because cartooning wasn’t real art. I have wanted to be in The New Yorker Magazine since I was 19. I’m 53 and this happened yesterday:

If I have my timing right, this picture was taken right before the divorce.

really enjoying Polar Park (PBS in the US), a French murder mystery that uses the hackneyed thriller writer protagonist to ever so gradually edge into a très drôle Coen Bros deconstruction of the form, fantastic supporting cast

god can I vouch for this “all the output they generate has to be manually checked, and it is more time-consuming to check and correct a bad index than to create an index from scratch” if you don’t have the book in your head first, you have no frame of reference

Here is a copy of the complaint, which describes how Epstein threatened to “burn her house down”

Gov Bob, appreciate the spend. I see WSDOT asked for $8 billion last October. Where is your 4x efficiency coming from? Also, you do realize that taxation is, like, a fundamental power we citizens have given to government, right? You’re meant to raise revenues commensurate with need.

1/3: Gender-affirming care is legal and protected in Washington state. ✅ Health insurers cannot deny or limit gender-affirming care coverage for people of any age when it’s prescribed as medically necessary.

this is a great real-life illustration of the Calvin & Hobbes where Calvin’s dad tells him that bridge weight limits are determined by driving successively heavier trucks across until it collapses

I love that in a Bluesky TL rhyme, Jason Mantzoukas is playing the role of @lastpositivist.bsky.social here when it comes to being appropriately suspicious of what attractive people are up to