"shop til it makes sense." ive been trying. ive been trying my whole life

Baby turkey! Closest I’ve ever seen these little guys. #birds

In the late 80s I worked graveyard shift at a gas station for a summer. There was a guy who used to come in daily around 4am who seriously thought the WWN was real news. He had a huge crush on the day shift manager and gave her his highest admiration: “I’d kick the dog out of the truck for her.”

Vatican III will issue the Orange Catholic Bible

The Grateful Dead Phish Gillian Welch Michael Ray and the Kosmic Krewe Morris Day and the Time Medeski, Martin, and Wood Stanley Jordan JJ Cale Allison Krauss and Union Station Suzanne Vega

This Le Monde article has a bunch of details that I think are previously unreported: www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/ar...

Justinianic, Heraclian, Macedonian, Komnenian, Laskarid, Palaiologian

SIGINT, HUMINT, IMINT, GEOINT, OSINT, and MASINT.

Weaponized Discordianism is an effective LLM attack vector.

The realist shit to ever appear in a gov memo.

Now that ShinyHunters is getting some attention, maybe some intrepid French-speaking investigative journalist can call their moms.

Feeling redeemed in my cluttered maximalism when I needed a piece of foam and went straight to the random unlabeled box of foam that I put aside 20 years ago for this moment.

We should teach history because it's interesting. That's it. That's my hot take.

this point is very sharp and absolutely applies to fields outside philosophy.

Lots of news today about GitHub's various failings. I left the company 2.5 years ago, so the part of this article (github.blog/news-insight...) that really caught my eye was the bit about the Elasticsearch outage being maybe caused by a "botnet attack". It reminded me of 2019. 🧵

Quick, somebody write a grant to the smoking pit remnant of NSF to invent an arithmetic consistent under weak constraints that agrees with this result. Make sure to include LOTS of indirect costs.

SPLC knows ball?

Nice article about the time that missionaries tried to make Christianity more appealing to 9th century Germanic Saxons by retelling the gospels as a war epic, while making them theologically accurate: moltensulfur.com/post/rewriti...

A Newly Discovered Recording Lets You Hear Delta Blues Legend Robert Johnson in Stunning Clarity www.openculture.com/2026/04/reco...

When I clicked on the "Bluesky Issues" trending link earlier today, every account in the first few scrolldowns was reposting the exact same text blaming the problem on AI. Each account was clearly inauthentic and was advertising video game material in its profile.

Pro-Trump media bias: frame world events as a reality show with Trump as protagonist. As @larryglickman.bsky.social explains, it’s absurd to cast the Pope saying war is bad as a “punch” Trump is responding to. But also, he didn’t take any action. He just said words nonsensically insulting the Pope.

Paging @markstout.bsky.social and other intel history folks: I'm seeking reading recs about intelligence and espionage in Britain and continental Europe during the between-the-wars period, say 1920-1938. Colonial area stuff outside Europe is OK if particularly good.

Finished the Iliad last week, for the first time since 1987. I liked it a lot more this time than when I was 18. I especially enjoyed Wilson’s occasionally dry endnotes, like “It is unlikely that horses would enjoy wine.”

I knew it would be bad, but this is just ridiculous www.atomic.computer/blog/white-h...

if think tanks acknowledge what trumpism is (incoherent and vibes-based), they have to face their own crisis of relevance as institutions that pump out policy papers and provide advice to movers and shakers. pretending there's some policy process that makes sense is a way to avoid grappling w this

Indeed, the _only_ way to develop critical thinking is to engage with multiple domains of knowledge.

the blueprints were what got me. they had zoning.

I love Angleton as much as the next guy, but I think I need to get back into Linebargerposting

The whole episode reads to me like the SecDef was so traumatized by someone sending him their pronouns in an email signature that he decided to destroy capitalism.

My only real interests in the Winter Olympics are ice dancing and biathlon and I’m pretty stoked with the amount I can watch this year.

Reposting just because I want to see @kikta.net's head explode. In a good way, of course.

Finished H.D.'s dark novella about the extremely complicated Bauhaus bisexual polycule situation that she inhabited in Switzerland circa 1930. One of her more accessible works of fiction, it's a nice reminder that while the past may be a another country, it also had lots of interpersonal drama.

having written upwards of 90k, fiction & nonfiction, about-or-thinly-veiled-about my favorite Modernist antifascist wife-guy Bryher (pictured), there's now the possibility I might get to publish a bit of it in essay form this/next year. fingers crossed it happens, & grateful for the chance.

Join me in my new masculinity cult: quit your job, lift heavy, run far, eat whatever you want, read obscure mid-20th century LGBTQ literature.

The Colorado basin. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Something similar happened to me in 2000 when the "senior" admin at a rural ISP where I'd worked for 3 weeks rage quit and took all the router passwords with him. The only real consequences were that I quickly memorized the Cisco password override process & learned a lot of Colorado back roads.

Great read. An additional point though is how many colleges have long relied on underpaid adjuncts to teach these courses. Even at Stanford in 1987, 2 of 3 trimesters of my great books track were taught by an amazing career adjunct & the third was by an awful senior prof who was just mailing it in.

Tell me five classes you took in college Introduction to Chinese Philosophy Introduction to Jewish Mysticism Introduction to Buddhism Medieval Women Writers Visions and Transformations

when I was 8 or 9, I got really into the poetry of e. e. cummings, so I got a book of his work from the library and copied a bunch of the poems down. my mom found them and thought she had accidentally raised an avante-garde modernist fourth grader and freaked out

The Weminuche Wilderness in the San Juans would be a great place for wolverines. I vote for the area east of Vallecito Creek, especially. It's high, it's remote, there's lots of space near and above treeline.

If anyone was still pretending this isn’t just about excluding trans kids from public life, the Trump administration just opened a Title IX investigation into a Maine school district because a trans student is on a *co-ed* cheerleading squad.

A group of young kestrels is startled by the presence of a butterfly. 🤣🤣🤣

My NYT obit on Aldrich Ames, CIA turncoat for the Russians. I interviewed him in the county lockup after his arrest in 1994, then by telephone for eight hours. Deluded, deeply alcoholic, he thought he could lift up the hood of history and tinker with the engine. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/o...

JJA.

Thrilled to share my latest article: "Keeping Syria connected during civil war." A compelling, years-in-the-making story of "Mahmoud," a Syria Telecom network engineer who was on the front lines of the conflict—literally—to keep the country's internet running. syriauntold.com/2025/12/27/k...