OpenAI has this commercial saying "you can just build things!" and Canva has this *terrible* podcast ad saying "you can show off your thing!" with their AI tools. It's literally true that they can't write or think or speak intelligently anymore, or at least don't think their customer base can.

*whispers* Go Spurs This is the shirt I caught at the Austin Spurs game a couple of months ago. Our then-6yo was pumped.

One of my favorite old t-shirts from my time on JET. Bought from a small shop in Kesennuma - which is what the kanji says if you look closely enough. It's just about giving up the ghost after 20 years, but I'll never give it up.

@ryannorth.ca Meanwhile...

Tragically true. Gotta append -ai every time.

Bsky users would overrate it, but many underrate how sick and out-of-it FDR was at Yalta. There was little room for negotiation, as Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe was a fait accompli, but from Churchill to now it's been argued that FDR's health made it worse. (Ofc, Truman at Potsdam failed too)

She's responding to a question about Indian diaspora politics, which is very interesting, but this also perfectly describes all tech types regardless of nationality. They don't think history applies anymore and don't think they have anything to learn from it.

People look for WWI/WWII in Tolkien, but a lot of it is the Indian Mutiny of 1857. A "They are coming" moment at a British telegraph office. Helm's Deep is the Siege of Lucknow (a "So it begins" moment, civilians underground, sappers). A woman warrior on horseback (did he know about Rani of Jhansi?)

I was looking for a particular 19th-c quote and typed "Queen Victoria is not your mother" into Google, forgetting to add my usual -ai to avoid the AI summary, and the AI spat out "You are absolutely right. Unless you are a member of the British royal family, Queen Victoria is not your mother." Wtf.

One of my unpopular takes is that the cult around the phrase "delenda est" is as dumb/harmful as the "molon labe" people. It's a racialized call for the razing of a civilization, which had late echoes in Charles Dickens' call to "delete Delhi" during the Indian Mutiny. It's too tainted to reclaim.

"[Sec of War Henry] Stimson was 77 in the spring of 1945 and was considered quite an old man in Washington." He would have been the 4th oldest senator then, today about the 10th (though the current cabinet is quite young.) He was 17 years older than the president then, now he'd be 2 years younger.

““My mother did not give her life. Her life was taken and it shocked the nation enough that they passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965,” he said, adding that the Supreme Court and Trump administration were “working tirelessly to go back to the ‘60s.” “It’s disgusting,” he said.”

Update - my tomatoes turned red! I've already eaten two. This one's a double.

Some shithead burned down our local troll. One of the lesser crimes du jour, but one that I hope the universe punishes quickly and appropriately. It probably already has, since someone who's had it easy in life presumably wouldn't do something like that. But they should take another hit or two.

Being a historian sucks because you're torn between being properly horrified by present-day travesties and the need to say, "Well yes, we nominated not one but TWO people on two different presidential tickets specifically because they fought or killed the Shawnee leader Tecumseh."

My best friend was in town last weekend and we played the 1992 LucasArts game INDIANA JONES AND THE FATE OF ATLANTIS, which is a great game that's well animated and well written and well voiced and really got me back in an Indy mood for the first time in years. Gotta play some of the other games!

Rescued this beauty today from a library that was going to throw it away. THE RUSSIAN WAR MACHINE, 1917-1945 ed. S.L. Mayer (1977)

"What on earth is the matter with the American people? Do they really covet the world's ridicule as well as their own social and political ruin? The national edifice is on fire... Such is the pride, the stupid prejudice, and folly that rules the hour." - Frederick Douglass

Language changes and I can understand her, and maybe most parents actually like this style of communication and would find formal structure cold and alienating. BUT I would simply never send this to a parent from my ISD email when denying a reduced meal cost application. At least she didn't use AI.

I have to admit, I missed that US Steel was acquired by Nippon Steel in 2025. What a way to cap off the long saga of American industrialization, the reorganization of the postwar world, and the free-trade-powered service economy of the new millennium in US History II lectures!

A friend of mine was saying he'd been trying to get through a book for months, and finally did it. Which is good! But I read like 15 over winter break. Admittedly only maybe one since then, but.

I can't help myself, it's the Shatner sightings that always make me unreasonably giddy. Seeing him in JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG is a head trip, but being taken out of that incredible movie for a moment to shake my head and ask myself what on earth he's doing there is just a welcome part of the ritual.

Happy 100th birthday to David Attenborough. His LIFE OF BIRDS is my all-time favorite nature documentary, and several others of his would likely fill out the rest of the top 10. I wrote a blurb about him in my annual centenarian piece: www.flickchart.com/blog/10-star...

I forgot to say that I went to see Willie this past weekend! My second time seeing him. I thought he did great - played for an hour, surprisingly strong voice for his age, though strictly a talk-singer now. By far the oldest artist I've seen; by far NOT the oldest crowd. Tons of 20, 30 year olds.

My kids' elementary school has a mustang for a mascot, but the drawing of it that they usually use looks very much like a donkey, as students regularly point out. It turns out they created it with AI, so this now makes perfect sense.

I have a student who built his own PC, it took months and a lot of money but he's really proud of it. My friends did that when I was a kid, and it was great to hear young people still do it. But he told me how expensive the RAM is due to AI, and how cringe he thinks AI is. Good convo in a dark time.

Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins

I just accidentally pronounced "memento mori" as if it were a Japanese phrase - gotta catch up on sleep this weekend.

The greatest American artist you haven't heard of. People need to know! (I had no idea until a recent Antiques Roadshow.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_...

Really good interview. The juxtaposition of the super long term of reaching the ultimate answerable questions, versus the potential abrupt end of the story. The pope appears too. www.scientificamerican.com/article/huma...

No shade to AOC, and this is not a nitpick of her. The Great Society's inspiration, though, shows something interesting about taxes and spending. New Deal spending was too low AND its tax increases were too broad-based. Higher spending and more *progressive* taxation would have boosted its impact.

Very hard to choose just 5, but 1. The contemporaneous contexts of Akira Kurosawa movies 2. Folk-prog band Jethro Tull 3. US-backed land redistribution in East and Southeast Asia, ~1900-1970 4. The work of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke 5. Basically any topic in US history - I do this every weekday

Or Blackboard, or Moodle, any of the third-party, for-profit middlemen apps. And the era of TAs doing the grading on those apps is rapidly nearing its logical end - TAs will soon be eliminated in favor of fully automated grading. Educational administrators are leading the charge into dystopia.

In our limited evening viewing time we made the unfortunate discovery that the new Count of Monte Cristo series seems to have been shot with a first-draft script and no director. At least, that would be the likeliest explanation for what we just spent an hour watching, with rapidly fading hopes.

I watch the Kitchen Debate every few years; more while teaching, as I find it useful in illustrating several key concepts. One thing that strikes me about it right now is how much Nikita Khrushchev's style of undisguised rudeness and bombast prefigures Trump. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CvQ...

Per my Flickchart, banned-in-France Camp de Thiaroye (1988) has to be the answer. (btw, I know some really big Holy Motors fans, so OP here is not alone!)

"[B]efore many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world." - Henry Adams, 1862

And not counting stuff you watch for the kids, I assume. I used to rewatch every Bond movie before each new release, which means I'm dangerously close to having seen Die Another Day this many times. I love Pierce, but it's never been worth it.

Borrowers who rate books on my local library's catalog have given TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY a 2/5. I almost understand. It can be absurd, offensive, nostalgic. But I also don't know how you read the opening chapter with wounded Jim Prideaux and little Bill Roach and get to anything less than a 3/5.

I joined this prompt a few months ago and danged if I won't do it again.

Kurosawa's last film, MADADAYO, is sort of a bio of the liberal Japanese writer Hyakken Uchida. There's a good book about Uchida by Rachel DiNitto, "Uchida Hyakken: A Critique of Modernity and Militarism in Prewar Japan" (2008). Kurosawa's approach is poetic, elegaic, rooted in specific incidents.

Rewatching THE WIND RISES, and it's amazing how much it's literally a Merchant-Ivory film with sharper politics.

A fellow college instructor who teaches in HS classes pointed out that you don't see posters in hallways anymore saying things like "Read!" Similarly, there's a sign in a hall saying "We can't control what's going on but we can choose to be kind." Nice, but actually we CAN control what's going on.

Good time for finding wee beasties

With its IMAX rerelease forthcoming, I'm still troubled by the pro-rearmament message and weirdly romanticized/whitewashed war memory of GODZILLA MINUS ONE. Much like GODZILLA RESURGENCE, which also took a pro-rearmament stance, its politics really don't belong in a traditionally leftist franchise.

Update - I have several baby tomatoes!

The electoral college was dysfunctional from the very beginning, and it should go, but this method of aligning it with the popular vote strikes me as extremely problematic and will in fact worsen its undemocratic tendencies. www.npr.org/2026/04/14/n...

It's easy to be cynical about Obama's presidency, but it's also easy to be too cynical about Obama's presidency.

I'm extra grumpy about this guy, because I am a good example (just one of many) of someone who is making more money than I ever have before AND simultaneously being tangibly, demonstrably economically worse off - more indebted, for instance - than I ever have been before. Both ARE true at once.

This paints a colossally inaccurate picture, since it says nothing about costs. Long-term wage stagnation is a core feature of the last few decades.