i hope this email doesn't find you. i hope email never finds you again and you are free

I am convinced that for the past ten years, all streaming services have functioned as money laundering for the ultra-wealthy. That's why they cancel successful shows, shitcan already-made movies for tax incentives, produce garbage they know will fail, and went all-in on AI slop being the future.

A newly rediscovered 1897 short by famed French filmmaker Georges Méliès is being hailed as the first-ever depiction of a robot in cinema. n.pr/3N9XSav

Applying for academic jobs right now is pretty grim.

From The Archives:

I definitely liked the first half of Bridgerton season 4 better than the second.

Happy ##Caturday!

Today's delight: "All the vintage Mattel Barbie teen-age fashion doll clothes from 1959 to 1963 identified, quick reference information organized by item numbers, outfit names, years sold and photos – they are all shown here except the Pak items, no outfit has been left out."

Nobly gracing the table

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

I should be in this film. I can be the human who annoys the ghosts by always asking questions about tiny details about daily life before they died. www.radiotimes.com/movies/ghost...

The Pentagon broke off its partnership with an AI company because the AI company didn’t think it should create the conditions for the Terminator universe if I understand correctly

Where do I sign up?

casual reminder: there has never been a free and fair election for the entire electorate in america because at least one party has been hyperfocused on voter suppression since america was founded by slaveowning racists who only cared about their own power and liberty.

when I found out that people in blue states don't check their registration weekly in the months leading up to an election, just to see if they had been purged, I was honestly kind of annoyed. like, folks are really out here just assuming they'll stay registered???????

When you buy into the idea that "porn is evil" then anything deemed porn becomes evil. We are so afraid of sex in this country that it is effectively a tool to control the masses. This is (part of) why sex education is so important. Sex should not be some kind of boogeyman.

Nintendo: “Pokemon Are Real And You Can Eat Them”

These are “low enrollment” majors but the classes are regularly at capacity. They changed the funding structure a few years ago here, switching the allocation from course enrollments to majors then blamed these departments for a structural, top-down change. This is entirely a political choice.

The closing of African American Studies and GWSS at Iowa is absolutely heartbreaking. It is such an important time to study these subjects. Words really cannot express how upsetting this decision is. www.thegazette.com/higher-educa...

There's a shitload of people out of work and a lot of important work to be done and it is madness-inducing how the overwhelming majority of our leaders don't care that those two problems can solve each other.

A lot of problems in this country could be solved simply by enforcing anti-monopoly laws

I'm still not over Bo Burnam's Inside. Masterpiece.

People are always like what’s something you miss from the past and one of mine is antitrust laws

The process that led to the Holocaust didn't start with killing people. First it made them non-people. Then it killed them.

Vibecoding is giving people spoons instead of shovels, then being excited by how busy they look digging all day a hole that you could have finished in an hour using a real tool.

No but this is entirely correct

Boss, it's the fascism.

A woman at church once told my mother (a nurse) *in detail* about her mother's uterine prolapse (in the shower) while little child me was standing there. When I tell you THE ABSOLUTE HORROR of me realizing 1) I had a uterus, and 2) it could potentially fall out at some time... 🤯🤯🤯😭😭😭

'My Wife's Lovers', 1893 painting by Carl Kahler (1856–1906).

our medical system is a kafkaesque complex of rackets even in the *best-case* scenarios & it pisses me off to no end that we're still expected to kiss Obama & Biden's asses for leaving it like this after their major legacy "reform"

stop calling us nazis just because we are invalidating IDs and rounding people up based on their skin color and putting them in concentration camps and sending them off to foreign gulags and using all that nazi imagery and banning books and dont forget about all the pedophilia. so just stop alright

Years ago our admin did a red and black report. It took salaries & how much $ each instructor made in tuition $ for classes we taught-you were in the red or black. They released numbers once & shut it down bc humanities were producing huge $ for uni & engineers, business and scientists were losing $

I have said this before, but eliminating programs that teach a lot of students but don’t have many majors is like a restaurant not buying flour in its grocery delivery because people aren’t ordering flour on the menu.

One reason Republicans are so laser targeted on trans kids existing, is that trans kids existing requires accepting the bodily autonomy and consent of children. Which is something republicans absolutely can't do, since they are pedophiles. Their transphobia and pedophilia is them being consistent

Republicans, every single day: fuck your bodily autonomy Normal people: go fuck yourself Dem leaders, for some reason: Let's compromise and fuck only *some* people's bodily autonomy

Was chatting with someone last night about how the history of radio mimics the history of the internet — utopian ideals about information sharing leading to freedom only for the platform to get co-opted by fascists and hucksters — and it was both comforting and depressing.

Abolish the legal gender marker entirely. No government can be trusted to have a database of which people have changed theirs, no government has any business tracking what your gender is "supposed" to be in the first place.

I can't believe we have to get up every day and pretend any of this is fucking normal and that we've been forced to do this performance now for so. damn. long.

Does this dude think schools were invented in order to satisfy the demand for essays and dioramas? That before schools, there were just piles of triangles whose area needed to be calculated?

Working from home often requires compromises.

In a text message to you, Dacey commented: “No, yeah that’s cool, no worries xx”, before privately spending the next two hours having a full mental breakdown. We have, once again, Patreoned: www.patreon.com/posts/150759...

stole this off reddit for the very niche group of you who will enjoy it as much as I did

Why would I learn from history, everyone from history is just dead dry bones now and *I* am living wet bones and therefore superior

You can really tell when a man is horrified that he might have to endure the routine indignities suffered by a woman

About a quarter of all trans people in this country have moved states in possibly the largest internal migration of a particular minority group since the great migration. This is a full blown crisis.

Things I learned today.

🧵