Measles is a bellwether. Because it’s the most contagious vaccine-preventable disease, when vaccination rates drop, it’s the first to start spreading. Now we’ve got mumps rolling up. Expect more. This is just the beginning of RFK Jr.’s successful infectious disease reintroduction plan.

I contracted as a paid media strategist at agencies for many years, basically auditing efficiencies for PPC clients. Throughout 24-25, they axed me because various AI tools made my job “unnecessary”. Seeing this contextualizes the “how’ve you been” text I got from a former colleague last week lol

Browsing my media collection today to see if there was anything worth a proper writeup in Eat God's "Inspirational Media" section that I'd overlooked, and I can't BELIEVE I forgot to include this one.

The article doesnt actually mention them "distancing" themselves from Palantir, only that prompts to give your ID to Persona were "a test, which has concluded" Continue to cancel Nitro and migrate elsewhere

Albanese’s comms crew have dropped his CtG speech to try and appear to be doing something so to reiterate: unless the cause is addressed by concrete measures to reduce numbers, powers, funding, and impunity for racist violence of police, nothing can change. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

if you saw your first violent police attacks on women and children and heard police calling kidney punches and steel cap boot kicks “public safety” for the first time, know that police did not start acting like this in February 2026. The difference is white people seeing police brutality first hand.

as we mark 18 years since Closing the Gap was launched with the National Apology to Stolen Generations and their Descendants, know that police routinely target and brutalise Aboriginal people including children and then charge them with offensive behaviour, resist arrest, and assault police.

So it's Black History Month and that means I think it's a good time to get familiar with Mike Pondsmith, if you're not already. When you see R. Talsorian Games, that's him. When you see Cyberpunk 2077, that's his world. Mekton, Castle Falkenstein, also him. cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Mike_Po...

This is really the critical point: Firefox is packing its browser with AI slop functions by default; relying on a user actively choosing to turn it off. That isn't neutral - that is a political and ideological statement that they want more reliance on these tools

I do want to shout-out my fellow sociologists, who have collectively created a discipline so woke that not a single one of our introductory textbooks can make it past Florida's censors. Great work everyone.

Rebekha Sharkie: We need to ban the burning of our flag! Australians: We are making stir fry from the animals on our coat of arms. Go fuck yourself and the performative emu you rode in on.

"Wearing badges is not enough in days like these" ( @billybragg.bsky.social 1991). But it's a start. I attended the first meeting of Women Against The Far Right North West yesterday. And I will be out protesting the far right in Manchester on 21/02.

Here’s some sketches exploring one of my ideas for the creature from “The Terror” by Dan Simmons, and how I imagined it could work as a supernatural element while still able to be mistaken for a polar bear at a glance or in the distance~

man I’m sorry to be all corny here but when I see a “the city is beautiful! There’s more to it than homeless people!” I gotta say you know who’s also beautiful? People who have no place to live & are trying to get by in a system that has turned its back on them & if you don’t see that that’s on you

Call it what it is, @nbcnews.com. Concentration camp. Every time. The OED defines a concentration camp as “a camp in which large numbers of people, esp. political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities.” 👀

Let’s bring integrity back to our politics. Join me in signing this petition demanding great transparency and oversight of foreign lobbying in Australia: www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/...

the magic of the Muppets is that there are two fourth walls. they constantly break the one that reminds the audience they are performers. they NEVER break the one that reminds the audience they are puppets. this dynamic is the key to their entire comedy style

SomeBODY once told you, SwarOVski's gonna roll you. (It's me. I told you. Also I see it is once again time to remind the world that the Swarovski family were card-carrying, torchlight-marching, chipping-in-on-a-summer-house-for-Hitler Nazis, & their kids who still own the company won't address it.)

If you are only now learning about THE WESTING GAME, written by Ellen Raskin in 1979 & winner of a Newbery Medal, find it and read it NOW. It's the best puzzle mystery novel ever, and is illustrated and typeset by Raskin herself (who started as an illustrator and book cover designer)

I can’t believe how no one learned a damn thing from Amazon’s tactics. So cheap! Until it wasn’t. So simple! Until it wasn’t. Everything’s there! Until it wasn’t. Now retail is dead, people are stuck with Amazon and it’s full of slop 🫤

Wow, sure would be pretty crazy if a ton of experts in the artificial intelligence field relentlessly warned everyone about this state of affairs being inevitable over and over for years.

This is stunning

It exposes directional alignment; you still seek to limit, not expand, who is allowed to be human. Yes, you have set your limitation more inclusively than our fascist gang of white supremacists; it doesn't mean you're not also setting limitations & they'll use your limit as long as it serves them.

This Brazilian woman hates AI

You can just about make out that there's a teeny, tiny model of the castle on its hill behind one of the buildings in the model model village too.

One pub a day closed permanently in England and Wales in 2025

I will never understand why they replaced community submitted subtitles for this nonsense Real human people were happy and willing to make subtitles in a variety of languages for free, and the creator had full control of what submissions were used And they GOT RID OF IT

So many grand hopes for 2026. So few that I can put into words without violating Bluesky's community guidelines.

It's just a bullshit product designed to fuck everyone over except the billionaires. Stop using it.

Happy New Year to you all & as we careen into the GodKnowsWhattery of 2026, remember the words of the late great Kurt Vonnegut: ‘There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.’

My funniest thing about 2025 in a purely Australian context is that Barbaby Joyce was pushed out of the Nats by the force of public opinion (imagine that!), and joined Hanson's One Nation where failure goes to be fossilised.

for all the talk about this being the next transformative technology, there is an awful lot of forcing from above. no one ever met with a country's PM to tell them smart phone adoption was too low. what are we doing here?

HAPPY NEW YEAR AUSTRALIA'S EAST COAST

Old enough to remember when text messages on NYE would overload the phone system and you’d get an SMS sent from a friend at midnight at around 12:30.

I got stuck in the city for midnight, which I didn't intend. ‘At least I'll get some steps for Pikmin Bloom’, I thought. The app still inexplicably thinks it's still 2025.

The correlation between companies named after the Tolkien legendarium and their CEO/Founder being a chittering skinwalker fingering his own taint at the idea of draining the planet of all its resources and then fucking off to a sealed dome in New Zealand while everyone else suffers is extremely high

I'm getting the urge to make an overly complicated gingerbread house again (one which I probably don't have the energy to follow through on) This is so gorgeous

2025 Headline of the Year nominee (November)

Techbros seem to love Tolkien, so here's an analogy to help you understand what genAI is. GenAI is The One Ring. You think your use is justified, b/c you don't have evil in your heart. But it came from evil, it is intended for evil purpose, & anything you do with it will be twisted to that end.

All I want for Christmas is an “opt out of AI” button on everything.

It's not possible for my empire to have problems. My courtiers are always nervously smiling and telling me everything is great

It’s weird to live in a time when basic principles like cruelty is wrong, cheating is empty & the idea that curiosity, generosity, originality, the satisfaction of earned accomplishments & loving intimacy are the center of a good life feel like countercultural concepts

this is from April of this year, but it's so cheering I thought I'd repost - FBG's AI statement

i literally can't stop them from writing like this all the time

In our last Mandrake dev thread of the year, we'd like to consider that most festive of topics: the unquiet dead. #indiedev #gamedev

I've written about "disordered counterpublics" groups that reinforce shared delusions Here, the LLM becomes a 1 person counterpublic. It mirrors assumptions, absorbs contradictions, & provides the sense of a responsive, confirming audience. It is the architecture of disordered discourse, automated.

Cricket Australia is the first Chump to evolve into a Champ and then revert back to a Chump again. Dropped Alinta sponsorship 2023 New Origin sponsorship 2025 Global heating caused by fossil fuel companies like Origin will kill cricket. This is sad. Vale their values. www.chumpslist.org/chumps

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance. The first time I heard about it was in 2016 when Jeff was the Trias Writer-in-Residence at Hobart-Wiiliam Smith College and we were living in Geneva, NY. #TransgenderDayofRemembrance