Now there's an entertaining fill-in-the-blank.

It feels like a good day to re-post this and bask in the gift of prophecy.

JD Vance renamed himself for his beloved grandmother and then made her name a global shorthand for someone it would be humiliating to concede anything to in a negotiation, poisonous to accept help from in an election.

(Part of the problem, I suppose, is that people think of religions as immutable and unchanging, in part because traditions themselves tend to emphasize and backfill continuity. In fact, they are always changing, and sometimes they do so very fast.)

run it like a scrapyard

My entire generational cohort of female editors--who were pretty numerous--is gone from DH. Many of them no longer work in the comics industry. This is not exceptional. I cannot emphasize how exceptional this is not.

The four genders

I think some people get VERY invested in the candidate they like. They're convinced they've found the one truly good one, who isn't a corporate puppet, or a racist, etc. And if their "guy" turns out to be bad, they get angry at themselves for believing in him, & then they turn the anger outward.

This beaut just came from space. Frikkin space.

Going to see The Trojan Women on the anniversary of my mother's death. This should go great. Last night was O Brother Where Aer Thou, so technically I'm doing them in the wrong order. I think this one is going to be less generous to Ulysses, that maniac.

Ok, I am reading the NYT clickbait article on "household" voting aka repeal of women's suffrage, and why does no one call out alleged "traditionalists" on their exclusive citation of times and places of extreme social volatility, change, and failed attempts at society-wide reengineering?

Women deodorant flavors: rain, spring breeze, sunshine Men deodorant flavors: granite, rusty shovel, cow chip

I need to get the house clean before the astronauts get home.

I made this during the gloriously simpler times when Ever Given was stuck.

if you invented public libraries today, every opinion page in the country would be arguing for means tested subsidized Amazon Prime memberships

March came in like a lion and left like a Tasmanians devil. April comes in like an electric eel on a meth bender.

My cold and well considered take on generative text AI: I don’t want to take the time to read what nobody took the time to write

I think the conservative goal, which fortunately appears will not be met here, is to transition the establishment of citizenship and thus voting rights to be like getting a mortgage: a process one has to gather documentation to pursue, and having white parents or spouse who have money helps *a lot.*

Ok that's a good April Fool's.

Hello, fence police? I'd like to report a felony.

Bold Garlic & Herb Chex Mix has completed a journey of self-discovery, taken a hard look at itself, and decided that I'm probably the best it can do.

This is the conservative ethic. The obligation to be empathetic, sensitive, generous, & compassionate is a requirement of subordinates to authority figures. Its absence is vice. Empathy, sensitivity, generosity, and compassion from authority figures to subordinates is unrequired heroic virtue.

It is 2026. Why is Seth MacFarlane still on the TeeVee.

Old enough to have seen this many times. A new slur drops (or, more often, an old slur suddenly finds a new audience) and people rush to use it, flush with excitement at finding one that they imagine isn't yet socially unacceptable.

This story of what happened at Pratt pier makes no sense. This is not going to turn out to be the accurate story.

The cover design was unimpeachable, though.

Senator Warren, no!

7/ 3. SOCIAL CONTEXT: Functions as a conversational disruptor, an in-group signifier, and a subtle test of whether the hearer understands that some statements are not meant to clarify the world, but to reveal that the world was never especially clear to begin with.

I think a lot of people get very broad ideas in their head that they're sure would make sense if they could just write them down. They don't realize that in the process of trying to write actual sentences and paragraphs, they end up discovering lots of inconsistencies and unjustified assumptions.

One thing that AI evangelists seem to assume, particularly legal AI evangelists assume, is that the thinking and analysis is quick, and the writing is just tedious busywork that slows us down. But the writing IS the thinking and analysis. You work out the thinking and analysis by writing it down.

futurism.com/artificial-i... This piece describes chatbots generating specious cases where none exist, but it's not hard to imagine LLMs being programmed to tell a user they don't have a viable legal claim when they do. "Do I have a case against my employer for wage theft?" "Ha ha, no."

What in the cranberry bog is this

When your neighbor is desaturated

I swear every dystopian tech development is like "Hey, are you OK with being this much not-a-person in our eyes? How about this much? One or two? <clicking noises> OK, how about now—one or two?" like I'm at the devil's optometry office.

A new-to-me MRMR FUNGI!

There is some extraordinary ad placement in the Tennesseean today.

Going to post a photo of Bradley Whitford standing between me and the exit to the bus

Am I the only one who got kind of a St Valentines Massacre vibe at :33 when they lined up the groundbreakers and set off a rat-a-tat of fireworks behind them? youtu.be/pNjwqZT8NIE?...

On January 20, 2025 I said that things would become worse than we could possibly imagine. I hate being right.

Me: ITS NOT FRENCH ITS GRUYERE ICE: (tackling)

Unclear if this headline is a threat or a promise

Do I understand correctly that the big Green Party winner in this election is the daughter of Princess Peach and Luigi?

CHICAGO

Does anyone else find both the IN and IL state legislatures passing legislation to woo the Bears to be a bizarre moment of fiddling as the flames leap? Or these acts of optimism? In other news, Pat Quinn is on WGN debasing himself before Reinsdorf.

For a long time one of the arguments against universal healthcare in the US was that there would be no incentive to develop new drugs and new treatments without the profits made possible by the market.

i like this, and I think we’re getting at one of the root “fallacies” in how we think and develop computers and equating it to a human or non-human living intelligence. We don’t even have “uploads” like The Matrix, learning is a process of taking into ourselves over and over, in test with reality.

our skin, our guts, our eyes, our balance and triangulation, all of these “computing” (generally hate this framing) processes we have and use and subconsciously develop, they’re only being confirmed as vital elements of human capacity and development. Humans remain marvels!

(just to go behind my own curtain, one reason why I’m not threatened by LLM research for the purposes of “replacing humans” is that every advance in research only further reveals and develops, by contrast, the mind-melting intelligence and capacity in a human body and mind. they’re *so* far behind!)

This reminds me of the Confederate fondness for looking at a map of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, imposing a map of the Mediterranean, and fantasizing about establishing a Confederacy that would function as a new Roman empire, even though that was logistically absurd.