This is an excellent analogy, because my recollection from grade school is that the pen on the right looks fun and exciting, and then you play with it for a few minutes and realize it's not actually useful for anything and in fact makes some tasks more cumbersome, and never think about it again.

I think we should just shut down the entire concept of generating images using AI. Outlaw it, or as close as you can come to doing so. I know it's not possible to eliminate it completely, but we definitely can stop companies from scaling it up to "industrial-scale abuse".

I'll say yet again: Trump & his party do something virtually every day that constitutes a more violent & alarming suppression of speech than anything that happened during the entire alleged tyranny of woke. Every day. Yet the entire Free Spech army has just vanished into mist.

The basketball moms are organizing The dorky pastors are organizing The preschool parents are organizing The dive bar regulars are organizing The book clubs are organizing The taekwando dojongs are organizing The uncles group chat is organizing

I came to Minneapolis to report on what's going on, and one of the main questions I showed up with is "just what is the scale of the resistance?" After all, we're all used to the news calling Portland a "war zone" or whatever when it's just some protests in one part of town.

But when I asked an organizer what they wanted to see out of press coverage, they told me they wanted people to see the beautiful things they are building here, and not just the worst stories of the worst of ICE's crimes. What people are doing here is beautiful. It's a tragic beauty, but a real one

I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what's happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.

Ernie was the rare one who is both a top-tier shitposter and also an amazing legislator. He once sent me a letter from a typewriter (!) in which he quoted Popeye: I YAM WHAT I YAM

DOGE actually *signed a contract* to steal Social Security data for an explicitly illegal purchase

Look for the helpers

The good news? We’re winning universal childcare faster than anyone expected. The bad news? Ms. Rachel and I have to find some new song inspiration…

👋

lol

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.

The frogs will rise.

My 2 new frog mugs, face and butt view. #frogmug

I think this Stack o’ Frogs vase experiment is a success, and I plan to try more groupings of frogs! #frogart #ceramics

Walz: "What's happening in MN defies belief. News reports simply don't do justice to the level of chaos & disruption & trauma the federal govt is raining down... This long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement. Instead, it's a campaign of organized brutality against the people of MN"

last night, government agents, undercover of the authority of the president, launched chemical attacks against American protestors. I got nothing more pithy than “fuck this,” but fuck this. power to the people.

I wrote about how and why to run an in-person zine distro, something I did and enjoyed from about 2012-2016. I recommend it! tbh it's a lot easier and more fun than running a distro via an online store. sheerspite.ca/running-an-i...

'Why do good people resign before they are made complicit in potential crimes?' Bravo to @skiles.blue for taking on and crafting an excellent and thoughtful response but sad that someone really had to even ask. 2026 is starting out so well. #DOGE #civilservice

think it’s time to start treating cbs news links the way sensible people treat free press links, by which i mean ignoring them and not spreading them

just a little more training bro then ice will be okay, i swear just some more training bro i promise, we can reform this

Not spreading hope for hope’s sake, but also: a heart whose pain feels unbearable is a heart alive, and it’s hearts alive that are the reason why we will win. thewhitepages.net/p/what-a-rag...

Bluesky web doesn’t respect my phone’s text size setting, and its custom “larger” size is quite smaller than I actually need at night. Awful accessibility but overall good for my wellbeing to just not read anything on here, I guess.

This isn't just a casual observation. Fascism scholars have long made this point. It's why calling them "weird" was a more effective strategy than talking about the prices of eggs. Fascism is an aesthetic political movement - you need to make people feel embarassed and horrified by it.

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold. We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old For the union makes us strong. Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong.

A moment of #DHtries with vertical typesetting, reminiscent of my favorite laptop sticker. #DHmakes

The broken watermain is from 1957. For reference, Carling is from 1913, Catherine is 1899, Slater is 1875! We are FAR behind on replacing our aging pipes, and council just this past summer voted to defer $2 billion in recommended replacements. Expect much more of this!

Mel is the best! She's right there on the front lines covering activists, immigrants, and labor in a deeply impactful way. She knows the ins and outs of journalism and has a lot of great insight into where the industry is going. Plus, she's Nebraska Nice!

it's just a little over 10 hours until the minimum wage in nebraska goes up in accordance with a duly-passed ballot initiative, despite efforts from jane raybould and her republican pals in the #neleg to undermine the will of voters as for me and my house we will be toasting her failure at midnight

The utility of genAI—whether it can actually perform the task at hand—is irrelevant and OSS ultimately a trap to bother talking about it. There is literally no amount of usefulness it can add that could make it worthwhile. None. Willing users are either ignorant or willfully choosing massive harm.

My Christmas tradition: reposting this thread by @themountaingoats.bsky.social

Btw this is one of the biggest reasons why it’s not as easy as people think to start up independent newsrooms or just be an indie journalist on substack. If you are actually holding powerful and rich people to account, you WILL need legal representation. Not a matter of whether but when

I thought “what if the new archive on Unbreaking.org on developments in US restrictions on trans healthcare was easily printable, and I could keep a copy for myself and mail one to all my friends”. It already is and I can! unbreaking.org/issues/trans... #uspol #antifascism #TransRights #zines

So one of the things that I think is lost on AI proponents is what I call the card catalog effect, a thing I shouldn’t call it because a lot of people probably have no experience with a card catalog.

this is PRETTY bad www.fda.gov/inspections-...

20,000 words, 150 footnotes, 100+ timeline events = our attempt at documenting and synthesizing all the ways that the federal government has attempted to destroy access to gender-affirming care since January unbreaking.org/issues/trans...

Here's @bikeottawa.bsky.social on Ontario Bill 60: "A Veto on a Safer, More Bikeable Ottawa" bikeottawa.ca/2025/10/30/o... #ottpoli #ottawa #ontario #ottbike

I'm glad someone is doing this. The government is making the streets mess safe and should be held responsible.

Ok, here's why it's "Free" www.canva.com/policies/pri... "We may analyze your activity, content, media uploads and related data in your account to provide and customize the Service, and to train our algorithms, models and AI products ..." You can turn it off in settings, supposedly. 😒

Hey Ontario! You've heard of the disastrous Ford bill to destroy tenant rights, but did you know that Omnibus Bill 60 would entirely wipe out the ability of cities to right-size their roads by reducing lanes _at all_, not even just for bike lanes? #onpoli #OttBike #ontario #ottawa

my favorite color, Dark Gary

We made a big mistake when we decided that governments should and could communicate with the public during disasters largely via corporate-owned algorithmic social media websites. We have to return to requiring governments to use truly *public* platforms designed for this use case that all can see.

so wild there are these threads of radiant beauty just coursing through all things, and not only do we get to witness this glow, we get to pluck the strings ourselves and travel to the future or past through art and creation. all you have to do is reach out and strum to connect with the infinite

Frederick Douglas gave his “What to the slave is the Fourth of July” speech at an event put on by the Rochester Women’s Anti-Slavery Sewing Society. Much love to everybody, past and present, keeping tiny community spaces alive while wondering “is there any use in this?”

'Ten messages for a man who thinks children should stay off the roads and stick to the park'. [From my Diagram Club newsletter. Subscribe for more like this: diagramclub.substack.com ]

A near-guilty pleasure of mine is little riddles in Ruby. Terse code is a break for me from thinking about how the world is a mess. skiles.blue/blog/ruby_tr...