I haven't mentioned this all that much, but I have been writing for www.fallenlondon.com and I can't get over how much lore is back there. Millions of words! It's just an immense slab of culture, and a weird object: a story website? In this universe? It's true!

I've spent the last two months putting together this exhaustive analysis of the New York Times coverage of trans people. It covers 3,242 articles over 12 years. In 2022, the NYT shifted towards a hostile stance towards trans people in their framing. www.thedissident.news/exclusive-ho...

do you like my new smart watch it's smart because it doesn't connect to any networks or accounts and it has no AI and it doesn't track me or sell my personal information and it's just a watch and it costs like $22 and its battery lasts seven years

Which—of course!—got me pondering meta questions about higher ed & the way we seem collectively determined to destroy precisely this aspect of college—the niche, the specialized, the weird—we’re killing precisely what makes college transformative for so many students who didn’t “get” school before

I don't know what everyone's complaining about. Just go to settings > features > worms, then change the "worms pouring out of my phone" toggle from "yes" to "maybe later"

Ride by and be counted! A beautiful day for #PedalPoll / Sondo Vélo in #Ottawa

i wrote a book that is to a large extent about this! bookshop.org/a/122679/978...

Humans are so cute www.reddit.com/r/crochet/s/...

My friend @greatfartsoflit.bsky.social wrote a book! Wow, it is good. This book easily flies beyond “thing I am reading because I know the author” and is rapidly rising towards “favorite collection of essays I have ever read” It’s funny, heartfelt and poignant, and quite well written. #books

I’ve been living happily during the war for a decade now, and I’ve learned a lot. Most people are making these 3 mistakes when they try to do it. Here are my top 10 tips for living happily during the war. Follow me for more.

discord is a mysterious piece of software whose primary output is notification noises. No one is especially sure what purpose the noises serve, or what triggers them, but they tolerate it in order to use discord's ancillary functions as a chat service

Something my younger friends have told me is that house parties are basically dead because it's becoming increasingly unaffordable to rent a cheap house. When I moved to Omaha, I had friends renting houses in midtown for $900. That price has tripled or quarupled in ~20 years.

my productivity and creativity are doing just fine thanks. what you mean is will I let you send alerts asking if I need the computer's help every time I'm trying to work in a document. or cleaning up a photo. or in Garageband. anywhere. big nope, only upgrade on pain of death at this point

A reminder of one of the loveliest pairs of siblings in the dictionary: ‘muscle’ and ‘mouse’. To the Roman imagination, the flexed biceps of a (typically naked) athlete resembled a rodent scuttling under the skin. ‘Musculus’, in Latin, means ‘little mouse’.

Figure skating has long been a space for LGBTQ2S+ athletes to shine. Now Skate Canada is taking a stand: no events in Alberta until trans athletes can compete freely. Mel Woods explores what happens when values meet policy: https://thewalrus.ca/the-sports-organization-that-stood-up-to-alberta/

For the past few weeks, in addition to solidarity fundraising, I've been compiling letters from across the world to MPLS (1000 so far) They've been shared in a variety of ways already, but today we launched this website. It's a tiny thing, but so too is every act of love. loveletterstominnesota.com

brass solidarity band performing “stand by me” in the streets of whittier next to alex pretti’s memorial. the crowd started chanting “the people united will never be defeated” so they incorporated it into the song. i love minneapolis

I think @sarahjeong.bsky.social said it's because they devalue women's labor and a LOT of this Scary Logistics stuff comes from people who don't understand that basically all of the civic life they enjoy is created with the help of free labor, largely by women.

There's a prison revolt at a concentration camp in Texas in solidarity with Minneapolis:

Another question I came here with was: how effective are the whistles and honking? Does it stop abductions? And the answer is, surprisingly to my cynical self, yes, and often. I have talked to so many people who have successfully interrupted kidnappings.

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!