This week's newsletter is out. Why are you, as an adult, doing election denial for a failed middle manager? www.google.com/url?q=https:...

Oh this breaks my heart. Her speech at my first Wiscon changed my life as an artist. I was lucky enough to get to know her somewhat later. She personally ordered me to write The Glass Town Game. Goodbye, Jane. Oh, I wish it weren’t so.

Happy group chats day

Blue lobsters are very rare: 1 in 2 million by some estimates. But SPLIT COLOR LOBSTERS are 1 in *50* million. This lobster is a chimera of two fertilized eggs that fused together, with two distinct genomes: male on one side, female on the other. (📷: Woods Hole Science Aquarium/NOAA Fisheries)

Oh, don't I fuk'n know it. Growing up, I was friends with a Iranian guy named Amir. His birthday was, I shit you not, 9/11. So, that was fun for him.

Something I think about a lot is how both STAR WARS and RAIDERS were conceived by Lucas and Spielberg as intentionally cheesy — even-to-the-point-of-parody — throwbacks to old adventure serials but made them so well that audiences five decades ago and now unironically appreciate them as drama

Giant inflatable trolling Elon Musk appears in Times Square ahead of SpaceX's IPO “SpaceX's Grok makes AI child porn" (via WIRED)

"FFS mom I came to save the world from sin, not to do catering...oh fine just this once"

tradcath (calling in favors from your brother, the pope)

I'm now reminded of Le génie du mal, a statue of Lucifer by Belgian artist Joseph Geefs, it was considered so hot there was fear it would distract people during sermons, so it was removed and his brother Guillaume made a second version, that was also too hot.

Congratulations to the New York Chicks

Out birding, @sarahlovesbirds.bsky.social and I found three juvie kestrels and their parents in a large yard with a meadow and tree cover. Two of the teenagers were hanging out in the storm gutter of the house! So cute.

Every so often a new story pops up and everyone remembers that Elon is a white supremacist mass murderer who foments violence on his Nazi website. Then everyone forgets again.

The modal "apolitical" guy in current year is someone who insists "politics is a shitshow, I don't pay attention to it" but knows of every single right wing two minutes hate thing that's going on because social media shoves ragebait in their faces

The thing you have to recognise when chatting with religious people is that if you're gonna argue against someone's beliefs you have to have some basic info on what you're arguing about. Otherwise you're just being annoying and probably disrupting a fun and interesting chat about different beliefs.

As a Christian I have a lot of conversations with Atheists and they're kinda nice except for when there's one of the All Knowing Men who don't? Actually? Know anything? About Christianity? But are very confident and loud about what they THINK I believe and also about their insane conspiracy theories

"I think everybody knows instinctively, something is wrong here, and that’s a concern” -- House Speaker Mike Johnson

This bizarrely cruel activity is brought to you by Donald Trump and his Supreme Court.

the horrifying realization that lots of people don't understand that the results they get from machine translation of foreign languages is not actually as good as understanding the language or getting a translation from someone who does learning a language is, in part, understanding why LLMs don't

Oh this is going to go great

What if all the points in a basketball game were scored at once but we randomized the unveiling on the scoreboard

These exist, they're called 'graded readers', I used them in ESL teaching all the time. They serve a real purpose, but making *everything* a graded reader will impoverish us artistically and intellectually.

This entire, miserable political party is so hyper-fixated on attacking trans people that even when they face a straight, white male like James Talarico, they don't know how to do anything except to pretend he's transgender

I see raw milk is in the news. Allow me to introduce you to my favorite moment in West Virginia legislative history: www.eater.com/2016/3/9/111...

Or maybe it’s this bsky.app/profile/arya...

lmao

Happy Pride to this Caravaggio self-portrait that made one man so gay he had to go to the hospital

Sometimes I’ll post something like “Bari Weiss is bad at running CBS News and also she wants to run it for bad ends” and several people will comment or quote like “also she’s a Zionist” and like…anti-Zionism isn’t the same as antisemitism, but a sustained volume of non sequitur anti-Zionism maybe is

When these people insist the mere presence of people unlike them is an attack on them, their country, or their rights, this is exactly the outcome they are seeking, and disappointment among far right Trumpists is largely that he failed to produce events like this here. www.yahoo.com/news/us/arti...

Seems reasonable to me the-decoder.com/landmark-ger...

There is a vast difference between turning in neighbors and not marshalling sufficient volunteer forces to prevent all abductions after months of this. I think it’s ok to appreciate that the pogroms didn’t happen while also acknowledging the ongoing problem.

The violence in Belfast is a reminder of something I don’t want to take for granted: The fascists here hoped the response to the depredations of ICE would be similar, with people turning in or attacking their neighbors. That it was the very opposite is worth remembering in this season of despair

“Congress's top bathroom sheriff Nancy Mace is on the ballot, and while not all of the votes have been counted yet, she is in a respectful fifth place,” Sarah McBride just said. “I don't like punching down and I believe in the politics of grace. So all I will say is happy Pride, Nancy.”

Also, keep your cat and their succulent head indoors! 😽

The Trump admin insists they review every refugee case based on its merits, & that it has nothing to do with race.   Look at their own quota system: nearly 100% white.   So much for merit-based.

the cars don't drive themselves and we're still nowhere near Mars, but you can't question Elon Musk's ability to deliver screwworms and racial violence

love this chicken/egg situation where you have to have Dutch cyclists before you deserve Dutch cycling infrastructure

I used to generally appreciate Jordan’s takes but his brain has been completely fried lately also support to @defrank.bsky.social now and always

one might ask why a free speech org is scrutinizing the small dollar political donations of private citizens

grabbing every small business owner I can find by the shoulders and yelling directly into their faces that IF I DON'T HAVE AN INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT I CAN'T SEE ANY OF YOUR SHIT GET A FUCKING WEBSITE

not polite to call some people stupid, but it is genuinely a party of stupid people

saying this after shitcanning half the staff and appointing partisan appartachik Bari Weiss as editor in chief is like "Putin Promises Territorial Integrity for Ukraine"

Like we keep saying They are not just Evil They are not just Stupid They are Evil *and* Stupid

I am less concerned about Trump literally “canceling” the midterm elections than I am about him insisting that no results can possibly be legitimate, and urging his most psychotic acolytes to take matters into their own hands (again)

The Punisher sticker we've needed all along

kalshi and polymarket should, flatly, be regulated out of existence I'm generally not big on moral arguments for this stuff but they are tremendously destructive to civil society as a whole