some significant part of this is just catch-all fear for “this is not the child I ordered” I think

measuring a clown’s funny bone with calipers

THE spiders???

ChatGPT is NOT alive and yet it IS stupid? God’s mysteries confound us all!

This is a keen and valuable insight that interacts well with the Pope noting that algorithmic media is profoundly closed, giving you what the past determines is safe rather than opening up to a possible future. Intellectual friction is good and seducing people into a life without it is harming them

Josie and the Pussycats (2001) is better than actually good media too

When I teach Science Fiction, I always insistently start with /Utopia/ because it cannot be stressed enough that the earliest technologies we are studying and most study are governmental, the structures that are invented to organize people larger than a family unit. Du Bois was big on this too

It's funny that baseball cards and such are accidental flash cards. I don't like star wars much, but I loved the Decipher card game, so I can tell you the species of every alien that was in half a frame in the mos eisley cantina scene or the imperial officers at the death star conference

This is what you say when it’s obvious that something is real and there’s productivity coming out of it

Esther ... Number one ....For me... "oh Esther mean" Oh no my brother in Christ spice comes with heat... Write that down

One time the gate next to ours was going to Fort Myers and the guy on the PA was just dripping venom about people not holding their own boarding passes. A dad in the last family to get on told his teenagers "if you're not holding your own boarding pass, you're going to have your ass handed to you"

Doomerism is chickenshit. an embarrassment to every ape that threw a rock at a bear to protect the tribe. if you actually believe this doomer shit what are you posting for? it's chickenshit and i will have no truck with it. you had something better to do with your life than make the world better?

i think i would honestly find this whole discourse more tolerable if people simply said what they were actually saying, which is that they think the Democratic Party is too associated with femininity (and secondarily, with black people) and that they want to correct this

A theory - a portion of Platner's relatability isn't that he's working class, it's that he's a downwardly mobile failson in a way that resonates with his online supporters

vulgar freudianism has a higher hit rate and way less dangerous failure mode than vulgar marxism, and you can get WAY more vulgar doing freudianism than marxism

Every angry screed about how Biden blew it just does not acknowledge the whole reason Biden was unpopular was because he did the exact economic policy they claimed to want instead of pummeling the workers with austerity until Doordash servants worked for pennies and Subway footlongs were $5 again.

One thing we've learned in the last 12 hours: The Sinclair-Nexstar ban on Kimmel, in terms of his reach, means nothing in an era when late-night shows have an afterlife or simultaneous life on streaming. Kimmel's average audience is 1.6M. On YouTube, last night's monologue is already at 8.4M views.

CHOTINER: So You created us right GOD: Yes CHOTINER: In Your image GOD: Yes CHOTINER: And sometimes we do bad things GOD: Oh Yes CHOTINER: And then you send plagues and floods GOD: OK I think I see where you are going with this

This is a great post and follows up to a fantastic point about the meaningful optimism of immigrants. This has historically been the source of a lot of American civic virtue. The people who thought America was the land of opportunity came here and made it that way

the Will Smith track “Wild Wild West” just came on the radio and: 1) it was weird that for several years whenever Will made a tentpole movie he also rapped about it in partial character 2) we should make more actors do this

Even better Ed Asner was the chairman of the parent company to the NBC analog that wanted a fight with an overreaching FCC. Has any actor meant more to the business of fictional television than Asner?

Not food-related, but important information! The National Toy Hall of Fame at the Strong Museum (in beautiful Rochester, NY) has just announced the 2025 players' choice nominees for induction into the HoF! Thoughts? See link in replies to cast your vote!

i refuse to choose, i live in america, by god, if i want katsu curry for breakfast and tandoori chicken pizza for lunch and a sushi burrito for dinner, i barely even have to leave my neighborhood

Honestly, I think a solid number of them are afraid of being killed. I don't want to give Ezra Klein et al. more credit than is strictly necessary, but I think they'd be nuts if they weren't thinking that at least a little, which explains the bizarre media behavior.

I wonder if there's a word for an actual economic downturn which bums you out like a vibecession, but it's not just vibes.

ALTERNATE UNIVERSE WHERE CAESAR LOST AT PHARSALUS: "Honey, would you pass the Pompey dressing? This salad you made is utterly flavorless" "Fuck off, ASSHOLE" "Fine, I'm ordering a pizza from Little Pompey's"

Yes, literacy is important -- but literacy means more than "how to use X". It also includes understanding what X (here, LLMs) is and when NOT to use them. Synthetic text that reads as authoritative but for which no one is accountable is poison to the information ecosystem.

Big news: Snack Stack is back with a deep dive into the cultural history of Chicken in a Biscuit It's weird, it's fun, it takes some surprising turns! snackstack.net/2025/09/07/t...

EIGHTY PERCENT?

Genuinely a wonder account just because, but also it's like listening to trance songs where we see the periodicity of various patterns create new points of contact, networks from A Few Good Men, San Andreas, and The Producers. This account is the shuttle on the loom, and I love it

This is one of the greatest posts of all time

those who have made this connection and understand its implications are who are most opposed to LLMs invading everything. setting aside what could be done to improve the tech, we're always back to it being a shortcut for thinking.

*cracks knuckles* okay so you know how the media has a problem with taking snippets of scientific studies out of context and writing articles which mislead the public? now imagine a computer program is doing that when you ask it questions about scientific literature but also it makes stuff up.

Happy Labor Day 🙂

TURN THIS UP

Florida Orders Cities To Remove Rainbow Crosswalks https://theonion.com/florida-orders-cities-to-remove-rainbow-crosswalks/

We lost something as a nation when the ecru stopped making this music… i need the pinkish to get back to the garage!!!

planet of the apes!

Having to use 𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 so an executive making 300k a year knows • which part of the email they 𝙖𝙗𝙨𝙤𝙡𝙪𝙩𝙚𝙡𝙮 𝙢𝙪𝙨𝙩 read.

This is some of the finest work in American Studies, truly and sincerely.

I wonder what we're actually measuring here. I feel like "the average person slightly favors rock" is the kind of pop psychology factoid that you can learn on Tumblr and maybe young people know that and try to compensate? Old people know there is a "normal" answer and want to be normal?

anyone else ever think about how one day you're going to be 85 and saying things like "lol"

This is utterly, completely false. Math and science were ruined in Germany and Italy approximately instantaneously, because the best scientists fled. Hilbert, who stayed in Germany b/c he was not a target and was too old and disabled to leave, openly said academic math was dead in Germany.

There are people who believe it is meaningful to be born indebted to the colossal national project that enabled their world to exist and those who hate and resent it and want to burn it down. Fundamental American philosophy is literally the former. The latter people genuinely hate America

Last time I taught science fiction with an interesting in history and philosophy of science was 2021. Might be doing it again soon and uhhhhhhhhhhhhh it might be different this time around