Let me tell you what I think about FROG www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfvP...

This is the baseline Gaza is rebuilding from remember - a situation where the infrastructure literally cannot physically support the density of the population because everything designed to make density tolerable has been destroyed

The answer to pretty much every literary, narrative, character, storytelling, or worldbuilding question is "you can do either, as long as you do it well".

I feel lots of things that felt like, were billed as, self-actualization read in retrospect as canaries in the coal mine for the fraying commitments we owe to each other as members of a society.

God I am so ready for a retvrn to turn-of-the-century edutainment politics (now updated to be queer-friendly)

wizard frog is insane

Found John Silksong in the wild

one thing i think which informs ezra klein / derek thompson thought is this notion that liberalism won the war of ideas with facts and logic and not like a century and a half of intermittent warfare against the ancien regime(s).

oh man this post was unfortunate in retrospect

Now reading

it's pretty funny that there's a bunch of vague 2011-esque anti corruption anti inequality protests in a bunch of massive countries and they all have basically no media coverage beyond describing it as the "gen z protest movement"

ah, well

I agree that we need to be less in thrall to The Groups. The problem is these guys are blissfully ignorant of the fact they too are A Group and the centrist Omnicause is no less an Omnicause than the lefty one.

One policy solution to Young Men we should be considering is Universal Basic Electric Guitar (UBEG). I'm not joking, by the way. Kids of any gender should get a low-cost starter kit for some hobby of their choosing once they turn 13. A camera, paints, a cheap sampler, etc.

Been re-reading the intensely quotable 1986 essay by Michael Swanwick, 'A User's Guide to the Postmoderns,' and thinking about the long, slow death of science fiction as a genre.

Classical Chinese for When It Happens or Possibly Already Happened: 丞相斯為上崩在外，恐諸公子及天下有變，乃祕之，不發喪。 Because the Emperor had died while away from the capital, the chancellor Li Si feared rebellion among the princes and the rest of the empire, so he kept it secret and announced no mourning.

If you're disgusted by Trumps attempts to establish foreign gulags and forced deportations, you should be disgusted at this too. Australia has been pioneering these assaults on human rights and decency for decades. We are the model for the authoritarian far right.

the ar-15, so named because it's the 15th model of assault rifle ever built, is a machine gun #gunfacts

There’s a sense in which internet inspired mass shootings are becoming a sort of mystery religion. There’s a canon of sacred works (various manifestos), symbols, a great many worshippers and acolytes (mostly online in forums) - and then a final, often fatal, initiation by blood into the pantheon

"omg the lady who wrote eat, pray, love is a sociopath" "yeah, self-help airport slop books are often written by total ghouls" "and she tried to kill her lesbian partner so she wouldn't have to take care of her" "wait, what"

Everyone who condemned Assad and Russia’s civilian bombing in Syria but excuses Israel doing exactly same things in Gaza (or vice versa) ties themselves in hideous knots. And still just wild on some level how little Israel cares about alienating so many of their own sympathisers in the west.

US has this intricate imperial system which places it at the center of institutions that take painstaking efforts to appear non-coercive while also advancing US interests as the default of the “rules-based” order and they’re blowing it up because they’re too stupid to understand how it works

a country's capacity to reckon with its crimes and mistakes is one of the greatest gifts that can be given to the public

All that New Age woo about manipulating 'energy' in your body is coming back to bite us all. Health crankery is the opposite of harmless. It's now destroying our public health apparatus as we speak.

Clumsy Hunter In the early Permian, a little less than 300 million years ago, life on land had long been rich and diverse, but most of the animals were still a bit... goofy. Here's Eryops chasing down a Platyhystrix in a lush riverside forest in what is now Texas, some 290 million years ago.

Pretty crazy to realise all those "de-extiction" projects and claims come from the same dodgy company, from Mammoth to Dodo, even Neanderthal (don't think too long about this one it's morally repugnant) and 90% is bluff and marketing (and 10% of real gene editing that make a dog slightly less dog).

it’s cool that we had a few years of VC subsidies making food delivery cheap and it brought down civilization

this is a structural problem that threatens the entire industry: the financial incentives lean toward Takes but Takes ultimately depend on a bedrock of reporting that there is almost no working model for at this point.

personally I think we should restore the Pahlavis in Iran simply because it would set an all time speed record from dynastic restoration to second revolution. I reckon it would take about five days.

The logic of the story's world should match and amplify the themes/morals you're trying to convey on every level.

I feel like a lot of YouTube "rock covers" of pop tracks make the mistake of forgoing texture and structure in favour of turning it up to 11 for their entire length, so it's great to see a very well-done exception like this one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agye...

Fiction plays a part in this. Think about how common it is for shows to depict untouchable criminals and how rarely the far more common situation of police mistakes, fuckups and malice is shown.

This is the biggest similarity that trump and rubio’s offshore prison has with Chinese laogai and Uyghur prisons. There is no actual legal procedure that is understandable and that people can navigate here. They put you in there and it’s a black box.

in quote-skeets people are saying things like "this is why CS majors need to take history courses." If you're familiar at all with the people behind Palantir, that's actually the opposite of the problem

Dropping a major identity thing on your parents once a year keeps them humble and reminds them you are in control of your own life

a lot of people think you need a lot of money to buy clothes. now you're right. ok. my bad.

Have you seen the markets? They crashed the Dow. It literally tanked Heebee. It brought down the TOPIX with banks. It's literally hitting the Russell. It probably tanks the Hang Seng. Dude he crashed the Gumpy. It's hitting the Kospi original. It's reached the Poob.

It is unacceptable to permanently send people with criminal records to forced labor prisons offshore either

People have a very silly idea of what nature looks like. Even bona fide nature parks aren't really "natural"--there's a lot of work put into maintaining them for human use and dealing with any lifeforms hostile to humans. Actual nature is red in tooth and claw, in rash and fever.

i miss the early internet. people were like “you gotta see this dude. this cat sure is long.” and they were right. it was really long. it never shoulda gotten any more complicated than that.

This is true, but you can often save yourself a lot of work by asking fairly obvious follow-up questions. "How do you know" or "where does the information come from" are good ones because a lot of the time, these people will link you to a scientific source that says the exact opposite of their claim

I don't even know why what Boyega is saying would be considered controversial. It was clear after THE FORCE AWAKENS that his character was sidelined and sidekicked and its not unreasonable to conclude that audiences' reactions to Boyega being black was a big factor in that decision.

Uni wearing a cherry blossom collar :3

yes

"China Is No Climate Savior" - the inevitable counter to overly rosy takes. China deserves credit for promoting clean energy AND criticism for promoting energy intensive industry and coal. Need to hold two thoughts at the same time.

the really cutting thing about the Wiggles doing a Not Like Us parody is that you know Drake's girlfriend is gonna see it www.tiktok.com/@caterinawig...