late night thoughts (shh ignore the timestamp): how dark is "nut brown" anyway, like are we talking dried gum nut brown or dark like a chestnut nut shell brown or like, as pale as a peeled peanut or cashew or a macadamia nut (and has anybody described anyone white in nut skin tones lol)

today in YouTube comments sections: someone in Adam Etymology Nerd Aleksic's comments attempts to deny that they use Hangul/Chosongul in North Korea? ????? people stop being egregiously wrong when corrected on the internet challenge level impossible

we are so poisoned by conservatism being the default that people are looking to explain away what are not benign influences: Mormonism, Gun Culture, Gamer Forums, etc. it's getting extremely pathetic

"just a gamer who liked video games" is a wild thing to imply when there is a whole ecosystem that is designed around delivering conservatism to that exact community but I wasn't flashed with the men in black device so I remember things as far back as the entirety of the 2010s

All of Africa & Asia to the British Museum:

Book bans get headlines, but the bigger threat to books is hiding in plain sight: A handful of companies control how ebooks reach readers, and they can cut off access with a click. New from @mariabustillos.com in @columjournreview.bsky.social ⤵️

It’s not so much that the guy is stupid, although he probably is, it’s that he agrees with Hitler and thus is willing to pretend Hitler was being honest

Gamergate never ended, it’s just became the world we all have to live in. Thanks, we all hate it.

here’s the thing those rich dudes lived WAY closer temporally to the French Revolution than our rich dudes like, they were aware that if you piss off the peasants TOO much, money doesn’t matter to a guillotine I don’t think they were better people than our billionaires, they just remembered fear

I’m not going to amplify any more of this fucking train wreck. Why the ABC executive capitulate to zionists demanding its once-trusted stations and journalists produce this kind of mess will never make sense to me.

it is my considered opinion that Google and Apple vastly overestimate the appetite for change from their users

Meanjin closing & AI stealing the work of authors. Times are tough for Australian writers. Please sign chng.it/p4KFP8BB9Y #australianwriters

you can't excise trans people from society because transness is an emergent property of free will. if you divide the world up into men and women and say men do this and women do that, some people are going to say that sucks, fuck you, i do what i want. it doesn't get more complicated than that

Welcome back another 500 years of 3 Houses discourse

The year is 2026. A new Fire Emblem is out. Somehow, Three Houses discourse continues

FIRE EMBLEM WELCOME BACK

really gonna need these white dudes to stop making me look bad. lord have mercy. don’t give out your name for things you could get arrested for. EVERY DAY is shut the fuck up Friday.

they can subpoena orgs for mailing lists. idk why this is so hard to process. there's an actual reasonable threat here and you're acting like it's just some Online People Being The Most Online.

"We didn't come here to listen to a load of stuff about famine and colonialism and genocide and being forced into exile, we came to hear some Irish folk songs!"

trans people are flesh and blood trans people are biological gender isn't biological, and all sex variation is biological this dogwhistle is intended to make you rhetorically think of trans people, subtly, as less real, less human, and less deserving than cis people don't swallow the bait

In science fiction, so much of what is "classic" was essentially written for one man: John W. Campbell, the editor of the pre-eminent US SF magazine. Even the stuff published elsewhere, because it was often sent to him first. Think on what it means to have a whole genre filtered through one dude.

-is to give them access to book blurbs and recc lists and shit like that and access to getting those books they choose, especially if they already like the genre. Or maybe I was just kind of a sicko at sixteen who liked working my way thru a list

and there’s really no obligation for any reader to read the “canon.” That sentiment is how we veer into asshole smugly asking their date what three songs by x band they know. But if ur writing in genre, I think it’s maybe good to see what has been done before and the history of it

RT if you also wish ill upon JK Rowling.

Something very very weird happened during the Hugos award ceremony... It's been on my mind for days, and so I wrote this blog: "When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident" grigorylukin.com/2025/08/21/w... #Worldcon

This thumbnail is killing me

Potentially one of the weirdest things about Australian planning culture is how every planning department in the country is hellbent on ensuring that the public and private realm has the least protection from UV rays in the summer possible in the name of preventing "overshadowing"

Her son Edward I passed history’s first clean air act in 1306 to ban the burning of Northumbrian coal in London. Eight centuries on, Britain has finally burned its last coal for power.

It's even worse than that

This is a pretty good bit

There's something telling in the way a huge chunk of the chattering class is convinced there is a wellspring of xenophobia just bursting to come out whilst a regional rep of an explicitly anti immigrant party thinks anti immigrant rhetoric is a political loser

Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia' https://www.404media.co/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-ai-chatgpt/ The only bulwarks we have against being drowned in grey slop are volunteers committed to accuracy, and that’s damning.

hear me out here, what if none of it is a 'distraction' and they're just doing a lot of horrible shit simultaneously

Damn these post size limits. He was going to tell us all about the colour but he was out of space

I am one of the 14 authors who chose to leave the Polari Prize, and I find myself frustrated and saddened at the way this entire story has been represented. 1/

thread

I didn’t know until now that in the original Rosie the Riveter painting, she is crushing a copy of Mein Kampf under her foot. Happy feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, remembering all the women who crush the serpents of Satan under their heel.

I really can't emphasize enough that it takes only about three pieces of information about someone to re-identify them. None of us are particularly anonymous if we have any sort of sustained online presence

the problem with having god as your client is that he initially makes a pretty good witness during direct but he dies on cross

we have both computers and science fiction because Byron was so insufferable it inspired all the women around him to come up with elaborate reasons to get away

"'Probably half of our recruitment in the last two years has come from the freedom movement,' [Australian Nazi leader] Sewell posted." I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that the cookers have since turned into Nazis. 💁‍♀️ #PandemicEugenics

New skill unlocked for our clever cockies! Sulfur crested cockatoos in Sydney have learned to use twist-handle water fountains to drink, according to a team of scientists from ANU and around the world. Read more in the ABC: www.abc.net.au/news/science...