Like Robert Pattinson, I am most certainly Gen Z

And on April 20 too

I said you wanna be starting something

I want to add he’s wearing a quarter-zip jumper, dark-wash jeans, plain white leather Puma tennis sneakers and thick black-rimmed glasses

He’s giving established architect or adman

Fortysomething-looking guy on the tram: “So my wife told me to put the laundry on before I left the house, but I just left”

you cunt

† figurative and in figurative context. to hit the master-vein (slang): to make a sexual conquest. Obsolete. 1592 My faire daughter was hit on the master vaine and gotten with childe. R. Greene, Disputation Conny-catcher 1614 I know a lad Can hit the maister-vaine. W. Browne, Shepheards Pipe ii.

I found it: the nastiest historical slang for sexual intercourse

Screenshot of an email I'm writing where I demonstrate that to me, spaced em-dashes are the ChatGPT tell " — like this — " but Gmail's intrusive AI writing 'assistant' has underlined my example and smarmily offered to "Correct grammar" by removing the extra spaces from around my em-dashes Other bits of my email text are also visible, including "US styles tend to favour", "Tbh I think the 'ChatGPT tell' discourse has moved", "hyperbole and the 'it's not just x, it's y' formation", and "why should we let the bots have our writing styles"

The fkn clankers are learning…

Plaintiff Charlotte MacInnes's barrister is Sue Chrysanthou, who successfully defended Lisa Wilkinson against serial rake-stepper Bruce Lehrmann

This bit from AAP: "The actors avoided eye contact as they sat near each other in court, with Wilson occasionally scoffing through proceedings."

Highlights from latest Rebel Wilson legal stoush:

Hyping up her own film, whose star is suing her: "I love the movie. The Deb is so cute and amazing. Thank you to everyone who’s going to the cinemas.”

Court heard she took out defamation insurance before posting the comments she's being sued over

Love how she used this as a promo spot, telling all the journalists assembled outside the court, "I love the movie. The Deb is so cute and amazing! Thank you to everyone who’s going to the cinemas."

I feel innocent in a wholesome way that I've only just learned of the exercise called 'rucking': walking with a weighted backpack (a 'ruck')

The point is not to 'carry stuff you'll need' – don't be such a naive fool! It's cross-country weight training! The packs are just pockets for free weights!

If you are doing academic work in AI, but cannot see the technofascist project called "AI" for what it is, how are we to trust your work does not support that project?

Was just musing that Tucker’s daughter would probably have helped out her dad & so would be well equipped to “slap my kneebones to the ground” (Moss, 1989)

In the song Tucker is a cotton-grower “on the plains out of Narrabri” where the slave-coded narrator is “Swingin' a hoe in a CAL-cotton row”

loser who can’t or won’t collaborate with others, which is the key skill of directing, and instead thinks directing means ‘ordering things to be done’

The Rebel Wilson case is so satisfying to watch because she’s just as nasty as you’d think. Big friendless loser energy.

If her and Ruby Rose had beef with each other it would keep sydney’s lawyers in business for three hundred years

Tucker (SW England), Walker (W, N) & Fuller (SE) are all the same job: stomping on or pounding urine-soaked wool cloth to clean, shrink & polish it

Walking ('waulking' in Scots) could also be done with the hands at a long table, keeping the rhythm in song – there's a great 'Outlander' scene of this

More occupational surnames:

Naismith: cutler; knife-maker
Sixsmith: sickle-maker
Jagger: packhorse-runner
Teamster: female packhorse-runner
Lorimer: harness-maker
Latimer: interpreter, 'knows Latin'
Bailey/Baillie: Norman court officer
Reeve: Saxon court officer
Kellogg: pork butcher, 'kill hog'

Editing a reference list I saw the name Webster, which reminds me of that genre of gendered artisan surnames

Baker (M) & Baxter (F)
Brewer (M) & Brewster (F)
Weaver (M) & Webster (F)
Singer (M) & Songster/Sangster (F)
Seamer (M) & Seamster (F)
Spinner (M) & Spinster (F)
Hawker (M) & Huckster (F)

Email I just got: "Jean Valjean in cinemas this week"

lol, can't he watch a movie in peace?

"As I stare into the void
To the whirlpool of my sin
I'll escape now from that world
From the world of Jean Valjean…"

I've had some success with dictating an email via speech-to-text while standing at the kettle waiting for water to boil for tea

how is this literally happening in real life

Network TV drama pitch: in the precarious modern economy, it's more common for people to have more than one job. Our protagonist is one such person. Each week, we follow them at another one of their gigs, to wit:

1. Cop
2. Firefighter
3. Lawyer
4. Barely-holding-it-together doctor

(continued)

Fuck's sake, my super fund invited me to a "pre-retirement outlook" planning event

here's my pre-retirement planning: never retire

like, I'm fully expecting to just grind away to a nub and then die

Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex X.com #ArtificialIntelligence systems increasingly shape and permeate our mentality and social environments. Like every great historical transformation, this too calls not only for technical competence, but also for a humanistic formation capable of making visible the logic behind economics, embedded biases and forms of power that shape our perception of reality. 1:31 PM • 4/17/26 • 91K Views

Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex X.com Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses. Dear friends, you, however, are real persons! Creation itself has a body, a breath, a life to be listened to and safeguarded. 1:31 PM • 4/17/26 • 209K Views

Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex X.com When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth. 1:31 PM • 4/17/26 • 696K Views

Pope Leo on AI:

“Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses.”

This short thread is worth reading:

Unimelb student: "Can I use a genAI tool to generate references?"

Unimelb library website: (the most pathetic pissweak non-advice)

Christ, MasterChef's back tonight

not now, MasterChef

I've always found it intriguing how the US version of this song goes "all through the town" whereas I grew up singing "all day long", implying the bus can go cross-country

Ah, cool – based on the same novel that was adapted as 'Edge of Tomorrow' (2014), one of my comfort-watch classics. I always meant to find and read the novel but never got to it

In its tech and in its eugenics, Silicon Valley has such a sad mechanical notion of what intelligence is, one bereft of moral beauty, emotional intelligence, intuition, etc. But in a more meaningful definition of intelligence the titans of industry would discover their own bereftness and dimness.

We already KNOW how to make super babies, you eugenicist creeps! And it's all the things you fucking fucks are fucking up! THREAD!

amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight