Comic. [Person and person with white hat facing two boxes stacked with $80 price tag and sale tag on each box.] PERSON 1: They want $80 for this? I could make one myself for $10 in parts, an hour of work, a trip to the hardware store, another $30 in parts, another few hours of work, two more trips to the store for $20 more in parts, another hour of work to redo the first hour of work because I messed up, and $80 to buy this when the one I made breaks.

Make It Myself

xkcd.com/3233/

Bob Mortimer holding a card to read on Would I Lie To You?

“I added all the necessary footnotes to the draft article as I wrote it and did not wait to insert them later”

An Interview With the Guy Who Yells "Mortal Kombat" in the Theme for Mortal Kombat; Nearly three decades later, he's still got it. By Matthew Desem, April 7, 2021. Desem: I see. Will you do it over the phone? Kyle Wyatt: Would I do it over the phone? Absolutely. Desem: Let's hear it. Wyatt: Mortal Kombat!

Great moments in journalism: this interview with Kyle Wyatt, the actor who did the shout

YAY

Screenshot of poem - full text in link in post.

Screenshot of poem - full text in link in post.

Two new poems in Literary Matters! One of them is about a poo. The other is about whether it would be nice to be a wolf or maybe about being broke.

www.literarymatters.org/18-2-invoice...
www.literarymatters.org/18-2-manhood/

Michelle de Kretser's Theory and Practice on a cluttered coffee table with Easter eggs

this is so good that I am absolutely seething with jealousy, I feel as though I have been transported to a higher plane of being by how good it is, it is set in something close to my personal milieu, I am enraged

Screenshot of a phone screen where the word 'I'm' has been typed. Predictive Text suggests the next word should be 'unemployed'.

when you had to write so many begging letters that predictive text does this

but that ep exemplifies the total tonal confusion in SNW. is this a camp musical theatre show, or high-minded space exploration show with side-quest gritty war trauma. the switch is jarring. imo the writers are stronger in camp mode, meaning it outshines what is meant to be the dominant serious mode

I did enjoy the mystery set piece in the holodeck where the suspects (played by shipofficers) are actors working in a camp sendup of 60s Star Trek - and it had an air of authenticity about TV people behind the scenes which I feel like validates my speculations about the writers' limited job history

I worked at a university - minor updates to the HR/finance database took 20-30 people planning, installing in test environments, testing, culminating working the weekend to go live, test again and fix if needed. imagine thinking you can make uncontrolled changes to a system that runs life support.

they haven't invented software change management or dev/UAT environments in this future I guess - very reminiscent of the total management incompetence in DS9. clearly a throughline in this franchise is writers have never held any kind of job that impacts other people's concrete welfare

thinking about holodecks again - there's an ep in Star Trek Strange New Worlds where someone gets trapped in a holodeck of a camp country house murder mystery, meanwhile the program threatens to choke the ship's life support out because they just installed it untested straight on the live server

Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.

that sounds hideous and I'm so pleased for you

Transfer of IgG from long COVID patients induces symptomology in mice Chen et al. show that long COVID IgG induces pain-associated behaviours in mice. Pathogenic IgG effects vary across biomarker-defined subgroups, which exhibit specific, long-lasting autoantibody signa...

More evidence for autoimmune cause of long Covid - not surprising, really. Chen et al in recent Cell Reports Medicine (open access): 'these findings demonstrate that long COVID IgG can induce mechanical hypersensitivity in mice, support a causal role for autoantibodies in long COVID pathogenesis'

God Updates Humankind on Their Pronouns “And God frowned, for They knew this was going to be a whole thing.” Nov 12 2020 July 15 2022 3/31/26

“I am the Lord your God. It is time that you start using my correct pronouns. Which are They/Them. Capitalized.”

The people were distraught and cried out, “My Lord, My God! ... What?”

And God frowned, for They knew this was going to be a whole thing.

Fun fact, most catholics get yelled at by the pope exactly zero times in their whole lives but Censures Georg here has managed it like five times in six years

Someone years ago explained the plummeting birth rate in Italy to me as follows: “The women became feminists and the men didn’t.”

I just assume all you bros are the same bro, a timeless, ubiquitous every-bro to end all bros forever.

United in grief, divided in strategy: the limits of Australian Muslim political engagement - Overland literary journal The invitation by the Lebanese Muslim Association, and the intense criticism it received, reveal that, despite a shared sense of collective grief, the Australian Muslim community currently lacks a uni...

“Years of cultivating ‘good’ relationships with politicians were never enough to humanise Muslims in the eyes of those in power.”

Sara Cheikh Husain on the limits of Australian Muslim political engagement.

my patience has increased but I will say, it is ok to have trouble reading, it is not ok to scream at people for things you imagined they said because you can't read what they actually said

If People Talked About Other Things the Way They Talked About Gender Identity Fiction: “It’s either a short story or a novel. There’s no such thing as a novella.” March 31 2022 3/31/24 3/31/25 3/31/26 CALENDAR 2027

“It’s either a short story or a novel. There’s no such thing as a novella.” #TransDayOfVisibility

yes

This is the multitude, the beasts you wanted to show me, drawing me upstream, all morning up through wind- scoured heather to the hillcrest. Below us, in the next glen, is the grave calm brotherhood, descended out of winter, out of hunger, kneeling like the signatories of a covenant; their weighty, antique-polished antlers rising above the vegetation like masts in a harbor, or city spires. We lie close together, and though the wind whips away our man-and-woman smell, every stag-face seems to look toward us, toward, but not to us: we’re held, and hold them, in civil regard. I suspect you’d hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight our shared country, lead me deeper into what you know, but loath to cause fear you’re already moving quietly away, sure I’ll go with you, as I would now, almost anywhere.

At my wedding (!!) on the weekend we asked my cousin to read out “the Stags” by @kathleenjamie.bsky.social, which is one of the most beautiful poems I know: www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

Asking for precariously employed academics to constantly undertake services to the profession (peer reviewing, etc) without any prospect of compensation or reward is unsustainable

A sculpture showing two marble figures, one nude and one clothed. The one who's supposed to be the faun is the nude one, which is how we can tell there's no tail to be seen

Least convincing faun ever! He doesn't even have a tail! He's just some guy! 👍🏛️🍑 #MuseumBums

"Faun and Bacchante", 1837 by Boris Orlovsky, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg 😁

The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review Writer and author Alex Preston said he “made a serious mistake” after a reader spotted similarities between his review and one that appeared in the Guardian

Rather than cheat at writing book reviews, couldn't one, if one has a snazzily remunerated day job, simply not bother? Are the lifestyle and rewards of a freelance book reviewer simply too huge a temptation

www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

every non-trivial organization has a spreadsheet somewhere in their crucial business logic