A week on Mastodon and Iran would give up anything to be free.

Danielle Steele’s office, which is very bright and colorful and all, but which is absolutely dominated by a custom desk that looks like three of her books casually arranged on top of each other.

Now you have to get a custom desk made of enormous copies of your own books. I don’t make the rules.

My mother-in-law gets me a year of GamePass for Christmas, I buy a bunch of games during the Holiday Sale, and… that's about it for Xbox. I think the last full price, AAA Xbox game I bought was Dragon Age: Inquisition.

ALL HAIL SPACE KAREN

We literally watched him and Juliet have a book club.

More people died of communicable diseases in the Civil War than from combat. Disease extended the war by TWO YEARS. But America’s Warfighters™ need the freedom to get sick because they’re led by a cadre of blowhard dumbasses.

What, are you married to a cop?

No, no, John. Advocating for higher pay, especially livable wages and job security for NTTs, because it's what we need to do our jobs effectively while providing the research to back these claims up isn't criticizing. It's insouciant at best and rabble-rousing insubordination at worst!

This Is Just To Say

I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update

and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize

Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying

Full text of poem "For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper" by Joseph Fasano

"Love is for the ones who love the work."

Honestly it is getting to the point that it works just as well to call this "For the Teacher Who Used AI to Grade a Paper"

Okay, there's a lot that pisses me off about pervasive genAI in higher ed, but one of the things that gets me the most is this: The way genAI undermines academic integrity is impacting well-meaning students who need accommodation. Technology has been a huge field-leveler and it's all going to shit.

If it is (I’m pretty sure because of the Norwegian flag), you should read the chapter about it in Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia. The different reception in popular culture (in no small part due to the doc, as I’m sure you know) and in the scientific community is fascinating.

Why does my entertainment have homework?

Is that the Kon-Tiki?!

If I got one, I can promise a breathless review from a 6YO who loves nothing more than causing chaos and destruction at 200 mph. Will there be an in-depth discussion of various race modes? No. Will there be thoughts on whether hypercars or box trucks are better for wrecking things? Absolutely.

"Suddenly he awoke and there he was, solid and unmistakably a person who liked Friends. But he didn't know if he was someone that enjoyed Friends who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he enjoyed Friends."

–Zhuangzi, probably

I’ve taught my students arguments for atheism, twelve kinds of antirealism, and had a sustained discussion about whether their lives are meaningless. NOTHING has gotten close to “Friends is mid”-level pushback except the time I called quinoa a “trash grain.”

The Geordi LaForge Drake meme with WrestleMania Night One as the bad one (dogshit, honestly), and Night Two as the Good One

And now, Jake’s WrestleMania 42 review that you almost certainly didn’t ask for but are getting anyway:

I told my 9YO, who wanted nothing to do with this absolutely horseshit test,
that it wasn’t actually for him. It was a test for his teachers and principals, whom he really likes. That ultimately motivated him.

The most controversial thing I’ve ever said in the classroom—the thing that generated immediate and sustained pushback from students—was when I called Friends “mid.”

The thing that makes me most upset is how incredible most of the faculty and staff are at that school and how much my kids have learned. There are teachers and admin at that school I would go to war for. And they have to drop everything for testing my 9YO sees through as total bullshit.

I've gotten more emails from my kids' teachers, principals, etc. about last week's standardized tests (good night's sleep! good breakfast! spirit wear for the kindergartener to show support for the 3-5th graders!) than literally anything else all year.

It makes me really upset.

You can’t edit a blank page.

If you watch and share one thing today make at this. Why is every democrat in the country not talking like this?

2Martin 2Niemöller

I don't know what the law is, but justice is seizing every last dime of the estate, giving it to this poor woman, fast-tracking her citizenship if she wants it, and throwing these men in the clink for a good long while.

Oh, and as always, prosecuting literally everyone involved with ICE.

Everything about this story shocks the conscience while being utterly unsurprising. Two brothers locked in an estate dispute with their 85-year-old stepmother REROUTED HER MAIL so she wouldn't get immigration notices and had her detained by ICE. One brother is—unsurprisingly—a former state trooper.

(My dissertation group was a bunch of philosophers of biology all writing at least tangentially on evolutionary theory. We had a group meeting the day that dropped and spent at least 30 minutes roasting the shit out it.)

Me, as a professional philosopher, reading Dawkins' unhinged Darwin Day tweet:

SPECTRUM: Are there devices emitting microwaves that interfere with the WiFI?

ME: On a different floor. And again, not the issue.

S: We think you need signal boosters.

ME: I HAVE NEVER ONCE LOST WIFI. MY DEVICES TELL ME THE NETWORK IS DOWN VIA THE WIFI.

S: New modem?

ME: Fine.

/scene