I always thought Sun Tzu's "Art of War" was a little simplistic and obvious but it turns out yes, you do literally need to tell the Secretary of War "you need to feed your troops and keep them from being wiped out by preventable diseases"

I’m not sure how to think about it. It is more interesting than convincing.

watching the latest episode of Bill Maher to prep for the I Hate Bill Maher podcast and this guy is just a total dipshit, huh?

a portrait of a man with a red background Alt: Mao Tse-Tung

Papaya!

In my new film THE MINION CANNOT HEAR THE FALCONER, we'll explore the way in which the emergence of 20th century ideologies fractured the once-cohesively evil Minion society into competing fascist and communist blocs that soon come to blows over which form of totalitarianism will shape their future.

“I used AI to combine the data from two excel lists and then send emails to people who were on one list but not another. Saved me so much time.”

My brother in academia, you just fucking discovered mail merge. Welcome to early nineties computing.

As a matter of principle, you can either have a dinner that celebrates the First Amendment or you can have a dinner that features Donald Trump. You can’t have both because the president holds the freedom of the press in contempt. www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump...

Obviously the answer is mostly “drugs” but it really is kind of fascinating to me how Musk oscillates between “a post scarcity utopian future is at hand!” and “the mongrel races are coming to claim the persecuted white man’s scarce resources in a zero sum game!”

Nested threads about misunderstanding the place of the Talmud in Jewish culture

They not only won’t cancel; they’ve handed the entire event over to the fascists.

Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth are sitting at CBS’ table.

FCC’s Brendan Carr has actually been invited, while he’s trying to take away press freedoms.

I have bad news for him about conservatives

I hate how our institutions so fail at protecting us that people resort to creating tools this ripe for abuse

Oh yes.

My reaction to this thing is very much informed by having thought about your work, which has more sophisticated intent and applies a firmer hand to the unruly properties of LLM imagery as a medium.

Very much my sense.

These tools rest on a foundation of several kinds of exploitation. One might employ them thoughtfully. I am not sure whether one can ever employ them responsibly.

But I like seeing thoughtful people exploring whether I might be wrong.

I’m not sure I would call ‘The Patchwright’ great art … or even good art. I need to sit with my ambivalences for a while. But needing time to reflect shows how it is unmistakably •real• art, made with craft and intention.

Struck by the reference to Lucas in the headline —

LLM-generated imagery tends toward grinding its vast pile of sources into a sour paste. “Slop”.

London’s work leans into that texture of LLMs as an instrument, pursuing something like the pastiche deliciousness of Star Wars.

Ooh. I look forward to hearing more about that.

Gibson •thinks• his movie is based on the Gospels.

Being 1000% clear, your immunocompromised friends (you have them, right? Well, you do now) weren’t happy with lockdown because we hate people and didn’t want to hang out.

We miss lockdown because that’s when abled people acted like they cared if we died.

speaking as a lifelong global traveler: getting to the airport early has saved my ass from massive travel disruptions so many times that I now view it as a key travel survival skill.

Also, I love airport bars.

Ha!

Gibson •thinks• he loves the Gospels.

But viewers seem to have broadly missed all of this.

Ordinarily I stand for trusting the audience’s intelligence and for judging works for what they actually do than for how viewers misread them. I am starting to doubt those principles.

6/6

Your observation about an insulating camp sensibility lurking in a lot of pop media adds a dimension to that. ‘Basterds’ very obviously plays that card, but IMHO also critiques the problem with that.

5/6

I take a confrontation with protagonism as the main payload of ‘Inglorious Basterds’, and one of the major themes of the Difficult Middle Aged Guys Of Cable Drama like Walter White and Tony Soprano.

4/6

I read a lot of recent pop media works as deliberately toying with protaganism, letting it half-seduce us then confronting us with what we have embraced.

3/6

Somewhere recently I saw a commentary on “protaganism” — the tendency to root for the main character of a story even if they do bad things. It said that this is always a problem, and suggested that we seem to live in an era in which it is getting worse.

2/6

I just found this lurking on a tab and I’m glad to have occasion to come back to it.

You raise some very hard questions about what responsibility creators bear … and about •audiences• … and about The Work Itself, which I think we can as having its own voice & position if we are careful.

1/6

❝
It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you ⋯
❞

I had not caught this but I am unsurprised

We Need to Prepare for the Mammoth Task of De-Trumpification The damage he and his cronies have wrought could take decades to repair, particularly when it comes to science and public health.

❝
One day, we will be free. But we need to hold to the fact now that rebuilding will take decades and not lull ourselves into the idea that we will return to normal (however deeply imperfect it all was before 2025) anytime soon or without putting in the work.
❞