That money could’ve ended homelessness in the US, or established UBI for every American, student loan erasure, or supercharged every creative industry in existence to pay artists better,
instead of, yknow, blowing it on dead malls full of Elegy of Emptiness statues for rich people
I hate it here
meta-discursive comment: the incentives of social media where making an incorrect naive prediction is seen as much more embarrassing than making an incorrect cynical one are very bad.
STOP CALLING IT AN IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN! TAKING CITIZENSHIP FROM EXTREMELY VETTED NATURALIZED CITIZENS IS NOT A CRACKDOWN! IT'S BETRAYAL.
A famous guy I was a fan of sent an email during the pandemic just being like "hey I like your show, great job" and it meant a ton to me. So ever since I've tried to reach out whenever I really like something and just tell the people who made it "I really like this, thanks for making it!"
I’m not Becoming The Joker,
Britain is Becoming Gotham
Well I mean in order to be a convincing scapegoat you've got to perform agency enough that people are comfortable with the belief that you are at fault
Tbh a big part of the role of CEO/president is to just be the person who can get fired if people are mad enough that someone needs to be fired. Like a false tail lizards can drop to confuse predators
It's weird to not only have lived through an information revolution but also now living through its undoing, all within less than a generation.
evergreen
“Prohibited words and concepts: Equity, diversity, & inclusion; anti-racism; Bias; Critical race theory; implicit bias; oppression; intersectionality; prohibited discriminatory practices; racial privilege; promoting stereotypes based on personal identity characteristics.”
This week, I withdrew from a speaking engagement at a public university because they sent me a list of prohibited “words & concepts.” I will not humor this censorship. It does a disservice to the stories I’m discussing & the audience, who deserve unfettered access to information & conversation.
My forthcoming book on K-pop fandom looks at how parasocial relationships in K-pop today can be viewed as asymmetrical relationships -- never entirely one-way, but in many cases, two-way, asymmetric-yet-mutual attachments 💞
Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..."
https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1
💯💯💯💯💯
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”
reading slaughterhouse 5 for the first time and i was absolutely knocked senseless by this passage, which is so true and relevant that it feels like it was pulled from a history book
Jesus Christ. Yeah you're a saint
Hi Olivia, we usually never publish in anything other than Dutch (well, Flemish, as is mentioned in the comments). But... we did just create an English version of the piece! You can read (and share it) here: apache.be/2025/10/24/b...
Good job! I am both proud of you and impressed. Idk what in particular you're dealing with but given some of the stuff I know you put up with I'm sure violence would be a normal and understandable reaction
If I could somehow get everyone in the world to come together on one point, it would be this: please, for the love of God and all that is holy, stop basing your politics on a fantasy of unification
From Kenneth Burke's "Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle'" (1941)
"The yearning for unity is so great that people are always willing to meet you halfway if you will give it to them by fiat, by flat statement, regardless of the facts."
early 21st century americans were so modest that they would regularly censor their own feet in video and artistic depictions, and it was considered improper to expose your feet in public — dismissed with cries of "put those grippers away"
The Pornhub productivity suite took me out.
Fan Studies question: does anyone know the exact origin of the term "headcanon"? I know it comes from fic around 2007, but can't find anything more specific than that.
There are still shares available at txwatson.com/my-soul!
Shares of ownership in T.X. Watson's immortal soul, packaged for shipment
Sold a bunch of shares of ownership in my immortal soul recently, getting them packed up to ship now
The AI bubble is JK Rowling's fault
actually our AI programs are like people so its racist to say you don't like them. anyway would you like to buy one
shit what if i am cringe but also not free
Maybe you hate the first three or four or five. But when you find one you like, you're not gonna need to go read all those books in between there and the last book you finished before knowing that you want to read this one.
If everything you're reading these days is ass, you don't have to read your way through the whole stack of books you know also suck to work your way out to the shit you maybe want to try reading. You can just pull out the interesting-looking shit and see how you feel about it.
Stuff that's almost like the stuff we're currently doing isn't less popular because there's a range of acceptable kinda stuff to do based on similarity to the stuff we're doing. It's usually less popular because we've tried it and it sucks. That doesn't mean that stuff we haven't tried also sucks.