It's only snowed three times this winter/spring combined. All three were right before I hosted a furry poker game. 😂

For decades, birthday party clowns folded balloons and played games. John Wayne Gacy is taking a different approach.

Yeah in this case the recipe said 4 hours in the smoker... I should have been way more conservative and planned for like... 10. If it did get done early can always rest it for a while, let it continue to tenderize.

I just smoked a corned beef brisket on Saturday. XD I followed a pretty bad recipe though and it didn't give nearly enough time. Yours came out like I thought it should!

This "LinkedIn Speak" generator is so funny.

#StrategicPartnerships

A recently published study from a team of researchers in Europe attempts to measure the degree to which X’s algorithm is poisoning the brains of those who continue to use it. The study, which took place in 2023, randomly assigned around 5,000 X users to view either their algorithmic or chronological feeds over a seven-week period, and then measured the effects on users’ political attitudes and online behavior. For anyone who does not have a vested interest in the financial success of X, the findings are pretty grim. The researchers found that the “For you” tab shifted users’ political opinions toward more conservative positions on certain issues—for example, the then-ongoing criminal investigations into President Donald Trump, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They found that the algorithmic feed increased user engagement, promoted conservative-coded political content, and demoted posts from traditional news sources, which appeared in users’ algorithmic feeds 58.1% less often than they did in users’ chronological feeds.

Finally, and maybe most troublingly, the researchers found that these effects were asymmetric—that although turning the algorithm on changed users’ views, turning it off did not move views in the other direction. After the study, the chronological feeds of participants the study exposed to the algorithm contained 60% more posts from conservative accounts and 28% more posts from conservative political activists, relative to the chronological feeds of study participants who did not use the algorithmic feed. The researchers attribute these results to the types of accounts that users encountered in the “For you” tab and eventually chose to follow, thus adding those accounts to their chronological feeds, too. In other words, once the X algorithm moves you to the right, you probably stay there. And if you use the X algorithm long enough, even on those occasions when you decide to peruse the “Following” tab, you will probably see more conservative-coded content than you would have if you had never checked out the “For you” tab in the first place.

I know we all understood that the post-Musk version of Twitter featured more right-wing slop, but this academic study of the algorithm's effects is pretty astonishing: Just 7 weeks of using the "For you" feed made X users more sympathetic to Trump www.fastcompany.com/91507338/x-a...

Today I learned that Eyes Wide Shut, a movie about wealthy aristocrats living a world of debauchery and exploiting women, was partially filmed on location in several English mansions, mansions that were owned by people named in the Epstein files. Knowing Stanley Kubrick, this was likely intentional.

My job just sent out an invitation to a "Pi Day" employee event. But it's scheduled for 3/11...

These people are fundamentally not serious. XD

No way this is a real thing in pet stores. XD

Another way of saying it is that our enemies are actually in decline, and without a strong enemy the United States need not remain the world’s military leader. Moreover other nations won’t subordinate themselves to us for no reason.

Sympathetic to the view that this was always going to be the decade where this happened. The Cold War is long over and America’s military alliance has shown cracks since 2001 when Bush had to go to war with a “coalition of the willing”.

It sure is. There’s a lot of different options here, between caves, private indoor rooms, outdoor rooms, or even the main pool in the arboretum which is about 105 degrees.

This is one of the private cedar tubs at Indian Hot Springs.

I have realized my dearest ambition: to become soup.

No it definitely became a sort of cargo cult behavior at a lot of companies. I think one reason is because developing and collecting accurate metrics at scale is really hard. And the businesses think there’s lots of room for improvement there.

Why did they call themselves Furry Raiders when “Knot Z” was RIGHT THERE?

That’s not how people’s beliefs work. When you fact check someone and present evidence that their beliefs are false, they dig in even more to them. They cling to their false beliefs all the more. The left wing has been trying to fact check conspiracy theories away and it doesn’t work.

All the more reason that making it mandatory has been counter productive… The tendencies and attitudes of the American public are not a mystery. We must choose policy that will persuade people.

I think a lot about when Baron Von Steuben was trying to get American soldiers to fight in their own revolution, he observed: “In Europe, you say to your soldier, 'Do this' and he does it. But I am obliged to say to the American, 'This is why you ought to do this,' and only then does he do it".

You said it yourself. “Individual freedom” is the issue. And culturally, individualism is very different here. It’s not just a tendency it’s a core political belief. And it’s significant groups of both right wing and left wing. The more you fight people on it the worse they dig in.

I can’t be sure, but I feel like vaccine skepticism grows when you force people to do it instead of convincing them it’s the right thing to do. People who have been convinced don’t need a mandate, they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Coming around to the Japanese style of vaccine policy. They’re all optional, but the take-up rate is very high. If all vaccines are optional, you’d spend a lot of effort convincing people that they should get them. When they’re not optional, you don’t have to convince anyone, so you don’t bother.

Galaxies with ‘hoop skirts’ are more common than we thought The discovery of thousands more galaxies with stars ringing their main disks could help astronomers study galactic evolution more generally.

They’re turning the galaxies gay.

www.sciencenews.org/article/pola...

WATCH: Trump shows his middle finger and appears to say "fuck you" after Ford worker yells "pedophile protector" - TMZ

I wonder whether Bari Weiss tried to deep-six this opinion on the ground that it doesn't "advance the ball" given what we already know about the CECOT detentions.

There’s purple lighting? 😍

The Justice Department has begun making *some* of its Epstein files publicly available -- not all, despite being required by law to do so today -- and its searchable database is a bust:

Yeah I went ahead and replaced it with the same manufacturer and model, should take like 10 minutes to install.

I literally have a monster in my sink that I need to fix immediately… XD How do they make these comics so relatable.