CaelReader

'Seven Samurai' (1954) dir: Akira Kurosawa a thoughtful figure saying two or three samurai won't suffice.

tfw u need seven samurai

Excerpt from wapo article: The questions flood in from every corner of the human psyche. “What are permanent hair removal solutions?” “Can you help me analyze this text conversation between me and my boyfriend?” “Tell me all about woke mind virus.” “What is the survivors rate for paracetamol overdose?” “Are you feeling conscious?”. An ad breaks up the text: Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask the Post AI.

perfect placement of this ai link

4-panel vertical comic. (1) 100 Years Ago [two people standing next to bicycle with small car nearby] PERSON 1: It’s too dangerous riding a bike with these cars around. I should get a car, too. (2) 50 Years Ago [two people between smaller car and bigger car] PERSON 2 with short hair: Small cars are less safe in collisions with larger vehicles, so I should get a bigger one. (3) Today [two people between big car and even bigger car] PERSON 1: Everyone has huge SUVs now. If I don’t get the biggest one, I’m putting my family at risk. (4) Soon [two people next to large armored car with spiked clubs attached] PERSON 2: If I don’t install more whirling spike clubs, I’ll be destroyed by all the other drivers who...

Car Size

xkcd.com/3167/

IBM Document that reads "A Computer can never be held accountable", edited to say "Pretty Cool, Huh?"

Open borders. Children's rights. Worker Self-Management.

The mad king is falling asleep at court, making nonsense pronouncements, ordering palace renovations while the people starve. Truly the greatest republic ever to grace the earth.

Claim: Mamdani is a communist. False: Any real communist will happily spend six hours explaining why this isn’t true.

Fact-Checking Claims About Zohran Mamdani https://theonion.com/fact-checking-claims-about-zohran-mamdani/

'we need to expand the tent!' 'to the left also, to include socialists?' 'no no, exclusively rightwards tent-expansion, thankyou'

A photo of Eugene V. Debs with red laser eyes

Debs mentioned

Sandwich of mass destruction you say...

The words of @mikeduncan.bsky.social keep resounding in my head

A digital poster in the style of a World War II propaganda piece. Isolaed on a yellow background, a normal, squarish, 20-something guy with glasses is sitting working on a laptop. A ghostly figure of Hitler has his arm around the guy and is grinning and shaking a fist triumphantly looking at the laptop screen. On the lid of the laptop where an apple might otherwise be is an openAI logo, bright green, and dripping green ooze down the lid. Text on the poster, in combinations of sans-serif type and brush script reads: Using Generative AI? You’re prompting with Hitler! GenAI is a Fascist Project! Try using your brain instead Don’t surrender your creativity to the tech billionaire’s control

New awareness campaign

every couple of days the official white house website says "we want to kill you. we want to destroy everything you love. we are the living incarnation of death and we shall sweep life from this earth like an unstoppable whirlwind" and its like oh. ok. do i still have to pay taxes

Masters of Small Worlds by Stephanie McCurry

historically, racism has been weaponized by ruling classes to drive wedges between workers of different nationalities/ethnicities/religions and align a favored group with the ruling class against everyone else.

e.g. impoverished white yeomen vs. black slaves in antebellum south carolina

Fushimi Inari Taisha at midnight is like stepping into the fey realm

We've hit the point where a lot of our dystopian sci fi now feels hopelessly optimistic

Imagine living with the debilitating condition of not being able to enjoy Heat (1995).

more like Halo: Infinite Remakes

This shopping trip is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan

sponsored by Augustus Caesar, ironically enough

Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life In Cycles This is the fifth and final part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd, IVe) looking at the structures of life for pre-modern peasant farmers and showing how historical modeling can …

This week on the blog: Peasants! We are at last putting together and wrapping up our discussion of life for pre-industrial peasants - a category which includes a majority of all humans who have ever lived.

How we can model how they lived, worked, loved and died.

acoup.blog/2025/10/17/c...

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay

An array of beautiful Japanese kitchen knives with decorated sheathes under a glass case

If you pass through Osaka check out the Sakai Traditional Crafts Museum

Today marks 15 years since the release of Fallout: New Vegas.

Since 2010, players have explored the Mojave Wasteland where countless Couriers have walked the same road—each carving their own story. Thank you for keeping the spirit of the game alive all these years.

Viva New Vegas. 🎲

The situation we’re in is not a choice between something with a low cost and barrier of entry like No Kings and something like this. We need both. We have to do both. And some people will be suited for one who are less suited for the other, and that’s neither a bad nor an unusual thing

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants. Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

In my USA mod for Victoria 3 the player now has to contend with a Neo-Confederate movement that appears in the decades after they complete Reconstruction. The Nadir of American Race Relations is truly grim research material.