Avram Grumer

🎶 ICE weasels and Trumpsters comin’
We’re finally on our own
Folks keepin’ the chatbots hummin’
New state called “O.K. HO” 🎶

Gollum spends the intervening years working his way up and down the Anduin as a riverboat gambler

You should never have let that one player base his PC on Elon Musk.

Draw a geographically accurate map of New York City and label all the neighborhoods. This thing is not going to put neighborhood boundary expert @rachelholliday.bsky.social out of a job any time soon.

"generate a map of the USA with each state named"

Saturday night and you’re still hangin’ around
Tired of living in your one horse town
You’d like to find a little hole in the ground
For a while, hmm

Rodney Dangerfield

"I told my wife 'Gender is a performance.' She said 'Yeah, and your act is over in two minutes.'"

I’ve just been told that, a few days ago, Zohran Mamdani filmed an ad with Elizabeth Warren in a #Brooklyn park JUST A BLOCK from our apartment and I HAD NO IDEA and now I’m FURIOUS.

Great minds think alike

Specifically, GPT captures the experience of discussing, with a PhD-level physicist, any topic other than physics.

Yes. Love it. "Two hundred million dollars for his Epstein Ballroom". Brilliant bsky.app/profile/beau...

That’s just Steampunk Sonic the Hedgehog advocating the generation of power by burning bundles of sticks to run steam engines, right?

If McEldowney outsourced the strip to an AI, how long would it take us to notice?

Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong. Here’s why unemployment is higher, wages are lower and growth less robust than government statistics suggest.

Have you read this article by Eugene Ludwig (US Comptroller of the Currency 1993–98) about how our economic statistics might be flawed?

R2D2 model with a lot of tools sticking out, ranging from "hmmm..." to "OW OW OW STOP"

That is genuinely shocking to me. Who knows what other little retractable gizmos are hidden in that dome? Like a kink Swiss Army knife, just pull up to the bumper baby

Is there a tool that strips out the background music from videos, leaving the dialog intact, and lets you swap in your own music? Lets you just put “Yakkity Sax” behind everything?

Text can be emotionally manipulative too.

Photo of a table setting. The runner under the plate is gray, and has the name "Georgia O'Keefe embroidered in gold script. The place setting consists of a plate, napkin, fork, spoon, knife, and goblet. The plate has been elabroated with a complex, organic-looking multi-layered sculpture."

The last thing we looked at was Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” which I’d seen before, but Chris hadn’t.

I know that nearly all of the plates have vulva-like designs, but giving one to Georgia O’Keefe seems too on-the-nose. Or… something.

#Brooklyn

Photo of part of a stained-glass window, showing angels with swords flanking a church steeple and a saint. (Not sure which saint.) Banners at the top say "L'Eglise Militante" and "L'Eglise Triumphante."

Chris pointed out the captions here, and I spent the next few minutes singing “L’Eglise Militante” to the tune of “Feliz Navidad,” and trying to figure out more lyrics.

#Brooklyn

Photo of a black chair that looks disturbingly curvy, organic, and spinal.

Anyone else think this chair looks like something H.R. Giger would design?

#Brooklyn

Photo of a canister of Vita brand dill pickles on a shelf. The canister looks like it was designed in the 1960s or '70s, and is battered and stained.

Today was @bugsybanana.bsky.social’s birthday, so we went to the #Brooklyn Museum to celebrate.

I think these pickles are *way* past their sell-by date.

Photograph of a street sign. Rectangular, blue with a white border, generic icons of an adult and a child holding hands, and the words "NEIGHBORHOOD SLOW ZONE."

Ah, *this* is why our FTL drive doesn’t work!

Photo of a softcover book on a wood surface. Title is PLEASE BE MY STAR in dark purple hand-drawn script. Illustration shows an oval-shaped mirror, cracked, reflecting a young man and woman; she's behind him, reaching her hand over his shoulder, and he's reaching his hand back, their figertips just touching, Next to the mirror are a cellphone and some earbuds sitting on a drawing pad, a clear cup of boba tea, and a pen case with some pens in it. Author's name is Victoria Grace Elliott. .

And now I’ve finished PLEASE BE MY STAR by @vgeportfolio.com, which I’ve also had checked out for a long time. Also great!

Trump Weighs Getting Involved in New York City Mayor’s Race

Hey @andrewcuomo:

Is it true that you spoke to Donald Trump about clearing the right-wing lane for you? When? What did you promise him in return? New Yorkers deserve to know.

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/n...

guess I'm canceling my paid shounen jump subscription @viz.com. Money not well spent.

Serve your country! Defend your culture!

Just in case it’s not already clear that ICE is a white supremacist thug army, Homeland Security is recruiting with a “defend your culture” slogan.

Panel from a comic book (V FOR VENDETTA), showing a standing figure from the waist down, and another figure crumpled on the floor, both in silhouette. The captions read: "…Because you were so big, V, and what if you're just nobody? …Or even if you're someone, you'll be smaller, 'cause of all the people that you could have been, but weren't… Oh, I don't know. I don't know what I mean."

Garment-rending? With the cost of garments nowadays?

There is, I think, a compelling case to be made that the American political tradition thinks of free speech not as the basis of a free press but as an instance of it. A newspaper is not a giant person; a person is more like a little newspaper. If this is so, then the vast majority of Americans have low budgets, limited circulation, and few dedicated readers, even in the age of social media. In other words, speech is a resource, not an inalienable property, and as such it is subject to the same regimes of theft, privatization, and accumulation that have swallowed up the labor of workers and the fruits of the earth. We have heard much lately about when free speech ends: the moment when protesting for Palestine becomes grounds for detention or deportation in the eyes of the police state, for instance. Less often asked, but equally important, is when speech begins. Did

instance. Less often asked, but equally important, is when speech begins. Did Cotton's speech begin the moment that the Times published his op-ed? During the editorial process? When Bennet's deputies pitched the idea? At what point, in other words, did the ordinary flow of money, labor, and influence through civil society stop? Well, never. To say that Cotton was too important not to publish is to say that he enjoyed a certain social position that deserved the paper's famously discriminating attention. From the start, Cotton had more than free speech: He had actual speech, the very thing that protesters were being denied all across the country.

One of the principal goals of the protests of 2020 was therefore to seize the means of expression: protesters were not exercising their right to speak freely so much as they were trying to amass a form of social influence that could meaningfully compete at a national level. In other words, they were starting a newspaper; what Williams hates is that people started reading it. The fact is that telling a voiceless person they have free speech is like telling a poor person they have freedom of money: Nice work if you can get it! Williams might respond that a person who finds their ability to speak curtailed does not thereby lose their capacity to think.

"Expression is the exterior form and, if I can express myself so, the body of thought, but it is not thought itself, writes Tocqueville. It is seductive, I know, and highly flattering to those of us who write for a living, to suppose that thought "makes sport of all tyrannies," as Tocqueville puts it. (At least the slave, Buckley had the gall to imply, had retained his freedom of thought under the whip.) But a thought without expression, like a soul without a body, is just as good as dead. Surely we cannot comfort ourselves with the idea that the brutal neck restraint that kept George Floyd from breathing nonetheless could not keep him from thinking. For in the end, we know it did.

Obviously yes you should read Andrea Long Chu’s latest for all the usual reasons (thrillingly blistering assessment of worthy target) — but these two somewhat standalone paragraphs exploring the true nature of American free speech left me absolutely gobsmacked www.vulture.com/article/post...

Black-and-white comic-book panel from CEREBUS. Shows a man in a powdered wig and 18-century clothing, and a billowing cape, standing on the roof of a building, looking grimly determined. Next to him is a canon. In the background can be seen another building, and a mountain. Someone off-panel is asking "What do we do now, Mr. President?" The man in the wig and cape replies "We'll see if he gives out soldiers the gold.… If he doesn't, we'll just have to dig it out of the rubble.…"

I’m starting to get tired of how closely the Trump administration is paralleling the plot of Cerebus.