Anindita Basu Sempere

There’s a GoFundMe to help this family with legal, travel, and communication expenses. Please donate here: www.gofundme.com/f/mim-ajuda-...

Kid: Poor [friend's name]!
Me: Why? What happened?
Kid: He wants to be an artist when he grows up, and he thinks AI has ruined his future career possibility.

Kid: *sits next to me* I need to be near an organized human.
Me: Why?
Kid: It's too painful to be around disorganized humans.

Also glad they found a way to connect because they've been like a pair of skew lines over the past few days.

My child and my mum are both extremely competitive, and they're trying to kill each other at a board game, and it's kind of hilarious. They're both so savage.

So thankful that dudes without game now have the option of driving all of our energy bills up to come up with devastating lines like it was nice to meet you

Needed to sleep on this and my god the evil of this news. I don't have better words than that.

Help Us Investigate Book Bans and Educational Censorship Around America 404 Media has gotten a grant to unearth public records about systematic censorship of books, schools, and libraries in the U.S.

. @404media.co is investigating book bans. They could use your pointers on where to be looking. You can do it anonymously.

"We need help deciding... which school districts and cities to seek public records from and... where we should point our reporting efforts. "

www.404media.co/help-us-inve...

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

This is my mother. Nothing so pedestrian! It’s all complicated stuff — 5 types of Bengali sweets, kochuri, vegetable cutlets (chop). Everything divided into portions and labeled.

Me: I don’t think we have that much space!

Mum to Dad: She needs a freezer.

Me: 😳 I will make it fit!!!

Me: Please don’t bring any stuff for us. We have way too much stuff.

Parents: *have 3 suitcases for a weekend visit*

Me: Whyyyy?

Mum: You said not to buy you stuff. So I cooked. The big suitcase is full of food. We need to get it into your freezer.

Kid just explained the Sumerian number system to me, and it’s very cool!

😂

Ohhh noooo I forgot how annoying my mum's Bengali soap operas are... so much fake crying!

Conversation over breakfast:
Me: Your grandparents’ flight is delayed today.
Kid: Why?
Me: *explains government shutdown* *explains three branches of government and checks & balances* *explains budget standoff* *explains air traffic controller pay situation*
Kid: Oh yeah, that’s where we started!

🫠

Every so often, I have to tell myself: You’ve done enough today. There will always be another thing. Do it tomorrow.

Posting in case you need to hear that, too.

🥳

The cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities go far deeper than any of these agencies - almost 70% of 179 people were terminated, despite no change to the agency's budget.

There were no savings here - only idealogical destruction. #NEH

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

I see pieces like this a lot, often w/ a spin of lamenting cultural degeneration, but reading is a LABOR issue, it’s declined because so many people are working overtime or two jobs & employers expect after hours work. France has Earth’s highest reading rate b/c long lunch breaks & labor protections

Two wins tonight. The world is burning, but I'm going to keep fighting those local fights.

"Such a situation is not a "vibrant marketplace of ideas" but an educational failure."

Ugh it feels like a summer night. This is so wrong.

YouTube video by IFC Films Queens of the Dead - Official Trailer | Katy O'Brian, Jack Haven | HD | IFC Films

Whenever I see Bari Weiss's name in the news, I think about how she went to a rival K-12 school in Pittsburgh.

She & Tina Romero (who went to my school) are about the same age. Both born and raised in Pgh. This is TR's contribution to the media landscape: www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_gU...

Overhead at the writers' pub meet: "have you tried to write poetry? No? I wouldn't recommend it."

I don't know why I find this indescribably funny, but I am drinking a beer, so

The fact they jumped straight to AI actors modeled after women when, if I’m not mistaken, male actors are a higher labor cost kind of says it all doesn’t it,

One of the soccer dads asked me for my thoughts on AI at practice tonight.

😬

Kid: *outraged* Barcelona is better.

It's amazing to me that LiveJournal perfected social media 25 years ago and no other social media site since has come close.