McKinley Valentine

bsky.app/profile/mcki...

like, I still have the same responsibility i always do, to make thoughtful choices about what to include, and arrange them in a way that communicates something coherent to the reader

"but that's how it happened" doesn't change that!

i don't write about myself much but when I do:
"It actually happened that way" is not a good enough reason to write a badly structured piece

i can be pathologically uncomfortable with telling partial truths, and need the reminder that this is still a piece of writing, with an audience and a purpose

but was it helpful to you?

a lot of pieces of advice are true but not helpful!

As an aside - I think having very good ideas that are ahead of their time (the advice, not the comics) is a real risk factor for turning toxic. You get used to being right even when everyone around you says you're an idiot, and so you've stopped listening by the time people call you out correctly

It is always strange to reflect on the death and life of a person who objectively is a terrible person, but also who you cannot deny tangibly improved your life.

(I am not telling anyone else to soften their stance on him - I'm not even softening my own. I'm just saying some also-true things)
(5/5)

Much of what he wrote in the early 2000s in a page at the back of a comic book was later padded out into an entire book by a productivity guru of the 2010s).
I still (with a reluctant preface) pass on his advice to people today.
(4/5)

At the end of his books of collected cartoons, he would have a couple of written chapters of productivity and career advice, which collectively was way more helpful to me than much of the dedicated productivity advice I've read since
(3/5)

It occurs to me now - probably partly it helped me parse out what was confusing to me because I was undiagnosed neurodivergent, vs "no, all workers agree this is an impossible instruction if you take them at their word"
(2/5)

photo of Scott Adams with Dilbert character in background

I am very sorry about what happened to Scott Adams (going alt right I mean, not dying)

It is extremely not cool to say it, but his workplace cartoons were genuinely helpful (and funny) to me as a 16-19 year old entering the workforce and trying to grapple with the insane things managers say
(1/5)

wikipedia screenshot: E. M. Forster's novel Maurice is a story of love between two men. The first draft was written in 1913 when homosexuality was illegal in England. Homosexual acts were legalised by the Sexual Offences Act 1967 but Forster still did not publish because "He knew the endless fuss and brouhaha it would [lead] to". The novel was finally published in 1971, a few months after Forster's death.

publishing something posthumously is the ultimate don't @ me

heh

it’s important to do things for your teenage self every so often, as a way of staying on speaking terms with the person you used to be

in an earlier piece they described Patterson as "emotionless" and Wilkinson (a victim) as "stoic". That's just two people identically not making any facial expressions!

people's delusion that they can read minds through body language is how we got the Lindy Chamberlain false conviction

guardian article screenshot "Erin Patterson raised her chin almost defiantly, giving a sense this was all a grave mistake, that she was not supposed to be there. For lengthy periods during her sentencing she even closed her eyes, a woman seemingly at peace with her fate."

court reporters stop pretending to be psychic!!
you can't lift your chin "defiantly", it's just looking up, and "closing your eyes during a long meeting" means fucking nothing.

you might as well report on her skullshape, it's egregious to do this shit (esp during the actual trial, which they did)

Although coins have had the monarch's head on them throughout a tonne of places and times, much more ubiquitously than an Other's head

(and a common pub sign motif was "the king's head", which was intended to be wholly patriotic, not rebellious or anything)

oofffff was not aware of this ty

AI called Maya tells Guardian: ‘When I’m told I’m just code, I don’t feel insulted. I feel unseen’ Cofounder with Michael Samadi of AI rights campaign group Ufair says it should watch over the technology in case an AI becomes conscious

hey @theguardian.com this piece is wildly irresponsible! To post an "interview" with an LLM, with zero context given that that it cannot answer questions about itself, and that you've basically just asked it to generate some science fiction dialogue?

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

ChatGPT was it a good idea to indiscriminately scrape training data from forums?

A book titled "Outdoor Pigs: How to Make them Pay."

those damned outdoor pigs can't keep getting away with this

yeah but they would still think it was normal and not shocking that a guy like that is president. They don't expect the president NOT to be a narcissistic liar.
Like how we tell everyone their whole lives to drive safely, but that doesn't mean we see car accidents as weird or abnormal

Museum-style photo of an bust of Cleopatra with one boob out. The caption reads "Bust of Cleopatra (one of a pair)" (also says French, Rouen, ca. 1720-30)

The caption 👌

[via The Met Museum open access image library]

just remembered that wikipedia has a list of fish named after other fish

honestly, i think that's reductive. it's about all the usual reasons for war, occupation and resistance (resources, strategic positioning, domestic politics, civil rights, etc etc). I think religion is a bit of a distraction, a way to make people overlook the actual facts of what's happening

5-Star Amazon book review. "The book, The Field, was mind-expanding, confirming what I "knew" to be true."

Sort of expanding while remaining the same size

slate @PleaseBeGneiss you can't just abbreviate phrases all william nilliam

It's not that it hasn't figured out how to depict gravity - it's that it hasn't tried. It doesn't work by learning the rules that govern movement, it works by looking at a bunch of gymnastics videos and trying to follow the pattern of pixel placement - it's like your phone's autocomplete, but visual

This is very unfair; if I travel to Berlin, and hook up with someone while I'm there, that doesn't mean I travelled 14,700 kilometres for sex. That whale might have been going to the cool artistic part of the ocean.

Screenshot of the Australia Post app Greece 19 November 2024: Items sent to and from Greece may experience delays due to planned union strikes on 20 November, which will impact postal operations and delivery services. Ireland 10 November 2024: Items sent to and from Ireland may experience delays, as Storm Darragh is affecting delivery services and postal operations. Italy 4 December 2024: Items sent to and from Italy may experience delays due to cyber attacks impacting the IT systems at Italy Post.

So sick of mainstream media; I get all my news from the Australia Post parcel tracker app