Lance

going by the shibboleths and archetypes of what the broadest cross section of Americans consider honorable and decent, CBP executed a goddamn saint today. a nurse who served veterans, who no one would speak a word against, a legal gun owner exercising his 2nd Amendment rights, and yes, a white man.

Okay, might as well get this started.

It's January 1, which means, as I'm sure you all know, that there's a whole new bunch of characters who have entered the public domain. This time around, it's characters created in 1930.

The following is a list of pulp & pulpy characters now in the p.d.

1/

Sexual Dysfunction Treatment 3G Magicians Blow up your house. “God makes insects. Maybe we are smarter.” —Perisophie, scientist

Desecration Plague #GoogleTranslatesMTG

Original: scryfall.com/card/jo...

BREAKING: The High Court of New Zealand has granted PATHA’s application for interim relief, declaring that the Crown should not take any steps to enforce the incoming ban on new prescriptions of puberty blockers to transgender children and young people. More to come:

My daughter wanted to make me a replacement #kawaiicon ticket 😊

NZNOG 2020 Day1 YouTube video by NZNOG

From an old conference: www.youtube.com/live/4xGxotB...

From 6:30 onwards, there's a cool talk about the recent history and practicalities of engineering undersea fibre.

It's pretty entertaining! The math behind phase division multiplexing and digital signal processors is modern wizardry.

of course, all the requisite hugops to everybody at AWS, but I will share a little secret: I always tried to hold the line on Glitch being entirely hosted within US-EAST-1 simply because I knew that it would make people more forgiving of outages and downtime once they knew where we were hosted.

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay

This morning my ChatGPT quota was inexplicably exhausted.

It took a while but I pieced it together. Voice mode somehow got activated when I went to bed.

The bot then engaged in a 10 hour conversation with my snoring dog, answering questions the pup wasn’t asking and praising him for his insight.

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

I do the art for this magnificent con, and if you’re a hacker, you owe it to yourself to a) come down to NZ for it, it slaps, and b) submit a talk????

So there's someone arguing about using people's requested pronouns with the sentence, "no one can compel or coerce me to use or not use certain words. I decide what I say and how I say it."

Which... fine. That's a stance a person can take. I could even see there being some merit to it as a policy.

looking at new hardware, and it is /such/ a nightmare that everyone's added an onboard NPU without a single actual use case.

like literally MS has not even come up with a single NPU application other than studio? obscene. they're just waving their hands about how there's going to be in the future.

nintendo switch 2 connected to an oscilloscope by 4 coax cables

it would be cool if i had a sibling who had kids and and really liked black jelly beans so i could have a niece named anise

One of the most unsettling conversations I ever had was with a guy from NASA about 8 years ago. I expressed my skepticism that space colonisation was worthwhile. He expressed that it was an amazing way of selling billionaires on the idea of funding tech we’d need here on earth in a few decades.

NZ Govt: we need to live within our meanness.

every time I see one of those rants that include an"Ozempic is a weight loss drug" rants its like yes it is and you're simply gonna ignore that it functionally cures Type 2 diabetes and to land whatever zinger you think you've cooked up here huh

“When someone works for less pay than she can live on - when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently - then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.” - Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

I think of this quote all the time.

Swallow perched on a dead tree in front of some beard moss (Usnea), blueish-purple wings, green back, clean white front and violet neck.

The first thing I noticed was how fast this swallow flew. When it landed, I noticed the white cheeks and green back. I was thrilled to realize that it was a Violet-green Swallow. They are stunning!
#birds #photography #birdphotography #birding

Wikipedia screenshot of a reddish brownish maroonish rock that had indentations in it that look like a face. There's a scale at the bottom that shows it's a little bigger than 5 cm across. The caption text reads "The Makapansgat cobble with its distinct 'face'."

one of my favorite archaeology terms is "manuport" which just means a thing (rock, animal, stick, etc) that's in a weird place because a prehistoric human picked it up and carried it there. this one is estimated to be 3 million years old

Man speaks to killer from beyond the grave in Arizona courtroom through Al video

I’m seeing a lot of outrage about this story but honestly it’s preferable to the old way of doing this which was both disrespectful of the deceased and traumatising for the puppeteer

A frog wizard and his faithful familiar on this international bat day

These two will be the leads on my next frog book (whenever I finally get to it)

[SHIVERS] the streets are overwhelmed, you moron. they cannot take the stench of five of you. the streets buckle under your degeneracy.

Why do Al company logos look like buttholes? April 10th, 2025 If you pay attention to Al company branding, you'll notice a pattern:

omg lol