Joshua Meadows

Just saw a car with the license plate "LESBMW" which is officially the only acceptable vanity plate, everyone else stop, the peak has been reached.

We have had little CMOS batteries inside computers for generations to keep the time accurate when power is switched off, but I can’t have one in my microwave so I don’t need to get the manual out to remember how to reset the time again after a power outage???????????

With nary an agreement amongst them as to what "woke" even means.

The incel neckbeards used to scream "who cares about politics if the game is good" any time somebody criticised something or didn't want to spend money on something offensive, now every major release has multiple Steam threads of "I want this but I won't buy it until someone confirms it isn't woke."

No man is ever going to gratify me the way this does. 🤤

(Also I think the bag is finally done, it has its first real test running errands today so we will see how it performs!)

I ordered some 2x1mm magnets as a way to tidy up the last bit with this 3D-printed bag (I didn't like how the doors were behaving once I had stuff in it) and I clearly have a wide gulf in my head between what I think a millimetre is vs what a millimetre really is. These are... smaller than expected.

If you look at the current state of the world and still think you're one of the real centrists, you probably ought to introspect on the likelihood that you're actually right-aligned with varying degrees of fascistic acquiescence.

Also that South Park thing is fun but I wonder what sort of world they could have contributed to creating if they hadn’t spent the bulk of the noughties onward promoting "both sides are just as bad" and that, actually, caring about politics at all is worse than being awful politically.

For no particular reason at all, here's your reminder that dying doesn't absolve your sins in life and if you actively spent your time on the earth hurting folks then you don't earn more compassion than you showed others just because you're dead now. May you be forgotten, except as a warning.

Good morning. What are you going to do to make Visa and Mastercard’s existence difficult today? What’s your goal for fucking with the swerf n terfs?

Having heard the song and placing him to it now (I had only ever seen photos and videos of him Being a Thirst Trap and thought that's what he was famous for) I kinda get the comparison.

It's a /knockoff/ Freddie Mercury but that's what we get in this derivative era and I'm sure he's a nice boy.

Today I heard a Benson Boone song for the first time; or rather, I saw that a song I'd heard before was sung by Benson Boone.

Vlas was talking about him recently and said they were calling him Gen Z Freddie Mercury, and I was like, "what, the kid who looks like he sings about fucking his truck?"

"Link" Vignette: "Link," originally written July 21, 2025.

[A lighthouse stands alone on the edge of the sea and overlooks a port where no ships visit any longer.]

Read the rest here:

logbook.joshuameadows.com/link/

YouTube video by Joshua Meadows #notengineerJoshua — Ep. 01 3D-printing a bag!

Oh hey — this has taken me about a month but I relearned my Blender skills and picked up an entirely new set of other skills in the process; I’m very proud of this, so much so that I felt photos weren’t gonna do it justice.

I 3D printed my own bag!

youtu.be/fIsmaoFM5zk

I do genuinely wonder how much generative AI wouldn't be an existential threat if we existed in a civilisation that appreciated art beyond passive consumption and actually saw value in supporting its creation.

I accidentally bought mid-strength wine and it is NOT a 5% ABV kind of day. 😩

Ryan had never seen Heathers before so Vlas and I have now fixed that.

We are currently in the country and there are MOUNTAIN and KANGAROO and SO MUCH POOP

EA CEO Andrew Wilson got a nice pay bump last year, while the company's workers earned less on average EA CEO Andrew Wilson's pay went up last year, while the company's median worker earned less on average than previously.

Wow, EA's latest CEO looks like a cursed version of Max Headroom.

www.rockpapershotgun.com/ea-ceo-andre...

Sabby is open for preliminary co-op memberships‼️

If we get 100 memberships by August 16th Sabby can get a cool new building for bigger and better things and keep existing! We desperately want to keep providing cool free events and services to the arts community in Naarm! 💖

sabby.gallery/join/

Me: Ah, that looks all right.

Vlas, nodding: Mhm. Looksmaxing.

Me: …

Vlas: ...

Me: Sorry, I just had a brain aneurism. For a second I thought you said "looksmaxing."

Vlas, still nodding: Mmhm. Looksmaxing.

What its source training material is* — typos are human, just like my em-dashes.

I had to doggedly pursue the matter only to eventually find out that the "plagiarism detector" was simply googling, and she’d found the poem on my personal website without realising I was the same person. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When I asked for feedback as to why, I was accused of plagiarism. The teacher responsible for curation said that she’d put my poem through a "plagiarism detector" and it was obvious I’d stolen it.

I’ll leave with an anecdote: in high school, I submitted a poem to my school’s writing anthology for that year. By this point I’d already been attending a writing conservatory for some time so I was surprised when the poem was rejected.

I certainly think a video purporting to give definitive methods to "catch" its use is, at best, irresponsible.

Again, I’ll cop to this being more on my mind now than it might have been even a year ago, but I don’t know what good comes out of self-proclaimed forensic AI analysts certain in their convictions of its use when they’re wrong and making accusations wildly.

But I don’t really think there’s a lot of value in being certain that This One Weird Trick is the easy way to tell. Some people write differently than others, some people draw differently than others.

You can’t rely on the number of fingers anymore. You can’t count on punctuation, or stylistic quirks — at least, not in isolation (oh, oops, there’s an em dash).

Whatever methods might have worked before are certainly obsolete now.

I’ve been using the em dash my entire life and you’ll pry it from my cold, dead hands.

I also think the point that it might have been instantly possible to discern whether or not AI made something is long behind us.