Jill Damatac

My socially anxious introvert ass after 30 minutes walking my dog

This was a year ago:

It's not just what Andrew Cuomo is saying—it's who's funding him.

The single largest donor to a pro-Cuomo SuperPAC is Airbnb cofounder/board member Joe Gebbia, who promotes vile and racist messages about immigrants.

a photograph of the interior of a church. Several people are visible sitting in pews. In the pew immediately in front of the photographer, a black human-sized cardboard cutout in the outline of a woman is visible, as though a shadow is sitting in the pew in front of you.

Went to a prayer service tonight at St. Mary of the Lake, where they have cardboard cutouts throughout the church representing parishioners afraid to come to Mass because of ICE.

We Have to Move "There are living, breathing people all around you who need your sense of decency to be made material. Don’t give up on them, or on you."

My latest. "Do not allow your values to be captured and contained behind a screen in a cycle of inactive reaction. Jailbreak your cynicism and isolation, and escape your devices. Bring your hope, rage, and potential into the world."

Federal immigration agents tear-gas Lakeview, raid Lincoln Park as feds focus on city’s affluent North Side Lincoln Park Ald. Timmy Knudsen, 43rd, said masked immigration agents hit “every corner of the ward” he represents, one of the city’s wealthiest communities.

Context for non-Chicagoans: The median list price for homes in Lincoln Park is $758,133 according to Zillow. It's also 80% white.

When they go after places with that much privilege, know that no one is safe. And the vulnerable are even more so.

James Meek · Computers that want things For all the fluency and synthetic friendliness of public-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, it seems important to remember...

This is very funny: "Researchers struggle to come up with ways to make unsupervised AIs pro-human without hobbling their other capabilities – the ones governments and private investors back them for."

Like, if we made AI models prioritise being nice to humans they'd stop doing profitable stuff.

Epitaph on a tyrant by WH Auden

Today’s #poemsontheunderground
@poemsonthetube.bsky.social

Opinion | The Dogged, Irrational Persistence of Literary Fiction

I wrote this op-ed in the New York Times to shine some light on the supposedly dismal literary situation. The cure, as always: crazy hope and leaps of faith.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/o...

*During

i see you're doing something online that you have effortlessly done 100,000 times. would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? w

YouTube video by Music For Listening D'Angelo - Africa (Demo)

Rest in peace, D’Angelo. Thank you for everything.

(Ran to this demo of “Africa” as soon as I heard the news. In tears listening.)

youtu.be/_RLP0xAjdJU?...

The trailblazing transgender rights activist Miss Major has passed away at the age of 78.

Miss Major was a lifelong organizer and participant in the ballroom scene. She took part in the 1969 Stonewall Riots and was injured by the police — but she kept fighting.

Neighbor shielded 7-year-old during South Shore federal raid: ‘I didn’t want them to take her’ During the Sept. 30 raid one tenant protected a terrified girl and her mom. Remnants at the complex, including a detailed map of all the units, offer clues to what authorities may have known before th...

During a military-style raid on a building in Chicago’s South Shore, one resident heard a knock on his door. 

It wasn’t the feds —  it was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for help.

He let them hide in his unit for the next 3 days.

chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

This video of Chicagoans intervening to save a man from being abducted off the streets by ICE is making the rounds on Instagram.

Community action works.

Source: www.instagram.com/reel/DPZL2AL...

Entire thread 🧵👇🏼

‘Her need to make is off the scale’: why Nnena Kalu’s Turner prize nomination is a watershed moment for art The Glasgow-born artist makes huge cocoon-like sculptures out of found fabric and videotape. We meet the team who helped her become the first learning-disabled person to make the award shortlist

Love her! 💜🎨

Nnena Kalu, who has limited verbal communication, was born in Glasgow to Nigerian parents & moved to London as a girl where she still lives in supported care, close to her studio at ActionSpace, a charity that provides space & assistance to learning disabled artists.

#Art #Disability

Letting the flight in “fight or flight” express itself…

Werner Herzog on AI-Generated Movies: 'They Look Completely Dead' Herzog spoke with Conan O'Brien about the concept of truth and why AI is a

Werner Herzog voice:

“I’ve seen movies, short films, completely created by artificial intelligence. Story, acting, everything. They look completely dead. They are stories, but they have no soul…They are empty and soulless.”

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune

I was going to go to bed early, then I picked up my phone: a memoir

Inside of me there are two lions. Both have anxiety.

😍

14, 15, 16 for me! We need Lilith Fair back

A bit of James Baldwin today:
"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain"

Most Americans don’t know that the U.S. violently colonized the Philippines in 1898, through 1946. An estimated 600k Filipinos were killed in the years after U.S. annexation, to crush resistance to colonial rule.

“You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.”

Major yn Englisshe:
• focused readinge & writinge prepare you for anythinge
• research, communicacioun, creativitye, and interpretacioun will be needed for careers not even invented yet
• meaningful engagement wyth big ideas and textes that will staye wyth you forevir
• it ys awesome
• books!

a man talking to another man with the words so much going wrong so much to say and all of it happening so quickly below him Alt: Karis Nemik telling Cassian Andor, "So much going wrong, so much to say, and all of it happening so quickly" on the TV show Andor.

"The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it, and that is the real trick of the imperial thought machine. It's easier to hide behind forty atrocities than a single incident."