Joshua

The Artistic Journey:

2021: celebrated as I published one of the best books of my career.

2025: watched Anthropic steal it, with millions of others, to train its model, without compensation.

2026: watched Anthropic sell that model, an AI killing machine, to the US government.

Human progress!

YouTube video by Forbrukerrådet - Norwegian Consumer Council A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator

This is brilliant: youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ

It’s not just Medicaid funding they’re withholding to MN. It’s food assistance, child care assistance, social services, job training, safety testing, public health, disaster relief. SNAP. Free lunch for kids in school.

They hate us for loving our neighbors, and are collectively punishing us for it.

This doesn't seem worth having a Discord account

whereas, the pitch for genAI is to spend gravity bending amounts of money and resources to make copies of things we already have. it's a completely baffling idea that inverts all prior ideas of what good technology or business looks like

historically, tech was an infinite money printer because you can write a program once and then sell it or its utility unlimited times. you can keep building atop existing things and not have to duplicate effort on remaking things that already exist

Has anybody tried *not* destroying the best minds of their generation with madness, starving hysteria ?

age verification is functionally a huge security hazard for _all_ internet users but the government will call you a danger to children if you point this out

The point of the AI project is to provoke despair in creative people. They haven’t produced profits or anything anyone wants, just a steady stream of articles about how us artistic types can’t do the thing we’re already doing, making art. Jokes on them, we’re even better at despair than they are.

A post on threads from user stephens_bens. It reads 'I'll always remember an interview with Steve Buscemi on Bulleye, Jesse Thorn asked him "As an actor with many decades of varied and outstanding roles across your career, does it ever bother you that one of the things you will most be remembered for is a 3-second gif in which you're wearing a backwards baseball cap and carrying a skateboard?" And without missing a beat, Buscemi replied "I'm carrying *two* skateboards." And you know what? He is.' Below that is a screen cap of Buscemi's famous "fellow kids" moment.

I never noticed this either.

Most cartoonists aren't Rembrandt, but they become the voices of generations bc they are able to pinpoint, with painful accuracy, something no one else had the words to say. That's where the quality of their art comes from. A great artist is a great observer. The skillset is secondary.

The quality of art is not the quality of the art; if it were, art would begin and end w/photorealism. The quality of art is in the quality of the artist's observations. Some of the greatest novels have workmanlike prose; they are carried by jaw-dropping truths about human life. Or take cartooning--

The big tech founder whose 417-foot, $500 million superyacht needs a 256-foot, $75 million superyacht to "shadow" it -- because the bigger yacht lacks a helipad -- had to cut his paper's newsroom almost in half, for reasons

I think one thing people outside Minnesota don't understand is that after Good and Pretti were killed by feds while observing, the most normal people you could imagine have made peace with the fact that they could be next, and they are still out there because they say it's the right thing to do.

chainsawsuit comic. a doctor speaks to his patient panel 1: you have stage 4 cancer which is incredible news, for the cancer panel 2: tumors fuel growth and innovation. cancer is all about moving fast and breaking things like, what it we stopper getting in its way! panel 3: who are we to say we know better about cancer's business? i'm just an oncologist

this is about billionaires

A black and white photo of Ray.

Superman 14 (1942). The cover shows the now famous image of Superman standing front of a large shield colored like the U.S. stars and strips, with a large eagle resting on his arm.

Today is the birthday of Fred Ray (Feb. 4, 1920-Jan. 23, 2001). A frequent Superman cover artist in the 1940s, he redesigned the “S” shield into the look it would retain throughout much of the Golden Age. He also did covers for Batman & others titles, & drew the DC hero Tomahawk for two decades.

rep omar, liam ramos and his dad, rep castro!

liam and his dad are home!

and someone please get rep. castro a coat!

IWW IU 520 (Railroad Workers) PRESENTS: TROLLEY PROBLEM SOLUTION "Slip the switch" by flipping it while the trolley's front wheels have passed through, but before the back wheels do. This will cause a controlled derailment bringing the trolley to a safe halt.

Union workers solved the trolley problem, you're welcome

The anti-ICE movement isn't just about politics — it's a caregiving social movement • Minnesota Reformer It’s a caregiving social movement based on relatedness and belonging.

Commentary: The anti-ICE movement isn’t just about politics — it’s a caregiving social movement minnesotareformer.com/2026/01/30/t...

what if something good happened

My 7yo daughter’s best friends’ family fled the country a few weeks ago. Today she came home with a drawing of her and another friend blowing whistles at ICE agents.

“We’re blowing the whistles and so ICE will go away and our friends can come back,” she said.

I started sobbing uncontrollably.

2006: Less is more, don’t repeat yourself
2016: Beautiful code prevents technical debt

2026: trillions of lines of generated spaghetti code that generate other spaghetti code will save us

pouring one out for the systems thinkers who can see the abyss and have to live with the darkness

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

I know all eyes are on Minneapolis, but there's a fast-approaching nightmare in Springfield, Ohio.

Trump is revoking protected status for tens of thousands of Haitians living there on Feb. 3.

Reportedly, on Feb. 4, 1000 ICE agents are arriving to remove this population. Ethnic cleansing.

I will simply never recover from reading this sentence:

"Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people."

Oftentimes I’m asked by non-Minnesotans how we stand living with our harsh winters in Minnesota.

I hope the country has seen over this past month that Minnesotans, while generally reserved by nature, generate a warmth of community.

It’s that simple.

my grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor, was Anne Frank’s neighbor in Amsterdam, and Oma thinks this comparison is perfectly apt

We call for a deescalation of tensions from both sides, the murderers and the people being murdered