Dr. M. Harris-Peyton

I regret to inform you that the Epstein plotline is so perfectly conspiracy-shaped that we've damaged the suspension of disbelief on reality. You can expect the following by Friday:
-Intermittent mild to severe plot armor
-A precocious golden retriever sidekick
-Heretofore unknown magical abilities

TV conspiracies: we’ve hacked their computers but they’ve perfectly cleaned up the evidence!

Real conspiracies:
To: conspirator
From: famous person
Attachment: evidence.png

"Setting-Flexible Scifi Western Dwarf Fortress with an Extremely Dedicated Mod Community" is the gaming equivalent of a Schedule I substance.

Me: I have a chapter to revise, papers to grade, episodes of Dispatch to play through, a chicken pot pie to make...

My brain: New Rimworld colony.

Future humans consulting "The Bread" before major decisions like Romans reading rabbit entrails before battle.

Baguetteomancy.

Prediction: a K-fueled brainfart from Musk that will use AI and the cloud and 5 other PR terms for technologies that don't do what he thinks they do. It fails immediately but unpaid fed workers pull several all-nighters to make sure nobody dies, resulting in the president thinking Musk was right.

The deal "includes $203.5 million in new funding to enhance security measures and protection for members of Congress" per CNN, which is definitely an indication that all involved believe the action will be very popular and not controversial at all.

Just heard that James Watson died, which by James Watson logic means I’m the first person to discover this

The term boxed beef tells me he's talked to caterers a lot but has never seen the inside of a grocery store even once in his entire life.

I see the biologists are having their very own Kissinger Day and I wish them the best.

I mean, I mentioned to my students that I saw the pilot episode of Spongebob in high school and my elderly bones turned to dust, so time is weird.

(Also if I was being accurate, the crowd I rode the train with was a lot of 70-80 folks including an entire sign-taped-to-walkers contingent.)

Honestly one of the really good things about the No Kings protests is that, in my experience, it's a lot of 55+ straight married suburbanites who haven't protested since the 60s (if at all) actually offering to do some lifting, even if it's mostly symbolic.

Further evidence for my "actually NJ is just extremely weird [despite/because of] being a giant suburb" theory.

With each passing day, Medvedev's arms seem to disappear. He's approaching his truest form: a literal talking head.

My electoral constituency has shrunk by 50%!

(Forgot to remind my spouse to write my name in for the school board election so that neither of us would vote to renew the local reactionary goofball already on the board and running unopposed.)

Am I saying that the Boomers and your average iPad kid have the same level of accurate historical knowledge?

Yes, actually. We're just accustomed to the Boomer version.

My counterpoint is that schools did, in fact, do a poor job of teaching Gen Z history, but that Boomers' parents and teachers did an objectively abysmal job at the same task so that both are extremely vulnerable to vibes-based history nonsense and presentism especially re: the Middle East.

I swear to god some McKinsey consultant saw one tomato farm from the turnpike and decided this is Salty Nebraska where nobody ever swears.

Regardless of the outcome of the NJ gov election, I think maybe Sherrill needs to fire her entire comms team.

How do you milquetoast-flavor a navy helicopter pilot and prosecutor? Why are all your ads cornball wholesome nonsense from some midwestern state? Do you know how New Jersey works?

It's like, folks consistently like a little innovation on a reliable bop, they don't always want avant garde. A lot of subversive and interesting stuff happens within an established set of patterns.

(Also, working in a genre doesn't support the Romantic solo-genius-artist thing--art is social.)

Weirdly, I came to this exact thing in print genre fiction, and ended up writing my doctoral diss about it in the context of crime fiction.

This is, as I understand it, basically how drinking age laws got standardized across states--you don't *have* to but there sure is a strong incentive to bring your laws to this standard.

Did I just read an entire CBS News article about the NJ election's early vote totals that was supposed to be an objective report but...only interviewed the GOP candidate?

Yes.

Basically:

"Planets' Rights!"
"Planets' rights to do what?"
"Uh..."

I think it was "the Browncoats have Southern Accents" combined with the Western trope of the disaffected confederate protagonist?

My point being: this really isn't a very hard problem.

Every time somebody quotes Popper on the paradox of tolerance, I remember that I:
1. never heard of the problem phrased that way in my entire philosophy curriculum and
2. arrived at a same conclusion by simply identifying tolerance as a form of societal contract, at age 20, with no prior context

When a retired navy officer accidentally reinvents the guided missile destroyer from a combination of first principles and what I can only assume is a significant memory impairment.

ai video games are going to take the innovative gameplay step of divorcing cause and effect

The CHE running an article with the headline "Your College President Makes 6x as Much as You," meanwhile when I did the math two years ago for one of my faculty positions, the prez made 41x as much as me. Four-thousand-one-hundred percent.

An entire department of me's for one guy.