C. E. M. Henderson

I won’t be designing chatbots for my classes, thanks.

This is cataclysmic in just about every imaginable way.

A whole lot of people still believe that games journalists are being bribed to give stuff positive scores.

Games journalists are, almost universally, broke-ass weirdos in it almost purely for the love of the game. Nobody's getting paid under the table. If anyone was, word would get out SO quick.

Ooof sorry to hear it, roomie has it and is extremely disgruntled about it. Much less irritating once you learn your triggers. Basically shit until then though.

French Revolution document rifle continues! Let’s just not think too much about what these personal papers might be stained with eh 😬😬😬

It is huge that Valve is breaking silence about their communications with payment processors that DIRECTLY contradict Mastercard's public statement

Put the irons to them

I’ve seen several posts about Sesame Street and urbanism — esp its portrayal of density and diversity. There’s scholarship about this! ⬇️

Germany’s new willingness to lead Europe’s anti-immigration front removes one key obstacle preventing European countries from enacting policy proposals that were until recently deemed beyond the pale. Those include plans to deport migrants to third countries and to process asylum claims outside the EU, copying the U.K.’s failed Rwanda scheme, which Merz previously praised as “something we could emulate.”

Absolutely revolting that this is becoming normalized as a policy
www.politico.eu/article/germ...

So what did Vikings really look like?
TV/movies tell us they looked like dollar-store biker gangs, wearing black leather, covered in dirt and allergic to colours... but in reality... they looked like 1970s pop singers.

Seriously, thread time.🧵

Photo: Roberto Fortuna

In the death registers of early modern Venice, marginalia often marks the cause of death: drawings of daggers for murders, for instance.

In 1696, Giovanni Battista Rinaldi was killed by a dog. This is the drawing by his entry.

One of the most disheartening things about trans advocacy is how little the people who claim to be on our side actually listen to us.

"trans-identifying", "biological sex", and a variety of other GC dogwhistles have become common parlance because people listen to our enemies, but not us.

"When the first of August came round, the Professor realized he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week."

--Willa Cather, 1925 and timeless

From r/chatGPTpro, 25 minutes ago: chatGPT blocked at work Today my job decided to block the site. I use chatGPT to create SOPs (standard operating practices) and power points and polish my emails. What should I do now four question marks. It has 0 upvotes and 20 comments

help my job says i have to do my job what do i do help

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like ‘They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong’, or ‘They can't do that; it's against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney's Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan's Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a ‘miscarriage of British justice’. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

I think Orwell put it best www.orwell.ru/library/essa...

The timing is especially stupid. I had a bunch of students this term saying that they didn’t feel like the course prepared them for the exam. It did! They got the marks to prove it! But they didn’t know they did until after the exam.

But I think a deeper problem with course evals is that they shift the model from advocacy (students communicating if something doesn't work for them while the class is still ongoing) to retaliation (students waiting until the class is over to leave a negative review). Education is a dialogue. 2/4

if you've ever heard me pitch I Have the High Ground in person, you've heard me recount the finale of this session on @theneoncaster.bsky.social's stream, in which i won & my victory was getting shot thru the heart & dying instantly b/c ruben's character cried over my body so i had the moral victory

in case you were looking for a game to play with your lesbian crush this is the one

Persian speakers - I'm looking for someone to watch about 1.5 hours of videos on the looting and forgery of Iranian antiquities. I'll pay of course! Any leads?

“This is the County Magistrate Court,” she says wearily. “The library is behind the post office.”

“Oh. Err, you should know that Google Maps—“

“I know.”

“I’m not the first, am I?”

She shakes her head. “I suppose it’s nice that so many people want to go to the library.”

‘Past The Point Of No Return’: Doctor Describes How Starvation In Gaza Is Driving Mass Death "In August and September, there are probably still going to be ... large numbers of deaths because children have already passed the tipping point," Mark Brauner, who volunteered in Gaza last month, to...

NEW— "A lot of children have passed the point of no return...The gut lining has started to auto-digest & will no longer [absorb] water or nutrition. Death is imminent for 1000s"

An American doctor who just returned from Gaza on where US-Israeli policy is taking us:
www.huffpost.com/entry/gaza-s...

A Second Tea Breach Reveals Users’ DMs About Abortions and Cheating The more than one million messages obtained by 404 Media are as recent as last week, discuss incredibly sensitive topics, and make it trivial to unmask some anonymous Tea users.

New from 404 Media: a second data breach at Tea has exposed more than a million direct messages between users that we obtained. Discussions of abortions, cheating. The other data was older. This is as recent as *last week*. Hard to overstate how sensitive this data is www.404media.co/a-second-tea...

Quaker?

one of the greatest and most controversial principles that wikipedia has stuck to for its entire history is that articles on "sensitive" body parts or sex acts can, should, and will contain photographs and illustrations of educational value, prominently, with no age gate. because it's information.

I’m going with “owned by a mechanic”

10. attracting and retaining queer/trans researchers in non-queer fields is as much if not more important as supporting researchers of queer and trans subjects. the doll writing her thesis on safavid numastics is every bit a victory for trans historians as is the doll working on eleanor rykener

7. legal history has a reputation for being dry, niche and difficult to understand that is completely out of proportion to how fascinating and vitally important it is to research. if you can comprehend the ruleset for dnd, you can understand canon/civil/customary law.

My thing for this (since I'm what the kids might call a digital collections girlie) is to show various 18th and 19th century Steps of Life prints where having children is something women do in their 30s

If someone claims to have been a former Labour voter and are going to vote Reform: legitimate concerns. Must be listened to. Labour must Get More Racist.

If someone was actually in the party and was told to leave for having morals: Your concerns are pathetic. Vote for Labour while we insult you.

This framing is so interesting to me because Labour literally called me a "flea" that they were happy to "shake off" despite the fact that I was very involved in the party. But I am apparently still supposed to vote for them even after they told me not to do so. Is my vote important or not?