clockwork bird

Impeach, convict, remove.

And if our current leaders won’t do it, they need to step aside for people who will.

I’m a Trans Journalist Choosing to Live in Texas. Here’s Why That Matters. My name is Kit O’Connell. I’ll be covering queer and trans life in Texas for Big & Bright — The Barbed Wire’s first underwritten vertical.

I'm here, I'm queer, I belong in Texas, too.

thebarbedwire.com asked me to take a moment to introduce myself, and why our state needs reporters like me, and media where we can see our stories reflected.

This one starts when I'm just 13 years old...

I lost *10* friends and family members over a three year period, got serious brain damage from medical negligence, and everyone expects me to just Be Normal now.

It's really hard not to be resentful about that sometimes.

I feel like here's where I'm supposed to say here that things are better now.

And sure, I can type again, and look at computer screens, and I've got small in-person group events going again; but my sense of direction never came back, and I can't repair estranged relationships with people who died.

idk, I feel like there's always been a lot of pressure for people who continued to exercise precautions to be conciliatory to people who didn't.

Like I've been personally sitting on the time machine dial, keeping them from making it 2019 agin.

I lost access to a whole wing of my social network because I continued to mask and asked people to test before coming to events for awhile. I was told this was "too triggering".

I had an aneurysm when I got covid, but sure, it was more important that they not be reminded that covid happened.

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

in the last 1.5 years journalistic fact-checking has become significantly harder specifically bc of this, without touching all the other ways education and knowledge-sharing are under attack rn (book bans, censorship, media industry crumbling, etc etc)

oh man, we did a pie flight for thanksgiving last year and it was fantastic, highly recommend.

"writing code to solve a problem" used to have "understanding the problem" as a prerequisite. but vibecoding allows solution-shaped objects to be produced without any of the hard-won understanding. beware of solution-shaped objects.

YouTube video by Farm to Taber RFK Jr's Plan To Put Americans On Farms

If you've heard about RFK Jr's "wellness farms," have I got a story for you.

I've worked on farms where most of the crew were put there as rehabilitation for various issues.

So I'd love to tell you all the various ways those farms made us all worse!

youtu.be/pDNoVqiGb_c

Boycott the 27'th - 1'st weaintbuyingit.com it's a temporary protest of certain companies.

I'm already boycotting every company I see backing Trump, Isreal, or rolling back DEI with just two exceptions: I get meds from Amazon, and I buy gasoline/diesel.

If you aren't though, go ahead and try it.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 cleans up at the Golden Joystick Awards Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won seven awards at last night's Golden Joystick Awards, highlighted by Jennifer English's victory speech.

“And I chose queer joy. As a result of that queer joy I felt safe enough to pour my grief and pain and all that nonsense and joy and love into this incredibly beautifully written character. I am so proud of that and I just want to thank queer joy for that.”

www.avclub.com/golden-joyst...

In Monrovia, California, protesters are purchasing 17¢ ICE scrapers from Home Depot and immediately returning them to create long lines and slow down the entire store. Their aim is to disrupt sales and convey a message opposing ICE raids occurring in their neighborhood.

I'm not even joking, this looney tunes ass event occurred when I was shelving books as a volunteer page at my small local library.

Someone reached over my head without saying anything, and got startled when I started standing up because they hadn't noticed me crouched next to the book cart.

A copy of Dracula fell on my head in a library.

When I was nine, I played a game called ZZT. It came with a level editor that had its own programming language. I was so annoyed that I couldn't write the code I wanted with that language but didn't understand why. I needed to know.

Now I have a PhD in programming language theory.

somebody on here suggested awhile back that a pretty compelling 2028 Democrat campaign promise would be "on day one I will deploy a WPA-scale army of forensic accountants across every square inch of the federal government" and I think about that every day

evergreen

TRUMP [after spending 5 minutes with Zohran]: surplus value, it’s a very wonderful thing, very wonderful, and they’re stealing it. Can you believe that?

We’re going to be looking very strongly at the bourgeoisie, what they’re up to

North american cuisine does this too in some specific contexts, like cheddar cheese on apple pie in the northeastern US.

Reminder that there are other good mail services. My wife and I moved to mailbox.org (hosted in Germany, one of many options). You can set up your old gmail account to delete and forward email to your new account and give people your new address to transition.

Google no longer deserves your trust.

Yeah, it may be time for me to move too.

+1 to Google not deserving our trust anymore.

What helped you choose mailbox.org vs the various other options? (I'm not familiar w the space so I'm not sure how to evaluate)

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features."

There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

Q: Will Breaking Bad fans like it? A: Considering that the main character is a woman, no.

What To Know About ‘Pluribus’ https://theonion.com/what-to-know-about-pluribus/

damn I heard you the first time, you don't need to keep yelling my name like that

me and who rn

it's so cool that we're just inserting the folie à deux automat into every telecommunication device, I'm sure it's going to really accentuate our normalness as a society.