Ian

Veronika The Cow's Record Scratch | Defector Veronika was 4 years old when she picked up her first tool: a tree branch, found in her pasture in the town of Nötsch im Gailtal in the Austrian alps. Veronika lives with Witgar Wiegele, an organic fa...

chronicled the cow of the moment
defector.com/veronika-the...

Femmunist Intimations - Journal #159 McKenzie Wark describes four types of masculinity and how to overcome them.

up early after the party reading @mckenziewark.bsky.social

happy 2026 out there

How Gaza Broke the Art World • EQUATOR The former editor of Artforum, fired in the wake of 7 October, reckons with two years of division, fear and silence

great essay about #gaza and #art #nangoldin #berlin and the #artworld www.equator.org/articles/how...

Why Are Gays So Mean to Each Other Online? On the Gay Internet, everyone is a content creator. Some are Main Characters.

i love reading what John Lanchester writes about economics in @lrb.co.uk & when he talks about good sam / bad sam in ^^ that essay it was making me think of the nice-to-troll spectrum Paul McAdory talks about in this essay:

John Lanchester · King of Cannibal Island: Will the AI bubble burst? Nvidia shares are the purest bet you can make on the impact of AI. The leading firms are lending money to one another in...

enjoyed this combo review that sketches two quick multi-decade profiles of Jensen Huang at #nvidia and Sam Altman at #openai in @lrb.co.uk all about #ai #machinelearning #neuralnets #tech

The Substrate of Mystery – with Merlin Sheldrake How can we learn to build flexible ecological, social, or structural systems of exchange? In this conversation, acclaimed mycologist Merlin Sheldrake says a wild world of possibility opens when we beg...

this was good, i recommend listening to the audio, about #🍄 for anyone looking for an open-ended read about #ecology emergencemagazine.org/conversation...

Cruising for Normal | Eric Dean Wilson “Plainclothes” reinforces many of the tired and moralizing claims about cruising that queer artists and activists have worked hard to counter.

great essay about #cruising and #plainclothes

yes - thank you ! the pair i got on sale.

i love spring steel frames from mykita. they’re durable, super light, smart shapes. great fitting in-store, and great customer service. yes, they are $$$ (although ive gotten frames half off on sale). i’ve had three pairs over three decades. a gay stole my first pair while i was working an event.

ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants The Trump administration is being open about its plans to violate Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights.

Social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools — now being turned on Americans by ICE to target protesters. bit.ly/3Kq348R

Is language the same as intelligence? The AI industry desperately needs it to be The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake.

“human thinking is largely independent of human language — and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own.[…] We use language to think, but that does not make language the same as thought.” #ai #llm

Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound Research has linked the ability to visualize to a bewildering variety of human traits—how we experience trauma, hold grudges, and, above all, remember our lives.

i see mental images, non-linguistic thoughts. how about you?

AI Slop Recipes Are Taking Over the Internet — And Thanksgiving Dinner Food bloggers see traffic dip as home cooks turn to AI, inspired by impossible pictures

watch where your recipes come from out there … thought in particular this observation was notable that "Because the content isn’t an exact copy, traditional takedown tools like DMCA aren’t straightforward, leaving creators with almost no remedy even when the imitation is obvious.” #ai #food

Literally zooming into a dark age somehow hastened by technology and innovation is weird to think about

my to-be-launched drag name will be Amanita Mann

been thinking about making this name my actual name … wdyt ?

yeah it sucks not gonna lie ! feels even worse in contexts where i have to show ID …

The AI Bubble Is Not a Question. What Happens If It Bursts Is. The AI industry's most important product is not a chatbot or a video generator; it's the story the AI industry is telling about itself

I wrote about the irony of the AI bubble, a phenomenon driven by storytelling and imagination in an industry that has contempt for both

YouTube video by Catherine Brookman Catherine Brookman - Montreal

youtube.com/watch?v=x76Z...

two talented friends got together to make this beautiful music video for a beautiful song - give it three minutes ! #musicvideo #newmusic

ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship Videos on social media show officers from ICE and CBP using facial recognition technology on people in the field. One expert described the practice as “pure dystopian creep.”

New: Videos show ICE/CBP agents are scanning peoples' faces on the street to verify citizenship. ICE has tool to instantly look up unprecedented number of databases with just a photo

“I’m an American citizen so leave me alone”

“Alright, we just got to verify that”

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

just ordered a copy of @kristiedegaris.bsky.social ’s memoir,‘Drystone' - I’ve been excited and curious to read this for a while, and it’s nice to order a book from an independent publisher, Birlinn, that I’m not familiar with

The Good Pervert, by David Velasco A friend’s life, a brutal death

among the best things I’ve read in a while harpers.org/archive/2025... #pervert #art #writing

The Queer Lives of Frogs What frogs teach us about sex, science, and why biology is messier than we think.

did not expect reading this piece about toxicology and frog sex to be as riveting as it was ! #climate #🐸 #queer #biology

*while driving through krumville*

an eastern copperhead wrapped in a tight coil just off a trail and tucked into a thicket of poison ivy

my first time seeing a venomous eastern copperhead — it was coiled and not moving at all and definitely not a mushroom. spotted in the mohonk preserve a week ago. #🐍

two white mushrooms with pale yellowish gills poking out of a deciduous forest floor

a nice pair of lactifluus or lactarius of some kind. I’m still searching for a positive ID. any ideas? I think maybe L. piperatus or L. vellereus. Do you know these July-emerging #🍄 in a deciduous New York forest that ooze a whitish liquid from broken gills ?

I’m curious to hear if others have seen stuff like this at other subway stops, in other cities, and where, as well as if there’s been reporting about it I ought to catch up on… (21/21)

… I start to wonder: was this a version of a tool intended for deployment in places like subway stops for use by DHS in the mass deportation effort Congress recently funded? (20/21)

ICE Is Paying Palantir $30 Million to Build ‘ImmigrationOS’ Surveillance Platform In a document published Thursday, ICE explained the functions that it expects Palantir to include in a prototype of a new program to give the agency “near real-time” data about people self-deporting.

… or at reporting from @carolinehaskins.bsky.social ‬ @wired.com listing a September 2025 delivery date for a prototype of software due from a subcontractor (Palantir…) which I can imagine being on the other side of that security camera www.wired.com/story/ice-pa... … (19/21)

Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People The database allows filtering according to hundreds of different categories, including visa status, “unique physical characteristics (e.g. scars, marks, tattoos),” “criminal affiliation,” license plat...

When I look back at the excellent reporting that folks like @jasonkoebler.bsky.social at @404media.co‬ have been doing about the kind of data to which a rig like this might have access (lots) www.404media.co/inside-a-pow... … (18/21)