Zeb Larson

2015 me (who admittedly was stuck in the genteel poverty of grad school and was *very cheap*) would be horrified by what I spend on groceries now

Learning to detect sarcasm is a useful thing on social media.

this is correct. and while you would get a nontrivial one off sum from a billionaire tax (not enough for a welfare state, but a lot), the ongoing point of that tax would be prevent billionaires from existing

He’s never been the most hands-on manager and always just wanted to be there at the ribbon-cutting, but now his subordinates pretty clearly run the show. Once they’ve curried his favor they just have to maintain it and he’ll say what they want.

One of the reasons De Klerk moved to release and negotiate with Mandela in 1990 was that he was the only viable alternative partner to negotiating with the later, more radical generations of MK and Poqo militant leaders. Slovo and Hani were considerable more hardline, let alone Sabelo Phama.

(Good == least violent, not an endorsement, fuck off pedants)

Didn’t think I’d look back on McCarthyism and the Second Res Scare as the good red scare but here we are

A take born out of musical illiteracy. He started his career alongside Elvis!

Who in their right mind thinks Johnny Cash is "deeply uncool?" He had Dylan on his show and sang his songs! Kris Kristofferson, too.

What in the world.

He is pathologically a sore loser, and we know this because he’s a sore loser even when he wins

I was actually surprised to see that it hadn’t folded. I mean…I guess I could? Userbase looks really small.

Whether in academia or tech (job markets in which I've had to exist), the farther out you are from your first position, the less insight you probably have. Entering tech in 2020 is very different from doing so in 2025; profs who got jobs in the 1990s frequently misunderstand more than they know.

It feels like a lot of them know that Trump is old and in ill-health, that there's no succession plan, that they're all conspicuous losers and toadies with no charisma, so it's all smash and grab.

Eventually, it became "why am I even posting here? Most of the people I like are gone, and a solid 25% of my interactions with strangers are borderline hostile." And that last bit feels unique to Mastodon; I do not get many strangers here looking to pick fights.

I just got to this point posting over there where A: so many of my followers and follows had dropped off, and B: I actively hoped that my posts wouldn't get too widely recirculated because if they did, I'd inevitably have people coming to argue with me and pick really pedantic fights.

Watching Veggie Tales when I was a kid marked you as an object of pity. Clearly your parents were uncool and they wanted to inflict that same status on you. (Naturally, every kid I knew like this wanted to binge my tv shows with me and play SNES the moment they could come over).

Goddamnit

But the attrition rate would be enormous; hell, I suspect a goodly number of Bluesky users already tried it once. I was there in November of 2022 and watched the bump followed by the crash, it’s hard to think history wouldn’t repeat itself.

This is the way. In fact, it is the only way.

I just don’t know where else to go — I don’t think a compelling alternative exists at the moment.

The thing is if Bluesky falls apart, I don’t really have another corner of the internet to retreat to. I guess I still have my Mastodon, but I stopped posting there because it stopped being fun; I very much doubt that has changed in the last year.

At some point, I began narrating my kid’s diaper changes and turning them into a commercial for the brand (Parasol), but the narration would always be horrifying. “Do your child’s blowouts resemble the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919? Then you should consider Parasol.”

Though given how MLK, Jr., Tutu, Mandela and others were treated by liberals or conservatives on the right, it's not so surprising.

Amy McGrath raised millions after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Is it all wasted? After the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Democrats around the country began donating to Senate races in an effort to remove McConnell as majority leader.

Set $100 million on fire last time therealnews.com/mcgrath-rais...

Oh sweet Jesus not again

Why you've never heard of the largest national park in the US We'll give you a hint: It's in Alaska.

I’ve been going through this weird wave of nostalgia about the short period of time I lived in Alaska; it was one of the few youthful adventures I got to take as the Great Recession put everything on hold.

That nostalgia I think comes out in this piece. This is about the park I worked in.

“Academic peers as friends” is such a dangerous game to play, in that so much of those friendships fall apart if they’re breathed on too fiercely.

“As early as 1938, Ernest Gruening, then Gov of the territory, suggested that the area should become a nat’l park. ‘I have traveled through Switzerland extensively, have flown over the Andes …’ he said. ‘It is my unqualified view that this is the finest scenery I have ever been privileged to see.’”

Obviously I have the time