Crafting the Witch

If you missed my talk "Misinformation in the Age of 'AI'" at the Durham County Library, Digging down on dis-/misinformation, authoritarianism, generative "AI", the stakes for consensus reality, and what we can try to do about it, the recording is now up on the tubes:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=THE5...

There was no screen protector.

I peeled off a chunk of the glass screen and my pry tool slipped down into the black murk of the Underphone and that, as they say, was that.

I feel like a.colossal dumbass.

Thank goodness for phone repair shops now being on every 20th corner in the metro.

Let me tell you how I made a very expensive mistake today that bricked my phone until I could get the whole damn screen repaired.

I *thought* I cracked the tempered glass screen protector. So I tried to pry it off to replace it.

ASCII art moon in a terminal window

I made an ascii art moon phase tracker that runs whenever I open a new terminal window, and it makes me aware of the passage of time more than any calendar. github.com/asweigart/as... and github.com/asweigart/as...

Mutual aid in difficult tasks is a form of mutual aid! Humans are stronger when they help each other no matter what the task is.

yep it's a Malort advent calendar alright

"Malort advent calendar" is already such an unhinged concept but every little window just having Malort in it really pushes it over the edge into something transcendently funny

The Epstein Email Cache: 2,300 Messages, Many of Which Mention Trump An analysis of documents released this week by Congress shows President Trump was mentioned in more than half of the messages.

Incredible piece of data journalism here from @wsj.com.

www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Saruman telling Gandalf, "Your love of the halfling's leaf has clearly slowed your mind." Response post: "never forget when saruman literally told gandalf 'you've been smoking too much weed bro'" Counter-response: "You're smoking too much weed," says the guy who got addicted to manosphere podcasts on his orb and started a fascist militia with a side hobby of deliberate environmental destruction. Started cutting down trees to own the woke elves.

A whitetail buck with a nice rack (of antlers) stands in the leafy grass at the edge of a deciduous forest in autumn.

View through my living room window (that I apparently really needed to clean)

Heads up: If you haven't read A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by @tkingfisher.com (and frankly that's criminal in the first place) and you're on Audible, it's part of the 2 for 1 sale right now. You won't regret it.

It has a possibly sentient, probably murderous sourdough starter in it.

Especially - ESPECIALLY! - for topics on which there is no default progression of knowledge.

Someone can love Star Wars and know nothing about the Samurai movies that inspired it - or be an amazing self-taught baker who's never learned the chemistry behind it or had to adjust anything for altitude.

a mock up for Zohran Mamdani's iconic font & color combination, but instead of any campaign message it reads CALL YOUR SENATORS and tell them not to cave like spineless dorks

sorry i mean

mingo has taken to mocking my spouse whenever he sneezes or coughs by sleepily making the cat voice version of an annoying human sneeze or cough in response

Nuremburg trials is the moderate position

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’ Critics of New York City’s mayor-elect have said his pledges of free bus service and universal childcare are unrealistic, but in Europe it’s a given

This perfectly encapsulates how I feel living in the US. The republican party is an insane death cult, the democratic party is 3 corporations in a trench coat, and the "socialists" are just the completely normal left-wing capitalists you'd find in any of 2 dozen European nations.

Sometimes I see people like 20 tweets deep into an argument with Grok. Like, what are you doing brother? You are trying to win an argument with a vending machine.

virtue signalling is good actually

The secretive donor circle that lifted JD Vance is now rewriting MAGA’s future Chris Buskirk put tech elites in power in Trump’s Washington. His efforts are grounded in a controversial theory: An “aristocracy” is needed to move the country forward.

Very telling that oligarchs want to be called aristocrats. On the donors who think they deserve to rule:

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Prayer of Binding
Wylie Beckert
www.wyliebeckert.com

Rav Danya has explained why I am Jewish better than I can. I got teary reading it. You should read it too.

Related: is that true or does it just make you mad?

(Although unless you're in a precinct near Excelsior Springs, there may not be anything to vote on tomorrow)

Voting in Clay County, MO?

www.voteclaycountymo.gov

Your occasional reminder that test audiences for “Good Night, and Good Luck” said the actor playing Senator McCarthy was too over-the-top trying to make him into an obvious villain.

It wasn’t an actor. The film used real archival footage of the real Joseph McCarthy.

Tucker Carlson’s lovefest with a white nationalist just blew up the Christian right A conversation with Nick Fuentes about Christian Zionism got many MAGA notables upset.

Christian Zionists often profess to love both Israel and the Jewish people, but for many of them, this devotion is intrinsically tied to their beliefs about the fate of the Jews in the end times—and it’s not pretty.