draglikepull

Surely someone, somewhere has written an interesting book that isn't about how much they resent their parents.

Every year I go through the lists of best books that various outlets put out, hoping to find something that looks interesting, and every year it's like 50 books that are all about how everyone is scarred by their relationship with their parents.

It's good to see news outlets raising the alarm about these toys, but the idea of a small child asking their stuffed rabbit about the legal status of Taiwan is very funny.

tweet reading: GAME TRAILER: “Enter a world beyond belief...” ME: “Yes” GAME TRAILER: “An adventure like never before...” ME: “YES” GAME TRAILER: “Join your friends online” ME: “I’m out”

i stand by this statement every year

Yeah yeah, now you can put yourself in a clip with Simba and Yoda, but Disney didn’t put a billion dollars into this deal so people can make fan videos for Facebook.

The real point of this Disney deal with OpenAI is that this is a test run for Disney to get rid of all the humans who make their animated films, right?

Annoys me when you unsubscribe from an email list and they say "It may take up to 7 days to remove you from our list." Man, I work with databases, there is no good reason for any modern business to need a week to get you off a mailing list. Those lists should be updating in real time.

I can't speak to what it's like in any other market, but the local small book store here will let you make an online order for pretty much anything their distributor can provide, even if it's not a book they normally stock. I get most of my books this way. I suspect many other stores do, too.

I suspect that the huge decline in local news sources is a big part of the problem. For a long time national news was mostly provided by local sources that also put resources into local issues, but now all the news that many people get is national, and local coverage is disappearing.

Constitutionally, municipalities don't even exist!

A major problem in Canadian politics that I don't know how to resolve is that many of the things people are angry about are provincial or municipal jurisdiction, but a lot of voters think the federal government is responsible for everything that happens in the country.

It's a good thing provinces don't have any responsibilities in Canada's system of government.

I bought a paperback copy of A Christmas Carol that contains a copyright notice saying that no portion of the book may be reproduced etc., and, uhhhh, all of Dickens' works are very much in the public domain and very much may be reproduced by anyone for any reason.

Wheel World on Steam Dive into Wheel World as Kat, a rider chosen by ancient cycling spirits. Race elite teams, trick out your bike, and perform the long overdue Great Shift ritual to save a universe on the brink! Your bi...

Impossible to see the name of this game without saying it in the Wayne's World voice.

This is Mars Volta erasure.

Person of the Year The Architects of AI Time An image of several tech billionaires sitting on a metal beam high above a large city.

I mean, having them cluelessly perched on a narrow beam above a vast chasm *is* a pretty good metaphor.

A man sits in a hot spring. The screen is overlaid with text that says: Reflect on… My mother My poison

Sometimes my PlayStation reminds me of the time when Ghost of Tsushima sounded like it was ready to drop this year’s hottest emo album.

Nevertheless, by Hammock 11 track album

If you like music that is very pretty and very slow, the latest Hammock record, Nevertheless, is both of those things, and I recommend it.

Whether it's creepy or weird or dystopian or whatever is really beside the main point: a statistical model that outputs a probabilistic sequence of tokens is not, on any level, the same thing as a dead person "speaking".

I checked out that band Geese that everyone is going on about, and I don't think they're very good, but I do think they'd be perfect to soundtrack a 2004 Subaru commercial.

Queen's principal says 'no risk' university will close, but fears remain | CBC News After months of anxiety about the future of Queen's University, a statement from principal Patrick Deane on Friday reassured worried staff and students that the institution is not facing imminent fina...

It is so weird reading all this reporting about how Canada is trying to bring in academics who are being chased out of the US while our universities are literally running out of money due to underfunding.

What Happened to the Young Middle-Class Man? Canadian men under 45 earn less than their 1970s counterparts, even as seniors hit historic highs, and homeownership trends make the gap even wider.

Good blog post digging into something I've talked about a bit in the past: Millennial men make less money than their fathers did at the same age.

“I am so bored by AI. One of the things I love about the theatre is AI can’t do it.”

Ethan Hawke is a dude 👌🏻

Travelers visiting the United States from countries like Britain, France, Germany and South Korea could soon have to undergo a review of up to five years of their social media history, according to a proposal filed on Tuesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The change would affect visitors eligible for the visa waiver program, which allows people from 42 countries to travel to the United States for up to 90 days without a visa as long as they first obtain electronic travel authorization. In a document filed on Tuesday in the Federal Register, C.B.P. said it plans to ask applicants for a long list of personal data including social media, email addresses from the last decade, and the names, birth dates, places of residence and birthplaces of parents, spouses, siblings and children. Under the current system, applicants from visa waiver countries must enroll in the Electronic System for Travel Authorization program. They pay $40 and submit an email address, home address, phone number and emergency contact information. The authorization is good for two years.

This is INSANE www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/t...

and these are our closest allies!

I’ve been reading We Don’t Know Ourselves, an engaging history of modern Ireland, & one interesting thing that keeps coming up is how Irish people through the 20th century viewed England & the US as more progressive because things like birth control, abortion, and being gay were not crimes.

I'm sorry, at any random house I walk past that has one of these cameras, a private company is going to perform a facial recognition scan on me and upload that data to their private databases, even though I have no relationship to the company or the home owner, and I can't opt out?

The Legal Case Against Ring’s Face Recognition Feature Many biometric privacy laws across the country are clear: Companies need your affirmative consent before running face recognition on you.

This is good.

Amazon's Ring rolls out controversial, AI-powered facial-recognition feature to video doorbells | TechCrunch The feature lets you identify the people who regularly come to your door by creating a catalog of up to 50 faces. The company says the Ring feature is opt in and the biometric data isn't used to train...

Ban facial recognition software.

Seems like good news for Moist, but what's the value of Creature looking like?

Please, for the love of all that is good in the world, stop posting Olivia Nuzzi quotes. I get it, everyone gets it, she's a terrible writer; there is nothing more to be gained by subjecting your followers to this tripe.