Jennifer Weston

As a child I ate government cheese and free school lunches. I then went on to uni thanks largely to Pell grants.

I now (HAPPILY) pay taxes on an income that would not have been possible without that support.

Taking care of your citizens is good actually.

The simple truth is people love this stuff and will watch it if you let them, not by putting it behind a premium fee. I fell in love with these cartoons as a kid because they used to be on TV all the time so I could, ya know, watch them lmao.

You are free to question the science behind my research, but I stand by my claim that coffee and tea taste at least 63% better when you're drinking them from your most cherished mug.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節)! 🥮

Cover art for upcoming Martha Wells book Platform Decay, the 8th book in the Murderbot Diaries series. The art shows Murderbot possibly transiting a passageway within a spaceship. Murderbot is gripping an orange ladder moving along the grey walls of the passageway. There is a window behind it showing stars in space, and it appears to be in a "zero-G" environment.

Just pre-ordered the newest MurderBot novel by @marthawells.com. Not sure how to wait until May...

MW correctly reading the room

A disgruntled purple gremlin that appears on Steam when you try to buy something, but fails. The text reads "Something Went Wrong. We were unable to service your request. Please try again later."

Happy "Something Went Wrong" day everyone

The thing about living in a human society is you either decide that everyone (except those for whom it would be medically dangerous) has to take VACCINES into their bodies or everyone (with no exceptions at all) has to take VIRULENT PATHOGENS in from those around them and, look, the first is better.

I refuse to give em dashes to the AI

The maddening thing is that we know EXACTLY how to prevent this. Yes, kids should get vaccinated, test, stay home when sick, mask as much as possible.

But even without any of that: Better ventilation and filtration in schools can MASSIVELY reduce viral spread, for all sorts of respiratory diseases.

I mean I’m actually ok if we just go back to making cinema instead of tech extravaganzas with dialogue

I keep that thing on me

Hong Kong cinema was some of the best to ever do it, genuinely unrivaled

News of the pratfall leaked. “Fred Astaire, aged 77, has broken his wrist by falling from a skateboard,” announced The Associated Press in a world news bulletin. Three days later a spokesman for Golden Films, Astaire’s company, issued their own update. “It was a clean break but his wrist will be in a cast for six weeks. We wanted to have a picture taken with the cast but he is a little shy about the accident,” a spokesman told California local newspaper The Daily Review. Although he was embarrassed about the accident, Astaire noted drolly that some of his actor friends had cautioned him about the dangers of doing skateboarding tricks at such an advanced age. “Gene Kelly warned me not to be a damned fool, but I'd seen the things those kids got up to on television doing all sorts of tricks,” said Astaire. “What a routine I could have worked up for a film sequence if they had existed a few years ago. Anyway I was practicing in my driveway and fell off.”

Fred Astaire should be an unlockable character in Tony Hawk

give me a bag of these and you don't even have to worry about the money

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.

Claim: Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles are crime-ridden cesspools. False: These cities are safe, vibrant cesspools.

Fact-Checking Trump On Crime theonion.com/fact-ch...

Physical Media Is Cool Again. Streaming Services Have Themselves to Blame Collectors tell Rolling Stone an exhaustion with streamers is making owning physical media the next big thing — again.

Physical Media Is Cool Again. Streaming Services Have Themselves to Blame

Collectors new and old tell Rolling Stone there's nothing quite like the feel of holding your favorite art in your hands.

Sound on

4. I don't really believe you could make a workable adaptation of the Vorkosigan Saga but I'd be willing to spend a few hundred million dollars trying to find out.

Lao Gan Ma spicy chilli crisp

Pro tip

This is spot on. And expertise lost in this way cannot be recovered with the wave of a king’s scepter. There is so much informal knowledge in any large technical endeavor without which nothing works. And that evaporates amazingly fast when it’s human repositories scatter.

Tom Lehrer wasn't just a satirist or a musician.

He as a comedian who could quietly tell a joke and wait more than SIXTY YEARS for the payoff.

That's dedication to craft.

We lost an icon.

See, entry 3 in the bibliography is "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds" by one N. Lobachevsky.

And if you've ever heard Leher's song "Lobachevsky", you may have just finished that title with "Bozhe moi!"

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

Everyone is celebrating him for his (obviously wonderful) songs but I am also celebrating him for releasing all his works into the public domain and insisting he retained no copyrights over any of it.

we must not look at LLMs
we must not buy their fruits
who knows upon what text they fed
their hungry thirsty roots

ANY CAT OWNER: this cat is enjoying being petted and would never bite me. (five seconds later) by talos this can't be happening

Random cookery post: I get a nice, $5.00 stewing hen, boil 'em with half an onion for 3-ish hours, pick/reserve the meat, throw in a palm-sized piece of jinhua ham with ginger, scallion, and garlic, let it go for another 45 minutes/hour.

Makes a broth concentrate you wanna bathe in.