Morose Barnacle

BREAKING: DHS waives dozens of laws to rush border wall construction through Big Bend State Park.

They want to rob this iconic western landscape from all of us, locking away our fishing holes & campsites behind concrete and steel. It's a grotesque act of political vandalism.

‘Tödlein’, Death as an archer.
Made from pear wood.
Dated to before 1519; artist: Hans Leinberger
www.khm.at/kunstwerke/t...

Reminds me of the hiking app on my phone that thought I hiked 60 miles via freeway because I forgot to turn it off after I got back to the trailhead. It messed up my stats forever!

I've just realized. Banks used to be big imposing high street buildings because it gave people confidence they had money and weren't fly by night. A big elaborate website was the internet equivalent: proving someone had invested £ and was here to stay.

You can't trust that any more.

I am generally dismissive of these things but this actually feels scary. This isn't just a scam email, it is an elaborately worked out and callous deception scheme, enabled by AI, and it is hard not to feel targeted.

Be careful out there, authors. Be *very* careful.

I read Caitlin Rozakis's Dreadful (2024) recently. More clever funny than laugh out loud funny, but I liked it!

It's about an evil wizard who loses his memory (and eyebrows) in an explosion, and he has to keep up appearances, but has no idea what he's doing.

Lots of subverted tropes. A quick read.

I found it $100 cheaper on their own website than Amazon, too (including free shipping!), so it's always worth checking.

The brand is "Hermitlux," which is hilarious. Us hermits are going lux with our small kitchen appliances.

I bought a countertop dishwasher yesterday. It's like my happy thought right now while waiting for it to be delivered next week.

Have I mentioned how I *loathe* hand washing dishes? I know this thing won't wash everything, but just sharing the chore will be such a relief!

A few days ago, I stood in the graveyard of an 1100 year old church, getting damper and damper in the drizzling rain.

A woman walked into the graveyard, waved, said hello, and, as we had previously arranged, handed me a paper bag full of human bones.

The life of a churchwarden is a strange one...

Tonight’s dumb napkin cartoon…

Totally agree--analogies fail on that scale. Someone made a website of a billion pixels and it's really eye opening because it makes a billion somewhat tangible:

whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website

Unfortunately, the formatting is wonky on mobile. Worth a visit on a tablet/desktop though.

We gotta come up with a better system than “everything rests on whether these twelve billionnaires are nice”

Droopy sad plant in a pot.

Same plant, looking fine and acting as if it wasn't on the verge of death a few hours ago.

Having a drama queen among one's houseplants is useful. All the other plants look fine, but that one always goes to extremes to remind me that I have, in fact, not watered them lately.

And then I'll water them, and after a few hours it acts just as if it hadn't thrown a tantrum before breakfast.

I'm the same way! It's kinda encouraging that I'm not the only one.

I track word counts on a spreadsheet, and I've just started to compile estimates of how many words are left to write. I'm trying to make watching the number go to zero an incentive for finishing stories. We'll see how it goes!

Anne Frank died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen

Ooh, Return of the Obra Dinn is a fantastic giant logic puzzle video game!! Definitely recommend. It's a little magic, a little horror, and lots of dead sailors from 1807. The objective of the game is to logic out who all the victims are, how they died, and what happened to the ghost ship Obra Dinn.

I think you're mixing up doxxing and swatting.

But yeah, any talk of doxxing here as if it's somehow offensive is ridiculous. The officers responsible should have been formally charged and arrested already, and then their names would've been made public anyway. (Depending on MN law, of course.)

The “prosecute the former regime at every level” candidate has my vote in 2028.

There are more of us than them. Don’t forget that.

Two small children hold signs they made. "LEAVE MY FRIENDS ALONE!" "ICE GIT OUT YA FUCKIN DUMBIES 😡"

Gotta remind yourself not to cry when you see the kid's signs.

It's negative -25°F and tears are dangerous.

"LEAVE MY FRIENDS ALONE!"

"ICE GIT OUT YA FUCKIN DUMBIES 😡"

Photo of a beautiful scrimshaw pie crisper made of aged ivory in the shape of a sea horse. Caption reads: Whaler made scrimshawed whale ivory Sea horse pie crimper, circa 1850. @tonyhawktruther replies "string of words your grandpa lets out when he stubs his toe"

I just know some committee thought to buy the foam kneeling pads and I love each and every member of it.

Most adorable 19th-century pufferfish I've seen all day!

But when I asked an organizer what they wanted to see out of press coverage, they told me they wanted people to see the beautiful things they are building here, and not just the worst stories of the worst of ICE's crimes.

What people are doing here is beautiful. It's a tragic beauty, but a real one

Aw! Please give them scritches for me! I need more sweet dogs in my feed.

I'm on the Green Line towards downtown Minneapolis ICE OUT protest.

The train filled immediately. Even 20 stops away from our destination we reached capacity.

People are cheering at every stop when they see people waiting to board because we are all starting to realize how big this is.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators filling the streets with signs and banners

Demonstrators as far as the eye can see. Current status of the march in Downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota for Ice Out of Minnesota. They are turning onto 3rd Street from 5th Avenue.

How One Guy Crowdsourced More Than 500 Dashcams for Minneapolis to Film ICE ‘We have to make sure people are watching. We have to make sure we’re keeping track of our community members.’

When self-employed software engineer Nick Benson put out the call for dashcams online, he thought he’d get maybe 10 people to donate. More than 500 have shown up on his front porch in suburban Minneapolis.