Ben "Jammin'" Verschoor

There was a bill introduced in this session of the Virginia General Assembly (HB1515) that would have put a two-year moratorium on data center approvals. It got punted off to next year, but I can only see the clamor for it going up. If several states passed them that could help arrest AI growth.

Social media should have a Vent button, significantly larger than Post, which deletes the long angry screed you wrote and plays a pretty sound and particle effects as it congratulates you for now being able to get on with your day

How do we brick these

I don't keep up much with my high school classmates, but I have several friends from the classes above and below mine. But I come from a small town and I visit every year or so.

Watching the Bad Bunny halftime show & I still can’t believe the Left got football in the cultural divorce.

It was a lovely vision of the country where our differences and diversity are celebrated. Flip the channel and you can see footage of different people being crushed and suppressed.

America!

Honestly the two movies should have switched titles: the Sam Raimi movie will have you gasping for breath in laughter, while the strangely boring Markiplier video game recreation will make you feel as trapped (derogatory) as its protagonist.

Truly incredible moment from an international treasure, but I have to pull this up from the replies:

This motherfucker is every sketchy ad on YouTube rolled up into a single sinister turd

Ron Wyden Only Talks Like This When The Spies Do Something *Real* Bad No, I don't know what they did. But I have a lot of experience with the senator

Senator @wyden.senate.gov is trying to raise the alarm, writes @attackerman.bsky.social

The slop merchants don't care if you read it ironically, they only care that you give them money.

Now I'm imagining Fishburne playing The Matrix Online and dissociating as he watches Morpheus die.

A fine is merely the cost of doing business. We need to be throwing C-suite level people in jail.

He made similar statements in the first administration and caught heat from the far right for it. Ammon Bundy generally sucks and made life actively miserable and even dangerous for a lot of Idaho health care workers during the pandemic, but he has been consistently good about this.

Here's a thread that you should all read, even though it will make you want to punch a wall

Even further back, the Duke LaCrosse Team rape allegation episode is basically Miller's supervillain origin story. The vindication of his trollish defense of the accused put him on the radar of national conservatism.

Epstein is the most garish and harrowing manifestation of this but oligarchy makes life miserable in a thousand other ways. A core point of democracy is that no one should have so much power that they can make themselves everybody's problem. We should have a political party that believes that

Antisemitism is part of the fitness criteria for the Christmas Adventurers Club

Barely subtext in the article, but it's interesting that the NFL is basically charting an 'internationalist' business strategy that is by default diametrically opposed to the administration's America First ideology.

Performative also refers to concepts reinforced by repeated enactment. Knitting/selling protest hats from a classic design reinforces the connection between that design and protest.

Performative (derogatory) is better applied to those who rag on others' real efforts while doing nothing themselves.

“bari weiss’s wife in the epstein files” is simply too perfect

Lava Beds rocked: a combination of Geology and History, where we explored lava tube caves as well as the site of the Second Modoc Indian War and Camp Tulelake, used to house German and Italian POWs in WWII (I don't think it included the nearby Japanese internment camp). So, so much history

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college:

- London: Art, History, Architecture (with 3 wk London trip!)
- 19th C. European History
- History of the Middle East
- Lava Beds National Monument (field trip, but I had to write a paper, so it counts as a class)
- Stage Combat

4 Black journalists have been kidnapped by the federal government

So, a quick note on Oakland Review of Books, or ORB: a handful of us are working to will it into existence, and--aside from a big boost to get started from our friends at @ebbooksellers.bsky.social--it's a self-funded operation whose goal is to exist and enable writing like this.

Bellingcat community members have already found two files detailing explicit allegations that President Trump engaged in sexual activities with children.

One file is an FBI complaint form and the other is an FBI email chain.

www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

I can't believe I'm writing this but: free Don Lemon.

Why do they think anyone is interested in these things without actors? Yadda yadda Auteur Theory, there's a reason the Hollywood publicity machine has overwhelmingly been about stars.

I reviewed Hamnet in blank verse doggerel, in a repurposing of "To Be Or Not To Be" that is at least better than how it's used in the movie.

The text is on my Letterboxd, since it's kind of a lot to absorb on a first listen

I have a theory that The Gamers getting enraged by 8/10 scores stems from the US' really stupid grading system in which 64 is failing and 70 is "barely passing."

they are incapable of understanding that 7/10 means "significantly above average, but imperfect" because their mom grounded them in 1992.