What I've learned recently from the GOP in Congress: anti-semitism and anti-Zionism are horrible problems on college campuses and on TikTok--BUT TWITTER IS A FREE-SPEECH ZONE THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

I'm not paying close attention, but surely it's a sign of restraint that Kristi Noem didn't shoot her dog with Kim Jong-un's anti-aircraft gun.

(Who could have seen this coming?) Decades of data show toxicity is a staple of online conversations via @psypost psypost.org/decades-of-dat…

Working on my pitch meeting: COCAINE POLAR BEAR: THIS TIME IT'S SNOW JOKE.

All I can think of is the sequel: a woman in the woods who encounters a man and a grizzly bear at the same time, and who quickly checks whether her running shoes are laced up.

RUFKM? vanityfair.com/news/rudy-giul…

The Randian characters in Tolkien, of course, are the ones who want the One Ring--for all the constructive things they can do with it to achieve their vision of the world--and who won't let tiny little comfortable people or tiny little oppressed people get in their way.

InterLibrary loan lives!

Record numbers are getting articles and chapters through this reliable free method from the Internet Archive.

The long tail holdings are needed!

384 libraries are now getting docs through one system.

Go Internet Archive go #ILL

Netflix's UNFROSTED is a slow-building, lovingly parodic comedy that abruptly escalates into a deeply absurdist avalanche of jokes. Now if only Netflix would hire the writers of UNFROSTED--Seinfeld, Feresten, and Robin--to rewrite all the dialog in REBEL MOON.

No #Cheers fan could have predicted that after the internet became our postal service, LLM-based AI would become our Cliff Clavin.

LinkedIn just asked me if I'd like an AI assistant to rewrite my posting. Geez, everybody's a critic!

After quizzing ChatGPT with some straightforward factual questions to which it confidently gave wrong answers, I realized that my problem with LLM-based AI is not that 'hallucinates' or 'lies.' It's that ChatGPT, as implemented, doesn't hesitate to produce bullshit.

I got to see #TheFallGuyMovie in a preview earlier this week. It is a lovely tribute to stunts and stuntfolks, leveled up by having two lead actors of immense charm, Gosling and Blunt. Not so incidentally, it includes what can be taken as a kind of parody of #RebelMoon .

Apple Safari (on my Macs) now frequently exhibits the problem of loading pages with unclickable buttons and unselectable text. The same pages work fine in Chrome and Firefox. Should I just give up on Safari, or is there a setting change I can try that will make it reliable again?

This is really about student debt cancellation, right?

(Look, the $50B bonus has got to come from somewhere!) Gift article from The New York Times. nytimes.com/2024/04/30/bus…

If Noem wanted to permanently establish her cred with the rabid (so to speak) Trump/MAGA contingent, but *didn't* want to endure being reduced to a Trump puppet by being named his VP pick, she could hardly have done better than proudly declare she shot a bad-behaving puppy.

He couldn't help himself; he had to watch.

*Maybe if she'd shot the dog on Fifth Avenue instead of in a gravel pit in South Dakota

—Versificator Construction Committee

One of the things I have a limitless appetite for reading is comedians--particularly standup comics--talking about their craft. newyorker.com/culture/the-ne…