kenyatta

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Isabel Reitemeyer

MARCO LIKES TO WATCH

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The fact that Fountain is pissing off trads over a 100 years later is so fucking funny

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Interview with Elizabeth Minkel: Fandom Journalist

On this episode of Mind the Tags, Vee and Emily interview @elizabethminkel, fandom journalist, co-host/editor of @fansplaining, and co-curator of @thereccenter. We talk about Elizabeth's travels through Buffy GeoCities of yore, what she loves and has learned about fanfiction over the years, and the trends she's observed in AI in fandom spaces. Check out some of Elizabeth's articles that we discuss here:

Why Generative AI Won’t Disrupt Books

Lots of People Make Money on Fanfic. Just Not the Authors

The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction

You can find out about Elizabeth's projects here.

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Cannot tell if the guy painting over the Core Values word cloud mural at the FBI Academy in Quantico is making a reference to fellow painter George Bush, or if the new FBI Core Values are just WHITE. Either way, an unfortunately strong candidate for painting of the year.

image via nyt/adam goldman posting on the nazi social media platform

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Reblogging this again to be more explicit with my point this time. Here are the lyrics:

If there's been a way to build it There'll be a way to destroy it Things are not all that out of control If there's been a way to build it There'll be a way to destroy it Things are not all that out of control

If there's been a way to build it There'll be a way to destroy it Things are not all that out of control If there's been a way to build it There'll be a way to destroy it Things are not all that out of control

La-la, la-la (la-la-la)

If there's been a way to build it There'll be a way to destroy it Things are not all that out of control If there's been a way to build it There'll be a way to destroy it Things are not all that out of control

If there's been a way to build it There'll be a way to destroy it Things are not all that out of control If there's been a way to build it There'll be a way to destroy it Things are not all that out of control

La-la, la-la (la-la-la)

If there's been a way to build it There'll be a way to destroy it Things are not all that out of control If there's been a way to build it There'll be a way to destroy it Things are not all that out of control

If there's been a way to build it There'll be a way to destroy it Things are not all that out of control If there's been a way to build it There'll be a way to destroy it Things are not all that out of control

La-la, la-la (la-la), la-la-la (la-la-la) La-la, la-la (la-la), la-la-la (la-la, la)

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[I]f you pick up most books on post-war international relations, U.S. foreign affairs, and some of the best and most recently published books on the Cold War, intelligence is addressed in a lopsided manner, at best — more often as footnotes of history. You will likely find references to what the CIA did, about how they meddled in foreign countries and launched coups. But I guarantee you that you will find hardly any mention of the KGB, or Soviet active measures. The result is you’re given this lopsided, one-sided view of history where the CIA was apparently active in these countries doing various things, instigating coups, but there’s no mention of what the KGB was doing in those same countries. We are supposed to believe that CIA was operating in a vacuum. In reality, KGB active measures were often on a much larger scale than anything the CIA could marshal in the Cold War.

Calder Walton quoted in an interview by Christina Pazzanese in The Harvard Gazzette. It’s spy vs. spy vs. spy

Harvard fellow will co-edit three-volume series tracing espionage from ancient times to today

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In 1982, quite by accident, a zookeeper at Izu Shaboten Zoo in Shizuoka Prefecture discovered that capybaras absolutely loved soaking in hot water, and the practice of providing them an onsen, or traditional Japanese hot spring, was born. Source Massimo; video @yu_haradakei.

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At the height of the dotcom mania in the 1990s, many critics warned of a creeping reactionary fervor. “Forget digital utopia,” wrote the longtime technology journalist Michael Malone, “we could be headed for techno-fascism.” Elsewhere, the writer Paulina Borsook called the valley’s worship of male power “a little reminiscent of the early celebrants of Eurofascism from the 1930s”. Their voices were largely drowned out by the techno-enthusiasts of the time, but Malone and Borsook were pointing to a vision of Silicon Valley built around a reverence for unlimited male power – and a major pushback when that power was challenged. At the root of this reactionary thinking was a writer and public intellectual named George Gilder. Gilder was one of Silicon Valley’s most vocal evangelists, as well as a popular “futurist” who forecasted coming technological trends. In 1996, he started an investment newsletter that became so popular that it generated rushes on stocks from his readers, in a process that became known as the “Gilder effect”.

(See also: The Californian Ideology)

A really good article, well cited and historically focused, that's worth a read to bone up on the face of Silicon Valley and politics. A good companion to another article honestly about the related issue of the so called 'Paypal Mafia' on the rise in American politics:

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peak philosophy in ao3 tags

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I feel like the cyberpunk series Max Headroom was ahead of its time and also too radical for network TV.. it heavily satirized it and the country that produces it.. A shame lots of people probably don't remember that!

Remembering Max Headroom as either just a talking head shill for Coca Cola or as a hacking prank someone pulled on a television station is a damned shame...

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Dean Cornwell - Studies for 'Telephone Men and Women at Work', Executed circa 1947

The fragments are arranged in order so you can follow the work along until it wraps around on itself.

Another source

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Warped medullary rays found on pieces of wood that resemble animals

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A declassified World War II-era CIA guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.” 

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The history of computing is one of innovation followed by scale up which is then broken by a model that “scales out”—when a bigger and faster approach is replaced by a smaller and more numerous approaches. Mainframe->Mini->Micro->Mobile, Big iron->Distributed computing->Internet, Cray->HPC->Intel/CISC->ARM/RISC, OS/360->VMS->Unix->Windows NT->Linux, and on and on. You can see this at these macro levels, or you can see it at the micro level when it comes to subsystems from networking to storage to memory. The past 5 years of AI have been bigger models, more data, more compute, and so on. Why? Because I would argue the innovation was driven by the cloud hyperscale companies and they were destined to take the approach of doing more of what they already did. They viewed data for training and huge models as their way of winning and their unique architectural approach. The fact that other startups took a similar approach is just Silicon Valley at work—the people move and optimize for different things at a micro scale without considering the larger picture. See the sociological and epidemiological term small area variation. They look to do what they couldn’t do at their previous efforts or what the previous efforts might have been overlooking.

- DeepSeek Has Been Inevitable and Here's Why (History Tells Us) by Steven Sinofsky

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Cyberpunk 2025