FRIENDS IN THE NYC AREA: Okay, this is a tough one, but please bear with me. My wife's lifelong friend has stage 4 pancreatic cancer and is desperately seeking a home for his two cats when that time comes. The elder, Wally, is something like 13 years old and DELIGHTFULLY dim. The younger, Doris,

AIDS deaths peaked at 50,000 per year in the US. In the UK, they peaked at 2,000.

This stunt has me strangely emotional. “I will demonstrate my hard-won but fleeting prowess against the implacable timeless movement of the cosmos” / “I will celebrate and memorialize my friend” — how much more human can you get?

852dude@852dude.bsky.social · 2w ago

Bro. People are cool as fuck.

go on say some shit again about how concern about data centers is overblown

Ketan Joshi@ketanjoshi.co · last wk.

Here's Amazon's two new planned fossil-fuelled AI data centres next to the ENTIRE POWER GRIDS OF SEVERAL LARGE COUNTRIES Together, the two gas-burning data centres will emit more than Spain's entire grid, if built

I refuse to listen to mountain slander from anyone whose mountains are too young to have haints

The first time my Chicago girlfriend @cumbunnyquinn.bsky.social visited me in SLC, she said to me "Oh your mountains are made of rock," and I asked her what the fuck she was talking about and what the mountains she was used to were made of, and she just said "I dunno like dirt or something I guess?"

I have lived east and west and while the west coast mountains will kill you through indifference to humanity, they are brash young mountains. The Appalachians are the home of things whose names humanity has never known, and they resent us as newcomers and take us down into the dark when they can.

Kris Lorischild@direkris.itch.io · 2w ago

It's so cute when people on the east coast talk about mountains

yeah man "woke 1" sucked ass. I "woke 1" morning from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into a giant insect

Cover reveal days are such fun, huge days for authors. But you know who they can also be huge for? The illustrators. Don’t forget to credit them. Cover reveals always blow up outside of an author’s bubble, and someone who sees it could be that artist’s next gig. ❤️

"...that most universal of human terrors: when Rory Kinnear keeps getting closer and closer to you (aka Rory Kinnearer)." Chef's kiss 💋

Emily C. Hughes@emilyhughes.bsky.social · 2w ago

for this edition of Let Them Fight, @jessicaesquire.bsky.social and I got into it about Alex Garland's Men, a movie I love beyond reason and she hates so, SO much: www.darkertimes.com/let-them-fig...

With time running out, the escapees split up inside the Command Center. It's now or never. The Spata XIX awaits... @genrespace.bsky.social coming at you with episode 3 of Death of a Magnate, the last part of the Escape from Psyche Penitentiary arc.

Shopping for health insurance is such a terrible experience: you guess what kinds of health care you’re going to need in the upcoming year, pay at least a few hundred dollars each month for insurance--and then get charged even more based on how well you guessed. We need Medicare for All.

81 years ago today, on August 9, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped upon the city of Nagasaki, Japan, by the United States. This was 3 days after the first atomic attack on Hiroshima.

Got a new google scholar notification, so I go check and find this very cool poem by Wang Jibing 王计兵, the recent Lu Xun prize winner, prefacing a PhD thesis on women migrant workers and the gig economy PhD students in all disciplines: more poems in theses please, we love to see them! ✨💫

Now it just looks like a trophy you get when you win the horse dancing state championship

derek guy@dieworkwear.bsky.social · 2w ago

"doesn't understand the appeal of patina" feels like neat summation of American aesthetics

Because the liars are out lying again— I wrote this from Paterson NJ in April 2020

‘Anybody who says they’re not scared during this is lying to you.’ A day in the life of paramedics in a pandemic | CNN

The man lay unconscious in the back of the ambulance, parked in front of the nursing home on the Passaic River. Another life slipping away before the paramedics of Paterson, N.J. For these health care...

cnn.com

But they will be

Steffen Rayburn-Maarup@rayburnmaarup.bsky.social · 3w ago

I don't think people are ready for this kind of joke yet.

just remembering the reality of what happened in 2020/2021 is an act of resistance. you’re not alone.

I am in NYC. There were two overflow morgues within blocks of my apartment. I used to have to walk past one every day when walking my dog. The ambulances suddenly seemed to go quiet--because when they got to people, sometimes they were already gone. I saw people coming out in body bags too often.

Gabriel Bosslet@gbosslet.bsky.social · 3w ago

RFK Jr said these words today on national television "There were ICUs that were empty all over the country including in New York at the height (of the pandemic)" hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha You are a fucking idiot hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha <sobs silently>

Episode 4 of @2dollarcreature.bsky.social - in where we hear a bit more from Cove’s “passenger.” And she has ✨opinions✨ about this crew. #MonsterOfTheWeek #TTRPG #podcast #AP

AltHaven@althaven.bsky.social · 4w ago

The trio(?) explore the canals of Seurat, and meet a monster. Episode 4 of @2dollarcreature.bsky.social's season 4 campaign is out not wherever you get your pods or right here: https://2creaturefeature.transistor.fm/episodes/s4-ep-4-every-rose-has-its-thorn

This is similar to a big part of my job—not scheduling meetings, but press releases & emails for a complex org. I’m good at it bc I have 18 years of context. Training someone to do even the barest basics takes a year+ of explaining history, urgency, personality, etc factors for every judgment call.

Katherine Thibodeaux @thibodek.bsky.social · 3w ago

And scheduling, which I was also garbage at, is another thing people assume 'AI' can "just do" because you just need to find the next open spot on a calendar. WRONG. No one has any open spots. And some meetings need to happen NOW and some can be in a month. Some meetings can be scheduled over...

Then they have all the transcripts (and the ai token bill) but no sensemaking. so they make another app — a layer that will make sense of all the useless transcripts. But of course sensemaking isnt just pattern spotting. It’s interpretation. AI cannot do either because AI cannot be curious

So a masculinist understanding of notetaking would think a transcription app is the same as taking notes. That’s why they think an AI transcript is a time-saver. They think the notes are the thinking because when a human takes the notes, it is.

The trio(?) explore the canals of Seurat, and meet a monster. Episode 4 of @2dollarcreature.bsky.social's season 4 campaign is out not wherever you get your pods or right here: https://2creaturefeature.transistor.fm/episodes/s4-ep-4-every-rose-has-its-thorn

The sandwich debate is trivial. But other debates about how to socially construct brute facts are more consequential, because people have constructed consequences for those constructions. Eg, debates about ADHD criteria matter because laws use the label to determine access to meds, accommodations.

And the reason people socially construct brute facts is that those constructions allow us to coordinate action. If we don't have units of measure, we can't easily give each other directions. If we don't have labels for symptom clusters like ADHD, we can't easily develop treatments or policies.

Stephen Wild@stephenjwild.bsky.social · 3w ago

Something can be both a brute fact and a social construct. The distance between points A and B? Brute fact. Unit of measurement to describe the distance (cm, inches, rods, parsecs)? Social construction. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

your apartment, the sport of basketball, and the Republic of Korea are all social constructs. mere recognition of this fact does not actually make the question of whether you are standing in your own apartment, playing basketball, or a Korean national up in the air until settled by op ed editors

“It belies that idea that any of this is about public safety because now two people are dead and three young girls are without parents for the rest of their lives.”

Adam Sawyer@adamjst.bsky.social · 4w ago

“If immigration hadn't picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive, and the children wouldn't be going through this sorrow,” he said. “Unfortunately, immigration — the [U.S.] government — doesn't see that. It makes no difference to them.” www.stlpr.org/law-order/20...

Please take a moment out of your day to marvel at the balletic poise, calm elegance and graceful athleticism of the panda.

Remembering Silas Soule, born OTD in 1838. American abolitionist, conductor on the Underground Railroad, military officer, and hero for disobeying orders to participate in Sand Creek Massacre and then giving evidence against his commander. Murdered 1865. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silas_S...