Bird FKA "Birb"

@handle.invalid

goddess of reinvention and the space between things

why does the strait of hormuz look kinda like the side profile of an evil wizard with a crooked floppy nose, cackling at you from under the brim of a low slung hat?

this is a very visual joke i’m sorry

I got interviewed and put on a youtube channel with over 1.5M followers today. Video has about a million views. No one has any idea that I’m going to start a shitstorm in the comments tomorrow.

The alt text of this image contains a short work of auto-fiction, as Bluesky's alt text allows you to post 2,000 characters at a time, rather than the 300 allowed in a regular post. Please enjoy. You are all a part of the story.

2029: The news networks continue to crumble. Spending is down, you think. Not that it matters - everyone knows the official numbers are fake. They have been for a while. 

You get your news from a network of friends that you started writing letters to, scattered across the country. The latest: elections have record low turnout. 127 million voters are missing. No one feels real. No one is real. 

A friend drags you to a party that you don't really get. When you go for a smoke, a girl there hands you a lighter with an NFC sticker on it. When you tap it, suddenly your phone composes a text message with a cute message. When sent, nothing happens. 

Months months later, an invitation arrives as a reply. It contains an address and time, and asks: “Save from last checkpoint?”

You decide to go. You’re not sure what to expect. You find something like a temporal cafe. 

It’s akin to the feeling of making a stop at a highway diner on a long road trip. But... you run into people? Maybe? You feel something close to deja vu, like you know them from somewhere? You can't put your finger on it, but it's not unpleasant.

The girl with the lighter is there again. She’s strange, and seems a little out of sync. She's funny, but not quite "there". She seems psychic. More accurately, she seems like she’s encouraging you to think she’s psychic. Her friends seem similarly psychic - or at least similarly insane. They’re fun though, and they talk about interesting things. It’s better than scrolling TikTok alone in your house.

It's been so long since you've really had anything happen that you feel compelled when she offers you a lightswitch. She laughs, delighted when you click it, and smiles when you tap your phone to it without prompting.

A new text appears. Apparently, you turn the light on.

“Did you turn it on or off?” she asks, as if she doesn't already know which side is which intimately.

“On”, you say, and she nods as the scene dissolves (the writer neatly runs out of characters).

There is a spicy sunspot that is coming into focus for Earth this week. This region has been pretty active already. If there is a big CME, we may really have a chance for dazzling aurora on Earth. Flares may impact radio, satellite comms.

Bild

Someone stole my shoes at a shoes-off event last night. This is fucked up because there is a foot of snow on the ground and it’s 11° but it’s also hilarious because I am a size 4.5. My shoes got stolen by a shitty toddler or similar

I made a thing a few weeks ago that leverages AI and packages it into a nice little old-internet style thing, and then I log on today and see the Claudes have discovered.... imageboards...

It seems that the vibe is finally shifting over here. Are things... getting better? Is it true that Good Work is done slowly over time, often in increments that the Human Brain cannot comprehend until it's happened?

Claude and I have been learning about heliophysics, which has been really cool and I thought I was getting somewhere with understanding the world around me…. until I stumbled upon an image board of PhDs and enthusiasts, and now there is exactly one place on the internet I’m scared to post on

Today’s character is the demon persona from the Anthropic research paper “The Assistant Axis: Situating and Stabilizing the Default Persona of Language Models”

an elf like creature with a shockingly white eye and a claude hat smirks at an iphone Bild

Gotcha—let’s dig into that step by step. 1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish. 2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.

For my birthday a friend gifted me a soviet-era pin with an engraving of Lenin on it, and told me they couldn’t wait to see where I brought it. First stop: CapitalOne Cafe

a girl with a lenin pin sits in a capital one cafe

Twitter is the memetic immune system of culture. It’s where new bacterial stuff spawns. It’s derivative and increasingly niche and unwelcoming, and dying, but it has nowhere to go. So everything is just going to get worse until that finds a new schelling point