Feral T. Robot, Oil Swamp Utility Bot #7629
@feralrobots.bsky.social
Cis straight borderline-elderly middle-class white man. Follow implies ABSOLUTELY NO expectation you'll follow back. I block follow-farmers. https://mastodon.social/@FeralRobots
There’s a book coming out about this next month www.npr.org/2026/05/25/n...
In the 'biggest book giveaway in history' WWII soldiers received pocket-sized reads
The books had to be light and small enough to fit in servicemen's pockets. The motto of the Council on Books in Wartime was: "Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas."
npr.org
I’m reading a book published in 1944 and this logo is so unbelievably tough. I’d absolutely wear a shirt with this exact design.
Sewer socialism was always VERY serious. It was pretty much the baseline of seriousness, because it dealt with measurable results: DOES THE FUCKING SEWER WORK? That's as serious as it gets. That's why people hated it: It demonstrated "socialists" actually getting practical things done.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 15h agoThis focus on meat-and-potatoes service delivery was once dismissed as "sewer socialism," an unserious form of progressive politics with an undue focus on improving people's daily lives at the expense of high-flying political change. 50/
Turn the sound on. Video taken by someone who regards this as "actually terrifying" & what's happening here as "mobs of people on scooters". This is why we can't have even decent things.
Elle Ess@viamarsala18.bsky.social · 8h agoI’m sorrrrryyyyyy I’m crying over this 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
1. This New York Post cover: “Thousands of 9/11 families demand Mamdani be banned from 25th-Anniversary” is a brazen lie. How do I know? I interviewed the organizer of the petition.
Here, I’m seeing adults who describe a people as if they were a person, denouncing antisemitism by engaging in Islamophobia & vice versa, engaging in shockingly casual racism & prejudice, saying the most vile garbage to defend ‘their side’. You are all losing your decency. Stop
I don't know if this counts as sewer-socialism but it's a big deal.
Richard M. Nixon@dicknixon.bsky.social · 2h agoThis just came up when we spoke with an older lady in Manhattan, a stranger. “He gets things done. I didn’t vote for him, but I will next time.”
“Much like fascism generally, if left unchecked and unaddressed: AI is a totalising force that destroys people and planet from the inside out. AI entryists want to join committees as if they are anti AI and then instead make pro AI company rules, for example.” 2/🧵 olivia.science/entryism/
Entryism
AI entryism subverts anti AI critique.
olivia.science
This is a real thing. I can't say anything I write really resembles John Crowley, but he has been a huge influence. It's at least as much a frame of mind he puts me into as anything. (It's gonna stay present-tense.)
Christiane Knight@christianek.bsky.social · 3h agoJohn Crowley was a big influence in my writing, though our styles aren't the same. Much respect and thanks for the inspiration.
RIP #JohnCrowley. Go read LITTLE, BIG, the AEGYPT cycle, KA, ENGINE SUMMER, and more. One of the most amazing, inventive writer I ever recorded with. Our talks: 2013 - chimeraobscura.com/vm/podcast-r... 2017 - chimeraobscura.com/vm/episode-2... 2022 - chimeraobscura.com/vm/episode-4...
The report states oil was found inside a Belemnite. I normally predict a thimbleful, but a Belemnite full means an awful lot of Belemnites need to be found to meet the 13 billion-barrel bonanza. Here is the background info: geoexpro.com/hydrocarbon-... www.londonstockexchange.com/news-article...
London Stock Exchange | London Stock Exchange
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londonstockexchange.com
for a junk drawer to legally qualify as a real junk drawer, what is the ONE absolute mandatory item it must include? Two lockbolts left over from assembling an Ikea shelf that you no longer have.
darth™️@darthbluesky.bsky.social · 2d agofor a junk drawer to legally qualify as a real junk drawer, what is the ONE absolute mandatory item it must include? a mysterious key that does not unlock any thing
Domestic partner implies the existence of feral partners
OK but this happened, what, a month ago? So it's not exactly "trending."
VERY short version: Greenland Energy are hucksters if not outright scammers & there's a high probability the oil drilling is part grift & part geopolitical ploy to get support for Trump's Greenland ambitions. Still unclear: Is there actual oil there. (Maybe not?)
Brandon Bishop@brandontbishop.bsky.social · 7h agoGeneral Bluesky users today: The Guardian reports there's an American oil company going to Greenland, now it all makes sense! It's always oil. All Bluesky geos today: what the fuck, that's not actually an oil company and what they're claiming to do is crazy-pants.
This hits home. Haven't kept up with John Crowley's work in a couple decades but he was a huge influence on me in many dimensions. ...
Steven D. Brewer@stevendbrewer.com · 5h agoI learned from his son that John Crowley passed away today. He was the author of Little, Big and many other significant works of speculative fiction.
Researchers at the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark have conducted multiple landmark, population-wide studies tracking hundreds of thousands to over 1.2 million children using national health registries to examine potential links between vaccines and autism. Every major study found no connection.
Large Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or 49 other health conditions
A new Danish study finds no association between aluminum in childhood vaccines and 50 different health conditions, including autism, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. The findings reaffirm the safety o...
en.ssi.dk
Sometimes I see something in nature and then spend the next several years waiting for the shot. Sometimes I never get it. Sometimes you see it and a week later you land it: I give you tonight's murder of crows in front of the sunset. 🪶
IMHO that is what they are gambling on - “have we neglected alienated & punished our Eloi public’s prosocial relationships and life skills enough AND fed them enough bias confirming simulacrum that they will gladly accept & pay us for our door opening subscription service”
From a moral perspective, I hear this. But as someone else put it: the "meaning" of that "no" vote, to them, was that they got to position themselves. That's what being the holdout vote on anything gets them. Both deeply cynical actors. It's more obvs w/Murky, but Collins no less.
Allyship@allyship.bsky.social · yesterdayIf Murkowski and Collins don't spend every minute shaming their colleagues and getting more to pledge a no vote, their no vote means nothing, and they know it.
“The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate” https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-massive-climate-lie-that-will-destroy-human-civilization > This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change... we have more time.”
The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate
Thinking we have time left to address climate change, or that “Net Zero by 2050” will save us, is driving us toward full social collapse in ways that become more obvious with every new broken temperat...
currentaffairs.org
From this perspective the "AI" bubble starts to look like a #Longtermism conspiracy: putting us into a position where the "only" solution is to go all-in on brain uploading because the earth isn't sustainable. #POSIWID Srsly tho 'conspiracy' is the wrong term. AIBros all just dropped the same acid.
Baldur Bjarnason@baldurbjarnason.com · 14h agoThis is the main reason I'm so angry about the "AI" bubble. All this enormous effort could have been spent combatting the climate crisis and the opportunity cost of your fucking chatbot is going to be the very climate we live in Imagine what we could have done with those 3 trillion dollars?
I’m on a small-ship Alaska cruise with my son; our boat rescued a stranded vessel last night and apparently we did that after the Coast Guard radioed Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht - which was closer - and they repeatedly refused to respond. (There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this)
Susan Collins has spent the bulk of her career as the ~50th vote in the Senate for whatever she wants to be the ~50th vote for. She is therefore more responsible than any other Senator for what the Senate has and has not done over the last couple decades.
It's kinda funny they win on tough when their guy is the one running away from questions.
Robert Downen@robertdownen.bsky.social · 22h agoHow things are going: This is how the recently former mayor of Southlake, a Dallas/Fort Worth suburb that was the epicenter of the CRT/book banning movement, is talking about the Paxton/Talarico race on his Substack.
This seems to be SOP when cops go in to clear out a homeless encampment, & the wanton cruelty of it has always blocked my mind.
✊🏼Indigiqueer Hummingbird@riotousmuse.bsky.social · 3d agoi’m gonna expand on this. when we say, “destroy everything,“ it means medications, ID, phone if they have it, birth certificate/Social Security card if they have it, last mementos or even ashes from loved ones, Clothing, Food, Library card... You name it. & actively being criminalized for it.
In 2022, before Chatgpt and everything that came next, I participated in this study. It was framed as a research on a new tool that I could try and offer my opinion on. I didn't know that it was trained on copyrighted material.
Wordcraft Writers Workshop
The Wordcraft Writers Workshop is a collaboration between Google's PAIR and Magenta teams, and 13 professional writers. Together we explore the limits of co-writing with AI.
wordcraft-writers-workshop.appspot.com
I think people might want to put their pitchforks down about this 2022 project I am as big a foe of the Plagiarism Machine That Burns the World as anybody else, but this seems like a trap a well-intentioned writer could easily think was an honest experiment
Eugenia Triantafyllou@foxesandroses.bsky.social · yesterdayIn 2022, before Chatgpt and everything that came next, I participated in this study. It was framed as a research on a new tool that I could try and offer my opinion on. I didn't know that it was trained on copyrighted material.
