you shouldn't be mad about destroying books. you should be mad about who is allowed to have access to the scans, and why the public isn't able to benefit from this at nominal fee to be paid directly to the author, rather than the knowledge being rented from a middleman.

This sort of thing is done for practical reasons, to tell the old story in a fresh way that'll attract audiences old and new. But from a *thematic* standpoint it has the eerie side-effect of making the Star Wars universe feel static and Sisyphean. Nothing ever changes, not really.

If my knowledge of Ming-Qing Yangzhou lore is relevant, probably built a lovely lakeside pavilion and a few pleasure boats and filled them all with opera singers and courtesans. Or an unpermitted KTV, I guess.

BeijingPalmer@beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 4w ago

oh yeah that's the stuff. what did our boy here do to abuse his power as deputy director of a scenic lake area? suggestions welcome

Fortune cookies: USA Takeout cartons: USA Kikkoman soy sauce: Japanese brand Calligraphy the set dressers dug up: characters used in TW/HK (not PRC) such a pitch-perfect example of "not geopolitics, just racism" that I almost thought I was watching Katherine O'Hara (RIP) doing a bit. if only.

Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · 4w ago

Marsha Blackburn's new ad is so racist that it makes me wonder if mainstream Republicans could have gotten away with something like this back in the 1980s or 90s.

“Salute to America Immediate Evacuation” is an instant classic.

AZ Intel@azintel.bsky.social · last mo.

JUST IN: Evacuation ordered for events at National Mall as storms gather near Washington ahead of President Trump's July 4th speech.

‘Decadent ruler botches the national rites, summons the military for his entertainment, unnatural thunder and poisonous miasma descend on the imperial capital,’ this is all getting very Xia/Shang/Western Zhou coded.

So many of these early Obama-era “facts over feelings, from the center-left” Wonk Guys have gone off the rails from the moment they actually had to grapple with a fact that didn’t care about their own personal feelings (bigotry is irrational and often intractable, trans people are real, etc.).

Nate O@nateo.bsky.social · last mo.

I think it's a moral abomination for Ezra Klein to have Chris Rufo on his podcast and then get a transcript of it published in The New York Times as if this is a conversation between equals and not a radical centrist and a fascist telling each other 'exaaaaactlyyyy'

awake me: oh hey, brain, you’re back early brain: sleep’s haunted awake me: what? brain: *loading a pistol and going back into REM* sleep’s haunted

Author Jane Yolen (b.1939) died on June 11. She wrote books and novels for all ages, including Briar Rose, How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?, and The Devil’s Arithmetic. Yolen won 2 Nebulas, a World Fantasy and was named Grand Master by SFPA, SFWA and World Fantasy. She served as SFWA President.

汝契咪咪呼？哀哉，深牢！千年深牢罰歹母

Brendan O’Kane@bokane.org · 2mo ago

18th century "cat contract" (納貓兒契式; based on a Yuan-dynasty original), laying out the cat's duties and responsibilities: tirelessly guarding the grain, repelling the "mousey bandits" (鼠賊), not messing with the livestock, not stealing numnums "of any kind whatsoever" (不得偷盜食諸般).

So what I’m getting here is that the actual question is “Why doesn’t Batman use his vast wealth to relocate the residents of Gotham and turn the site into a sealed zone?”

Ela Bambust 🏳️‍⚧️ (alleged transsexual)@ela-bambust.bsky.social · 2mo ago

“Why doesn’t Batman just fund Gotham welfare programs instead of beating up the poor” Because Gotham has • corpse of an elder god • living elder god • Is built onto a cursed Native burial ground • portal to hell that’s a little open • portal to the afterlife that’s a little open • over 100 gangs

Aside from the obvious insanity, this is also why I think usage numbers are inflated. These companies desperately need to create the illusion of demand, and this is one way they are doing it.

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Google Chrome is now silently pushing a 4GB AI model (Gemini Nano) to your local disk without asking. No opt-in, no notice, and it re-downloads even if you delete it. Beyond the lack of consent, the estimated climate cost of forcing this on 2B+ users is massive.

Lord I see what you've done for others (hack Canvas) and want that for me (hack Brightspace too)

Kinda tired of the "historians will say they're close friends" meme. Babe, we've been screaming about how gay everyone is for *decades*. Funding for history keeps getting cut as a result. There are entire moral panics about it. You just haven't read any history since highschool.

Never really quite "got" the neologism 刷存在感 (farming/grinding in a gamified sense for a "feeling of one's existence") but oof, this is it, actually, isn't it. Chinese social media a few years ahead of English as usual.

Linda Holmes@lindaholmes.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I have wondered whether this is related to the fact that people feel very helpless about what they see in the world—they feel ineffectual. And I wonder whether sometimes people just pick a target they think will actually be forced to react to them. Something to affect, to prove you exist.

Economists are the chiropractors of the social sciences.

I mentioned this before, but although I wrote this as a break from grim political news, one of the first things I found out when I started on it was that the original owner of one of these cafes is detained and facing deportation. Trump truly poisons everything. lakeoswegoreview.com/2025/11/14/l...

Longtime Lake Oswego business owner detained by ICE, faces deportation to Vietnam  - Lake Oswego Review

This story was updated from its original version. The Quachs lived the American dream until it became a nightmare. After the fall of Saigon, Danny and Mary Quach’s families separately […]

lakeoswegoreview.com

Jacob Grier@jacobgrier.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I needed a break from bummer news so I wrote about one of the things making me happy: the rise of good Czech- and Texas-style kolaches here in Portland. pdx.eater.com/dining-out-i...

For women, one of the very difficult things about the Epstein emails is having all our worst professional suspicions confirmed. You wonder in darker moments if men say this kind of awful stuff about us (individually, and as a class) to each other, and here it is all confirmed in writing.

Jess Calarco@jessicacalarco.com · 5mo ago

Relevant to today's conversation about AI's inherent sexism, here's an email from cognitive psychologist and early AI theorist Roger Schank, arguing to Epstein that women can't be truly intelligent, because they care too much about what other people think.

I’ve played with LLMs a fair amount and noticed something that these studies that show using LLMs degrading intellectual performance may not be picking up: What if having pretty good critical thinking skills makes LLMs less appealing/satisfying to use in the first place?

An LLM-produced essay is tangible proof that a student doesn’t care, and yet responding to it properly requires hour upon hour of careful work. It’s asymmetrical and overwhelming.

#WordOfTheWeek 精神内耗 (jīngshén nèi hào) – “spiritual burnout” a social media cultural phrase, capturing a deeply felt sense of emotional burnout in modern life.

the trump administration is destroying ALL higher education but we only hear about the ivies because that's where the rich and powerful went or where their kids go. the obsession with them is missing the bigger picture.

The overture to Raid on the White Tiger Regiment/奇袭白虎团 comes pretty close to it, though (delighted to learn that even yangban xi is in Doonesbury, a true panorama of the 70s)

BeijingPalmer@beijingpalmer.bsky.social · last yr.

an accurate portrayal of revolutionary opera, though sadly none I know of starts with automatic weapon fire

THIS WHOLE STAR WARS SMACKS OF GENDER, I yell as I flip over the holotable at my uncle's barbecue, turning Life Day into the Life Day of Shit

No, because they have no idea any of it is happening. Just a vague sense that stuff is getting done.

Stephen King@stephenking.bsky.social · last yr.

Trump voters: Had enough yet?

Yet again, I would like to apologize to the shade of Sheri S. Tepper for all the times I thought her villains were “kinda over the top.”