Housemates left a door open; we lived in the woods.

A squirrel got into the house. Housemates, because young men are idiots, chased the squirrel further into the house… right into my bedroom.

They then tossed literally all of my possessions around the room in an attempt to remove or kill the squirrel.

Friends, they were not successful. The squirrel escaped the room and ran further into the house.

Absolutely.

Buy things used, repair and jailbreak what you can, and learn to make things for yourself.

We can’t, at least as individuals, divest from every exploitative system. But, we can remove ourselves from more than we think.

Often enough, you get a better experience out of the homemade and secondary market than whatever the new thing you’re being pushed can give.

You mean ecards?

I feel old. Where are my pills?

Someone for whom the normal and inevitable experiences of suffering (illness, death in the family, natural disaster, etc) have no real economic consequences.

I think it depends on the sport. Then again, I only watch 2 real sports and 1 fake one (wrestling).

Football: absolutely better without audio commentary.

Baseball: it depends. The local broadcast guys can be pretty good for a lot of regular season games.

Wrestling: commentary is part of the TV experience, but not every commentator can be Taz.

Deep Space Nine: “The Visitor”

Yes.

I was the director of a very small summer camp in a former career. For some background info, the camp mainly served kids from some rather infamous inner-city neighborhoods. This was one of the very few black owned summer camps in the country. 99% of these kids were black or brown; I am vampiricly pale white and ginger.

And so, I found myself at a conference representing this camp…. Mostly to beg, coerce, and shame wealthy people there into giving us money (we sure as shit weren’t making money off the families of our kids; most couldn’t pay, but going to camp was safer than any week at home in the city).

On day 2 of the conference I get a text. It’s from the secretary of some high powered individual from Focus on the Family whose name I have long forgotten. He wants to have lunch with me to discuss an “opportunity.”

What the hell, right? Their money’s just as green as everyone else’s. Maybe I can charm the guy into cutting us a check.

So, I say yes and we meet at the fanciest restaurant in the hotel this conference was in.

Friends, I’m not one to believe in possession but something was straight up evil about this man from the moment I sat down. I mean I felt like I was eating with a fucking demon.

The “opportunity,” by the way, was to essentially fuck over the community our camp was for and convince our board to sell the land to his organization. This land was the same space some of the families of our community had been enslaved on. It was hallowed ground.

I ordered the most expensive dish I could find, waited for the food to come, told him to go fuck himself, and then went back to my hotel room and took a shower to get the feeling of being around that…… Thing off me.

I really don’t know how to describe it. It was like sitting across from some kind of hungry emptiness in the form of an old man.

I don’t know what I talked to, but I do wonder if that mother fucker was human.

Plenty of lawyers, at least some of them talented, will offer to defend him for free.

It could make their career.

For work, I teach philosophy.

The impact there has been overwhelmingly negative. Plagiarism is more common, student writing is worse, and I need to continually explain to people at an AI essay just isn’t their work.

Then there’s the way admin seem to be in love with it, since many of them are convinced that every student needs to use the LLMs in order to find a career after graduation. I also think some of the administrators I know have essentially automated their own jobs. Everything they write sounds like GPT.

As for my personal life, I don’t use AI for anything. It feels gross to give anything I’d use it for over to someone else’s computer.

My aunt.

It’s not her politics (they’re awful, but she at least keeps them quiet). It’s more that she’s a combination of excessively chatty and dull.

She will talk about absolutely nothing for hours on end.

Do you know if the doctrine he’s been taken in by is religious or secular in nature?

I ask because I could recommend some books you could get him that just might get the kid to think a little harder about things.

For context, I teach philosophy and religion for some community colleges and have been looking for ways to get these Gen Z alt right boys to quit the propaganda.

While a lot of them seem to be lost causes, there are some who can be challenged to read outside their sphere, so long as what I give them isn’t too overtly “other.”

Depending on what he’s into, there might be some authors who know how to talk to an oppositional reader.

Nah, I reckon we’re better off for Kant not procreating. That guy gets worse the more you look into him.

I’d say that you could replace quite a few high level academic administrators for these same reasons.

They already behave like AI; but AI would be cheaper, more efficient, and wouldn’t change every 2 years.

And I mean that as an insult to admin, not a compliment to AI.

Mr. Burton is a treasure.

MikeSmith2.22.1989

See, Mike can’t forget his username if it’s his name and birthday.

For some reason I find this look to be more attractive than most of Troi’s outfits in TNG.

She always looks beautiful, and all that, but Marina Sirtis could have killed it in a western.

I truly love that the writers set Dukat up for a redemption arc, but that he chose to become worse instead.

People always talk about Riker and the ladies, but Worf also did pretty darn well.

I like to say that everyone is deserving of respect, but few are deserving of deference.