Tootfinder

The January wildfires that ripped through Los Angeles forced the state to spend billions in disaster aid
-- and delay tax filings for LA residents.
The cost of Medi-Cal,
the state-run health insurance program for low-income residents, ballooned to $6 billion more than anticipated.
Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff policies rocked the stock market,
which California heavily relies on for tax revenue.
And the state lodged a flurry of lawsuits again…

Your one-minute guide to California’s budget outlook this year
Spoiler alert: California’s deficit grows, uncertainty looms, and state leaders may have fewer options than before to tackle it.

I: Lookie! 120 FPS to the dot! 1440p FSR4 Quality! Ultra, not High, RT! Perfectly paced 4x Multi Frame Generation with insanely acceptable lag!
That one guy: dislike
It just hurts my feelings, you know 😀

Calling it “divisive” to document the honest brutality of American slavery and lynching is an attempt to erase the uncomfortable truth of racial terror.
Government efforts to remove such important history from both curricula and public institutions are efforts of deliberate whitewashing, propaganda to protect a mythology of American innocence.
Sanitizing the past protects power, not feelings.
(Clint Smith is always required reading.

The Power of Private Museums
Montgomery shows what’s possible when museums aren’t subject to capricious executive orders.

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

All worry is laid to waste.
The endorphins rushing wild from the freezing water,
the music pounding through my body,
the caffeine,
the fucking ducks and the God-roiling sky
– no what-ifs,
no yeah-buts,
no what-abouts, 
no caveats, at all.
I am made happy,
and that happiness is entire and incontestable.
And all the way home, I go
— to my beautiful waking wife
– on this, the best day ever.
Love, Nick Cave

Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files - Issue #344 - Which song comes to mind when you are genuinely joyful? I mean, carefree, energy flowing, dancing, moving, kind of happy?
Dear Marianne, This morning, I got up at five, I couldn’t sleep, I’d fretted about this and I’d fretted about that. The night had played...

Today's alarm in the Radisson Blu Hotel will just be a DRILL!
Der heutige Alarm im Radisson Blu Hotel ist nur eine ÜBUNG!
#radissonbluhotel #39c3

Mexico announces a 30% tax incentive for film and TV productions in Mexico, even as the Trump administration pressures studios to shoot more films in the US (Scott Roxborough/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/m

Salma Hayek, Mexican President Back New 30 Percent Film Tax Incentive
Mexico unveils a series of incentives to support local cinema and attract international productions, just as the Trump government is threatening tariffs.

Large eddy simulation of turbulent swirl-stabilized flames using the front propagation formulation: impact of the resolved flame thickness
Ruochen Guo, Yunde Su, Yuewen Jiang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21940 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21940 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.21940
arXiv:2602.21940v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This work extends the front propagation formulation (FPF) combustion model to large eddy simulation (LES) of swirl-stabilized turbulent premixed flames and investigates the effects of resolved flame thickness on the predicted flame dynamics. The FPF method is designed to mitigate the spurious propagation of under-resolved flames while preserving the reaction characteristics of filtered flame fronts. In this study, the model is extended to account for non-adiabatic effects and is coupled with an improved sub-filter flame speed estimation that resolves the inconsistency arising from heat-release effects on local sub-filter turbulence. The performance of the extended FPF method is validated by LES of the TECFLAM swirl-stabilized burner, where the results agree well with experimental measurements. The simulations reveal that the stretching of vortical structures in the outer shear layer leads to the formation of trapped flame pockets, which are identified as the physical mechanism responsible for the secondary temperature peaks observed in the experiment. The prediction of this phenomenon is shown to be strongly dependent on the resolved flame thickness, when the filter size is used for modeling sub-filter flame wrinklings. Without proper modeling of the chemical steepening effects, the thickness of the resolved flame brush is over-predicted, causing the flame consumption rate to be under-estimated. Consequently, the flame brush detaches from the outer shear layer, resulting in a failure to capture the flame pockets and the associated secondary temperature peaks.
toXiv_bot_toot

Freud: spends hours and hours dissecting phallic fish, looking for actual phalluses but failing to find them.
Later, Freud: everything is subconsciously phallic imagery! I ^H^HPeople constantly imagine phalluses even when they're not aware that's what they're doing!

📝How a 10’ coding session with copilot 🧑🏻‍💻 added tags to 10 years of blogging #hugo

Add tags automatically to this blog · Technical inconsistencies blog
When starting this blog, I didn’t think about adding tags. As time passed, I wondered about adding them, but back-filling them was a chore. But with LLMs, this can be done relatively quickly and easily: Pass the LLM some text, and it will happily tell you which tags you might use. And, while you’re at it, it can create the script to call the LLM on all the posts and the code to visualize tags (which were previously hidden).