Tootfinder

Office space <=> Star Wars mashup
from the talented
J. John Corbett
#OfficeSpace

Hegseth’s speech was vile.
It was also stupid.
Bulging Biceps Don’t Win Modern Wars
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bulging-biceps-dont-win-modern-wars

Bulging Biceps Don’t Win Modern Wars
Hegseth’s speech was vile. It was also stupid.

OpenAI's Sora 2 generates copyright infringing content, including numerous AI-generated clips featuring SpongeBob, Pokémon, Mario, Rick and Morty, and Star Wars (Jason Koebler/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/openais-sora-2-cop

OpenAI’s Sora 2 Copyright Infringement Machine Features Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus
The main use of Sora appears to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, images, and videos OpenAI has scraped.

Hegseth’s speech was vile.
It was also stupid.
Bulging Biceps Don’t Win Modern Wars
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bulging-biceps-dont-win-modern-wars

Bulging Biceps Don’t Win Modern Wars
Hegseth’s speech was vile. It was also stupid.

Advance Wars 1 2 Reboot Camp: blasting through
AW1 2RC is a compilation of the first two Advance Wars games (not the first games in the series, mind - Famicom Wars and Game Boy Wars hold that honour) with new graphics, the war room separated out into a combined section, and a few niceties added to make the game run a bit smoother. It also has a 'casual' mode which I seem to have been enrolled on, even though I answered "no" when asked if this was my first time playing…

I've been through so many tech hypes. If I'd have to rank them for sheer stupidity, and leave out obvious scams like NFTs, I think the Multimedia Compound Document Wars of the early-to-mid 90s stand out.
Tech companies tried to sell everyone on suddenly having videos in their invoices and 3D searches in their file browsers.

Interesting post on the CILIP website: 'AI Wars - The Libraries Fight Back' https://www.cilip.org.uk/news/712840/AI-Wars---The-Libraries-Fight-Back.htm
Timed for Green Libraries Week, which is examining the environmental impact of AI …

AI Wars - The Libraries Fight Back
Open Fifth explains how library management systems are fending off the AI bot attacks… for now.

Jimmy Wales isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but I enjoyed reading this interview about #Wikipedia in 2025: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/magaz…

The Culture Wars Came for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales Is Staying the Course.
Attacks on the site are piling up. Its co-founder says trust the process.

AI has sparked a new wave of competition in the browser market, as agentic AI browsers like Perplexity's Comet and others compete with Gemini-enhanced Chrome (Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/10/11/ai-browser-wars-agents-google-perplexity…

Browser wars, a hallmark of the late 1990s tech world, are back with a vengeance—thanks to AI
Google has integrated Gemini into Chrome, while Perplexity and Opera have launched AI-native browsers too.

ive figured it out yall

A typically cogent piece from Richard Heinberg.
Good to see this emphasis on the #bioregion as the appropriate scale to think about the (post #collapse) future. We've always emphasised this too, see thread to follow.
Bioregioning Is Our Future - resilience

Bioregioning Is Our Future
Humanity soon will be returning to low-power ways of organizing itself. And in our new age of tariff wars, the tide is already turning from global to regional in trade, investment, and politics. What has seemed impossible may soon become obviously necessary to larger numbers of people.

train_terrorists: Madrid train bombing terrorists (2004)
A network of associations among the terrorists involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombing, as reconstructed from press stories after-the-fact. Edge weights encode four levels of connection strength: friendships, ties to Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, co-participants in wars, and co-participants in previous terrorist attacks.
This network has 64 nodes and 243 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted

FACT FOCUS: With a truce in Israel, Trump now says he's ended eight wars. His numbers are off (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-eight-wars-trump-ended-fact-check-ff41789ca242462c1c0ab65eb4ae8c7e
http://www.memeorandum.com/251013/p90#a251013p90

„Not like women! Women hold grudges.“
Who is fighting 100% of all the wars in the world again?
https://mastodon.social/@MAKS23/115051841278622830

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/oct/21/london-museum-identifies-black-waterloo-veteran-in-rare-1821-painting?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/oct/21/london-museum-identifies-black-waterloo-veteran-in-rare-1821-painting?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

#Belltower News:
Groyper-Wars: Wenn rechte Meme-Subkulturen tödlich werden - Nach dem Mord am US-Rechtsextremen Charlie Kirk wurden Patronenhülsen mit Schriftzügen gefunden. Sie verweisen auf eine gefährliche Mischung aus Meme-Kultur und rechtsextremer Gewalt. #CharlieKirk

Hot take, let the flame wars begin: I never liked the design of the Framework laptops in the first place. Huge bezels. I mean, who needs transparent purple colored usb ports? And I was never really one for camping anyway.

A look at quick commerce in India and China: India's ecosystem is evolving into a retail-media play, while China's is being used as a weapon in platform wars. (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)
https://indiadispatch.com/p/quick-commerce-india-china

Delivering Different Things Entirely
Quick commerce has become a retail-media play in India and a platform weapon in China.

Disney and Webtoon strike a deal that brings about 100 Disney comics titles to Webtoon, with characters from Disney, Marvel, 20th Century Studios, and Star Wars (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/webtoon-disney…

Disney Webtoon Deal: 100 Marvel, Star Wars & More Titles Coming to App
About 100 webcomics featuring characters from Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and 20th Century Studios will be available in Webtoon under a multiyear deal.

Internet flame wars used to end on Godwin's Law, now they start there.

Hawking illegal VHS copies of the Star Wars Holiday Special in dingy parking lots to bring down the Mouse

Combining Blotto Networks and Voter Models to Simulate Voter Behavior in Response to Competitive Election Spending
Renee Jerome
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09697 https://

Combining Blotto Networks and Voter Models to Simulate Voter Behavior in Response to Competitive Election Spending
In the past, the Voter Model has been explicitly used to model the impact of propaganda on a dynamic, interconnected population, and certain factors have been identified that influence the behavior of voters when under outside influence. The Blotto Game has also been explicitly used to study information wars between two opposing parties, whether in regards to a political issue or advertising war. Both the graph theory behind the Voter Model and the game theory aspects of the Blotto Game are rel…

@… is someone who has done more than most to help her compatriots in this dreadful #GazaGenocide. To see her express such despair breaks my heart.
There must be rebuilding.
There must be reparations.
Palestine must be free.
There is no pea…

The Sith Lord's ultimate power is being able to run Star Wars: The Old Republic flawlessly on a penguin powered pc. Come see the dark side of open source tonight! #SWTOR #Streaming #PenguinPC

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #SoundOfCinema
John Williams:
🎵 Star Wars: A New Hope "The Throne Room and End Title"
#JohnWilliams
https://open.spotify.com/track/77K4rM93ibFfwjOk2xQxqi

train_terrorists: Madrid train bombing terrorists (2004)
A network of associations among the terrorists involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombing, as reconstructed from press stories after-the-fact. Edge weights encode four levels of connection strength: friendships, ties to Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, co-participants in wars, and co-participants in previous terrorist attacks.
This network has 64 nodes and 243 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted

My niece is in charge of props for a local theater group and asked if I could try to get these light sabers working.
I have never used one of these but when I finally got it powered on and it said "Powered up!" I nearly shit myself.
I did not expect it to talk.
I've seen every Star Wars film and they never talk!
I got one of them working fine, the other had a spicy pillow so I'll replace the battery and see if that gets it sorted.

Oh come on… *I* know why that is. https://bagarrosphere.fr/@rikefranke/115155357196579448

Waiting for the videos of right-wingers burning their Star Wars childhood toys and their Minnie Mouse sweaters because of Disney being against free speech

An interview with Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia's decentralized model, right-wing attacks and political pressure, Elon Musk, protecting volunteer editors, and more (Lulu Garcia-Navarro/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/magazin

The Culture Wars Came for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales Is Staying the Course.
Attacks on the site are piling up. Its co-founder says trust the process.

Don’t know what to do?
1. Cancel any Disney or Hulu subscriptions and let them know (look for corporate PR contacts, be polite but very firm and specific.)
2. Don’t buy anything else from them.
3. Stop talking about their franchises (like Star Wars).

train_terrorists: Madrid train bombing terrorists (2004)
A network of associations among the terrorists involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombing, as reconstructed from press stories after-the-fact. Edge weights encode four levels of connection strength: friendships, ties to Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, co-participants in wars, and co-participants in previous terrorist attacks.
This network has 64 nodes and 243 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted

Some leftists have criticized #NoKingsDay2 as useless. Though it was the largest protest in US history, it didn't change anything. I would go further to say that protests like these generally won't change anything. Dictators aren't forced to step down by 2% of the population coming out for one day. If they're forced to step down by protests, those protests are sustained. They are every single day. They are accompanied by general strikes.
We've been watching that happen all over the world. Portland in 2020 gave us a taste of that in the US. The George Floyd Rebellion was the type of resistance that actually brings down dictators like Trump. Occasional protests, no matter how large, can simply be ignored. That is precisely the reason the US developed a militarized police force in the first place. You need more, more than the largest protests in US history, more than Occupy, more than the resistance of the 60's and 70's, more than, and different from, anything we've seen in our lives.
And yet... Each protest has grown, and grown bolder. Some have grown more persistent. If you think of protest as the path to achieve change, you will lose. It is not. But it is a path to escalate. Some people, some otherwise comfortable white folks, came out for their first time. Some people got pepper sprayed for the first time. Some people questioned authority, stood up for the first time, and have had an experience that will radicalize them for the rest of their lives.
Protest is not useful in and of itself. It is training. It's making connections. Authoritarian regimes rely on the illusion of compliance, so visual resistance does actually undermine their power.
Liberals like to teach that non-violence is all about staying peaceful no matter what, that there's some way that morality simply overwhelms an enemy. I remember reading Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred in high school. I said it was a threat. My teacher said, "you're wrong, he was a pacifist." Pacifism is a threat. If you can spit at me, beat me, shoot me, and I will not move, if I have the strength to absorb violence without flinching, without even rising to violence, what will happen when you push me too far?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
For peaceful resistance to work, there must be ambiguity. It must not be clear if or when the resistance will stop being peaceful. Peaceful resistance with no possibility of escalation is just cowardice.
My critique then is not so harsh as some other anarchists. If you think that protest alone will work, you're probably going to lose. If you are prepared to escalate, if you are prepared to absorb violence without flinching, then it could be possible for protest alone to topple the dictator. The cracks are already beginning to show.
And then what?
The problems that lead to the George Floyd uprising were never resolved. The problems that lead to Occupy where never resolve. The DAPL was built, protesters were maimed, it leaked multiple times (exactly as predicted). Segregation never went away, it only changed forms. The fact that immigrants have different courts and different rights means that anyone can be arbitrarily kidnaped and renditioned to an arbitrary country. We never did anything about the torture black site. FFS, people can still be stripped of their voting rights and slavery is still legal in the US. The people who control both parties in the US are killing our children and grand children with oil wars and climate change.
Toppling the dictator does nothing to resolve all of the problems that existed before him.
No, #NoKingsDay was absolutely not useless. #NoKings and related protests are extremely useful but they aren't sufficient. But, I think we still need to challenge the movement on two points:
How do you escalate after you're ignored or brutalized?
What do you demand after you win?
#USPol

Media Coverage of War Victims: Journalistic Biases in Reporting on Israel and Gaza
Bedoor AlShebli, Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara, Anne Maass
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06453 ht…

Media Coverage of War Victims: Journalistic Biases in Reporting on Israel and Gaza
October 7th 2023 marked the start of a war against Gaza, which is considered one of the most devastating wars in modern history and has led to a stark attitudinal divide within and between countries. To investigate the role of media bias in reporting on this asymmetrical warfare, we analyzed over 14,000 news articles published during the first year of war in three Western (The New York Times, BBC, CNN) and one non-Western English-language outlets (Al Jazeera English). Exploring the media narrat…

train_terrorists: Madrid train bombing terrorists (2004)
A network of associations among the terrorists involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombing, as reconstructed from press stories after-the-fact. Edge weights encode four levels of connection strength: friendships, ties to Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, co-participants in wars, and co-participants in previous terrorist attacks.
This network has 64 nodes and 243 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted

I don’t care too much about the term “clanker” referring to annoying bots (like idk pharmacy phone tree)—because you can’t insult them.
Instead it’s much better to insult the humans ordering bots to be made to profiteer from them and the wanton suffering they cause.
(Also the origin of the term from Star Wars uses it as essentially a racist slur on sentient beings [droids], which makes it problematic.)

train_terrorists: Madrid train bombing terrorists (2004)
A network of associations among the terrorists involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombing, as reconstructed from press stories after-the-fact. Edge weights encode four levels of connection strength: friendships, ties to Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, co-participants in wars, and co-participants in previous terrorist attacks.
This network has 64 nodes and 243 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted