Tootfinder

Encountered: small (8-10yo*) human* of indeterminate race and gender, with bicycle.
I am walking the dog.
SH: [fondling rock retrieved from pocket] do you want some obsidian? It's free
Me: no thank you! It's cool stuff, isn't it.
SH: you have a weird looking dog.
Me: uh, yeah! He's a total sweetheart though.
SH: Did you know if you look at a dog's smile for a long time you'll be paralyzed?
Me: I did not know that!
*In retr…

(Did you know that in the original stage version of The Sound of Music, the thing that finally breaks Captain von Trapp’s engagement to the baroness isn’t the vague, wishy-washy “noble unstated feelings” scene that’s in the movie (and which never worked in my view, despite the actors giving it their all); it’s that the baroness tries to convince him to go along with the Nazis because there’s nothing he can do, and he decides he can’t marry a woman with no convictions. They cut the song from the film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Way_to_Stop_It)

A big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI

Did you know Frank Lloyd Wright had a brother? He played football. Gronk Lloyd Wright.

Did you know hostnamectl is like, literally Linux’s built-in fastfetch? No extra installs, just your system info served hot and so fetch. You’re welcome!
#Hostnamectl #Fastfetch #Neofetch

Did you know that one of the main ingredients of #gravy is mined at the north pole?. It is often made of starch which is a polar molecule. Like oil vast quantities of the #gravy precursor are mined. The south pole presently does not have starch mines . They do have to be careful while mining since …

Bot or not? A short history of web bots and bot detection techniques
– from @…
🤖 https://sinja.io/blog/bot-or-not

A short history of web bots and bot detection techniques · OlegWock
Did you know your favorite website can detect when you're browsing it in public transport or when you scroll it in your bed? Moreover, this info sometimes helps them to fight bots.

Did you know the Palermo Protocol was adopted by the United Nations in 2000 and says “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of people through force, fraud, or deception, with the aim of exploiting them” is human trafficking?
#ice #USpol

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

GOP/MAGA is growing in the fertile soil of an end-times religious cult.
Did you know that 4 out of 10 Americans believe we're living in the biblical end times?
Sure, they're not all in complete agreement about what that means
https://bsky.app/profile/arbiteriapetu

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

Help Calves and Sheep Beaten for Car Interiors #AnimalRights

Help Calves and Sheep Beaten for Car Interiors
Did you know that it takes an average of three cows' hides to cover the interior of a standard car? Take action!

Yes, I'm #ActuallyAutistic!
Did you know that mutations in the SETD5 gene are associated with a rare neurodevelopmental disorder? This condition often includes features like intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and facial dysmorphism.
There are only about 250 people worldwide with this specific genetic change, and I’m one of them! I’m here, I’m th…

DOOM, but you can cut, copy, and paste your opponents ("I don't know why I did this." 😂) #doom #ChocolateDoom

My friend Marty was like "Hey man, Fran needs help" and you know what, Fran is an awesome dude and a great asset to Milwaukee, and he gave me a chance to show & sell my work last year so I pitch a bit of money towards him.
And then more people did, and more, and it doubled the same day, and doubled again since last night! Smashed the original goal.
Community. We build it. Be there for each other. Help when you can.
➡️

Donate to Help Fran Heal and Cover Living Expenses, organized by Francisco Ramirez
Hello, I'm Francisco, most call me Fran. I'm a printmaker in Milwaukee, … Francisco Ramirez needs your support for Help Fran Heal and Cover Living Expenses

Did you know that you can disable #Android apps? https://www.guidingtech.com/how-to-disable-apps-on-android-and-what-happens-when-you-do/
The down…

i'm finna hike up to the used record store and see if i can sell some records
Machine-generated ALT: three photos showcase a collection of 12 diverse vinyl records, spanning genres such as rock, soul, jazz, Christmas music, and contemporary pop, featuring artists like Lucinda Williams, Frank Sinatra, Chick Corea, Ramsey Lewis, Lana Del Rey, Mavis Staples, and Hugh Masekela.

Good Morning #Canada
On June 30th, 1987, a Canadian one-dollar coin was introduced, produced by the Royal Canadian Mint at its facility in Winnipeg. The beloved #Loonie was born. But did you know the iconic Loon image wasn't meant to be the coin in production and only came to be because the original master dies were lost by a courier. We came close to embedding "Voyageurs" at centre ice during the Olympics.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Numismatist
https://www.mint.ca/en/blog/2022-07-a-tale-of-two-designs-loonie

Did you know that in two states in the USA there is no “Democratic Party” but a merged coalition that acts in some ways like the Democratic Party but has different values and a different platform?
In Minnesota, for example, there's the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (which was a merge in 1944 between the Farmer-Labor Party and the Democratic Party), which has values like Democratic Socialism and left-wing populism!
The other one is in North Dakota, the Democrati…

Series C, Episode 04 - Dawn of the Gods
TARRANT: How close were we going to Auron, Cally?
CALLY: Well, you know how close.
TARRANT: It's just that if the Aurons are responsible for this, I wonder what it is you did to upset them before you left.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/304/46

My grandmother would ask every person who lived in Germany (or occupied Poland) during 1939-1945 this assertive question:
"You knew what was happening [in the death camps]. What did you do about it?"
Well, here we are today, we know about the maga death camps such as the euphemistically named (and ambiguously operated) "Alligator Alcatraz" (aka "Alligator Auschwitz".)
When future grandmothers ask "You knew what was happening. What did yo…

Uff finally I wrote the blogpost for a hike I did in May (and you've probably seen the video of it already). But I haven't shared the #photos ans some more background story from it.
I don't know why but this time I found it really hard to write. Maybe I'm a bit out of practice or I just didn't find the right mood for it - I'm not sure.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy…

You know you've been together too long when you book your covid shots in on your anniversary. 🤦‍♀️
But I did check and we are planning on going to lunch afterwards.
We've been together since we were 22. I have absolutely no idea how that happened - it wasn't planned. But here we are - 41 years later. Bloody hell!
#Anniversary

It’s sad it’s come to having to offer this as travel advice, but if you need to fly to the US and are apprehensive, pre clearance through at the US borders in Irish airports is a great idea. You arrive at a domestic terminal.
https://metro.co.uk/2025/06/06/a-us-border-dub…

There's a US border at Dublin airport — here's why
Donald Trump's travel ban is stoking fears but did you know there's a US border where you can clear immigration on Irish soil?

@… Did you know that Humble Indie Bundle 12 had a tier that would send out physical items, including a floppy disk? https://archive.org/details/hib12floppy It was news to me

Humble Indie Bundle 12 - 1.44 MB Floppy : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
In 2014, with the release of Humble Indie Bundle 12, a physical package was available if you spent enough money, including a vinyl, stickers, and an HIB 12...

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Did you know some #copepods can "porpoise" out of the water, even though they are only mm sized? The forces required for them to break the significant surface tension of the water is enormous, 10x larger than other animals scaled to size. This requires swim…

Saturday was one of those days, even if I did get a new gadget to play with. #okwx #genealogy #reunion

If You Give a Writer a Weather Station... – Bob Mueller
You know how if you give a mouse a cookie, they'll probably want a glass of milk to go with it? It felt like I had one of those days today.

Did you know that under KDE you can simply type on the desktop to start programms? No Meta-Space or anything, just type. Even old people still learn things! :D
#kde

Popcorn time.

Did you know someone reverse-engineered the Weather Channel computer system from the 80s/90s and now you can generate your own private weather channel for your location?
https://weatherstar.netbymatt.com

#ArtEnsembleOfChicago
#CecilTaylor
#TheloniousSphereMonk
what else did you need to know?
Dreaming of the Masters Vol. 2

Did you know Bix Caleen had a mission that was cut from #StarWars #Andor Season 2?
▶️ Andor's Tony Gilroy on Season 2's Deleted Bix Mission, Defining Luthen &...

Running #Lando on GitHub Actions. #Laravel #PHP

Meat mention
Did you know you can use bacon to improve a soup?
And you don't even have to do much. Just cut off a few cubes of smoked bacon, put them into a bowl of soup you've taken off the fridge, and heat it all up in the microwave oven.

In both cases, the message is clear:
“Trump is really with •those other people•. Trump never cared about •you•. Trump never really wanted what •you• want. He just wants your money and your vote. He thinks you owe him your vote. Well you don’t.”
You know the playbook. If you’re having trouble coming up with it, just conjure up what the trolls did in your replies about Biden, turn that into a Mad Lib, and fill in the blanks for Trump supporters.
/end

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

Do you know someone who found their way out of a cult, or did you, and do they or you want to help others find their way out too?
I designed a t-shirt for that:
https://bit.ly/CultSurvivor-whitewriting

dennis cooper's keanu reeves interview

Series C, Episode 06 - City at the Edge of the World
KERRIL: To make sure none of his victims did anything rash like attacking the weakest point of the ship!
VILA: It's here, I know it's here.
KERRIL: If you say so.
VILA: How would he hide it?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/306/457

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

Did you know? You can run #ClaudeCode with any other #LLM, for example with kimi-k2, gemini, and grok - all together 😉 🚀
👉 https://

Tell me you're a complete ignoramus without telling me you're a complete ignoramus...

Fun fact: did you know the Switch 2 is merely an upgrade to the Switch so if you already have the Switch you don’t really need a Switch 2?

Did you know I run the world’s most low-key TikTok account?
Here I am, a tired greying man, telling you about the one drink a week I have.
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdBak8kc/

I asked this Monchhichi what they thought of the recent news, but they refused to comment.

Finally got a chance to listen to this. It's important information to know without having to subject yourself to the hate and bigotry of the NYT.
Thank you, @… and #CancelMeDaddy for the episode.
Here:

I've had a number of reasons to want to understand the standards (did you know that the industry work group creating the standards has vested interests in what is/ is not included, what the test method is, etc. So of course you can trust them without knowing the details, right?).
So this👇 is spot on:
https://

I've had a number of reasons to want to understand the standards (did you know that the industry work group creating the standards has vested interests in what is/ is not included, what the test method is, etc. So of course you can trust them without knowing the details, right?).
So this👇 is spot on:
https://

- Mama, did you know Flipper can get a sunburn?
- I did not know that, Marjorie.
- He can. He's a sensitive fish, Mama.

@… Did you know that Haskell’s `do` notation started out as a generalisation of list comprehensions?
Now list comprehensions are a specialisation of `do` notation, and most people don’t bother with them.

Series C, Episode 06 - City at the Edge of the World
KERRIL: To make sure none of his victims did anything rash like attacking the weakest point of the ship!
VILA: It's here, I know it's here.
KERRIL: If you say so.
VILA: How would he hide it?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/306/457

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

Did you know wood bugs are more closely related to lobsters than other insects? Yeah, they are the only land-dwelling crustacean.
No one told me. I nay have a plate full tonight... lightly done on the Bbq!

Long time followers will know that I enjoy a deep joke that optimistically three of you (certainly in #Canada ) might get.
Last night we did a self-entertaining bit where we drove out to Horseshoe Bay to have a drink at the Troller before returning to Deep Cove where–sadly–The Raven is closed and for sale. It was less than nine miles home at least.
As for stops in between, it seems that many…

Did you know Australia exports 70% of its agricultural production, yet 3.4 million Australian suffered from food insecurity last year? # FoodSecurity # CSIRO
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/News/2025

First national stocktake of Australia's food system reveals hidden costs and big opportunities
A new report shines a light on the complex challenges and opportunities facing Australia's $800 billion food system.

Is it plausible that someone who did a psychology degree in the UK in the early 1980s but went on to work in a largely unrelated field has never heard of The Trolley Problem?
I ask only for a trivial reason and to satisfy my curiosity. Backstory is that a UK talk show host took a call in the last week where the caller said, "you know The Trolley Problem?" and he said no, but I am sure he did that only so the caller would explain in their own words for the purposes of the show…

Did you know that RISC really means Rainbow Instruction Set Computing?

Really feeling this right now, but it’s a LOT more than just 2.

@… Just wanted to let you know that my RSS Parrot feed (@…) didn't update today. The website did.

@… The last IOS update broke a lot of things, did it break IceCubes as well? I don't get any notifications any longer. I fixed mail and whats app - but the same trick didn't work on this app. Do you know if it's IOS or IceCubes?

Did you know that the tickets for the world's most important awards ceremony run through Flownative's servers? 😎
I conducted another interview, this time with long-time customer @… from Passcreator. David talks a bit about what's going on and it's really exciting to see what he and his team have built over the years based on a flow applicati…

Did you know, President & CEO of CBS, which just bribed potus by settling a case and canceled Stephen Colbert's show, is named, not making this up, George Cheeks?
Sure they were bullied as a kid, but as CEO, George Cheeks laying down for fascists makes me theoretically ('cause violence is not a good answer) want to clap those cheeks (metaphorically slap him).
Stop returning Paramount & subsidiaries' (like CBS) calls. They wither w/no one to work for them. …

Did you know that many international conglomerates are potentially liable for assisting the occupation of Palestine? I didn't.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/1/un-report-lists-companies-complicit-in-israels-genocide-who-are-t…

UN report lists companies complicit in Israel’s ‘genocide’: Who are they?
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has named several US giants among the companies aiding Israel.

Hello @… did I see you on RailNatter? I just realised your maps are all upgraded since I last visited! They look amazing now. I thought you’d like to know I discovered the three tourist services extending west of Longreach Queensland — PURELY thanks to your maps 🙏🙏
I’ve even gone on the Savannahlander (another excellent tourist service beyond the end o…

Overheard in Cork this morning:
--He's a very holy and devoted man.
--He is. And did you know, his wife is a first cousin of Freddie Mercury.

Anyone who hasn't enjoyed this brilliant Deftones/Britney mashup will probably be interested to hear it, and then you will know my true frustration that, being a Britney fan, she never did an album with heavy rock guitars. Because that clearly would've been fuckin awesome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipk…

You know what would be really cool? A #quantifiedself person influence monitor. Say I have a #Fitbit and Joe has a Fitbit, we could have them detect when we are in proximity (if both people agreed) and then it would let us know over time how being around the other person influenced us - e.g. did heart rate variability increase or decrease (do they relax us or cause stress), did we burn more calories (maybe we usually go on hikes together), did we sleep better that night, and so on.
There are definitely people in my life who I'm pretty sure have significant effects on me in both directions, it'd be awesome to quantify them.
It would also be cool if one could do this without data sharing - e.g. maybe one presses a button on ones device to indicate one has entered x's presence and again when one has exited...
Honestly, I'd totally forget to do this...so something passive would be better - e.g. when you want to start tracking the next time you are around someone you press a button and it scans for electronic signatures and identifies Bluetooth etc. uniquely so that when you are around then it auto knows and can record...
The latter raises issues of #consent and #privacy...I'm not sure how/if one could do this in an ethical manner...but I'd like to have it 😂

The Witcher 4 didn’t look amazing tbh. RedEngine was plenty for what they showcased at the demo.
Unreal is a performance hog if not optimised as was the case with Silent Hill Remake. Did you know the mod that removed the fog showed they were rendering all the buildings which were invisible originally if the fog had existed?
Also, the push for DLSS & FSR is annoying.
just my opinion on things :)

I'm a cow and I know you did me a terrible wrong, but I'm not going to hold it against you. I'm in a very forgiving MOOOOOOO!

@… @… I did not know about this (shame on you, Samir) and I’m totally gonna use it. Thanks!

Good Morning #Canada
Today is "taking a break from packing up the house and going golfing day." Did you know there are over 2,200 golf facilities in Canada, with 90% of those being public. That means golf remains accessible and it's becoming less expensive to get started with lower cost starter sets and growth in the used club marketplace. Here are the top 50 public and private courses as ranked by Canadian PGA members.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Golf
https://golftalkcanada.com/pga-of-canada-top-100/

I had to uninstall F-Droid today because I think they are so alone and you are not supporting(I did follow them today, I didn't even know they are active on the fediverse but they are!)
F-Droid is active on the fediverse and willing to help!
Why not help them in return with a very simple thing just a tiny little follow.
Just a tiny little one...
follow button pressed: BOOM.
Public Service mission accomplished!
It's all about community!

The liberal obsession with optics serves the right and persuades no one. There is literally an active ethnic cleansing happening in the US right now, and the only thing that matters is making that as hard as possible to carry out.
Anarchists destroying intelligence assets saves lives. Every escooter thrown at a cop car is one less escort for a goon too afraid to kidnap random brown people without being flanked by a branch full of bad apples. Spray paint is not violence. Vandalism is not violence. Community self defense in all forms is legitimate.
Make no mistake, these raids are about changing demographics. Demographic trends have been shifting blue for a long time, and the right has, for a long time, been blaming "white replacement." Conspiracy theory aside, Democrats have also been relying on the growth of black and brown voters as a block. The nuances of whiteness as an identity are lost on the current administration and their supporters. They see that "white people will be a minority by 2050" and equate that with the "end of Western Civilization."
The only way to "save Western Civilization" is to change those demographics. Forced birth and forced removal are two sides of the same white nationalist objective. Of course they can't have due process, because they need to be able to kidnap anyone who they see as a threat to their demographic future.
They don't care about optics. The plan is to murder away any threat and flood everyone else with propaganda. There is no mythical middle. There's no one unconvinced. They know this, but they win when democrats buy that myth and save the police the work of policing the protests.
If your protest is 90% "peaceful," they'll take pictures of the 10% that isn't. If it's 99% peaceful, they'll shoot rubber bullets and teargas until someone throws a brick and take 100 pictures from a dozen angles. If its 100% "peaceful" and no one can be provoked, they'll generate pictures with AI or photoshop like they did during the George Floyd uprising and the pictures from the CHOP/CHAZ. Do you have literally no memory?
#USPol #FiftyFiftyOne #50501movenent #resistance #NoKingsDay #NoKingsDayOfAction

Did you know that the White House is actually named for Dana White, the founder of UFC?
Happy July 4th.
#uspol #July4th #UFC #WhiteHouse