Schuyler

Good luck, babe.

I read it out loud to my wife in rhythm as best I could, and she just rolled her eyes and said "God you love that song" :P

Oh noooo but also you got a laugh out of me. I hope both subside quickly

My friend held the master of the Voyager records!!

We go hard in VT ( basically, I jumped off the first story of a building to evade a snowball only to be met by a much harder object: pavement)

I was RUNNING around my apartment screaming when it arrived.

When I reached out, the librarian confirmed it was the right text, was happy to help, but said it would take a couple of months in queue to digitize. My reply was so RIDICULOUSLY excited, effusive in my gratitude, and happy to wait, that he just went and personally digitized it for me the same day.

I once tracked down a text that was critical to my research that I had known about for a decade but didn't appear to be any extant copies. I finally found a physical copy in some special archive at Yale...

I broke my back in a snowball fight when I was 13.

Librarians rule episode 20000

Jesse!

At the ancient Egyptian adventure I managed, I "resurrected" Rupert Grint and his family when their guide allowed their group to die in the penultimate room.

They were all very nice and we were too.

My 6 & 4-year-old use meditations & sleepcasts to help them go to sleep. But the Headspace AI chatbot cannot be disabled. It's presence terrifies me. I don't need advice, my kids & wife are aware of my feelings & we will likely make a change, but these things are everywhere. Genuine horror stories.

Enough A Eulogy for My Father, Bruce Towne

He was a great dude. At the risk of making things weird, I genuinely think you might enjoy the eulogy I delivered for him in January. I kinda think it has a lot to do with all of this stuff we're talking about.

towne.short.gy/eulogy

It genuinely sucks to live in a state of constant temptation, by the way. Just to acknowledge that. I'm sorry you have to live like that and whatever decisions you're making moment to moment know that they have zero effect on my love for you :)

Years later he revealed that it was a line from the TV show Kung Fu, but when I laughed about that he made it really clear that it didn't make it any less true :)

@jklabs.net knows this story, but when I was a kid my dad insisted that we forgo something that I really wanted and felt most people had, so I gave him the old "if you can't beat them join them"

And he hit me back with "we cannot defeat evil in the world but only resist it within our own souls"

So like, do right, and stay angry

And honestly I think we bring them both together.

Individual capitulation is a moral failure & collective action is powerful. But both of those facts are often captured by corporations or government trying to put the onus of responsibility on the individual instead of accountability for the systems

:(

It all just sucks. And when I try to engage people on the actual moral ground I find that "if you can't beat them join them" has somehow become the shallow moral center of a lot of people I used to really admire.

YES

Did I spend way too long piecing together a fake screenshot of the Nintendo arcade game Arm Wrestling just because opponent Texas Mac sports the best pecs in a Nintendo game? I sure fucking did.

Good mustache too.

Channeling my inner @histoftech.bsky.social

Your Naan de Plume, I presume?

Live long enough etc etc

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

Thank you for the great explanation!

♡♡♡

My wife and girls are coming home today after being away for 5 days. I can't wait. Despite amazing strides in my mental health, I would be lying if I said I slept in an actual bed or ate more than 1 vegetable while they were gone.

My father was always like this when my mother traveled for work.