Jake Wildstrom

Oh, wow. Corey's in for a fun surprise now.

The guy below would like to get you a great deal on windows and siding, and he is _also_ the same guy!

DHS keeps the fuck plane. Lewandowski stays on it and he has to fuck. Markwayne's problem now.

And his asserted rationale isn't even plausible! Pediatricians, psychologists, and pediatric-care researchers as a whole do not have any inherent professional investment in gender transition; they're not recommending it on an organizational level because they themselves benefit somehow.

Extracting text is something good old classifier-based systems are good at. Tying it to specific characters is also not outside of old-fashioned ML capabilities, although the evolution of your style makes that difficult (i.e. a classifier trained on your last 1000 strips will suck at the first 100).

My daddy always told me, "Never bet on anything that can talk." With that dictum in mind, I have a question about the constant string of reports of insider bets winning big on prediction markets: who are they winning _from_? Who are the dumb marks placing bets in pools with known insiders?

I'd never seen a homoerotic subtext to Ruth and Naomi, but I assume they're going to work around Naomi's advice of "give your cousin a handjob, maybe he'll marry you."

I feel like history suggests that unprovoked foreign aggression tends to give the government a huge legitimacy _boost_ (see: Bush in 2001, Zelenskyy in 2022) rather than driving people to rebel, but what do I know?

The Iranian regime was horrifically unpopular with their people mere months ago, and our response to that is... surprise attacks? I'm not any sort of student of history, but I get the impression nothing juices a government's legitimacy like foreign aggression. We've fucked the revolution so hard.

It would be hilarious if a governmental temper tantrum is what finally pops the AI bubble. I'm not looking forward to the economic shockwaves, but since it's gonna happen eventually, sooner sounds better and putting Trump and techbros at each other's throats seems like a nice side effect.

One of the great things about game design from the early microcomputer and console period is that memory and disk space were expensive so those things were _focused_ as a rule and were much better games than if they could've just tossed in everything they thought was a good idea.

True! We have the Pope Lick Monster, who I was disappointed to learn was not, in fact, notable for slobberously violating the personal space of Catholic leaders (Pope Lick is a local waterway).

Back in November, my wife got a bill for $15.56 from UPS for 15 meters of fabric from India, with a reported value of $3.39. The actual tariff was $0.56. The remaining $15 was a $1 "PGA Disclaim Fee" and a $14 "Disbursement Fee". UPS screws their customers the same way DHL does.

I would bet that on a close reading of that invoice, the lion's share of that $40 is "brokerage fees". Those only exist because the import is subject to tariffs, but they're not, in themselves, tariffs but rather DHL's own little side scam.

There are many surprise ovarian syndromes which harm or kill their possessors, and that's why even non-sexually-active people with them need regular gynecological care. There's no male parallel, AFAIK. Testicular cancer exists, but an occasional palpitation by a GP is the basic diagnostic there.

Croque monsieur - Wikipedia

In France the two genders are eggless and eggy, which, y'know, is at least normatively justified.

To triumph in a swordfight, you have to at some point do something your opponent won't expect, but despite its high success rate, the Surprise Blowjob never became a popular fencing technique.

Customer in Aisle 1 (loudly, into cellphone): Yes, I’m here, and I found it, but they have a bunch of different kinds and I don’t know which one to get.

Me: Hi, can I help you?

Customer: I need some rat poison for my husband.

Me: OK, no problem. How big is your husband?

(This really happened.)

Fair enough; "grinding meat" would be a lot easier to grow in a lab than a steak or pork chop. Although that's also the market in which plant-based substitutes are working well. I'm fine with us finding multiple different routes to the same satisfactory result, which may be how it ends up.

I'm pessimistic about lab-grown meat ever becoming a competing product for in-vivo meat; texture and flavor seems to come from utilization in the body. I'm reasonably optimistic about substitutes, though: plant-based imitations have gotten better, and tofu has always been tasty done right.

It's funny how the Persian Empire and Egypt and the Islamic Caliphates and the ethnically Semitic people of Mesopotamia and Israel never seem to be considered as part of "Western Civilization", despite fairly obvious ways they were enmeshed into the fabric of European cultural development.

Vader, despite cinematic coding as a big bad, is narratively clearly taking his orders from Tarkin. It seems like blowing up the Death Star should be the end of the Empire (and, indeed, if, as was planned as a possibility, Star Wars had no sequels, that would have been everyone's assumption).

but neither the Emperor nor the Senate is actually onscreen and we have no idea what they are. In the story presented to us, Governor Tarkin is the single highest-ranking political figure, and implicitly the Death Star, where he spends all his time, is the political nerve center of the Empire.

One interesting thing about Star Wars ANH (taken as a standalone work) is that it basically has a provincial worldview. One never gets a good sense of the scope of the Empire and to what extent they actually control anything. There are a few throwaway lines about the Emperor dissolving the Senate,

There's not even such a thing as a British passport. There are UK passports, which establish identity as British (inclusive not only of English, Scottish, and Welsh subidentity, but other citizen residents of Great Britain) or Northern Irish, or Manx. It's a pluralistic society and that's not new.

Fortunately, there's an easy test for VBNMW cheerleaders: what were they saying after Mamdani won the primary? Full-throated support? They're OK. Silence? Mmmaybe acceptable if they're not NY people. Equivocation or opposition? Fuck'em, they're just conservatives who want progressive votes.

GitHub - dwildstr/unbooklet: Split and reorder pages in a PDF from a scanned booklet Split and reorder pages in a PDF from a scanned booklet - dwildstr/unbooklet

I wrote a little tool to solve a problem that was bugging me. Little code solutions like this always bring me joy.

And that, @jaketapper.bsky.social, is why people call ICE holding facilities "concentration camps". No, they don't look much like Auschwitz in 1944. But they look a lot like Dachau in 1938.

Specifically: many did not have a concerted program of extermination, despite a high rate of death from overwork, disease, and guard brutality. Many, especially early on, were not intended for indefinite detention, but were supposed to be preparatory to deportation.

But it is undeniably a story of how a particular concentrarion camp (Dachau) worked at a particular point in time (1938). And the fact that it's different than the normative survivor narrative is why so many people have such a skewed idea of what a "concentration camp" looks like.