Sign that I'm raising a nerdy kindergartner: she thought that "merchandise" referred to gaming dice in a sports team's colors. So now she wants a d20 to match her T-ball team.
07.03.2026 00:30
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Sign that I'm raising a nerdy kindergartner: she thought that "merchandise" referred to gaming dice in a sports team's colors. So now she wants a d20 to match her T-ball team.
Just thinking for no reason at all about how our way to show that a character was unredeemably evil on Agents of SHIELD was that they killed their own dog.
Anything that forces you to look at your work with fresh eyes is useful. An instant fix version would simply not be as good.
If you're not under production timeline constraints, finishing a draft in minutes vs. hours doesn't make any difference, so take your time. Make the work the best it can be.
I just did the mostly copy-and-paste job of taking a screenplay outline from a doc and putting it in Final Draft. It's exactly the kind of rote task I could see people being tempted to outsource to AI. But the few subtle adjustments I made more than made it worth the few minutes of extra time.
Now seems like a really good time for some directors/showrunners/actors/producers with deep pockets to launch a new studio that focuses on stories told by real artists without any AI used whatsoever. An ethical alternative to consolidated slop mills.
And after all that, the Pitt/Cruise AI fight scene appears to have been just digital BG and face replacement on multi-angle green screen reference videos of two real live human stuntees fighting.
In other words, like most AI hype — it was a con. www.shokunin.studio/blog/2026/2/...
And if you *pay someone* to tell you to have AI generate text for you, you are a fool who deserves to lose all your money.
Everyone who has worked in publishing or read screenplay submissions for a production company can tell you about the piles of dreck they've had to sift through to find good writing -- well before AI was ever a thing. AI just makes the pile bigger, without copyright protection.
Filling the shelves with AI slop will make it harder to find something good to read. And in the process a lot of talented writers will lose their livelihoods or never get discovered in the first place.
They boast that AI can "write a novel in a day" as if that fixes a problem. But there have always been plenty of books on the shelves. The thing is, readers want quality, not sheer quantity.
And yes, this also applies to sci-fi, romance, YA, and whatever other genres you don't personally respect.
An infuriating aspect of the "Just use AI for everything" era is that when you need to call a company and speak to a human, they don't actually employ people anymore. Even if you do find a number it just rings three times and hangs up. How is anyone expected to do business this way?
I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows. I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.
Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...
Imagine how many problems could be addressed in higher education if university presidents didn't need to spend most of their time asking rich people for donations.
Not sure what drama is happening in the board game space.
But on a completely unrelated note to my above comment, I personally did not care for the film "X-Men 3" when it was released.
Is there a word for the strange satisfaction that comes from feeling like someone is very likely a huge piece of shit and then having that suspicion confirmed over and over by said piece of shit's public statements and actions for over twenty years?
I actually really enjoyed the noir/science fiction mashup in both the expanse books and the show, but I know that tastes vary.
I for one would be more far excited to see anything with spaceships or wizards rather than "alcoholic widower solves the murder of a sex worker in a perpetually cloudy/rainy city" yet again.
Here comes the video analysis:
- Pretti was shot 10 times after they took his gun
- He never "brandished" the gun, assaulted an agent
- They repeatedly pepper sprayed him at point blank range and beat him when he was down
- He was attempting to help a woman who an agent threw to the ground (battery)
We shouldn't be governed by people who get off on the idea that they're free to kill people anywhere on the planet so long as the senators and representatives of their party refuse to use their impeachment power.
What did you just do is exactly the right question to ask. Answer: Murder.
They view people recording with their phones as a threat because for many it is the most effective way to act as a check on a government that has thusfar faced little to no accountability.
Abolish ICE. Fire them all. Prosecute *every single abuse*.
The Democratic Presidential Primary election will be decided by which candidates show enough backbone to present themselves as true opposition. The time to do that is NOW, before it seems like they're just performing for the cameras. Added benefit is that it's the right thing to do.
I berated Simone Biles into giving me one of her many Olympic Medals so you must now all refer to me as a talented gymnast. That's how medals work, right?
Sometimes I think it would be comforting to believe in hell, especially when some of the very same people who most belligerently proclaim their belief in an eternal lake of fire act in a manner that would guarantee them a place there.
That was my takeaway too. She's clearly turning the wheel to her right.
I've slowed the video down here.
In the video that the shooter took, which I believe was leaked to be exculpatory, he appears to yell “fucking bitch” after he shoots Renee Good.
We shouldn't be governed by people who get off on the idea that they're free to kill people anywhere on the planet so long as the senators and representatives of their party refuse to use their impeachment power.
They want their own version of the famous Bin Laden raid photo so bad. Impeach, but also call out the pathetic photo op posing whenever it happens.
The correlation between companies named after the Tolkien legendarium and their CEO/Founder being a chittering skinwalker fingering his own taint at the idea of draining the planet of all its resources and then fucking off to a sealed dome in New Zealand while everyone else suffers is extremely high