Arrowstormen

Cover of Mariana Enríquez's short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire. There's an interesting background with a chaotic mess of drawn plants, thorns, and fires. There's some quotes on the right side: "Demands to be read." - Dave Eggers. "Unforgettably brings horror and the macabre to life." Buzzfeed. "Pulse-racingly superb." - Laura van Ben Berg. "Propulsive, mesmerizing." - The New York Times Book Review. "Read these stories!" - Kelly Link.

Finished Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire. Really well written, and really interesting historically and culturally, and the way it mixes Argentina's recent past with horror is great. I didn't always gel with the style of sudden endings a lot of the stories had though. #booksky💙📚

ONE. THIRD.
and countless lives destroyed because of it.

the united states government's almost pathological framing of their violence as liberation is so ghoulish. illegal, deadly, evil airstrikes, a senseless war announced in the middle of the night, and still the framing is "liberation". it's sickening

A lot of problems in this country could be solved simply by enforcing anti-monopoly laws

Give transphobes an inch on anything and they will come for everything.

bUt ItS sUcH a TrIcKy IsSuE

No it isn’t. Everyone gets the same rights. Period.

The real goal of anti-trans policies is to reinforce and police a patriarchal gender hierarchy: a system that puts everyone in a pink box or a blue one, gives people higher social value if they're pinker or bluer than their box-mates, and protects and values the whole blue box more than the pink.

being a working adult means spending 8 hours doing things you don't like and then making dinner and then having no energy for your hobbies and things you like and all of a sudden it's already bedtime x5

Goddess protect me from the evil & cruelty of "normalcy".

This passage from the notebooks of Maya Deren describes the tyranny of the normal more perfectly than I ever could.

Beware anyone who says that something "abnormal" is harmful rather than someone who says that something harmful is abnormal.

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

Georgia was skating to MORTAL KOMBAT at the Olympics exhibition gala

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

I don't know when it happened, but I started replacing most scrolling on social media with reading books and watching shows and playing video games and wow have you guys checked this stuff out??

Mom of 7-year-old hospitalized with brain swelling from measles: I still wouldn't have given my son the vaccine

Ethan's parents decided not to immunize him against measles as they did with his three brothers. Three out of four of them contracted measles. Still, despite Ethan's ordeal, his mom stands by their decision "We're not blaming God for this," said 35- year-old Kristina. "Yes, it hurts, of course it hurts. But God has chosen Ethan for a reason. God is doing something, and we're gonna glorify his name regardless. "And we wouldn't change it any other way" the mom continued. "If I knew this could be the outcome, I still wouldn't have given my son the vaccine."

I've interviewed moms like this—moms who won't vaccinate, reassuring themselves that if their child dies, it's God's will.

It's almost impossible to change their minds, because they believe God won't let them into heaven if they vaccinate their kids, since vaccinating means not trusting God's plan.

Historic photograph from 1880s Stockholm. Two well dressed gentlemen in top hats pose with a dog wearing derby

No matter the era, you can always spot the Call of Cthulhu characters.
Keeper: "We're going to have a serious game with rich characters as they wrestle with trauma & untold horrors, while also learning a whole lot about history."
Players: "Finally! Also, we want a detective dog in an adorable hat."

Wow: Meta has been working on plans to add facial recognition technology to its AI smart glasses. nyti.ms/3Os1oxf

And this was the company’s cynical view on when, and how, to do it:

Israel used weapons in Gaza that made thousands of Palestinians evaporate US-made thermal weapons burning at 3,500C caused 2,842 people to "evaporate" in Gaza, Al Jazeera investigation finds.

“Four of my children just evaporated,” Badran said, holding back tears. “I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?”

There are no words to adequately describe the evil here.

graphic that says no ice in Minnesota itch.io charity bundle

The No ICE in Minnesota Charity Bundle has officially LAUNCHED!

There are 1,439 games to discover for a $10+ donation to Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota!

Purchase the bundle here: itch.io/b/3484/no-ic...

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

French Response * @FrenchResponse X.com Investigating child sexual abuse material isn't controversial. Turning it into political theater is manipulation. Maybe that logic flies on some island. Doesn't fl in France. Elon Musk & X @elonmusk • 3h This is a political attack

My apologies to France, I was not familiar with your game.

My favorite (derogatory) climate denier argument: emissions reduction in one state will not fix all of climate change, so we shouldn’t do anything.

A perfect distillation of the sterile cult of individualism, right there.

I thought you more or less said what the next review was at the end of the Boxed Special? Or did I misunderstand, and that's something planned for a later season? 👀

The trick is to not teach them history, it seems.

in retrospect in the wake of the epstein files being released, no wonder ‘me too’ was met with such anger and ultimately those in power it meant to target never face many consequences

Any particular favorites you'd recommend?

"Florence Craye ran her Powered by the Apocalypse homebrew the other night, Jeeves. Have you played PbtA, Jeeves?" "I have not yet had the pleasure, sir." "Nor have I, Jeeves. Not a twenty-sider to be had. One would think dice technology hadn't advanced since the days of Parker Brothers." I took a harrowed sip of my energy drink. "I tried to roll initiative and was called an 'incurable gamist.'" "Most distressing, sir." "Give Bertram Wooster dungeons, Jeeves. Give him dragons. Give him dice by the handful. I'm a simple man, Jeeves." "Yes, sir."

on Holocaust Remembrance Day

screenshot of text from Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: "The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they're the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive - because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about "Western civilization," while armed brutes try to tear it down by force."

bars

The idea that America needs to occupy Greenland because we actually care enough about native people and want to build oncology centers is enough to make your head fully explode

A cartoon of a news report. The picture shows a government official doing a press conference flanked by goons. The headline reads “A man attacked federal bullets with his body” Underneath the picture is a quote saying “those bullets had families”

US government rn