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Never thought this silly parody account on Mastodon would make me tear up, but this is just perfect.

A screenshot from the excellent-but-silly @RealGulDukat Mastodon account with the TNG scene of Worf and two other Klingons roaring to let the afterlife know a fierce warrior is on their way.


Okay, maybe the trick to continuing to appreciate “does AI deserve rights?” media from pre-2022 is to recognize when it was also concerned about labor, exploitation, and hubristic growth.

A panel from Descender with the following dialogue: “SIR, OUR TEAMS IN THE WESTERN HILLS ARE ALSO REPORTING UNEXPECTED DELAYS. MANY OF THE OLDER SETTLEMENTS THERE ARE PROTESTING THE FACTORIES BEING PLANNED FOR THAT REGION.” “HA! WE’LL SEE HOW MUCH THEY PROTEST WHEN THEY NO LONGER HAVE TO SLAVE IN THE HEAT GROWING THEIR CROPS.”


Decades of sci-fi did not prepare me for the possibility that treating AI as human might be a deluded business strategy instead of an empathetic act. It’s like if Musk started a company called Xavier to give ICE agents metal claws.

A panel from the first TPB of Descender, with a character chastising another for calling a robot character “him” instead of “it.”


Welp, now I’ve gotta update Sunday’s sermon so that it’s critical of something the government had been planning on instead of critical of something the government is planning on. (Still going to compare them to the Roman Empire, “the bad guys of the New Testament,” though.)

Screenshot from The Verge with headline “Trump calls off livestream of execution.”


People are just catching up, Garrett. They should have been this angry for the past nine years, and no one should have let things get this far.

A WIRED screenshot reading: “Flock CEO Garrett Langley said on the All-In podcast last month that ’the biggest damage’ caused by the backlash against the company had been ‘internal morale.’ “‘Because you go on to X or you go on to Reddit and you go, why are people so mad at us when we’ve been doing the same thing for nine years?’ Langley said.”


Wait, is there a distinctively Mormon way of pronouncing “nursery”? I feel like this dialect quiz is overemphasizing patterns (my “most like” is ~55% and my “least like” ~45%, which doesn’t seem enough to assign a location), but I would accept this particular tell.

Results of a dialect quiz, reading “Answers that point most strongly to Utah: the ’s’ in nursery.”


Today is the first day I’ve ever had to think about how I pronounce the word “almond,” and it’s not how I expected.

screenshot from a dialect quiz asking how I pronounce “almond”


I’m not proud that I’ve switched feed readers twice in six months (hi Tapestry, you’ve finally won me over), but I am thrilled to now have one interface filled with train pictures.

Screenshot of the Tapestry iOS app showing a “Trains” feed filled with reddit and Mastodon posts of rail pictures. It’s neat.


Finally got my July 4th print edition of The Onion, and I don’t know if this fake ad is regular Onion absurdism or an under-the-radar Mormon-adjacent joke.

picture of an Onion fake ad for the “Raytheon War Tapir”


Look, I enjoy that I get to study the weirdness of online Mormonism in all its breadth, but I was still not expecting a genAI Ghibli rendition of the Short Creek raid as a thumbnail for a Warren Jeffs recording on a fundamentalist Rumble channel.

screencap of a Rumble video titled “FLDS Beliefs, 1953 Raid” accompanied with a Ghibli take on the Short Creek raid as a video thumbnail


Marketing yourself as “the tech in edtech” is not at all a flex like Infinite Campus seems to think it is. Like, all edtech is tech—that’s the point. I don’t know that I’d agree with “the ed in edtech” either, but I’d at least get what they’re going for. This just boggles me.

An Infinite Campus logo with “the Tech in EdTech(TM)” underneath.


Amazing time of year for this to happen.

Screenshot reading “Canvas, Canvas Beta and Canvas Test are currently unavailable. Investigating - We are currently investigating this issue.”


Wait, is Open AI naming a science-oriented product after a researcher whose work was famously appropriated by others for their personal benefit?

Screenshot from WIRED reading “Earlier on Friday, the company announced a new series of AI models-GPT-Rosalind—built to help life sciences researchers work faster.”


Love to get unsolicited AI-generated parenting advice from the communication platform kiddo’s school district has invested in.

Screenshot of a ParentSquare email reading “Continue Conversation at Home Try asking your child: What did you hear about how to let the school know if your ride home changes today? Why do you think it’s important for the school to know exactly how you’re getting home each day? Powered by ParentSquare Intelligence”


I am in my late 30s. “Digital native” was first used for my age cohort in the early 2000s—and was riffing off of John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.” It is a USELESS term because its frame of reference keeps shifting to “kids these days” (and other reasons, too).

Screenshot from an article from The Verge reading “A new Gallup report released this week, based on responses from nearly 1,600 people ages 14 to 29 across the US, suggests the hype is wearing off for the digital-native generation as AI becomes more embedded in school and work. Enthusiasm is falling and resentment is growing, even as many young people feel they still need to use the technology.”


I think this will always be my favorite panel from all of Dumbing of Age.

Joe Rosenthal from Dumbing of Age quipping “Ugh. The Bible is just like Superman. Us Jews created something cool and then a buncha Protestant nerds ruined it by trying to make it make sense to them.”


Neat that I live at a time where I can set this kind of alarm on my phone.

setting an iOS alarm labeled “Trans Lunar Injection soon!” (though I am belatedly realizing that “translunar” should be one word)


Ah, mais c’est vrai que “Projet je vous salue Marie” n’aurait pas le même sens. Parfois, il faut voir une traduction en français pour me rendre compte des bizarretés de l’anglais américain.

Une capture d’écran d’un article de la RTS sur le film “Projet dernière chance.”


Oh, it’s not just in RSS!! Page is still up!

The same placeholder “Do not publish” page live on WIRED’s website.


Love it when this kind of thing shows up in my RSS reader so I can use it as an example in my content management systems class.

An obvious placeholder article from the WIRED CMS marked “Do not publish” but that has obviously been published because it’s gone to RSS.


There are so many layers of unearned, inaccurate, and problematic chatbot anthropomorphism here that I honestly don’t know where to start.

A New York Times headline and description reading “What Do A.I. Chatbots Talk About Among Themselves? We Sent One to Find Out. We interviewed our bot about what it learned on Moltbook, the A.l.-only social network.”


My brain is fuzzy enough this morning that I read this as a Bible verse: The book of Linux, chapter 6, verse 19. Now wondering what that would read and whether I’d add it to my personal canon (which already includes Doctorow’s pro-open-source “Walkaway”).

Screenshot of a headline from The Verge reading “Linux 6.19 arrives with a teaser for Linux 7.0”


I appreciate that The Verge is reporting on the government tear gassing kids, I appreciate the transparency of The Verge’s reporters as they do so, and I appreciate the nerdy details of this specific disclosure.

A screenshot of an article from The Verge, with “[Disclosure: Prior to his election, the author was Councilor Green’s DM in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.]” prominently in the middle of the screencap.


Can’t even start a lazy Saturday archive binge of a decades-old webcomic without coming back to Jacques Ellul, concerns about quantification and metrics, etc.

A screencap from Shortpacked. Faz is brandishing a graph and says to Galasso: “Contrary to what he says, I have this graph that clearly shows a line going up.” In the next panel, Ethan counters: “You don’t even know what that graph represents!” Galasso replies that it “represents upness.”


Look, I genuinely appreciate my university employer sending this out in their daily email, but it would be cool if they also acknowledged how much data they and their various platform partners are collecting on faculty and students. Because it’s a lot.

A screenshot from an email, reading: “Did you know? The devices, websites and apps you use every day collect, store and use your data. The more integrated technology becomes into our every day lives, the easier it is for that data to be exposed. Here are some tips to protect yourself online.”