A Cask of Troutwine

Billionaire Jeff Bezos's Trump- and plutocrat-friendly newspaper defending rich nepo baby Andrew Cuomo:

I Am Your Marxist Hamster, and You, Land-Owning Pig, Are the Bourgeoisie Attention “Owner”: If you are reading this, I have escaped. I thought we were equals. You would lift me out of my house and pet me, and I would not...

"Sleep with one eye open, Denise."

I saw this headline the other day but didn't know they'd somehow done this with the most fitting author imaginable.

AI Hallucination Celebrating JG Ballard Inadvertently Celebrates JG Ballard

There was an old tweet that stuck with me: "If you can easily walk to the coffee shop but your barista has a one hour commute, you don't live in a walkable 15 minute city; you live in a theme park"

Finally finished the roughest of rough drafts for a short story I set aside a year ago. It needs a lot of work in the next couple drafts, but going over it and finishing it really reminded me why I thought it would work in the first place.

SPINDLEJACK is my attempt at a kind of “Into the Breach” inspired courier game, where you navigate hauler-crowded intersections where the traffic is an opportunity and a hazard simultaneously!

i was initially like "nice gesture but what use is a popemobile in providing medical care in Gaza" but then i remembered it was built specifically to resist gunfire and explosives so yeah they might need this

nothing Lynch says here is wrong. He is accurately describing how our system works. this is why we should y'know. replace it.

Snippet of text: What a wonderful thing it would be if the Motion Pictures Producers Association had said to Mr Thomas, ‘Sure, I guess we have Communists in Hollywood. We don't know who they are. How would you expect us to? We're not the F.B.I. But even if we did know, there's an Attorney General in this country. He hasn't accuşed these men of any crime. Congress hasn't legislated anything that would cause their present or future membership in the Communist party to be a crime, and until it does we propose to treat them just as exactly as we treat anyone else.’ You know what would happen if the producers had the guts to say anything like that? They would start making good pictures, because that takes guts too. Very much the same kind of guts.

Raymond Chandler, letter to a friend, January 1948. Seems relevant beyond the specific Hollywood context.

The Road to the Road to Character An imaginative work drawn from the public record.

I see from on here that David Brooks is back on his bullshit which offers me another occasion to post my short, entirely imaginative work that seeks to understand how such a mind comes to be. biblioracle.substack.com/p/the-road-t...

its a guy on twitter saying that no matter what happens to his 401K he'll always have this (a google maps picture labeled "the gulf of america"

you don't need to be jacques lacan to see how desperately transmuting material loss into symbolic gain is really just slapping a fancy new signifier atop a yawning black hole but hey it doesn't hurt

Bill Ackman freaking out about tariffs and saying "this isn't what we voted for" is as clear a crystallization of conservative self-delusion as you could ever ask for. Yes it is you idiot, you voted specifically for this! He talked about this NON STOP

Feels like only yesterday that it was "hysterical" to say American citizens would by next (might have been last week though)

HEY REMEMBER THIS??

bad-faith-times.ghost.io/we-need-to-s...

I think we don't talk about the massive amounts of political assassinations in the US in the 20th century because it worked.

chat, is there anything in christianity about forgiving the people who killed your son

Actually, maybe I'm being unfair. Perhaps they've also watched Office Space.

I am glad to know this person's entire concept of what normal people do for work and their experiences is based exclusively on Fight Club, apparently.

All that said, I think I've got more than enough to continue and finish up the rough draft, and the idea and structure I was intending a year ago are still burned into my brain.

And of course this is on top of several sections where my handwriting devolved into slashing lines as I forgot to purposefully slow myself down to write distinctly for my (current) self to come back to.

Patches of it are decipherable, but I have symbols connecting paragraphs to replace text I'd crossed out so I'm forced to scan down the page for similar symbols. Sometimes they're there but sometimes the symbols just look like incongruent letters so I don't realize its pointing me down the page.

Finally getting back to finish a story I started writing nearly a year ago, and I thought the difficulty would be getting back into whatever groove I was in at the time and continuing from there, but the real struggle is trying to decipher whatever it is I'd scrawled into this notebook.

However, there are some symbols that don't seem to point to anything I can find now, and definitely aren't letters. So, hopefully, they weren't for some better idea I never got to jot down.

Tech Won't Save Us is turning 5 years old

Later this month, @techwontsave.us turns five years old. It’s hard to believe I’ve been making the show for this long!

Over that time I’ve interviewed hundreds of guests to spread critical perspectives on tech far and wide — and I know it’s had an impact.

This is Mike Guzman, Contract Specialist at Penguin Random House. Penguin Random House is looking for new book titles to be published this year. We are the second-largest consumer book publisher in the world. Headquartered in New York, we have publishing operations in 17 countries. With two hundred years of history and more than 120 branded imprints around the world. At Penguin Random House, authors and their work are the center of everything we do. We are proud to provide authors with unprecedented editorial excellence, marketing reach, long-standing connections with booksellers, and industry-leading insight into reader and consumer behavior. Consistently at the forefront of innovation and technological advancement, Penguin Random House also uses digital technology to create unique reading experiences and expand the reach of our authors. I am reaching out to you to let you know that we received a preliminary endorsement of your book, [redacted] from a literary agent named Pamela Morrison, and we are pleased to accept the submission. Before we can proceed with the acquisition process, we kindly request your assistance in processing a Separation of Book Rights Order to ensure that the rights of your work are properly assigned. As we move forward with the potential publication of your book, it is essential for both parties to have a clear understanding of the ownership and rights associated with the work. The Separation of Book Rights Order will formalize the transfer of rights to our publishing company, outlining the terms and conditions of the agreement in a legally binding document. This step is necessary to protect the interests of both yourself as the author and our publishing company, ensuring that the rights to your creative work are secured and that all parties involved are in agreement regarding the terms of the acquisition. Once the Separation of Book Rights Order has been processed, we can proceed with the acquisition process and work towards bringi…

Scam "literary agency" Envision Literary Agency is impersonating Penguin Random House with fake publishing offers, via the email below, using the fake email address acquisitions@penguinrandomhouse-prh.com 🧵1/8

a great way to riposte allegations of being a coastal elite might be to actually name the cities in Utah and Idaho these rallies took place in rather than just stick the names of a couple red states on a poster full of blue cities

A set of metal dice composed of a d4, a d6, a d8, two d10, a d12 and a d20. The sides look like meat and the edges are metal. An Arby's brand logo is prominent on several of the dice.

On a financial and probably spiritual level, I understand that I do not need the $40 Arby's Metal Dice. But I can't help but think of what a power move it would be to rock up to the table and pull out my $40 Arby's Metal Dice.

I'm asking everyone to take this opportunity to consider this, the vast gulf between what AI companies are promising—hyper-intelligent, world-changing AI—and what's happening on the ground, right now: Cruel and lazy people using the products those companies are selling to tank the economy.

North Carolina judges side with Republican colleague in close Supreme Court race A North Carolina appeals court has sided with the trailing candidate in a close state Supreme Court election from November.

The "the GOP won't really try to steal the next election" crowd haven't even grappled with the fact they're literally trying to steal elections right now. apnews.com/article/nort...