Partial Robot

Explaining inclement weather to Marylanders: imagine a crab cake

For sale: clown shoes, too often worn

“Fascist regimes are doomed to lose their wars, because they are constitutionally incapable of making an objective assessment of the enemy’s strength.” -Umberto Eco

20 minutes in public in Seattle before overhearing a young man detailing his plan to start a company and then complaining about a polycule.

“Clown event still possible” made me literally laugh aloud

Delighted to have made it to the age where I compare pill boxes with friends on vacation.

I really think it’s related to the twin scares of the climate crisis and the pandemic reminding people that no matter how rich and sophisticated we are, nature has a say in what the future we’ll look like.

Everything we are up to is a flailing tantrum against the truth of our fragility.

Plus, they seem to do more of their clearance sales through outlet stores, meaning you no longer get to find a random really good deal on your Target run. And last time I was in there I had to dodge one of those clipboard guys selling phone plans. No thanks!

The capitulation to Trump on DEI and ICE (and before that to anti-LGBTQ maniacs) didn’t help. But even before that Target had become a miserable place to shop. They wouldn’t pay for enough labor to run their stores, leading to empty, messy shelves & absurdly long checkout lines. Brand is cooked.

She did all that to her face just to end up the disgraced former Secretary of Homeland Security. Maybe some of it is temporary?

Right! I forgot what they called the program, but a ton of resentment just came rushing back into my body reading that.

But I’m sure it made a nice revenue graph for some CEO to show off to get his next job at whatever company he’d destroy next.

I think the worst was when they mandated that booksellers try to hand sell certain titles—a huge blow to what made Borders special (knowledgeable advice and good service)

When I started there, we had very few mandated displays, and book and music sellers had a ton of latitude to build displays. We put in special orders to stock based on local concerts, lectures, radio programs etc. Dedicating more and more sold space was a big part of the problem.

Ugh, endless growth means no company is able to just do what they do and do it well—they’re always chasing the next highest competitor, just so the CEOs can work the circuit.

I’m the opposite; I got out before it really went downhill (though the writing was on the wall that the company was going to bankrupt itself competing with Amazon’s stock prices). Though I stayed in touch with folks who were there to the bitter end and I heard how awful it was.

Fellow Borders alum. It was so sad to watch the company pay out so many golden parachutes while falling deeper into a hole.

It was such a nice place to work for a while there.

DHS is taking public comment on a proposed 1,500-bed ICE facility in Williamsport (in a 100-year floodplain). This shapes our community.

@projectsaltbox.bsky.social built a tool to submit a comment in minutes: bit.ly/4s2FFLv

Read the notice + speak up. Silence = consent.

Project Salt Box makes this easy. I used this tool just sitting on my couch. It only took me away from my boom scrolling for 30 seconds and it can make a difference!

I was a vegetarian all the years I lived in Logan Square, so I never had the turkey sandwich, but their spicy peanut butter sandwich runs through my mind shockingly often for something I haven’t eaten in over 20 years.

Come on, bro, just one more war. Just one more war. I promise, bro. Just let us fight one more war and I promise it will fix the region. I promise bro. Just, just let us fight one more war. W-we just need one more war, I promise, bro. It's gonna stabilize everything, everything'll be stable if . . .

Let them eat liver!

It’s wild that this man has kneecapped health science and it’s not on the front page of every paper every day.

I love when we go back to regular regular Jeopardy! (from the various winners tournaments) and I get to feel smart again!

Let Baltimore be Baltimore!

I really worry that five years from now it’s going to be harder to understand what’s true about the world than it was five years ago!

I’ve been reading a little bit about using agentic AI for research/data analysis.

We’re going to be flooded with tendentious statistical analyses that borrow the language of high-quality QED and observational studies without any of the mechanisms that assure rigor.

WE ALREADY TURNED OVER THE VACCINE STONE AND FOUND NOTHING OTHER THAN FRAUD!