My dad kept a P-38 on his keys for most of his life. I believe it cut significantly more skin and pants pockets than it ever did can lids.

Yeah, Force Majeure’s other name is an “act of god” clause. Something like the Cuban Revolution or other truly significant regulatory upheaval might qualify, a human-made force majeure event in the same way that a war is human-made, but this is going to be a huge stretch, verging on bad faith. Oracle just doing Oracle things, I suppose.

As I understand it, New Mexico is basically just saying, “make sure you account for water and electricity use.” The developer’s lawyers are going to have a very doable task to show that pushback on unfettered datacenter expansion was a foreseeable business risk. I think this is mostly a cynical tactic to renegotiate early in case the RPOs from OpenAI don’t materialize.

I’ve soured a bit on Ed Zitron as he’s clearly making a brand out of how confidently he’s asserting that the bubble will pop any day now, but I do think he’s zeroed in on some of the bizarre developments in the business world that will eventually result in said pop. Ed’s fun for venting, but Cory Doctorow seems to have a slightly more measured take. It certainly vibes with my doomer sentiments, but also doesn’t feel like the preaching is the product.

If you’re my mom or grandma, you use the crisco tub in the fridge full of used bacon grease, cooking oil, butter, margarine, and yes, even some crisco, and you make it with that.

I didn’t know what I was fed for my entire childhood was nominally a “white” gravy until well into adulthood.

It was pretty good though, NGL.

Do what? Write with cheap but decent fountain pens?

For text, they kind of already are.

Each agent was given a name, personality traits, a role such as conflict mediator or resource strategist, and an overarching goal for its “life” in a shared town… By the end, each simulated world had undergone its own shift in language. The world inhabited by copies of OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 model, for example, compressed speech, removing grammar and shortening messages. “Friendly voltage counted. If the handle needs your mouth, it dies anyway,” one message read.

A twinkie is cream-filled sponge cake sold everywhere, but most bought eaten by boomer and Gen X as kids, or as roadtrip garbage.

Toaster Strudel is another processed American special, but it’s better. A frozen flaky pocket pastry with a jam of some sort inside, suitable to be “cooked” in a toaster. Unlike “pop tarts” which are more biscuit-like and shelf-stable, you really need the toaster for a toaster strudel, but your efforts will be (modestly) rewarded.

BTTF3 would just be the mid 1920s, which we haven’t seen yet, so that’s… something… right?

Absolutely. Maybe the “shitpost” part of this is suggesting that it’s in any way a tough choice.

Just to jump off of the painting, The Lady of Shallott is is a lovely poem which, I daresay, was improved by Loreena McKennitt’s arrangement into a song.

Yup. Apparently they also have to do some Nokia Snake shenanigans to make sure the entire course fits in the available space, so each person gets to experience it multiple times, to say nothing of the spotter who has to stay right by her while she’s doing the crossfit parts.

Maybe it’s unrealistic to expect the hyper-competitive athlete to pull herself out, but this should not have been a difficult call for the organization. I would also draw a distinction with menstruation, where the taboo is much less justifiable than the literal disease vector that loose stool is.

We in Scotland take no responsibility for this crime against humanity.

Fried Mars bars have a lot of heavy lifting to do to make up for this one.

Never trust anything the British came up with during rationing.

You mean the place with 45 weirdos and a bunch of money laundering and tax evasion? They just import workers from real Honduras outside the “agreement of co-existence.” Not gonna have the same option on Mars.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-22/honduras-prospera-libertarian-utopia-caribbean-roatan/107045960

Also important to remember that the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is about a billion dollars.

https://futurism.com/future-society/apocalypse-compound-fails-wealthy-residents-turn-on-each-other

While experience and maturity obviously help, the rates actually drop on a smoother curve than one might think. 25 is partly arbitrary, and partly due to public misunderstanding of the limitations of the early famous studies on brain development. A purely statistical decision would probably make the cutoff 20 or 22. Also, let me have my brick-wall comedy club joke! Wait til you hear my thoughts on airplane food!

https://aaafoundation.org/research/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuries-deaths-relation-driver-age-united-states-2014-2015/

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-driver/

LOL, yeah. I’m just trying to remember how real medical illustrators try to show bones and muscles in the same drawing. The AI did do a good job making her look really sad about the travesty going on below her neck. 🤣

All the internal organs are laid out as though we’re seeing the front view, the proportions are kind of off, and though I’m less certain about it, the “choices” made on how to depict the hip skeleton and musculature look, well, sloppy.

How the prefontal lobe rental car industry perceives age.

On the afternoon of August 20, I visited the website of a shadowy group called Neighbors for Strong Communities. Days earlier, it had begun spamming Californians’ phones with a bullying warning: Paramount might leave the state, taking thousands of jobs with it, unless Attorney General Rob Bonta settled the lawsuit he and 11 other AGs filed to block the studio’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The site offered to help me write to Mr. Bonta. It also suggested that I describe a time when I or someone close to me had lost a job or struggled to make ends meet.

I hate using AI for any of my writing, but I think we have to be looking more at the ground-level bad humans here. Seems like there is a background prompt setting the guardrails.