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• Post #4386595

  My cats realizing that the kitty camera (Panoptickitty) has a speaker. They all look like Simon's cat in the infrared light, don't they?

• Post #4384429

  I had a really productive morning working on the book. I uncovered a story about an all-Black minstrel troupe/orchestra showing up in a town occupied by the state militia following a race riot. The riot started when a Black man show a white man at a rail yard, and the mob was made up of his fellow railroad workers. The Black troupe pulled up in a lush private Pullman coach. (The response of the paper was Black people are not policed enough to prevent race riots. Sigh.)

• Post #4253588

  Was talking to admin staff today. Her husband is a fisherman. She said he found an object in his net the other day and she showed me a picture and had me guess. I said, rhinoceros tooth. Close. Mastodon tooth. (My tooth guess was sincere because I've seen a lot of Time Team.)

• Post #4253587

  My school is facing layoffs in the not too distant future. I spent a little time today talking to a staff member / union leader and conveyed the notion that no matter who the loudest people on faculty are, the rest of us are locking arms with our union siblings and won't allow management to pit one union against another.

• Post #4150161

  Well sign me up!

• Post #4087469

  God, swimsuits were so slutty in 1910. I swear, they are a sparrowfart away from inventing the swim pants-suit. #ILoveOldNewspapers

• Post #3924665

  The Princess Bride is on but I can't watch it b/c of all of the commercials. I hate commercials. Hate. Them. Can't stand idiots screaming at me to buy their shitty shit. Loud and intrusive, they are designed to make me furious. I hate being distracted. I have a hard time changing the focus of my attention and a commercial coming on is like getting popped in the nose, except there is nobody to swing back at. So I have to walk....

• Post #3615407

  Due to an excellent typo, I offer the world a band name: Inane Asylum

• Post #3582264

  The 4th this year is like celebrating a drug addicted family member's birthday.

• Post #3494366

  So, I put out a message on my university listserve, asking if anyone who was a native Chinese speaker would help me read something. I said that I had run some characters through AI and different models gave me different translations. So a guy, not a native speaker, not Chinese, sends me some AI slop that I have to now have to fucking spend time debunking. It's not the first time this has happened. ....

• Post #3447107

  I really think that we lost something important when tiny local newspapers died.

• Post #2507696

  Also, I think being busy will keep me sane. And off the rumor machine. I told my students that there are no good faith actors online for the next few days. They should watch the AP for authoritative coverage. They should ignore lawsuits, as they are a way of casting doubt on the election and nothing more. Now let's send these fuckers back to hell.

• Post #1837800

  In lighter news, the band will be playing at some labor protests should our union negotiations go as they usually go. We've put together a fun version of "For What It's Worth" with a haunting sweep before the delay on my guitar. At the end of one run-through, the guy singing started jumping around shouting FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!!! and it kind of stuck. We told the union leader that we could do it without the Rage ending, and she was like,...

• Post #1837799

  John Roberts will never have another not-spit-in restaurant meal for the rest of his life.

• Post #1837798

  Reason 10,318 I love old newspapers....

• Post #1837797

  Alright, so the update on the old man. Still waiting for echo results, I think. However, it may be low BP, which is caused by Parkinson's. The only new thing is that we learned his fainting spell was not the first one recently, though this one was much longer than usual, minutes compared to seconds.

• Post #1837795

  I have space nerd colleague. He was an aerospace engineer in a former life and now teaches college math. We were gushing over Artemis in the office today and I mentioned Vera Rubin. He hadn't heard of it. *blink blink* I was like, it surveys the whole southern sky every 3 nights. "To what magnitude? 12? 14?" I looked it up: "24.5, and fainter if you stack the images." And suddenly he got it. Looking for an interview with the folks processing the data...

• Post #1176555

  Welp. That happened. The lack of respect I currently have for my fellow citizens is absolutely staggering.

• Post #1174242

  Trying to compile my must-see list for while in LA. I find planning so stressful.

• Post #1174241

  I spent a lot of time with a document trying to get it to format correctly when I printed the html to pdf. I am now--foolishly, I might add--converting a 2000-page pdf that is still just a wee bit too small to read into Word. This was not my greatest idea. Still, not as dumb as attacking Iran.

• Post #1174240

  Update, the pdf is still being converted into Word. There is no guarantee at all that this is even going to work, but I live on hope.

• Post #1174239

  It's trying to open the Word document! This will be interesting!

• Post #1174238

  I expect it to look something like a Frankenstein baby.

• Post #1174237

  It...looks like it preserved the pagination. The font is still 6 point. I am going to try changing that and we'll see how good it looks.

• Post #1174236

  Word is struggling!

• Post #1174235

  OK, my sad conclusion is that the Word document only looks good as a facsimile of the original pdf. It made weird decisions about what was a footer and seems to have locked lists into cells of a certain size around which other elements can't move. My enormous catalogue of med man sources is, sadly, going to remain in 6 point font. I may have to work from a screen instead of from notes on paper, which I'd much rather do.

• Post #1174234

  I feel like I must have some sort of personality defect that got me personally indignant in completely different public situations in as many days. I don't have a lot of self-esteem but, by Christ, leave me with plausible deniability of uncoolness. Do I not understand how people perceive me? Probably not. But it usually doesn't lead to me being all defensive and doubting and hating myself. In the last two years, 2/3 of the people who made me feel like this worked for the boar...

• Post #1096043

  1/3 of my class used AI on the most recent paper in my Critical Thinking class. This is a disaster. I caught one when it confidently made up a quote in an article I know better than anything I've ever written myself. I looked at the document history, and the whole paper appeared less than a minute after the document was created. From now on, even looking at AI is cheating in my classes. No second chances. Seriously, we need to go back to typewriter labs.

• Post #1096042

  Why are we blocking the Strait of Hormuz? Wasn't Iran doing that just fine? This has strong "You're not breaking up with me, I'm breaking up with you" energy. Trump is saying that a sticking point was Iran not being willing to give up its nuclear ambitions. Now why would they possibly want to give those up now when you've provoked an existential crisis for them, you fucking simp? We had a deal. You ripped it up unilaterally for...reasons prob...

• Post #1018330

  Cancelled my recurring payment to propublica. You get to tell them why, and I said I'd return when they came to terms with their writers' union.