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  The great thing about presidential pardons is that nobody gives a shit about them at the Hague.

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  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?

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  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.)

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  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.)

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  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.

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  Well sign me up!

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

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  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....

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

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

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  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. ....

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

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  @inthehands Legislator contacted. Am now going to start day drinking.

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  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,...

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

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

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  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.

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  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...

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  @forestfern We used computers for my typing class. The old guy who taught it had the easiest job in the world. His attitude was "Just try to improve your speed and accuracy on these exercises, and wake me up if there is a fire." We got super competitive, trying to outdo each other's WPM count on the same exercises over and over again. LOL

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  @Legit_Spaghetti Some people actually aspire to be Timmys by being as lazy as possible, but these people don't realize that they are already Timmys. Because they are Timmys. What I'm saying is that metacognition is not their strong point.

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  @Legit_Spaghetti ...Timmy is the type of person you will probably have to fire one day.

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  @Legit_Spaghetti I repeatedly told them that you can't let AI do the lifting for you. We had at least a solid week talking about algorithms. I told them that the only thing more foolish than AI was the person depending on AI to do the work for them.

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  @stux@mstdn.social Oh my god. I know what job I want!

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

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

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  Word is struggling!

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  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...

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  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.

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  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...

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  @mattblaze@federate.social His daughter is looking for a job.