It’s like a Wimmelbilder of deeply troubling / embarrassing / weird shit. It feels like there should be extra special finds hidden in the details, like a copy of Mein Kampf or a gold statue of Trump holding a smaller gold statue of Trump.

I’m mainly thinking of Tony Blair making the same case for invading Iraq that George W. Bush was, just with the accent.

I’ve got a friend trying to move from the United States to England to escape our current shit show, and I’ve been telling him that England tends to do what America does, just with a posh accent to give it an air of legitimacy.

Rename the ballroom to whatever, but name the restrooms the “Donald J. Trump Shit and Piss Closets”

I never have had to do one of these, and I promise I’m not deliberately trying to ask stupid questions. Would this system be fooled by holding up a mannequin head?

Hold up a photo of any random schmoe?

It seems to me like there’s a lot of talk in the vein of “AI will never be able to meaningfully replace humans at [Task X],” and not enough talk about what we should do to prepare for the possibility of AI replacing humans at those tasks.

Like, right now, AI can create shitty art and write shitty code, but are we prepared for what happens if and when it can do those things well? We’ve got to acknowledge that human lives have inherent value, and not just because they can do things that machines can’t.

I’m out of the loop. Is this ball balancing image a political metaphor with which I’m not familiar, or is this just demonstrating the weird arbitrary limitations put on AI image generators?

Adam Smith does pretty well. I’d say it’s Marxism, mushroom guides, and beekeeping that remain consistently at the top of the rankings. Then you’ve got whatever fiction is currently hot. For a while there it was Where the Crawdads Sing or Demon Copperhead. Sarah J. Maas is currently enjoying an extended streak of very strong sales. The Twilight series went through a bit of a low ebb for a while there but for some reason it’s been selling quite well again lately. Harry Potter used to be a rock solid seller, but one can see that J. K.'s attempts to alienate her fan base have been at least partially successful. It’s interesting to see the trends develop over time.

I work at a used book store. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is a great seller, one of the best selling titles we ever get in, in fact. As a result, we keep raising the resale price on the thing each time a new one comes in, and it keeps selling. I’ve never had to mark down a Communist Manifesto for sitting on the shelf for too long. It’s a textbook example of supply and demand in action… and I think that Karl would kind of hate that.

It’s a good change!

Mirrored:

No, I took it

I got his autograph at a convention once. Most celebrities fall somewhere close to the middle of the “smile, nod, sign autograph, receive money” curve. Tony Todd started asking me questions about what I was doing at the con, what sort of stuff I was looking forward to. He was sweet and kind and giving to a gigantic dork to whom he owed nothing, and he gave me a memory that I’ll cherish forever. He deserves every ounce of praise he’ll receive, and more.

It’s a little more expensive, but not dramatically so

Buying boxes of full-sized candy isn’t even that much more expensive than the fun-sized, and the psychological impact is immediate and dramatic. Every year I hear kids go “Woah, big candy bars!”

There’s a tough lesson I learned about trying to get my friends into board games: It’s easier to turn gamers into your friends than it is to turn your friends into gamers. I’ve learned that some of my friends are never going to share my interests as much as I’d like, but that just means I needed to find people who were already in whatever hobby and start hanging out with them and some of them will eventually be your real friends.

Making and keeping friends as an adult is way more difficult than it seems it should be, but it’s a painful reality.

I didn’t even consider how many people with cardiac issues must be looking at that screen.

“Shrunken SUV” or “Took a normal 2- or 4-door and injected it with experimental growth hormones.”

I swear I see one once a week that would make sense and carry the same number of people and stuff at half the overall vehicle volume.