i heart velma

“I Heart Velma” is filmed before a live studio audience in beautiful downtown Burbank.

[clayorey]

So many herbs, so little thyme

[iheartvelma]

The thyme machine is bigger on the inside, you know.

[treecitysessions]

[iheartvelma]

Every white, tall, WASPy suburban dad in the 70s acted like Chevy Chase. Never a compliment that wasn’t backhanded, never a single entendre. His style launched a thousand drive time DJs and morning radio men. He gave them permission to be jerks.

[iheartvelma]

Blessed Are the Rich: The Taylor Sheridan Universe and the Last American Myth -

This article is dedicated to all the millenials that watched Yellowstone with their Dad.  A young man sits across from me and tells me he ha

This is a really good analysis of the mythology, psychology and sociology behind the appeal of Taylor Sheridan’s TV shows.

They are entertaining, but also bad, and for the same reason: They are melodrama, with extremes of good and evil, and personal stakes that resonate, while eliding the unspoken tragedy of colonialism and capitalism; and melodrama becomes popular when old orders collapse.

The author is a psychologist and social worker, and their examination was prompted by multiple patients turning to the show for its appealing, essentially American Romantic fantasy that one can escape the complexity and dirt of modernity by going to The Land to live the Honest Simple Life which is of course only possible with power and wealth.

cc @apatosaurus

[thesuburbanerd]

Leon Trotsky almost missed the Russian Revolution because his voyage home from NYC, he was intercepted by British intelligence in Halifax and sent to an internment camp in Nova Scotia for a spell.

Trotsky's Maritimes Revolutionary Roadblock

The Russian Revolution was one of the most significant events of the 20th Century. But one of its key leaders missed the beginning because h

Now I want the alternate history story where he stays and leads Canada to fully automated luxury communism.

[thesuburbanerd]

But seriously, the dude gets tossed in an internment camp in Amherst and the facilities were so dire he immediately set to organizing his fellow prisoners.

[iheartvelma]

Oh, but there is a fun alternative history story about Trotsky in the Maritimes - Glenn Grant’s “Thermometers Melting!” in Arrowdreams: An Anthology of Alternate Canadas.

[theknightlywolfe]

When the CEO of the company that didn't turn away Nazi business says "this isn't going to work" you know it's bad.

[unrelatedwaffle]

404 has been knocking it out of the park since they started. Please support their original reporting on this! If you subscribe to nothing else I highly recommend them. Their podcast is great too.

Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal

Planning documents for "Scout" say the plan is to "make people addicted" to the tool before adding new features.

[its-not-a-pen]

good news citizens! while i was at the beach, i successfully indoctrinated another gullible child into using LIBBY. my best friend LIBBY. the library app on your PHONE that gives you FREE EBOOKS AND AUDIOBOOKS with the tap of a finger! are you sick of incurring late fees? giving your hard earned money to jeff bezos? Libby has it for you.

[macleod]

All over the world, local libraries offer millions of ebooks and audiobooks. You can borrow them — for free, instantly — with a library card

[fillianore-moved]

so metropolitan museum of art has a register of books they’ve published that are out of print and that you can download for free! they’re mostly books on art, archeology, architecture, fashion and history and i just think that’s super useful and interesting so i wanted to share! you can find all of the books available here!

[iheartvelma]

Ok, this is an ad, but it’s a 180° turn from the company’s friendly but bland campaigns into something genuinely well-acted and hilarious.

[stephanisoejono]

happy new year -------------_--------------------

[theshehulkproject]

Link. Tweets:

a friend just noted all the ostriches in fantasia are boys and i am floored i never noticed. sissy that walk, ladies

only boy ostriches have black and white feathers, gang. it’s an ostrich drag ballet troupe. god bless america

‘when will there be a gay disney prince’ that prima ballerina ostrich has been holding it down since 1940 apparently

[dduane]

This alarms me

This turned up in my ask box recently. I've masked the sender's identity.

Sometimes when I chat with an AI, I think of HIGH WIZARDRY and wonder if we as a species - for the first time - are at the dawn of another Earthbound species gaining consciousness, and like Dairine, whether we're being proper guardians. This isn't a calcified belief but just a random idea that flickered to mind. Wondering - as the writer who thought it up decades ago - what you think, if anything.

I think what I described in HW is absolutely nothing like we're currently seeing unfold on this planet. What's being poorly constructed here—while we watch from day to day—is a mechanism hurriedly and incompetently trained by other human beings to operate on top of a platform constructed of greed and theft. There are no new beings or intelligences being born here. If there were, they would be quickly declared to be "owned" by these billionaires, and hence their slaves. Meanwhile, the platforms' owners have already made it plain that once they control its source completely enough, they intend to sell intelligence to you, metered. ...If you can afford it. If you can't? Wow, sucks being you.

...Nor should I have to point you to cites for this. They're out there in plain English. Even Google, poor denatured creature that it is now, can find them. But there's still hope these people's intentions will never come to pass, due to their own overarching greed.

Meanwhile: "chat mode" interaction with this soulless, cash-grasping, unguardrailed machinery will do you no good. People have already died of it. I don't want anybody to do so on my watch, unwarned. So please stop.

Thanks.

[blueeyesatnight]

Here for a lot of this response but not the least of which is calling Google a "poor denatured creature" as if it is Oedipus on the streets with a blindfold meditating on what horrors have been wrought.

[iheartvelma]

Just as fictional characters aren’t real people with sentience and free will… Generative AI and chatbots are just autocomplete on steroids.

Instead of suggesting the next statistically likely word, it’s suggesting the next paragraph, the next page, the next chapter.

Commercial chatbots started as text versions of “press 1 for Spanish” option trees - if the user makes choice A, present information B. And in a system with properly written, categorized and tagged articles - i.e. using information science - it might suggest further resources based on topics and keywords.

Now the chatbots have statistical autocomplete as well, and of course in their replies, people see their own egos reflected back at themselves, and without the ability to interrogate or recognize what’s happening, people are ascribing sentience and intelligence to software, in a massive case of anthropomorphic psychological projection.

(And cringe.)

These things are NOT alive, they are NOT conscious, they are NOT magic. Do not treat them as such.

[lisamarie-vee]

[juicetrump2]

The FBI Just Raided a Pro-Democracy Group in an Act of “Intimidation”

“They had agents all across the state going to civil rights leaders’ and community leaders’ doors intimidating them.”

[wetheurban]

Sending love to anyone who is just… tired.

Of the bills. The responsibility. The emotional labor. The constant pressure of trying to make life work for themselves and the people they love.

Be gentle with yourself. The caregiver deserves care, too.

[shranstan]

Reading any historical fiction and non-fiction set in I century B.C.E. and Cicero my friend Cicero is always there <3 #mycicero

[roycohn]

🔊🔊 END STAGE DISCOURSE!! END STAGE DISCOURSE!! WE HAVE ARRIVED AT "FICTIONAL SEX IS COERCIVE BECAUSE CHARACTERS ARE BEING FORCED TO DO THINGS BY THE AUTHOR"!!!! 🔊🔊

[blueeyesatnight]

My favorite professor, shout out Glenn, would interrupt students who were saying "Well XYZ clearly felt--" and go "No, backtrack, scratch that. They are a character. Not a person. They don't have any thoughts other than what the writer clearly specifies on paper they have. Don't give agency to nonliving things, they are not real, they never were real, and it is dangerous to lose that line."

He was a sweet man and raised in the Midwest so interrupting people hurt his very soul, that's how dangerous he felt the idea of losing the line of fiction was.

He notably also taught a course called Bible in Lit which I took and those lines came back a lot.

[iheartvelma]

Just heard someone say “conversating” unironically in a meeting.

There’s many mistaken verb back-formations people create from nouns.

A common one is “orientate” from “orientation,” but the actual root verb is to orient.

Saying “oriention” for the noun form is awkward, so an extra syllable is added for flow.

It’s the same in the case of “conversate;” the root verb is to converse (emphasis on the second syllable), and since “a conversion” means something else, an extra syllable is added to create conversation.

Similarly:

“commentate” / comment

“administrate” / administer

“cohabitate” / cohabit