drfogout

"there's a touch of the Gallipolis about this Prime Minister" - Clem Attlee, Labour leader and Deputy PM. Said in war cabinet whenever the CoS asked him to intervene. Major Attlee had led rearguard during the Gallipoli withdrawal in WW2. Churchill usually backed down when Attlee gently intervened

What if you set off a nuke in the Mariana Trench? Watch the latest What If? video in collaboration with @minuteearth.bsky.social! www.youtube.com/watch?v=alkJ...

SoI fell into a pattern, when writing practice sentences for Latin, where Marcus and Cornelia always do good things and/or succeed, whereas Lucius is usually doing bad things and/or failing and my students have noticed and are starting to agitate for Lucius to get better treatment.

*Way to go, Delvish

With my other head on.

This plushie is so adorable, I just can't.

*That's true, that troubled and kinky L'Interdit girl is indeed performed by Rooney Mara. But let "Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant but troubled computer hacker," land herself a lucrative perfume account, okay

One week until the monsters arrive. Have you pre-ordered your copy yet? If not, why not? DO YOU WANT THE MONSTERS TO GET YOU (Note: The monsters will not come get you if you do not pre-order the book. They will just be very very very very very sad. Look what you've done! Who's the monster now?!?)

The alleged home tree of the Wood Sprite known as Blood Scratch. His preferred appeasements are bone buttons, tin toys – especially soldiers and farm animals – and Tor Tonic fortified wine. Libations of Tor Tonic may explain his reputation as one Hookland's sweariest sprites.

Check out this very cool @rpg.actor experience, and make your own at attie.ai!

This is joy. This is fuel to keep on. Let it cycle for three or four minutes and then go make the world a little better.

Just a moment to parse the phrase "unsolicited dick pics" and ask what is the going rate and market for solicited dick pics? I may not be the most adventurous satyr in these woods, but I don't hear very much about actual women, even at their most flirtatious, requesting penis portraiture in tribute.

No, Ohio GOP, I'm not going to vote for the spoiler lefty candidate, but I'm really happy that you are wasting your money trying to convince people to do so. And I'm sure that he appreciates you sending out flyers on his behalf.

Hyperbole cannot outrun the fact that three Tubervilles stapled together would make this woman look like Kierkegaard.

Software Verification in Lean on November 7 has reached in-person capacity! If you're interested in attending live, please join the waitlist: A livestream link will be shared with all waitlisted registrants a few days before the event.

Glad Mayor Chow was re-elected.

*I also watch those chess videos, and they have many of the basic problems that art-critics have with AI artworks in general *The games are strangely dispassionate and drama-free. Nobody blunders. Nobody sets traps. *They strip away everything to win with the certainty of a one-pawn advantage

*There are also a lot of fairy-chess variants where they're assigned absurd situations, like 15 knights vs 15 bishops, and they go about the process with their customary solemnity *Clearly chess-fans do enjoy these spectacles, but what's the nature of the appeal, exactly *Heath-Robinsonesque

*It's become very common for humans to play chess along with an AI slider-bar estimating who is "ahead" *How would the AI itself become an AI chess critic, and verbally EXPLAIN to humans how it "knows" who is "ahead"

*I don't think it's "ironic" that Demi Moore plays a horribly suffering beauty-victim in the movie "The Substance" and then retails a substance off the shelves at Sephora *On the contrary, this deliberately plays to a self-destructive element of masochism in the beauty racket as an industry

*A few meters away, the always uptight, wary-and-suffering "L'Interdit" perfume girl has been reduced to jewelled bondage *Not just forbidden, as she customarily is, but chained-up for it

*Also her new brand-extension is an "elixir" now, like a youth-extension elixir for the fading libidos of an aging demographic *And it's *provocative,* that is my point here. The dystopian element makes it impulse-purchase sexy

*You're Gretchen-from-Bremen, you're in Milan buying lingerie to take home *You contemplate the Interdit bottle *Do you engineer it, do you think: "I need to douse myself in this 'elixir' so I can be more 'forbidden' and play hard-to-get with Karl, my on-again, off-again, situationship guy"

"I shall be with you on your wedding night" (Frankenstein) — Bernie Wrightson, 1983

*Okay, but what is it like to *describe* a branch selection that is against board states *Because the human chess critics on YouTube, analysing ongoing AI games, never say anything remotely like that

*It will "hallucinate" and make that up, of course *Hallucination being the "crazy magical thinking ability" that is baked into LLMs themselves, from their get-go

*Well, I can imagine an AI chess-engine that is *tuned* for fun *There are a lot of AI engines that are tuned to mimic the "styles" of human chess players *You would think there would be a market for a chess machine that doesn't remorselessly win, but always plays in the most-playful way

Refreshing to see on a room-service menu.

The citizen who yelled "Shove that ballroom up your fat ass" is, in this hard time, a patriot. Honestly, what is left to say about this level of misrule? What careful critique hasn't been already offered? What reasoned response to this full-on run at fascism and kleptocracy remained unspoken?

Hookland has a lot more Fully-grown Changelings than other places Nokes. You can’t be a decent detective in the county if you haven’t got a tolerance for the unconventional, for the weird. Mind you, I’d say you can’t be a decent human without acceptance for diversity. – #DICallaghan

It's almost as if he's for once trying to tell a fundamental truth, but he can't name names.

Big if we can do it because the NC GOP control the statehouse through pretty wild gerrymanders that normally give them super-majorities when the state is evenly split. If you break those permanently, NC government gets really competitive, really fast in a way that will be good for the state.

Forms of Water xkcd.com/3315/

Lately I've been pretending that he was Ukrainian.

Goodnight from Stephanie Ellis, trying to read the story under the headline: ‘THE DEVIL KILLS IN HOOKLAND’ from across the tram. Goodnight from Jack Belford, following the paths in Long Wolver Woods gilded electrum by the last of the Hunter’s Moon. Goodnight from Hookland.

If you happen to be at Denver's airport anytime soon, there are two signed copies of Kaiju Preservation Society at the C Gates Tattered Cover Bookstore

Software Verification in Lean (SVIL) comes to Stanford University on Saturday, November 7, co-organized by the Beneficial AI Foundation and the Lean FRO. Program and registration: beneficial-ai-foundation.github.io/SVIL2026_Fall/

The very start of the upcoming Neuromancer streaming series. Four people, discussing things

I did my live reading of The Body Snatcher at Geeky Teas yesterday, and I felt great about it. Friends, can I tell you how wonderfully surprising it was to feel the entire house connected to me and the story for the entire time?

Some will tell you that it's a carving of Stay Below. Nonsense. It's clearly a representation of Gedalip. People get lazy with their monsters, don't focus on the details. I mean, have you ever heard of a Stay Below with two tongues? No, you haven't. It's a Gedalip. – Lou Ash, 1982 #VOH

The House Judiciary Committee Democrats have released a report containing testimony from 11 women regarding allegations of sexual assault, including a new rape allegation, against President Trump in relation to Jeffrey Epstein that the lawmakers say has been deliberately covered up by the DOJ.

@neolithicsheep.bsky.social 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Kandy Korn Konoisseurs! @theonion.com

mossy stone steps climbing into the fog, that bright red torii gate halfway up, and a tiny shrine waiting at the top. i'd climb it slowly, just to see what's past the mist.

This is mostly because I almost never wear them, but the way suits involve shoulder pads always strikes me as ridiculous. Like, no less goofy than having a fake six back.

Come the season of the dead, come the commodification of the most tepid and tawdry stereotypes of the witch. We are not your plastic masks. Not your nylon conical hats. Not your acrylic green nails. We are the power to nudge the world. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

Oh, dear. I had the good fortune to meet him a few times at conventions and had lunch with him once in Australia. Such a lovely fellow and of course an iconic figure in science fiction. RIP.

Hey econs: So, Francis Fukuyama dislikes the idea of rational utility maximizers because it doesn't account for thymos. But isn't thymos a statement about where the utility function comes from (and possibly how it is affected by other people), not about whether the actor is a rational maximizer?

Children without a manglewurzels find other beets or squashes to carve into spirit lanterns for Mad Punkle night. Those with newfangled pumpkins carry them along the lanes like glowing orbs in some coronation procession for ancient kings and queens. – Joanna Vickers, 1982 #VOH

*Reverse-engineering, or, how to use AI to disrupt the tech biz in ways it hates and fears *While that activity is still, briefly, legal *"Black October" indeed youtu.be/YtBrjCXQUkg?...