Constant Fractal

NEW: I spoke with current and former EA employees to understand how the latest layoff round played out and the realities of daily life at the U.S. publisher. The short version? EA is controlled by an executive class that "cannot fail, only be failed." Workers, then, will always pay the price.

These people don’t want to win; they don’t even want to persuade. They want a world where they are a pure and rarified elite, with none of the responsibilities of actual power, only the smug gratification of being right.

Pope Leo: “Without love, our faith would be deprived of its essence, our good works would be reduced to mere moralism, and our hope would be in vain. Dear friends, we cannot truly love God unless this love overflows into love for our brothers and sisters.” www.vatican.va/content/leo-...

the world order is collapsing, our children are doomed and dutch politicians are squabbling about pig farms and abortions bsky.app/profile/matt...

I think "having better tactics and answers for movements of emotionally reasoning people" is one of the most pressing challenges of the current age. And it's just gotta be acknowledged that liberalism's preferred tactics have struggled to be effective.

I remember people on twitter dot com who found it genuinely shocking that I just don't really value debate as an activity, like in so admitting this I was basically saying I am an authoritarian tyrant. I found this odd! For reasons Alex is saying here - good and worthwhile debate is difficult!

Saw an old guy with the craziest drip today

A good metaphor also for the moral bankruptcy of the techbro slogan, "move fast and break things," that was once seen, in some quarters, as innovative and cool.

there's reasonable places to fight llms! but those are where they're causing measurable harm (screwing over artists, flooding the web with trash, burdening oss maintainers with nonsense prs, using polluting power sources, etc). fight there!

I think I found him

Met tijdschrift Nexus wilde cultuurfilosoof Rob Riemen in 1991 het ‘Europese humanisme’ in leven houden, in een samenleving die ‘steeds dommer en gruwelijker’ wordt. Deze maand verschijnt het honderdste nummer. V zocht hem op in zijn 19de-eeuwse leefwereld.

Most people do not read history books and frankly probably mostly didn't even read their history books when they were in school. They absorb their sense of history, its imports and its lessons broadly from popular culture. So that popular culture matters and shaping and influencing it matters.

Fwiw, been thinking recently about distinguishing theory that is self-referential. During my PhD I found Heidegger immensely helpful because it clicked for me in a way other continental phil didn't. Lots of the secondary lit on Heidegger, however, seemed to have no purpose beyond producing papers.

The end result is a more and more significant amount of my day being lost to tech friction. There is no upshot or tradeoff, it's just the things I need to use becoming worse and more frustrating. And everything wants you using an app now, so the friction continues to scale up with each new program.

Sometimes I have an intrusive thought hoping for The One Horrible Disaster to happen in the hopes it will snap people to their senses. This is stupid of me because if the pandemic and insurrection have taught us anything, it is that people do not learn from horrible disasters. People just die.

I wrote about the genre extensively almost a year ago! azhdarchid.com/against-metr...

I'd rather nobody invade another country just because you think they belong to your "sphere of influence" solely because you are a big and strong country and the strong get what they want.

📚 100 years ago today, Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends opened up a book to their enchanted Hundred Acre Wood. 🍯 🧸🐝🐰🐷 Read the full extent of their stories from a century ago at the Internet Archive. Courtesy of the #publicdomain.👇 archive.org/details/winn...

Detailed study of the dissemination of the spinach decimal point error, which was repeated thousands of times, convincing millions that spinach was a great source of iron compared to other veggies, all faked but caused by citing citations of citations without checking.

"Dr. Price’s latest book, “The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age,” humanizes that world even further by diving into the distinct histories of 21 people from ancient Norse burial sites." #MedievalSky www.nytimes.com/2026/10/11/s...

Dit maakt mij zo verdrietig. Ik ken de medewerkers daar als heel lieve mensen met hart en ziel voor de zeehonden, die verdienen het niet nu zomaar op straat te staan.

This is such an issue everywhere. Yes, lots of big franchises have been written poorly. Most online fan community complaints are about professional writers not catering to terminally online people's head canon (or their poorly kept childhood impressions that became head canon).

Normalize saying "this isn't for me" about popular media you're not into and moving on instead of jumping on bandwagons to hate something, or blindly repeating bad faith talking points, or starting harassment campaigns. Social media would be less toxic if more people did that.

there shouldnt even BE legal ownership of art and creativity by businesses. that shouldnt be a thing. it should be a lease/license with an expiration that needs to be renewed, and otherwise the work reverts to the artist who did it and they can do whatever they want with it. I CAN DREAM

Nikki Bowers - Little Egret, Cley. #Linocut

Katherine’s essay is a great way to cap off a week which also includes @radtranslib.bsky.social’s www.liberalcurrents.com/concede-noth...

the reason “AI will create so much abundance we will have a utopian society” rhetoric falls so flat is that the people building it will never, ever share their bounty unless it is taken from them and we all know it

"The bulk of the military is perpetually deployed on the frontier intercepting raids and launching punitive expeditions in order to maintain the status quo and keep trade lanes open" is a situation the Romans, Han Dynasty, or British Raj would understand implicitly.

One of my least favorite political narratives is this weird idea that it’s *obvious* how to defeat the fascists and the only reason Democrats don’t do it is because they’re feckless/corrupt/cowards.

Ignorance comes at a cost. Everpure's 'stuck in the Dark Ages' stereotyping (on left) shows how little they know about the early provision of data (on the right). Why does ushering in technologies mean mocking those upon whose knowledge we build? Clearly, these companies need trained humanists!

The secret lives of men who read romance books: ‘My life is full of love, so I’m drawn to them’

Reading, and writing, are holy. I love reading novels because they tell me something. They say: "this is what someone believed enough to dedicate months or years of their life to say." This is just as true for the trashiest pulp as it is for the highest literature.

Young man-- there's no need to feel down I said young man-- Pagliacci's in town You can go there-- see the world's greatest clown Now why do- you- wince- so sadly?

Like, this is classic 'aristocrat does not know basic life skills' stuff that has been happening forever, because why would they ever learn to cook or clean or drive a car or any other basic activity if someone else has always and will always do it for them?

if you don't know your own address it's because you specifically don't have to know it. people that detached from reality shouldn't be in a position to drive social policy for those of us living in reality

sliding this link in here in case anyone is like “oh man I really would love to read The Racial Contract but it’s just not accessible!” Also it’s 180-odd pages, and if you’ve not read it, it’ll upend your understanding of the world, and of philosophy, I promise abolitionjournal.org/wp-content/u...

But I cannot stress enough: we have spent decades de-prioritizing and defunding the humanities broadly in secondary and post-secondary education and then we're all surprised-Pikachu-face when we are suffering from systematic leadership failures in exactly those skills and knowledge domains.

To reiterate, "Only white people are capable of empire, slavery or atrocity" - that only white people can do the worst of sins - is itself still a form of white supremacism that imagines white people as the unique protagonists of history rather than recognizing that all people have agency.

It's genuinely fascinating that the US president keeps announcing that he just flat out doesn't know what trade is, he legit doesn't appreciate the concept of exchange and instead views economic activity through the lens of a dragon attempting to maximise its gold hoard to sit upon.

Where is the year going? Get our latest nuggets of microcriticism in the September 2026 issue of Exploits, including writing on The Tale of Princess Kaguya and The Odyssey. Buy: buff.ly/AzNU0so Subscribe: buff.ly/LK0CTtF Read @saraclemens.com's essay on Lestat's live rock show: buff.ly/l51eY9i

"Many of us, rather than regarding voting as one more bit of annoying work that has to be done to keep our governments on track, regard voting as a singular opportunity to express ourselves." (from July 2024) www.liberalcurrents.com/elections-ar...

I just finished a patch for Tlon: A Misty Story: sonneveld.dev/tlon/ It's a 1999 point and click adventure game that's notorious for being incompletable due to a bug. There are save game hacks but this is a proper fix with correct exits and everything. Try it out and let me know how you go!

hi, imperial power expert here! this is not funny, imperial powers only do this when they’re in extreme distress.