Every year for the past 36 years or so my friend Jay and I have exchanged Christmas gifts that are trapped in some way. Open it without disarming the trap and they’ll “explode” (set off a loud cap, sometimes with accompanying flash paper), fire nerf darts, set off an alarm, or the like. For a […]
As we say goodbye to Mariah Carey for another year, please enjoy one of my favorite Christmas mash-ups. As one of the YouTube comments put it: “A perfect mix of absolute pure evil and Marilyn Manson.”
KQED’s California Report Magazine has produced a beautiful deep-dive series Love You For You, featuring six conversations between trans, non-binary and gender-expansive kids across California with their parents, grand-parents and mentors. Well worth checking out, either at the above link or at The California Report Magazine podcast.
Love you for you: Conversations Between Trans Kids and Their Loved Ones Read More »
A magistrate judge in the ongoing copyright suit against OpenAI has ordered them to turn over a sample of 20 million private chat logs from ChatGPT users to plaintiffs, stating that the protective order baring lawyers from leaking the contents and OpenAI’s own “de-identification” of the logs should be sufficient to protect these user’s privacy.
OpenAI required to divulge 20M private chat logs Read More »
Tom Lehrer worked at the NSA from 1955 through 1957, and a recent thread on BlueSky reveals one of the papers he wrote while there included a bibliographical entry for “Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Remannian Manifolds” by Lobachevsky. Apparently the joke went unnoticed for almost 60 years. [via
Tom Lehrer Easter Egg in NSA Publication Read More »
I started playing Magic The Gathering when I was at Stanford back in early 1994, and introduced it to my high school friends when I went back to Atlanta that summer. One of those friends was Jay Schneider, who has this amazing habit of taking up a hobby and turning it into something world-class, so
History of the Sligh / Geeba deck in MTG Read More »
I just heard Tom Lehrer died yesterday at the age of 97. I first heard of Tom Lehrer reading the lyrics to The Hunting Song in one of my Dad’s old Mad Magazines, though like many of my generation I didn’t realize he was the same guy who sang Silent E, L-Y and a bunch
Remembering Tom Lehrer Read More »
Kaiser Permanente just announced that as of August 29th they will stop offering gender-affirming surgeries for patients under the age of nineteen, following a similar pause by Stanford Medicine announced last month. The Trump administration has threatened to withhold federal funding to institutions that provide gender-affirming care of any kind, and a few weeks ago
Kaiser pauses gender-affirming surgeries for patients under nineteen Read More »
As the latest term of the Supreme Court mercifully comes to an end, here’s your occasional reminder that the current court is illegitimate. Not because senate Republicans blocked any nomination by a Democratic president from even coming to a vote, or because Justice Thomas was caught red-handed soliciting and accepting undisclosed bribes gifts to remain
Reminder that the Roberts Court is illegitimate… Read More »
My seven-year-old daughter hasn’t gotten into chapter books yet, even for bedtime stories, but she absolutely loves graphic novels. One of her favorite authors / cartoonists is San Francisco native Raina Telgemeier, whose graphic novels have become my go-to for bedtime reading after she invariably loses interest in whatever book I wanted to read after
The Cartoonists Club Read More »