tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

Oral sex is the offspring of democracy. Fortunately, God protected Russians from this scourge by creating a throat cancer virus that is transmitted specifically during oral sex. https://t.co/pcMbSuze69

The internet is a big place. We can all have our own fedi. Each of us can have whatever kind of experience, community, connections, etc, we want here.

That’s the beauty of this place. There is enough room for everyone.

Be wary of anyone who tries to force you to be in community with them because of their myopic view of what online spaces should be.

We can make different decisions. We can make better decisions.

Water gets in cracks in rocks, freezes, breaks them open. Maybe our grief - our covid grief, our genocide grief, our climate grief, our ecocide grief - is like this.

#GhostApples - It's an unusual phenomenon where freezing rain coats rotting apples before they fall, then when the apple turns mushy it eventually slips out and leaves the icy shell still hanging on the tree

Here's a photo I bet you haven't seen before.

Buran test article OK-ML1 lifted by the mate-demate device at the Zhukovskiy airfield before being attached to the Myasishchev VM-T Atlant (seen in the background).

After mating, the Atlant will ferry the orbiter to Baikonur.

source: "The Energia blasts off", Mashinostroyeniye, 1990

Title slide for a talk I'm giving tomorrow, because why not.

🎄 Die Hard är ingen julfilm. Bruce Willis smyger runt i ett torn på natten och undviker Alan Rickman. Det är en Harry Potterfilm. 🎄

If you are serious about giving an intellectual a prize for their work, and then you don't like something they write, you should value your own former judgment enough to consider it might be you, not them, that is wrong. "Masha Gessen’s Hannah Arendt Prize has been canceled because of their essay on Gaza" https://lithub.com/masha-gessens-hannah-arendt-prize-has-been-cancelled-because-of-their-essay-on-gaza/

Thoughtful commentary here from Dr. Radchenko. Make sure to read to the end, lest you be triggered by something in the beginning or middle. (Come to think of it, that’s good advice for anything longer than an unexpanded tweet.) https://twitter.com/DrRadchenko/status/1734592206181134714

Abelardo captured on camera at least three soldiers firing into the ground near civilians. The army denies this.

In the latest shocking example of blatant disregard for humanity by western powers, an investigation by Al Jazeera and partners revealed that Frontex, the EU's official border patrol agency, has secretly been handing coordinates of #Europe bound crowded #migrant boats, to a Wagner linked Libyan militia vessel, known for horrendous abuses of migrants.

The militias then arrive at the location to kidnap & return migrants to #Libya.

It's the EU's plan to keep migrants out.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2023/12/11/with-europes-help-a-libyan-brigade-accused-of-killings-returns-refugees

Wow, Zotero & Retraction Watch just stopped me from citing a retracted paper that had been hanging around in my bibliography. How great is that?
#academia

"I hate maths because I had a bad maths teacher"

"I hate books because I had a bad english teacher"

One of these is seen as a perfectly reasonable thing to say. The other one would prompt responses like "why the hell didn't you experience books anywhere other than a classroom?"

COP out. Wealthy countries most responsible for the climate emergency have so far pledged a total of just over $700m to the loss & damage fund – less than 0.2% of the irreversible losses developing countries face from global heating every year https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/06/700m-pledged-to-loss-and-damage-fund-cop28-covers-less-than-02-percent-needed #COP28

Ukrainians are never shy about criticising Zelensky or the military policies and tactics but it doesn't usually make English-language media. Klitschko's comments, which have been trickling from German to English papers over the last 3-4 days, are a pretty big strike, and yet he says he doesn't want Zelensky to leave office while the war is on.

Oleksii Arestovych, on the other hand, has been outspoken about his own ambitions since he was ousted in January.

#Ukraine

Give whoever wrote this headline a medal

We’re hiring a JavaScript developer to work on Zotero “translators” — the pieces of code that let people save metadata and files to their Zotero libraries from across the web with a single click.

This is an open-ended contract role that can scale up and down in hours based on availability and workload. If you like web scraping, APIs, data formats, and exploring sites in the browser devtools, send us an email!

https://www.zotero.org/jobs/javascript_developer

"What is AI? It is a marketing term. It's a way to make automation sound magical. As such it is a way to dodge accountability by making machines sound like autonomous entities rather than tools created by people and companies. Discussion about this technology becomes much clearer when we replace "AI" with "automation" and ask: What is automated? Who is automating? Who is profiting and who is harmed?"
- @emilymbender

https://youtu.be/eK0md9tQ1KY?si=DmIPhir4VQ0tNg3O

1993: on alt.dreams.lucid, hackers discuss the best way to induce lucid dreaming so they can finally get back with that ex, at least in dreams.

2023. “Prophetic, a venture-backed startup founded earlier this year, wants to help workers…
control… their dreams, so they can use that time productively.”

https://fortune.com/2023/11/30/lucid-dream-startup-prophetic-headset-prepare-meetings-while-sleeping/amp/