“Starship Stormtroopers:” Writer Michael Moorcock writes about the prevalence of fascist themes in science fiction and fantasy. This 1977 essay is extremely relevant today. libcom.org/article/s…

Finding a dead bug floating around in your water glass is bad, but not finding the bug is worse.

Hitachi K-88 Portable Television (1978) reddit.com/r/cassett…

The dog needs eye drops. I give her a treat before and after to offset the discomfort and I put the treats up on a high shelf before starting the procedure.

This morning I stepped away for a few minutes and when I came back, Julie told me the treats were gone. Minnie had climbed up on a chair so she could get to the shelf and eat them.

That’s pretty good for a senior dog with kidney failure who seemed in June to be on the verge of death!

Should you bring an iced latte to a job interview? Apparently Generation Z is doing that, which some employers say is a big nope. I have not been on an in-person job interview in … decades. I can’t imagine bringing a beverage of any kind in to one – not iced coffee, not ho...

Hal Jordan and John Stewart are modeling the mentor/mentee relationship poorly.

There is a unique disappointment when you ordered something fun from Amazon and you see the package at your front door and you open it and you see that it is the toothbrushes which you had momentarily forgotten you also ordered.

The Imaginary Worlds podcast reflects on how “myths like Pygmalion or Pandora reflect primal human desires and fears that have an effect on the development of AI," and talks with “audio journalist Rebecca Nolan about her experience trying to bring her father back from the underworld as a chatbot.”

Spoiler alert: Nolan thinks making chatbots of your dead loved ones is a terrible idea and spoiled the process of grieving for her long-term.

The Munsters puzzle art (1965) www.tumblr.com/atomic-ch…

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo has turned to writing mysteries late in his career, and he is great at it. His latest, Under the Falls, hooked me in a way that fiction rarely does anymore. I finished the novel in a few days while on a recent business trip. Rus...

“The other day, I looked out my door cam and saw an 81-year-old man slowly and painstakingly carrying my heavy luggage that had been lost on a recent flight up a steep flight of stairs,” writes Erin Howell, who set up a GoFundMe to help the man. “He looked absolutely exhausted, and his steps were heavy with effort.”

The man, Donald Johnson, has had to go back to work delivering luggage so he can pay for his wife’s cancer treatments. He has been forced into this grueling work because it is the “only job that will hire me.”

81-year-old Texas man working to return lost luggage to fund wife’s cancer bills sparks community outpouring [The Independent]

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has an intriguing proposal for making content creation for the web a viable business in the AI era: Require AI bots to pay when they index a site and deliver results to users. That would require a gateway, and Cloudflare is, of course, in great position to be that gateway, Prince says.

Prince is articulate, intelligent and charming. But his proposal would be just a new generation of working for the algorithm, the same as people now trying to optimize their work for TikTok and YouTube, and the Google search algorithm.

Can Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince save the web from AI? [The Vergecast with Nilay Patel]

On the Verge’s Version History podcast, Oregon Trail designer Philip Bouchard walks through the history of the brutal edutainment adventure. I am too old to have played the game in school, but we had a similar resource game where you had to provision armies during the Civil War.

The history of Tewodros II, the mad 19th Century Emperor of Abyssinnia (present-day Ethiopia), who imprisoned dozens of British emissaries, setting off one of the most ambitious military expeditions of the British Empire. therestishistory.com/episodes/…

Minnie is physically doing well, but stoically suffering when she wears the collar. I give her a break from it every now and then because she is not scratching at the eye. At least not yet.

A friend said Minnie will adjust to the collar and by tomorrow “she’ll reach the ‘just smash into things anyway’ phase.”

She bumps into things now. I’m probably imagining that I can hear her mutter “fuck” when she does.

Talking to animals is AI’s next ethical minefield: Researchers are using AI to decipher animal calls and communications, presenting ethical dilemmas, according to Bloomberg. (subscription required). Researchers doing the work say that “if humans better understand the interio...

We need to redefine a productive economy as one where we make more things we need more of, rather than one where we just make more things. Cory Doctorow: “Inefficiency is bad, actually”

Minnie went to the vet today and she is improving! Her bloodwork was better than her last visit. I didn’t think that was an option. Of course we’re delighted. She was diagnosed with kidney failure in early June, which is fatal. We transitioned her to a prescription kidney di...

“Once again, a core feature of a major piece of AI technology will actually just be people working in a call center, doing work that a company says AI is doing.” Meta Tests Muse AI Agent Calls That Are Actually Made By Humans in a Call Center

Aaron Sorkin goes off-script: Sorkin on his career, why he’s drawn to uplift and romance and why he remains optimistic about America’s institutions and democracy, despite everything. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/1…

I think a large part of Sorkin’s optimism is that the institutions have worked out extremely well for him — he has achieved the pinnacle of success. Our opinions are always colored by our personal experience.

But our institutions are failing more and more people. They are collapsing.

Anyway, Sorkin is charming, thoughtful and entertaining. I’m a fan. Enjoy the podcast.

Science fiction movies often depict futuristic fashion, which is sometimes iconic and sometimes ridiculous. In the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode ‘Sci-Fi Walks the Runway," host Eric Molinsky talks with fashion historians and authors Raissi Bretaña and Thèresa Winge about “the influence of Paco Rabanne on ‘Barbarella,’ the work of Jean-Paul Gaultier on ‘The Fifth Element’ and the way Alexander McQueen was influenced by dystopian sci-fi, which informed the McQueen style in ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’. Each of these collaborations left a lasting impact on cinema and fashion, from the runway to the shopping mall.”

Leonard Nimoy, Harlan Ellison, and William Shatner on the set of “Mudd’s Women,” 1966 reddit.com/r/OldScho… Special effects designer Douglas Trumbull, pictured with the model of the Tyrell Corporation’s pyramid building on the set of “Blade Runner” (1982) reddit.com/r/OldScho…

Present-day noir is tired because it uses the esthetics of classic noir without the philosophy, she says. “What I love about noir is the cynicism. The bleakness. The awareness that corruption is everywhere, and everyone is complicit to some degree. That violence is not somet...

I stay on Facebook to stay in touch with specific people, whom I could name, some of whom I’ve known more than 30 years but for whom Facebook has become my primary source of contact.

If I were just on Facebook for the content, I could easily replace it with another platform. The content is like police procedurals — one show ends, another starts, and they’re basically the same. (Last night, I was planning to watch the new episode of “RJ Decker” but it wasn’t available yet so instead we watched a “Justified” rerun and it was fine.) Facebook content isn’t even all that good — if I just want to cruise for memes and vintage photos, I go to Tumblr and specific subreddits for that.

But the people are not interchangeable.

My Facebook feed has been nearly entirely taken over by ads and slop, which overwhelms the updates from people I care about. I don’t know if the slop is AI-generated – I suspect much of it is. And yet I find myself scrolling the feed when I’m very very tired and in need of m...