Tarnport

DO NOT post Debbie Harry or Blondie content in this environment without an obvious blinking headline reading NOT DEAD YET!!! Good lord. Y'all are gonna give us a heart attack.

Psychopaths are a lot like AI. I can't believe I'm just noticing that. The love-bombing and the flattering and the nefarious bloodless reptilian plotting below.

I really think things like the Kennedy Center are distraction and chickenfeed compared to what's up. For the record.

Lately I've been reading about homosexuals, Jews and disabled people inside the Third Reich. There were a lot of them. I knew very little about it, and that's no wonder, but it helps make the situation today a little less shocking. The concept of Honorary Aryan is not new.

I barely knew who Ed Sheeran was before the scandal, but the "apology" I just saw makes things much worse. He's rich, right? And he read the statement from prepared notes?! They don't have publicists any more to stanch the bleeding? I mean, I personally hate him now, from zero, in less than a week.

In a shop we're planning, we aim to feature toys and intimate items based on creatures normally feared or loathed, especially by children - spiders bats sharks snakes slugs crocodiles ants etc. In our research we discovered this site which I thought might appeal to many here: https://www.gagebeasleyshop.com

Matisse. Gouaches Découpés, 1952. I'm not posting this late-career cutout painting for artistic merit, but rather because of how prescient it seems in both forms and color choices. He was an unrivalled talent. #Painting

Hi everyone. @lionelb@expressional.social would like to say that their instance has been down for 14 hours, but they will be back on here as soon as possible. Thx.

A friend sent this from a service station in the USA.

Big news to make sense of words I encounter each day: In Italian there is a noun and its magnified & minimized forms: Casa, Casina, Casona But there are also cutifiers & uglifiers, too! Casetta/Casuccia, Casaccia Pentola (pot) Pentolino (little pot) Pentolone (cauldron) Pentolaccia (piñata game, ugly pot to break) Libro (book) Libretto (small) Librino (very small) Libricino (cute small) Librone (big) Libraccio (pulp/trash) -accio is bad, -uccio is cute These decline for gender, number, etc

The very bad news is that the general public still appears to be absolutely clueless about the dangers of corporate AI. The good news is that when you sit them down to explain it, they are by now very used to hearing downsides and mitigating talk about hyped-up "miraculous" tech. They are also accepting of nuance! They just need someone friendly to take the time to explain it to them in a calm tone.

TIL that lacuna and lagoon are the same word adapted to two different purposes. It changes how I read both. #EditorsNote

In the last days I was twice in the home of a very very old person who does not even have a cell phone or computer. The house is upholstered in bookshelves full to sagging, encyclopedia sets in multiple languages, & hardcopy dictionaries that alone took up about 3 meters of shelving. There is a desk with no pc stacked all around with magazines and newspapers on the floor. The walls are taped over in physical maps and hardcopy photos. It was like a time capsule and I nearly wept both passes.

Only a British person can tell you what "taking the piss" means. Rather, only they will try, and make sense to themselves, and to no one else. As nearly as I can discern it means making fun of, or being made fun of, or spoiling the fun. Those are... antonyms, like twice over?

I knew that there were 3 basic ways to trim olive trees, but today I learned firsthand from a very old man, the son of an olive farmer, why the "right" way to cut them is like this. The downward facing branches of olives produce the fruit, he said, or at least the most fruit. I am charmed (and now have to rethink my own trees). #Gardening

Of all the things that should fell AI, I think the thing that will get it is just how profoundly uncool it is. Even online we are still social creatures and it has no human connection, no swoon. It's the social equivalent of polyester.

Yesterday was a vision of the future: 38c at rush hour in a traffic jam on a narrow sunk channel of controlled-access black asphalt highway, each car a single fragile airconditioned bubble in a cauldron, churning out toxins & rippling heat. 1 jam turned into 4. 1 hour became 2. I started to run out of gas. Cell connectivity flickered. Then I had a random health emergency (better now thx, but I was not okay to drive). It was the 2nd time in 6 days that heat became life-threatening. #ClimateDiary

Carl Moll. Roman ruins in Schönbrunn, 1892. Why don't we hear about him alongside his Vienna Secession peers? It wasnt lack of talent but rather that he was an early, rabid Nazi. So much so that he and his family committed suicide rather than be captured at the end of WW2. It brings questions of objective beauty, subjective intention, the "statute of limitations" we impose on art. No one queries Fragonard's political opinions. But this is too close, too alive. This we do not forgive. #Painting

Hans Memling. The Man of Sorrows in the Arms of the Virgin, 1475/79. Have you ever wondered why many Christian images feature tools like hammers, pliers, saws and nails just sort of gratuitously tacked on? It's Arma Christi, and it's very weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arma_Christi #Painting

Franciszek Honiok Famously he was the first victim of WW2, but we wouldn't know anything about him, or the origin of the false-flag Nazi operation that murdered him and started the war, except for the Nuremberg Trials. He has no memorial and his body was never found. How many others remain unknown? And how much like the regimes we're familiar with the today to plant such false flags. [This was prompted by a TIL post someone deleted earlier and I wish they hadn't!] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franciszek_Honiok

4 separate notes came today to see if we are on fire. Such times. We're not on fire, yet, but I was right in the heart of a parched tinderbox woodland over the weekend and it was so scary, until it rained hard at last on Sunday morning before dawn, rained and hailed for 3 whole hours. It was an awful destructive storm in other ways, but at least it dampened the fuses for a few days down in that driest area. Stock masks, y'all. And keep a bugout bag with car keys in it.

Raoul Dufy. Seaside, 1960. I went looking for happy distraction but even Dufy seems foreboding today. #Painting lithograph

If you are trying to learn another language, here are the two best teachers I know of:

1. Having forced immersive normal conversations, knowing that you are making errors.

2. Translating random blocks of text without the use of LLMs, and then going over them with help for corrections.

Both of these teach me more and faster than anything else.

I've said this before but people seem overly focused on the Nazi comparison. A much more exact and useful comparison imo is Mussolini's Italian Fascism of the 1920s. In that vein you will never run out of parallels. "It's the same picture."

Reading about painting, I often run into the pat phrase "Virgin and Child." I know what it signifies but find it humorous for two reasons: 1. the in-your-face ko-an; and 2. the hijacking of the focus from the singularly redemptive male baby onto a female Mother cult. To me "child" makes it sound like just any kid she happened to have handy, like virgin with psalter or lapdog or curling iron. Stefano da Verona. The Madonna of Humility, ~1430. (Imo this Virgin is anything but humble.) #Painting

I spent the weekend isolated in a small meeting of highly intelligent, thoughtful, driven people. The hardest part but also the best part was how intensely we disagreed on certain basic premises. At one point during a shared meal a woman told me rather matter of factly that she was a Christian. It's a good lesson in what unity is necessary to get things done, and what is not.

When opposition forces these days take down a monument to racist, fascist or whatever oppressive past, they "put it into storage" or in a museum, so careful to examine history and respect its legacy for all. Meanwhile when the Right destroys something they crush it to dust and scatter it in the wind. There is the difference right there, and the so-called left would do well to learn it. The surveillance state only works one way.

He has unexpectedly taken the day off work. He slept until 8! Then waking with uncharacteristic alertness, he first thing asked for "church music;" I was dubious but went as far as Handel, just to see what all this was about. Now, still naked, he's got both arms in the air yelling yes yes yes, bring it girrrrrl, during the crescendo of Coronation Anthem No. 1. I'm thinking I should call for help.

Egg ideas: Microwave gently in bowl ~30s, no added fat Hardboil (boil water, dip in 11.5 mins, cold water shock to peel), less for softboil Salt only after cooking in all cases Scrambled, omelet: add dash of water for fluffy steam, beat, fry (20mins on low-low with constant stirring makes egg velvet) Canton omelet (beat, spice heavily, spread wide & thin, cook well one side, then cover to steam finish) Frittata: flip using a prop plate Oeuf à plat, coddled, poached, thread soup #Recipe

@ChrisMayLA6@mastodon.me.uk I wish there were some way to hold a mirror up for those inside the UK. I squawk about it a lot but it's really a huge problem, a blind spot for Brits and an impediment for all of us, an imperious megalomania which assumes a self worth that no one else can justify.

Ramon Casas i Carbó. Patio, 1889. To have lived in such turbulent times, he sure could capture the peace of home. Even more than his spectacular technology and landscape pictures, I love his domestic interiors, like this one. Like other favorite interior artists, Koch, Valls, Hammershøi, Vermeer, Clara Peters, we can see the same rooms and furniture move around. This is the same porch from breakfast and sewing, and the same table and palm seen elsewhere, and of course the woman. #Painting

@realn2s@infosec.exchange 5. People seem unaware that the military is paying private corporations for the privilege of using AI and that the AI is being leveraged back into directions, control and profit.

1. Do you remember the old catfishing ads? I had success with a version of that, saying would you invite President Putin or palantir to sit here in our meeting today and summarize what we've said and take it home with him. Even if so can you see the risk of that at scale? /End

It took my brain a month of rummaging around in the mental files, but I finally found whom I had cast as Judge Holden in Blood Meridian: Major Briggs (Don S. Davis), my favorite character from Twin Peaks. He's an exact fit for me, so clear while reading: look, tone, demeanor, pontifications. And yet it took me forever to place him. I'm thrilled. Now I'm going to walk around talking like that, pretending I'm the lonely devil out collecting paranormal artifacts. In fact it's not a big leap.

With 32c (90F) in the Arctic right now, it seems inevitable that we will all have forest fires. However, we may only have them once. I wish that were good news. The planet will not grow back as it was.

@lionelb@expressional.social Well aren't you just Jesus's own little Sunbeam this morning? Like he wasn't having a bad enough day already.

Podcast in Italian: "Burnham is above all focused on bringing down the cost of living, for making affordable things like beer and whatever else English people may consume."

@realn2s@infosec.exchange ...will not remain free once we come to rely on it. We all know this model by now.

1. Local LLM models answer many of the use cases ordinary people need.

2. The nefarious political ends to which this technology is being put, the devastating environmental impact... Both are hard to describe in full scale but people are open to the idea that it is so. ...

@realn2s@infosec.exchange 2. We've seen the sneaky "free" corporate model in Google Microsoft meta Amazon x etc etc etc and it's only done bad things. We all know it. I found no resistance to this premise.

1. Just like when we used to upload photos to Facebook innocently the data you're feeding into AI is not private and is being mined by the worst people. I found it useful here to give a few examples of how bad it is. I found it useful also to describe how it's free now but ...

@realn2s@infosec.exchange at first I was going to say I don't know enough to address this, but then thought I could at least share my experience:

1. We are all using AI every day and have been for many years. Every time we use automatic translation or automatic photo editing or traffic maps or many other routine tasks we are using AI. The problem is the corporate model, and the word AI itself which is a marketing term. It's no such thing! Let's call them LLMs.

...

This article on Jared French is exceptionally good: https://www.artcritic.com/en/jared-french-and-the-american-kouroi/ Jared French. Washing the White Blood from Daniel Boone, 1939. Piero della Francesca. Baptism of Christ, ~1450. #Painting

Dalí. Living Still Life, 1956. I won't go into my freely-associating thoughts about this painting, but I just want to point out that it's often tagged on the internet as containing phallic symbolism, and I'm like, oh really, which one??? #Painting

Santiago Rusiñol. Moulin de la Galette Ticket Seller (or, Le Grand Bal), 1890. Just a little tweak with the color brightness (2nd version here) and this feels like a photograph from today. I like the longer title better because it tells us who she is, not a guest but a worker. He was close friends with a lot of famous contemporary artists but here you can see a very clear overlap with Casas i Carbó. #Painting

Highly recommended https://roughlydaily.com/2026/07/24/never-trust-people-who-promise-to-make-you-rich-in-a-day-they-are-generally-crazy-swindlers/

@lionelb@expressional.social one might say they do that on a cosmic scale as well lol

Europeans, we need to appreciate & defend what we have. Americans... well, it's just not working: "[USA] without insurance, a colonoscopy could range from $1,250 to more than $4,000. A colonoscopy screening generally costs less than a diagnostic colonoscopy, which includes a biopsy or excision..." A no-insurance pay-at-the-counter colonoscopy with excision & biopsy in Italy today costs €368. Without biopsy it's €318. With any European national health insurance, it's all covered, of course.

@AubreyDeLosDestinos@101010.pl I love this discussion. he was not warm to me but a man lost in an existential universe of his own making! I wish we could have this conversation for two hours on the patio this morning over coffee... I want to look up your character now. A friend of mine in the movies says that it's a mistake to read books with the cinematic imagination but I can't help it.

@lionelb@expressional.social exactly. Exactly!!! Also social institutions and very peculiarly in the case of Mussolini some odd parallels about family favoritism

Leonora Carrington. Les Distractions de Dagobert, 1945. This article is a good artistic assessment of a work which is almost always discussed in terms of gross financial worth first: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/leonora-carrington-les-distractions-de-dagobert-2718627 I will only add is that they elide the period of her nervous breakdown and abandonment by Ernst with a few glib words, when the reality was horrific sexual violence. She undertook an amazing rebirth which informs her later feminist activism in Mexico. #Painting

@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai @carnage4life@mas.to further I think they were making the point that Africa doesn't matter to them one whit. "Taking full responsibility" as a badge of pride.