I want someone to make a website that shows you paintings etc depicting women one after another and you have to guess the gender of the artist, so you can find out how well calibrated you are on that, because my subjective impression is that the thing people say about "you can tell this woman was/wasn't painted by a woman" is true and spookily consistent, but this is surely fraught with potential confirmation/selection bias

Here is some rudimentary AI slop with a bunch of paintings I pulled from Wikimedia.

Note: They're not super well-filtered, so some of them are more "paintings containing a woman" than "paintings of women", and there are going to be some differences in... like, the choices of painting type between men and women that aren't really assessing the intended thing. But it does exist nonetheless.

This is very cool thank you for making it!! What a world this is where I can ramble idly about something I want to exist and the universe just brings it to me...

After guessing on 50 paintings I was on 48% accuracy which definitely suggests that my initial instinct in the OP (which I'd already softened in the tags) is maybe total nonsense. I would like it if more people tried this and posted results! Presumably some art history knowledge helps you cheat at this but from my non-art-history-knowing perspective I didn't find the most obvious genre correlations to be consistent enough to be "useful".

If I'm being honest, I didn't expect any good news to come of several votes today, but there are a few things to cling to as things continue to escalate on all fronts. A War Powers Resolution votes passed the Senate thanks to 5 Republican Senators defecting and voting in favor of it, and Democrats holding strong and voting unanimously. Thanks to unanimous Democratic votes and 15 Republicans crossing party lines, a vote to extend ACA subsidies for another three years have passed the House. Despite major opposition from House leadership and the White House rewriting history on the 5 year anniversary of the January 6 coup, a majority vote forced the raising of a plaque that celebrated the law enforcement involvement in protecting congresspeople from the coup. Additionally, Trump's vehement response to the 5 Senators who voted against him in the War Powers Resolution vote has led to several other Republicans saying they will vote in favor of further measures to constrain Trump's power over the military

I admittedly don't have the energy to write specific scripts for this, but it may be worth contacting your legislators to either thank them or condemn them depending on their stances in these situations. I will provide tools to identify who voted in which way on different matters mentioned here, if anyone wishes to make such calls

It's important to celebrate victories where we can while keeping focused on the work we have to do. Especially when things happen all at once like the last week or so. Hang in there, y'all

Republicans who voted in favor of the War Powers Resolution:

ACA Vote:

The vote to erect the January 6th plaque was unanimous in the Senate

Posted January 8th, 2026

Could it be? Could Congressional Republicans finally be growing at least 1 vertebra?

If you live in their States? Call them. Give the impression you will vote for them even if you don’t plan to.

You can say something like “This what I want my elected representatives to do in Congress. I’m going to vote for the Candidate who does that against Trump! You tell them that for me!”

It’s true and nowhere in there does it promise that promise a vote.

Seeing a lot of posts like "umm why does everyone love bees and hate wasps, bees are bastards and they sting you why are they the only insect anyone actually cares about, why does everyone hate wasps when they're the same as bees"

Well you see, everyone ALSO used to hate bees. Like. You guys are just too young to remember when everyone who wasn't an apiarist or a gardener or an ecologist was militantly aggressive towards bees Because They Sting You. People would burn their hives and kill them all when they were found, not call a bee guy to relocate them, they'd stomp bees in the clover if they saw them. They actively hunted down and destroyed hives.

The reason "everyone loves bees" isnt an arbitrary whimsical choice because they're cuter than wasps. It's because bee lovers made a HUGE effort to encourage people to see bees as valuable pollinators and friendly little guys that just want to defend their hive. They taught people to see bees as cute and fluffy! There were awareness campaigns about the value of bees, there were advertisements, there were little documentaries and articles teaching people how to readjust their views on bees so that the hatred of them didn't cause complete ecological and agricultural collapse.

Bee lovers used to be in the exact same position that everyone who loves other insects is - you say that you like this creature and everyone in a 10km radius comes crawling over to tell you all the ways they personally would kill them.

The fact that it's so common now for people to think bees are cute fun little guys doing an important job is a fucking monumental victory and it was hard won, and it's as recent as in the last 20 years. When I was a kid in the 90s, everyone hated bees except ecologists and bug guys.

If you want this for wasps too (which i also want) you gotta put the work in to change people's perceptions.

A small example of how my father really talks

Young people, please stop assuming that older people in your field are inherently the enemy. Yes, in some circumstances, new leadership and new ideas are good. But someone being older doesn’t inherently mean you don’t agree on many positions or that you don’t have something to learn from them as well. Environmental leaders from the 60s, 70s and earlier have been fighting the same fight we are now fighting for much longer - what we’re seeing now is not ‘unprecedented’, it’s just that people in their 20s have not lived to see it before.

these tags are an awesome expansion on my point. 100% this - progress is not uniquely linked to youth. we are all working and learning together.

The ArchiveTeam (team behind most of the large website archives on archive.org) is working on setting up a LiveJournal archive process.

They need URLs

Send lists of URLs to their upload page, they have instructions for doing so on the wiki page I linked.

obviously in the universe where perpetua is a real video game the fleggs are its fan-designated mascot in the same way that dragon quest has the slimes and pokemon has pikachu, which means of course there are nerdy teens running around with bootleg (bootflegg) merch. keychains and t-shirts and stickers and the like. odds are good at least one person has a flegg tattoo

credit to my gf (seabedcity on bsky. liz come back to tumblr) who saw this and immediately drew various bootleg flegg merch varieties. which one would YOU buy from a random neighborhood novelty store

the nearest depiction of an animal or other sentient fantasy creature to you at this moment comes to life right where it is (i.e. cat photograph, shark plushie, dragon painting, etc)

assume it doesn’t know you (unless it’s actually a specific animal you’ve met) and that it’s normal for its species and would do whatever was natural for it. including being too giant for and destroying the room it’s in. as well as dying immediately if its environment can’t support its life

How it felt watching Wake Up Dead Man as a Brit

this is also how it felt watching Wake Up Dead Man as somebody who knows what upstate New York looks like

they need to invent a staying up late that doesn't make you get less sleep

MAY ALL YOUR OBSTACLES COLLAPSE IN THE YEAR TO COME LIKE UNTO A GIANT STRAW GOAT IN THE WIND

saw this video of a production of the nutcracker that has tony hawk skateboarding in it today. btw.

likely place for tony hawk to be