It's almost midnight in Moscow. Has Putin announced the winner yet?

@riley Im glad I picked up my democracy last week before the shortages got too acute

The Deck of Many Things is clearly modelled after the real-world concept of a Kid Who Was Supposed to Be Many Things.

Moby Dick is a cautionary tale about the dangers of harassing innocent whales.

@amoroso As for the text material, the main points are: what this thing does, why it seemed like a good thing at the time, and which other ancient pieces of tech you need to connect to it if you want to play with it.

@riley “snap-off” and “400 knots” seems like a horror story, yes

Tirritate people who insist on "testing" being done before a trans child can access puberty blockers by gently suggesting that a standardised test be used for this purpose.:blobcatgiggle:

When your heart has been blessed, the polite response is Bless your heart, too!:blobcatupsidedown:

@spv According to time-honoured journalism rules, dog biting man would not be news.

TIL that a Moominvalley-dweller wrote a neurology textbook:

If one were to let it slip in the presence of a Disney lawyer that generative AI can be used to make pictures of people meeting Bugs Bunny in Disneyworld, how long will it take for the US Congress to adopt a Digital Millennium Intelligence Act that establishes an easy and easily abuseable process of DMIA takedowns?:blobcatthinking:

@alda Like in Schifffahrt.

@Uilebheist I think it might be that USA doesn't invite OSCE, but OSCE sends a small team anyway, based on its interpretation of OSCE's charter. Without an invitation, foreign observers would have limited access, and, of course, 64 is an extremely low number to cover even a fraction of the polling places in such a huge country, but it's better than nothing at all, I guess.

app store, np. A machine for laundering the untrustedness of untrusted software by distributing it via an elaborate trusted distribution network.#dixonary

If you liked fact-finding missions, you might also not like: fault-finding missions.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2934X2TRoU

I think I like this newspaper. Its very second issue, from 1923, includes another article about the history of the dream of visiting moon, and announces that it would print Le livre d’histoires, récits scientifiques de l’oncle Paul à ses neveux by Jean-Henri Fabre on an installment basis.It's a 'popular chemistry' kind of tale, once imagined as a chemistry textbook the same way that Selma Lagerlöf's Travels of Nils Holgersson would have been a geography textbook. The original book was written in 1869, though, just before chemistry became really interesting. But I like the spirit of it.

@tomjennings I'm not sure that's true, considering that this tends to make it easy for small numbers of powerful people to dictate the direction of R&D. A faster R&D process would almost certainly require rough equality in how financial slack is distributed among the people.But on the counterpoint, a faster R&D process would also likely create random new power centres, requiring a central government to actively maintain the rough equality lest an oligarchy happen del novo.

@riley Excellent idea.I think this should extend to political donations -- they're not allowed to contribute to any political campaign, at all.(Obviously if we could do that, we'd still have campaign contribution limits because Citizens United would have been unconstitutional. ..which it probably should be.)

According to an ancient tradition, the Smelling Nose Human of every disabled wolf must wear a service uniform comprising of a Little Red Riding Hood.

@tmstreet They haven't managed to get him pregnant yet