Powderhorn

During a golden sunset in Memphis in May, Sharon Wilson pointed a thermal imaging camera at Elon Musk’s flagship datacentre to reveal a planetary threat her eyes could not. Free from pollution controls, the gas-fired turbines that power the world’s biggest AI supercomputer were pumping invisible fumes into the Tennessee sky.

“It was jaw-dropping,” said Wilson, a former oil and gas worker from Texas who has documented methane releases for more than a decade and estimates xAI’s Colossus datacentre was spewing more of the planet-heating gas than a large power plant. “Just an unbelievable amount of pollution.”

That same week, the facility’s core product was running riot on news feeds. Musk’s maverick chatbot, Grok, repeated a conspiracy theory that “white genocide” was taking place in South Africa when asked about topics as unrelated as baseball and scaffolding. The posts were quickly deleted but Grok has gone on to praise Hitler, push far-right ideologies and make false claims.

For those who have been yearning for the absurdity of Airplane!, your ship has come in.

Visual gags, bad puns, crazy interpretations of a line ... it's all here. I'm glad they still make these.

Nichol fucking Hahnloser is being ... deliberately obtuse.

It's her right, of course. I brought up our time together from last month, and she kinda went off on a bender.

What is crucial to bring up is that we can't be in the same room without feeling what's happening. That was our downfall in 2009, and it remains the issue today.

I'm not sure we really like each other. But we are drawn like moths to a flame.

I can say that we love each other, but that eventually feels a bit hollow. I think we both love what could have been, but 16 years in, that's less of a possible outcome than a reality.

She had very different goals. She wanted kids. I wanted to avoid kids by all means. The timing of our divorce was to ensure Texas law didn't rope me into child support (at five years, it doesn't matter whether you're the biological father -- this is now your problem). My lawyer got us divorced mere days before hitting that cutoff.

My lawyer, of course, being one of my columnists in college. I think he was better at lawyering than writing, but hey, he was in Austin, and I needed a divorce.

It's sort of crazy that Jonathan, a columnist I decided to give a shot at in the late '90s, would be my divorce attorney. Life can be funny sometimes.

All this notwithstanding, I am left with the reality with Nichol. Her phone is off because she paid for mine, and I don't really care what your metric is there, but it seems pretty damn obvious.

I envy those of you who do not need friction to enjoy a relationship. Those sound nice. I can't do that. Unless someone is mentally and physically challenging me, I'm bored.

My college roommate stumbled into running a couple of pizza places a bit over 20 years ago. He went with flat-rate pricing, because, honestly, pizzas are really cheap to make.

$9.99, any toppings (within reason). I think they were 16 inches (only one size as well). I'd go up to visit from time to time, and he'd tell me to make myself a fucking pizza. The dough was proofed and the toppings at hand. Not sure what the health department would think about that, but they were very good pizzas.

Today's random YouTube find. It's an interesting exploration of the development of America's housing market over the past century.

There are many ways a progressive politician can fail. They can fail to be elected. They can fail to deliver on their platform once in office. And they can also fail to build up the left’s power in a way that outlasts their administration.

This third possibility has often been overlooked by commentary around Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor. However, this scenario fits the tenure of John Vliet Lindsay perfectly: a New York mayor who, from 1966 to 1973, passed progressive legislation that leftists would dream of winning today, but whose administration nonetheless oversaw an erosion of working-class power.

Because of this failure, Lindsay’s good intentions and accomplishments were largely for naught. By the late 1970s, his legacy was all but undone and the ex-mayor himself became, in The New York Times’ words, an “exile in his own city.”

The bunny-ear designs on the window aside, there is little to indicate that the ferry has arrived on an island teeming with rabbits. Then, moments after the passengers disembark, there is activity in the undergrowth. A single rabbit scampers out, wholly untroubled by its two-legged visitors. And then another.

A short walk along the coast takes visitors deep into rabbit territory on Okunoshima, one of 3,000 islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Half a dozen of the animals chase away another as it attempts to join them in a communal meal of Chinese cabbage. The scene unfolds in front of smiling, camera-toting tourists barely able to believe their proximity to Okunoshima’s fabled – but troubled – furry residents.

The two grey rabbits that greeted the ferry from the mainland return to bushes stripped of their leaves. Shallow bowls of water left by volunteers dot the island in places where its estimated 400-500 rabbits tend to congregate in expectation of pellets of food left by visitors in the absence of their natural diet of fallen leaves, bark, roots and grass.

To say Billie Jean Sweeney's had a storied career in journalism would be an understatement. Over more than two decades of experience in the field the longtime journalist, editor and press freedom advocate has worked at the Hartford Courant, the Associated Press, the Committee to Protect Journalists and, most recently, as a volunteer editor at Assigned Media.

She also worked at The New York Times for over a decade, [ed. note: I love that they decide to say "oh, yes, and also the NYT"] until her retirement in mid-2024, eventually becoming the day assignment editor at the international desk. There, as one of the Times’ few trans staffers, she witnessed the highest echelons of the paper's management increasingly push anti-trans bigotry and disinformation.

Trans communities have known, and sounded the alarm, about the NYT’s increasingly anti-trans stance for years. Sadly, too many cis people have ignored these warnings, especially as many of the details have often remained obscured behind the paper's extensive corporate hierarchy and established reputation.

I am currently going through a maelstrom. My ex is a viable option, as learned in mid-December. Not totally viable, but holy shit, are we still on the same page.

If only she didn't have kids ...

It's fucking hell to be next to the love of your life for two nights and have to leave. She told me she actually couldn't relax with me there, as she expected something to go wrong.

Which is not an expectation one holds when inviting a former partner to your apartment. She knew better.

I'm not going to once again revisit how things went, but they went well.

The problem is now disentanglement. Though I'm not sure I want to. She's absolutely terrible for me, but I can't see being happier with anyone else. Maybe that's bias, but ... she's exactly my brand of crazy while we're not trying to destroy each other.

I did not say this was a healthy relationship. It is not.

This said, I think there's a weird dichotomy in the world of relationships. Sure, something where you're just working together without issue sounds appealing.

But for some people, the fight is the point. And if you're mismatched on this front, problems will ensue.

She told me on the night we met that she'd most likely get bored of me within a week, as she needs a certain level of challenge.

That was 16 years ago.

I also don't care for a compliant bitch, as that's usually my role, so things moved along.

I just don't know what to make of it currently. We met up, we obviously still connect, and yet ... we can't make it work.

Yeah, we don't think much of those couple of floors in an office building.

Before she was hired by right wing billionaire Larry Ellison to turn CBS into a right wing propaganda and safe space, Bari Weiss tried her best to create a fake propaganda-fueled college in Austin.

If you recall, Weiss (alongside Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale) helped create the University of Austin in 2021 under the pretense they were creating an “anti-woke” (read: right wing) corrective to “campus leftism running amok” (read: a handful of young people annoyed by systemic racism, broad U.S. corruption, or Benjamin Netanyahu’s industrialized mass murder of toddlers).

The “university” pretended to champion free speech and the truth, but, much like the “renovation” of CBS, the pseudo-university is really part of a larger right wing initiative to reshape journalism and education in order to coddle right wing ideology, eradicate uncomfortable truths right wingers don’t like, and distort reality into a strange, delusional safe space (the exact thing the experiment professes to be combating).

This seemed a bit too quirky to bother posting, but there's an absolutely amazing reduction of what Wendy's does, and I had to share it.

Wendy's is a fast-food chain, predominantly found in the US, with a few scattered locations elsewhere around the world. It is notable for serving square hamburger patties in round buns, and a few examples of the company's goods can be glimpsed in the menu – the "Baconator" sounds particularly alluring.

And the Baconator is alluring ... at 2018 pricing.

And this is why, if you're going skiing in Switzerland, you stick to the German-speaking parts (or Romansch, but that's not really a well-known language).

It's a live blog, so excerpts would not be useful.