Halt's Spider

The shift in the cultural interpretation of fair, blonde families from fairy tale hero physiognomy to a sign of villainy is pretty profound. Originally it must have been a subversion of expectations, but now the origin has been lost.

The defining lesson of 2020s American politics is that voters want deflation. You can raise wages at a rate that matches inflation, but that won't satisfy them because they want the actual nominal prices of stuff to go down. There's nothing you can do to convince them otherwise.

She done lost her damn mind.

I think (many) people who do TTRPGs and fantasy fiction, grossly underestimate just how effective a name like “Troll Country” can be. It does a ton of evocative heavy lifting. 1000x more than a name like “Ungalya”.

do you think claude gets excited when it realizes it’s writing something of (mild) historical significance

I was about to say stock market is astrology for men but that’s a bit less than ideal comparison or unkind, so I have decided to say the academic field of international relations is astrology for men

NET 30 means you give the client 30 days before you capture them with a net

in my experience, basically everyone is nice but absolutely fucking *nobody* has done the reading. just doing the reading is an absolute superpower.

Japan Halloween is funny cause the concept of cultural appropriation didn't reach them so a bunch of Japanese guys are walking around dressed as Arabs

my experience with this was that after running out of books in the YA section of my rural library when i was about 13, i went to the adult section and grabbed a fantasy novel with a dragon on the cover. a third of the way into the book, BOOM it becomes porn. i was so taken aback

literally every huge enterprise public ceo responds to emails within 5 minutes, insane how consistently this is true

serving an LLM inference endpoint called “qwen-roulette” where a random 1 out of 10 requests are evil qwen

the pope requesting a mail ballot is so funny, somewhere in hell right now millard filmore and john birch are screaming slightly more in agony then usual

amazing how it took boomers decades to get a grasp on shit like 'sending a text' and 'using microsoft word', but they picked up on AI almost immediately

Amazing how every prior generation were unaware that Chicken Tikka Masala was our national dish until Robin Cook made a speech about it in 2001 and everyone started repeating it as a way to browbeat the natives about how they have no culture and need to be flooded with foreigners