Jo Berry

A 2/3 full cup of coffee and a book titled Gentle Writing Advice by Chuck Wendig resting on a wooden tabletop

Treating myself to a delicious rosemary latte and a @chuckwendig.bsky.social book at MoonBrew Magic, because sometimes a break in a witchy coffee shop is just what you need ☕️🐈‍⬛

Pete Hegseth's murderous buffoonery, coming amid a lifetime in which he's betrayed everyone close to him and failed up from one disaster to the next, is a perfect example of how the appeal of Trumpism is that it creates a permission structure for people to openly be their worst selves

Two scientists walk through a cluttered old-fashioned science laboratory. The female scientist says “Analogue instruments! Paper records! Chalk boards! I thought you'd agreed to modernise the laboratory?” The male scientist replies “That's what i'm so excited about: we have moved to cloud-based storage for our data!” They step out onto a balcony. She says: “Please tell me you haven't built a library zeppelin” This is exactly what he has done. It floats across the sky and he adds “It's got a fax machine!”

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com

A grifter getting themselves hired as an “AI welfare specialist” is a 3-season TV comedy

a passage from an article by Hunter S. Thompson We are At War now, according to President Bush, and I take him at his word. He also says this War might last for "a very long time." Generals and military scholars will tell you that 8 or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history-which is no doubt true—but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a wartime economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed. That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th Century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote this about a week after 9/11 and god he nailed it

Painting of a deer in the forest at night.

In a Flemish folktale, a woman who was said to have been a thief during life haunted a town in the shape of a deer. The ghost deer would knock on doors and wait. Between her horns she carried an illegible text. She stopped appearing when someone deciphered the text.

🎨Eugen Krüger
#WyrdWednesday

This was one of the last wide-angle views of Jupiter that Voyager 2 snapped, before the planet became too big to be photographed in a single frame. Jupiter appears truncated due to inconsistent and inaccurate pointing of the probe’s scan platform, which housed the camera systems. The orange, green, and violet frames were taken early in the morning of July 8, 1979. The planet was 1.35 million miles distant. The dark, fuzzy spot is the shadow of Galilean moon Callisto. NASA / JPL / Ian Regan

Voyager 2 wide-angle view of Jupiter (July 8, 1979) - From Ian Regan - https://flic.kr/p/2ebde9P

D'Éon had androgynous physical characteristics and natural abilities as a mimic and a spy. D'Éon appeared publicly as a man and pursued masculine occupations for 49 years. Starting in 1777, d'Éon lived as a woman and was officially recognised as a woman by King Louis XVI.
#CelebratingWomen

Charlotte (Charles) d'Éon de Beaumont (1728 – 1810), usually known as the Chevalière d'Éon or the Chevalier d'Éon, was a French diplomat, spy, and soldier. D'Éon fought in the Seven Years' War, and spied for France while in Russia and England. #CelebratingWomen

The Poet Laureate of the UK is famous for his translation of St Gawain and the Green Knight, and Kym once got up on stage, looked him straight in the eye, and then performed this.

Unsurprisingly enough, every time they've encountered each other since, he's remembered them.

A little bit obsessed with all the nut clusters currently ‘ashamed to be British’ because Starmer didn’t sign us up to this shit show.

Fun thing to think about very briefly: who currently has better lawyers, the United States or Nintendo

Ummm... Excuse me, can I help you find something?

DO HARM TO YOUR ENEMIES; TREAT YOURSELF WITH KINDNESS!

They're going to write books about all the big brain moves of this gang of imbeciles and among them will be "Spending a year trying to kill renewable energy and then launching a war that sends oil prices soaring"

This is "my nephew Thomas" on demand, huh

🕯️🤞🏻🍀

what the fuck

me: you think somewhere there's a taxidermist who uses a stuffed pig as a piggy bank?

wife: we don't actually have to talk about every thought you have

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

The feature, which launched in August, claims to help you “sharpen your message through the lens of industry-relevant perspectives.” When users select the “expert review” button in the Grammarly sidebar, it analyzes their writing and surfaces AI-generated suggestions “inspired by” related experts. Those “industry-relevant perspectives” include the likes of Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, among many others. The Verge found numerous other tech journalists named in the feature, as well, including former Verge editors Casey Newton and Joanna Stern, former Verge writer Monica Chin, Wired’s Lauren Goode, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Jason Schreier, the New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany, PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon, Gizmodo’s Raymond Wong, Digital Foundry founder Richard Leadbetter, Tom’s Guide editor-in-chief Mark Spoonauer, former Rock Paper Shotgun editor-in-chief Katharine Castle, and former IGN news director Kat Bailey. The descriptions for some experts contain inaccuracies, such as outdated job titles, which could have been accurately updated had Superhuman asked those people for permission to reference their work.

The endpoint of journalism is that an AI startup turns you into a fake "editor" without telling you and against your will www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

The world does not need more Firefly and I’m honestly not convinced it needs the amount of Firefly it already has

What is with the Little Nightmares proportions here?

Harper to the judge: "Your driver's license doesn't list your height and weight at birth. It doesn't list where you used to live. It identifies who you are now."

Imagine being this person’s family

I keep a single-panel version handy

Obama: "We are living in a time where it can be hard to hope. Each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions. Another setback to the idea of the rule of law ... but this man - Rev. Jesse Jackson - inspires us to take a harder path ... bc if we don't step up, nobody else will"

I think about this a lot

when Nickelodeon bought the building next door and expanded the studio in Burbank, they placed quotes from former creators around the campus.

This one from my all time favorite Nick show The Adventures of Pete and Pete is like the blueprint I strive for in my own writing.

The original sketch of the Alien Facehugger, done in an almost comically simple style. First figure is an upright oval with a circle on the upper portion. Second figure the circle has popped off (indicated by an arrow) and a creature is launching out of the hole (indicated by another arrow). The creature looks like a circle with six thick curved legs and a cartoonist toothy frowny face.

I keep coming back to the original first draft Alien facehugger sketch. If you can start with that and end up with one of the most iconic designs in horror movie history, then there's no excuse for AI.