One of my least favorite features of Mastodon is how it makes typos appear in posts after they’re boosted. I don’t know why they built it that way. They should really fix that.

I am always, always happy when any human system moves decisively away from fascism. That’s true no matter how messy, how problematic, or how broken the system is. I will celebrate all the same.

Not because the system is All Fine Actually. Because I am happy to see fascism pushed back, each and every time. It’s that simple.

“hashtag” is the new “backslash”

Automated phone system keeps saying “enter _____ followed by the hashtag sign,” and I am dying inside

I saw Patrick Stewart live twice.

The first time was in a production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?” at the Guthrie. The moment he stepped on stage, I reflexively thought “Hey! It’s Captain Picard!” …and then, not 2 seconds later, before he’d even spoken a word: “No, no, it’s not, it just…kinda looks like him.”

Just his gate, the way he held himself, he’d become a completely different person. I’d imprinted on Picard in my formative years, and Stewart’s acting was so damn good that it took 2 wordless seconds to wipe Picard from my mind.

2/

RIP. What an actor.

I spent my teenage years watching ST:TNG every week with my mom. His Picard was, of course, as iconic as a iconic gets. Debate the different ST captains all you like, fine, sure, so many great characters, but Picard will always be •my• captain.

1/

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/oct/29/patrick-stewart-dead

Such racist assumptions about Minnesota — including from the racists who live here, the racists who (for example) murdered George Floyd — severely misestimate this place. It’s complicated and sometimes ugly complicated, as all places are, but the humanist undercurrents here run •very• deep.

ICE, Veritas, I don’t care. Minnesota may be nice, be we are pros, we take democracy seriously, and we are not fucking around.

/end

The Republicans’ nation-wide racist obsession with Minnesota surely stems from an underlying feeling that Minnesota is •supposed to• be white. Other places, like say California or NYC? Oh, whatever, they’re already polluted by the sinister Other, and just need to be contained or beaten into submission. But Minnesota being diverse? Well •that• the right-wingers cannot abide.

5/

Note that this attack on Minnesota’s elections was explicitly racist: these bozos dressed in what they thought were Muslim costumes. You might not think that’s a key part of testing an electoral system — but •they• did.

It’s not that they think that people in general are voting who shouldn’t be allowed to vote. It’s that they think that •brown people• are voting who shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

4/

This is the process these Project Veritas bozos thought was insecure. They were wrong.

People hear about Minnesota’s process and think, over and over and over, that they’ve found the flaw, that it’s insecure or messy or unworkable or whatever. They’re always wrong. Every damn time.

We’ve had a few •squeakers• of elections here (like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_Senate_election_in_Minnesota) that have put the whole system under an intense national spotlight: hand recounts, ballot challenges, partisan operatives scouring for anything they can sue about, any whiff of fraud or mishandled process or even just vague doubt.

And Minnesota’s election process has come out shining • every • single • time.

3/

This was in Minneapolis, so yet again (argh) the national news hits close to home. I’d just like to say something about Minnesota’s elections:

They’re good. They’re really good. They’re arguably the best-run in the country; they consistently have among the highest turnout (and usually •the• highest).

Part of the reason for this is that they are •not• one size fits all. We have:

- mail voting for all
- early voting for all
- election day voting for all

…and if you’re not already registered, you can register:

- with multiple forms of approved ID
- or even more forms of ID + a utility bill
- or a neighbor vouching for you (under penalty of perjury)

…and you can do any of those ••at the polling place on election day.••

2/

Be sure you savor and re-savor this •incredible• right-wing self-own:

Two “Project Veritas” operatives committed fraud at a Minnesota polling place to prove they wouldn’t get caught

••• and they got caught •••

and both are facing multiple felony charges.

1/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/28/voting-felony-disguise-minneapolis

Consult _The Piano Book_ by Larry Fine, often available at libraries. Doesn’t need to be the latest edition; the “piano blue book” part at the end goes out of date, but the general advice about selecting and owning a piano is timeless.

Consult it •before• you go shopping, and also before you think about exactly where you’re going to place a piano in your home.

It’s a good old-fashioned paper book, and IMO it’s still better and more comprehensive advice than anything you’ll find online. The rest of this thread is just frosting; that book is what you really need to consult.

2/ #piano

Surfacing from a conversation in someone else’s replies, advice many folks on Fedi might like (but I don’t want to swamp their mentions):

ADVICE ABOUT GETTING A PIANO

If you’re thinking about getting a •piano• (the acoustic instrument) and not an electric keyboard…

1/ #piano

The lesson of the previous post is that real actual voter suppression doesn’t look like high-tech vote swapping that the hero of the movie stops by catching the sinister computer screen in a critical moment and then hacking things.

It looks like crappy processes with crappy interfaces and crappy accountability whose purpose (in a POSIWID sense) is to confuse, thwart, vex, bamboozle, and exhaust voters.

RE: https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5o6k7jvowuyaquloafzn3cfw/post/3myfjcm3isk2h

I’ve heard reports exactly like this in • every • single • election • since 2004. And every time, when somebody finally manages to get to the bottom of it, it turns out the culprit is garbage UI design — not the machine secretly changing votes (because why would it •show• the user if it’s actually cheating?!).

But these breathless stories about touchscreen voting aren’t going die unless touchscreen voting itself dies — because it’s a terrible idea.

Paper ballots, marked directly by the voter themselves, validated and counted in an optical scanner. It’s not rocket science, folks.

To be clear, re several replies:

(1) The post above is not about •my• opinion on the matter. It’s about which legal arguments make sense.

(2) It’s possible for it to be both: it’s a coherent argument to say that some things an LLM does are in fact literal enough reproduction to be copyright violation •and• to say that humans are responsible for the tool. (That is in fact my own position.) The point of the previous post is that while saying “both!” is logically tenable, saying “neither!” is not.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Zygos/117461869086312391

It strikes me that there’s a real Catch-22 here for AI vendors:

They want to argue that training an LLM on other people’s copyrighted work without permission is OK because the LLM and its output are transformative use.

But if it’s transformative, then the people doing the transforming must be responsible for this new, original work they created. No more “we’re just indexing other people’s sites!” If it’s misleading or defamatory, that’s their responsibility now.

Can’t have it both ways.

Here the IMF is finally saying the things about an AI bubble that people in my Fedi TL were saying 2 years ago. I could mock them for being late to the Market Analysis party they’re supposed to be hosting — and I do, I do mock them — but also I’m happy to see that this conversation has broken through to IMF circles.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/oct/13/ai-share-crash-risk-global-imf-debt-corrowing-cyber-attacks

WOGL creation of the day:

Logo for a 90s game console that never was?

https://wogl.innig.net/?p=H4sIAAAAAAAAE02RwUrEMBCGX2XJRYVQkjRt2iKC4EXQCvbgYdlDaOM22E1CmqzIsu_upK3g7Z_MzDf_TC7IeXv08oQaJHb3Xde2N23b3XZ3D7sXhJGTkJtRc0GzHhSIEqM5KIeanLCMUsFywjmrKeMcrzVPagoSNXQLHyc3pjATa-cWs4wIQACBVrTO86rAaIxqayYZKatCUHgveSXqqs4xsk72Ovz8ATCatPnHL64YeWUG5bU5JseAg3cmsoIQQqG-H709rdY21qKDl2aeYq9MQE3wUa3kDz2EcSkYbHiXg46wPizZR39OgyEikJP-69UOau0EC2etvtP0lSoDZPYirzNRcViUF7wUdYFpSXhWES5oyaqiZrw4wHl6Oal0GpZ2kUafZNDWJJqMwbpJguFPOc3gcIh-S8LhlJzVs1n8JPkWw6K9ckqCRMYaBZ8Jx3FWmwDO94fr9Rdc8UNL_AEAAA==