Founder of publishing company ¡AU! & a media biz journalist of many years - plus sustainability. Author of novel SKIES OF VENUS & graphic novel BOUDICCA. Used to write for the pictures. Dayton to L.A. to London https://linktr.ee/nealromanek
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Raskin: "The dictators of the world have got nothing to fear from this hearing. Republicans called it to attack our democratic allies in Europe. The star witness is not a human rights leader like Navalny, but a far-right pro-Putin politician who leads the UK Reform Party."
"If you want to understand why the Democrats are polling at their lowest point for more than three decades, look no further than these two uninspiring Democratic leaders in Congress." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
It is a pretty coherent ideology" "Shatter the dignity and security of everyone who isn't you." Bullying raised to a national - and international - level.
Nobody is “grooming” your kids to be gay or trans but people ARE grooming them to be Nazis.
In addition to tabling this month for @queerzestzinefest.bsky.social I will be doing a virtual panel on healing within the horror genre, with a focus on community catharsis and queer horror. I hope you can join us and participate in the other workshops and events they have going on all month long!
This looks great! We're launching a new event series at @auworks.bsky.social called Monster Lab, which looks at monsters (and horror and "baddies" generally) as a way to think about creativity in different ways. Might be good to get you on a future episode.
Seems that the patriotic roofer from Carshalton who has gone around the country putting up flags.... has something of a blot on his copybook
I’ll tell you what I know about subatomic particles, very little
Trump deployment of military troops to Los Angeles was illegal, judge rules in blistering opinion
That Pritzker press conference was... surreal, and I think marks a significant moment of escalation in the constitutional omni-crisis. This was the governor of a state saying plainly the Union itself is being torn apart and his state is being militarily invaded by an authoritarian regime.
Homer Simpson drool...
I heard they’re still struggling to get the president to master the line “putting on the ritz!”
What this really means is "to serve as temporary judges of anyone ICE happens to arrest".
Atta boy!
Trippy.
The coolest thing would be that it’s an Oval Office address from Noam Chomsky.
At least there has been wall to wall coverage in the press about it.
Stillsuit!!
Hey, I guess it is like Christianity after all.
Rob Waugh has been tracking down highly quoted experts who are nonexistent. Not only are they nonexistent as experts, they're nonexistent as actual living people. Our story in the latest ¡AU! Journal...
so what's everyone drinking for the 2pm announcement that the president has been dead for a week? i'm thinking moscow mule.
i met anubis in the realm of the underworld, big strong guy by the way, had a dog’s head, i’m not so sure about that. and he said to me, mr president, you’ve got the heaviest soul we’ve ever weighed down here. can you believe it? they’ve never seen a soul that heavy in all of duat
After receiving a text from Europe that says: "Where are you? We're already at the pub."
Gen AI is the comic sans of image creation.
It's not just that images "reek of AI" but they reek of awful people using AI.
How did we miss this? They like roundabouts because to use them you have to give way to the right 🤦🏾
I think that was the headline that originally appeared in the British press, as I recall.
It's going to be a really obvious deep fake video that the cabinet thinks looks really great.
@thejuicemedia.bsky.social once again showing themselves to be the Peter Weirs of climate communication. youtu.be/zYjooTz_1lA?...
cursed to be strangled to death by a skinless Night Hag but she didn't gather enough energy to fully manifest in my reality, so she can only squeeze my throat enough to give me persistent sleep apnea. she is so frustrated
Or BBC hosts.
Keir Starmer, now an American politician from the 1960s.
ALL THESE APPS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT BLUESKY. ATTEMPT NO POSTING THERE.
Absolutely tremendous
Authoritarians use this technique on their populations too.
It's good to think of Russia's microaggressions as a desensitization exercise. They push boundaries - but not quite enought for Europe to take decisive action. They do it over & over & over and the end result is a Europe that is innoculated against the idea of defending itself.
Britain has been multicultural for the last 2000 years. That's why we have the Roman alphabet, a Middle East religion, Arabic numerals, a Syrian patron saint, an aristocracy with French ancestry and a German royal family.
Giuliani Injured As Karma Decides To Get Off Its Lazy Ass.
Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) was released 123 years ago today. This silent, black-and-white film is the forebear of everything this account is about. 🖖
It’s REALLY important that #Vancouver’s Downtown Business Association, who were originally against downtown bike-lanes, are now among their most vigourous supporters, because of the evidence that they are better for downtown business than any street parking they replaced. Bike-lanes mean business.
He's beyond good and evil.
If you say 'heteronormative' or 'unhoused person' or 'food insecurity' you're basically talking gibberish and nobody can understand you but if you say you can see inflammation in children at the airport and that vaccines lower IQ or that germs are a myth you get to fire all the scientists.
Using this piece by @reallygoodwizard.bsky.social in my introductory lectures for my design students.
what if the UK had a major political party that appealed to people who didn't love pogroms
feel like slim and fat chance should be a different amount of chance
And if you're wondering whether someone getting killed is what it will take for the media and political class to come to their senses, I would just remind you that Jo Cox was murdered in a similar moment of demagoguery and hysteria 9 years ago, and if anything things have got far worse since then.
Damn, just realized it’s a yes or no! Then yes.
I support whatever is the smartest thing to do strategically for Ukraine’s & Europe’s safety. “Joining NATO” may or may not be the right thing to do. I think joining the EU is actually, longer term, more important.
The new issue of our quarterly magazine is here! In this one we talk about content pirates, disinformation and ravenous AI’s!
[being murdered] murderer: (murdering) what are you doing on your phone me: (putting away phone) my bad what's up what's going on
On & on I go about how we should be in this together, sharing our creative work & developing the best practices, networks & economics for creating a deep & blazing world of art. But do I share my own work? Not seriously. Not honestly. I’m a writer. But I do pictures for fun. Here’s a picture.
Lobby card for UNHOLY ROLLERS (1972), directed by Vernon Zimmerman - BOTD in 1936
If you were a user or admirer of NOAA’s amazing climate.gov website - which has had all the good stuff (e.g., actual data and climate monitoring indices) removed by government - some web and data gurus/guerrillas are about to launch a recreation at climate.us. Follow @climate.us for launch updates.
I wrote this in a nearsighted rage. Sorry for the typos. But it’s a global project we’re facing. Anti-migrant rhetoric is taking hold in Japan, a country that has NO MIGRANTS.
Amazing story: one of the organisers of the group putting Union Flags up around Manchester previously did time for being part of a people smuggling gang. manchestermill.co.uk/manchester-f...
What drives ne crazy us that these are large US ideas that gave very little to do with British culture - “Christian values”, an obsession with immigration, abortion, gender are all the drum beat of the Anerican extreme right for 20 years. This US culture, not British (or even English) culture.
As I argue in this piece for the Lane newsletter, “the truly best streets aren’t just for passing through — they are for living in.” Let me know what you think:
'Comrades, now that we're quorate, I propose we call a doctor.' 'All the best doctors have left or RFK Jr. fired them.'
Lure him into the tomb with the couch of Amontillado
And one more gallery to finish the week! Cartoonists for Gaza Part 4 – Solidarity in Ink with Palestine from the Comics Community, Including Work from Rufus Dayglo, Peter Kuper, Zara Slattery, Oscar Zárate and Corinne Halbert. #CartoonistsforG4za www.brokenfrontier.com/cartoonists-...
Them: “Cities are all rotting hellscapes!” Cities:
1. Out of curiosity, I went through the feeds of some habitual tuna tormentors. I found they’re big on: - fox hunting - Reform UK - antagonism to asylum seekers. In other words, the same few antisocial (psychopathic?) men, turning up in all the bad places. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... 🧵
Rewilding for national security.
New piece on Carbon Colonialism, net-zero nonsense, and how the UK Government's climate advisors (and many experts) shy away from speaking truth to power. We need a fundamental reboot of climate policy; - physics doesn't care about political sensibilities. theconversation.com/the-uks-year...
One of the crazy things is how the same tropes are rolled out in country after country no matter what is happening in reality. Apparently Japan is now worried about immigrants - Japan, which is virtually a monoculture and where it's almost impossible to stay in the country if you aren't Japanese.
As many of us people who study or work in tech tried to tell y’all, move fast & break things was always about POWER, not progress.
I was in grade school when Pope John Paul II got shot and we all had to immediately go into the church to pray for him. Are you kidding me. God was not going to save the pope if we didn’t ask him to? What is this business model exactly
Bunch of folks pointed to Paul Krugman’s depressingly plausible answer, which is that in the case of extraordinary disruptions, markets are biased toward pretending things are normal until it’s undeniable, then tanking. paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-arent-...
Over the last decade I've had the privilege of becoming close friends with legendary genre director Gary Sherman. He won't see this, as social media ain't his thing, but today is his 80th birthday and I know he'd love it if you checked out or revisited one of his films. Much love and many more Gary!
I always find polls depressing, until you remember that it's 40% of people who will answer the phone--a landline, often--to an unknown number, which is really a *certain subset* in itself. (Any number higher than zero is too high imo, but still, consider the source)
For 20 years, the primary job of a politician is content producer for news organizations. You are asking a lot if you expect them to concretely respond to real world events.
Full resignation letter from Demetre C. Daskalakis, a CDC leader, does not hold back. "The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning. My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud."
Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath was probably the most politically clarifying event for me as a young adult. I wonder how much younger people learn about it now
Perfectly consistent with US climate policy
Today just got so much better.
"The fascists want us depleted, numb, and cynical." - I keep this top of mind daily and I actively refuse.
i watched the disturbing video that's supposedly from the Minneapolis shooter and (with the caveat that it seems real but i've not seen confirmation of that) what seems clear is that more and more of the people who commit these acts do not have comprehensible politics, in fact that may be the point
When I start my journalism school, the first semester will only be elocution lessons where you practice saying "Well, that just sounds insane".
The mental health benefits of not knowing any history right now must be massive. Moving through your day with total equanimity. What happens next? Who knows? Maybe something good
Hey, I sketched that same skeleton, multiple times, when I used to go to the museum on my lunch break!
We all loved too the idea of a celebrity writer - that a storyteller could become one of the famous people in the world. That was a wonderful thing.
Always like a new take. The gods are endlessly reinterpretable.
Reform UK, which has a grand total of four MPs, was just given an uninterrupted platform for an hour and a half on the BBC and Sky News channels, in order to talk about its plans for mass deportations When was the last time the Greens (with four MPs) or the Lib Dems (with 72) were given the same?
Why don't we watch Midnight Cowboy anymore? Has that been stricken from the classics list?
Next in The Guardian: Do AI's feel sad when their homeless kids are starved to death and shot? 🤖😔
I think maybe the idea is to get you to look at it. It doesn't matter if it's good, bad, appropriate, inappropriate, it's what is most likely to make you look.
Fascism is not conservative. Fascism is revolutionary. (just doing my daily self-reminder)
Finishing the proofreading of the next issue of ¡AU! Journal and about to go back and make sure the many mentions of "open source" we're hyphenated. But no need. Apparently. Open-source 🙁 Open source 😀 opensource.org/blog/is-open...
Atta boy.
Because we are living in a world of zero-risk evil.
Why do these awe-inspiring new AI intelligences all communicate with the intellectual depth and emotional weight of a mediocre blogger? Oh, wait, I know why.
I think this is the usual pattern.
I think we need Superman most when it’s hard to be a good person. He’s ultimately not great because it’s easy for him to be kind, and ethical, and relentless about both. He’s great because it’s so easy not to be. He’s an embodiment of a choice to do the harder, kinder thing.
Really looking forward to seeing it. I still very very much love Christopher Reeves delivery of "truth, justice and the American way". Superman is invincible. He can literally do anything he wants without consequence. But he decides to live by a specific moral framework.
Putting all your site info in the footer, while also opting for infinite scroll is...it's not helpful. Doesn't help. Doesn't help anyone.
A great many more people protested the plight of Sheffield Wednesday this month than have attended any protest against asylum hotels www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...