Who’s Al?

San-serif fonts seem to be de rigeuer these days, which is supposed to be good for people with certain visual impairments. It’s bad for people with other impairments, and it’s not great for anyone to be unable to distinguish between lower-case L and upper case i.

This latter difficulty keeps getting me every time I see a headline about Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI. I often find myself asking “Who’s Al?” Even people in Silicon Valley who stand to benefit financially from wider adoption of Artificial Intelligence, whom you would expect to be big boosters of the technology, have a tendency to say that it will result in the creation of a permanent underclass, unless that is it triggers the extinction of the human race, which they assure us is a definite possibility. Moreover, we all know people who put their names on writing or imagery or music generated by Artificial Intelligence and behave as if they had made it themselves, as if they were sitting in front of a player piano and grinning with pride as if they were making the music themselves. Even schools and universities, which you might expect to have a professional obligation to take such people gently but firmly by the hand and explain to them that they are making themselves ridiculous, often embrace this bizarre idiocy and encourage or even force their students and faculty members to emulate it. And whether the technology in fact threatens to annihilate labor as a factor of production and wage-earning as an element of our socio-economic system, there is no doubt that it is already automating away whole categories of jobs, including many of those which people dream of having, which they find deeply fulfilling, and which have long been avenues of upward social mobility.

With so many obvious and well-publicized downsides, it’s no surprise that most brief items about Artificial Intelligence tend to elicit a negative immediate response. Even the benefits of the technology are so much bound up with these difficulties that acceptance of it is more likely to be tempered with deep misgivings than fired by enthusiasm. So that makes the sans-serif ambiguity between small L and big i particularly unfortunate. Whoever Al is, if he’s going to create a permanent underclass unless he kills all of us first, and is already wrecking higher education and encouraging people to believe they need him in order to produce an intelligible paragraph, he’s the greatest villain in history. It’s like men who are known by three names. You may greatly admire John Quincy Adams, but you do have to remind yourself that when people refer to him that way they are not differentiating him from men called John Adams who did not go on murderous rampages.

So in fairness to men named Al, I often think of well-known men with that name who are unlikely to qualify for the title “greatest villain in history,” and to wonder when and if each Al might be due for a replacement by A.I. Here I limit myself to living Als, which cuts it way down since the name passed its peak of popularity quite some time ago. I’ve only chosen Als about whom I already have opinions. Also, I’ve left out athletes named Al, since it doesn’t seem likely that there will ever be sports in which humans and machines are competitive with each other.

  • Weird Al Yankovic- what he does is pretty great, though it does seem to be the sort of thing the developers of Artificial Intelligence are specifically trying to emulate. If they ever catch up to him, it will be a Deep Blue Moment. A more disorienting one than the original, since chess has always had a computational element that makes it impressive when humans can do it at all while making puns and setting them to existing music seems to be more in line with what the brain evolved to do.
  • Al Pacino- he made a string of bad films when I was a teenager and was going to the movies regularly, so I’m biased against him. In those bad pictures he seemed to be doing an imitation of himself, so I guess it won’t be long before an A. I. Pacino can equal that version of Al Pacino. But of course he has also done a lot of great work, and for an actor that always means surprising an audience with new ways of responding to your scene partners. It will probably be a long time before Artificial Intelligence has that ability. Besides, he seems like a very nice guy.
  • Al Franken- whatever you think of his politics or of the circumstances under which he was driven to resign his seat in the US Senate in 2018, there’s no doubt that for thirty years he was the guy Hollywood turned to when they couldn’t get Albert Brooks. I wonder if, when the controversies about Franken came up in 2017, Minnesota wished they’d tried harder to get Brooks to take the Senate seat, he might have been terrific. Anyway, Franken did a bit on Saturday Night Live late in 1979 in which he suggested that the “Me Decade” of the 1970s should be succeeded by “the Al Franken Decade” of the 1980s. Right through December 1989, my father and I could make each other laugh out loud by randomly asking each other “What would Al Franken think of that?” So I have a fondness for the guy. It’s true that in his years as a political humorist and as an elected official, Franken hewed closely enough to the Democratic Party line that even the computers in existence at that time could have replaced him without much loss, but that bit was so funny that I will never choose A. I. Franken over Al Franken.
  • Al Green- maybe not as nice a guy as Yankovic, Pacino, or Roker, but for many generations his records have been the one of the most common soundtracks that accompanied the production of future generations. Not only in the USA- a friend of mine who was in the military for many years talked about meeting people in Africa and Asia whose first excited question upon meeting an American was “Have you ever met Al Green?” Whatever the future may be for Artificial Intelligence in Gospel, the name of the genre would seem to rule out great prominence for it in Soul Music, so I think the day of A. I. Green is far from dawning.
  • Al Roker- he’s a big part of many genres of American television that I don’t watch. It would probably be easy even now for Artificial Intelligence to generate an A. I. Roker who would be just as good at predicting the weather as he is, just as cheerful when reporting good news, just as jolly when others in the newsroom make jokes at his expense, and of speaking in just as somber a voice over images of himself walking with his head down next to people who have experienced of terrible misfortunes. A personalized version of him that puts the user in the place of those newsroom colleagues and survivors of tragedies would be a big hit.
  • Al Gore- I’m always surprised he’s still alive. To be honest, when I tried to listen to his speeches I was surprised he was ever a living being, he seemed to be a Disney Audio-Animatronics figure. It might be difficult for them now to come up with an A. I. Gore that is as primitive as the living Al Gore was in his prime.
  • Al Sharpton- when he first came to prominence in the Tawana Brawley matter in November 1987, Al Sharpton was so strikingly similar to the character the Reverend Bacon in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities that ever since people have assumed Wolfe was satirizing him. But the book was published in October of that year. Unless Wolfe was a clairvoyant, the resemblance between the Rev’d Mr S and his fictional counterpart must have been the result of conscious imitation on his part. Since Bacon was a brutal parody of a scam artist exploiting the later phases of the civil rights movement, it would not have occurred to many people to adopt him as a model. But that is very much the sort of choice Artificial Intelligence models make with surprising regularity, so I think A. I. Sharpton may be right around the corner.
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by acilius on June 24, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Current Events, Language, Technology
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Posted by acilius on June 24, 2026

https://losthunderlads.com/2026/06/24/whos-al/

Blaming Synesius

Decades ago, I was browsing in a used book store. A title intrigued me: Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, by Roland H. Bainton. I’d just read a bunch of books by Augustine of Hippo, so I looked him up in the index. That led me to pages 99-100, where I read the following passage:

Augustine assumed that a just war can be just on one side only. To him it seemed obvious that the cause of Rome was just, that of the barbarians unjust. They were invaders. Not only would they commit injuries to property, life, and honor, but they would disrupt the order maintained by the empire.

We today, who are actually more informed than was the bishop of Hippo as to what was going on all over the empire in his own day, can make out a very good case for the barbarians. They were being pushed westward by hordes from the east. There was room for them in the empire. They had long been infiltrating by a process of controlled immigration. The Roman army in the imperial period had increasingly been recruited from among the barbarians. When Rome was taken by Alaric the Goth, the defender of the capital was Stilicho the Goth. Then arose an old Roman party which sought to purge the Goths within the empire. The spokesman of this group was Synesius, later to be the bishop of Cyrene. He argued before the emperor Arcadius that the barbarian Germans could not be the watchdogs of the Roman Empire, because they were wolf cubs not reared in the laws of Rome. Theodosius ought never to have admitted them. Let them be deported or made into helots. Actually the Gothic general Gainas was assassinated and thirty thousand of his men were butchered; consequently the weakened empire could not cope with barbarian inroads.

An army might not have been needed to cope with invasions had good faith and sagacity prevailed. The above-mentioned Theodosius had stepped in after Rome, through her own treachery, had suffered a severe disaster. Under Valens the Visigoths pressed by the Huns asked permission to settle in the empire with their families, to the number of a million souls. They were for the most part Christian. Fritigern was their leader. The emperor Valens promised admission. The horde came over the Danube, but instead of being settled was coralled by the forces of Rome and kept alive by a supply of dead dogs. The price for each dog was a child to be sold into slavery. The guard of Fritigern was treacherously murdered by the Romans. The Goths broke loose and ravaged Thrace. Valens met them in battle. The emperor himself perished, together with two thirds of the imperial army. Then it was that the Spanish general Theodosius restored order by honorably granting the settlement promised at the outset.

Had Rome practiced her ancient virtue of bona fides, the barbarian invasions might have continued to be a controlled immigration.

(Roland H. Bainton , Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, New York, 1960, pp99f.)

I was very excited by that at the time. I was convinced that, if not for the influence of churchmen like Synesius and Augustine, there might have been a smooth flow of people into the Roman Empire that would have led to continuous prosperity from their time to ours. Now I know a little more about what was going on in the empire in those days, and I’m not so sure the case Bainton makes is particularly good.

My first objection is relatively minor. Our sources of information about any period of antiquity are painfully sparse, and the late fourth and early fifth centuries of our era are no exception. While we may be aware of many facts that Augustine could not have known, he knew the answers to countless questions we do not know enough even to ask. So Bainton gets off to quite an unfortunate start.

Second, Bainton ignores the change in the basic structure of the economic life of the empire which began a century before the time of Synesius and Augustine. In the course of the “Third Century Crisis,” an era of civil wars that went on from 235 to 284 CE, the currency of the empire was so severely debased that the empire stopped accepting tax payments in money. People had to pay in kind. So, if you were a baker, you would hand over a given number of loaves of bread to the tax collectors, and those would be distributed to the army. As a corollary to this, laws were enacted requiring men to continue in their occupations and to succeed their fathers in theirs. So the sons of a baker were required to become bakers. Since bakers were especially needed, men who married the daughters of bakers had to lay down their own occupations and become bakers. You might think you had an idea for a more productive use of your facilities than baking; you might want to sell up and go into a different line of work altogether. But the law insisted you remain a baker. Likewise for virtually every other form of livelihood. The whole economy was locked down, with no place for innovation or adaptation. The army and the church provided a few escape hatches for ambitious men, but only men with older brothers were free to try their luck even in those areas.

So, when Bainton says that “there was room for” the Germanic tribes in the empire, one is left wondering what he has in mind. Since landowners were not allowed to sell their land, newly arrived migrants could not buy farms. And since established residents were not allowed to change their occupations, there was no way to start businesses that would offer employment to landless men. One might imagine a program to settle newcomers on undeveloped tracts of land, a la Gaius Gracchus half a millennium before, but as Gaius learned too late that was not such an easy thing to do, as even wilderness makes its contribution to the agricultural economy.

I hold no brief for Augustine or Synesius. Their view of the Germanic tribes did indeed reflect a failure of imagination that left them worse than useless in the face of the events of their day. But I suspect that Bainton fails similarly when he does not notice the profound differences between the world in which the policies of which he speaks so highly operated and the world which in fact existed after the Third Century Crisis.

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by acilius on April 22, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient World
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Posted by acilius on April 22, 2026

https://losthunderlads.com/2026/04/22/blaming-synesius/

High Justice, by Jerry Pournelle

A few weeks ago, I stopped in a used book store I hadn’t visited in a long while. I picked up some old paperback science fiction novels. One that shed quite a bit of light on contemporary politics was Jerry Pournelle’s 1977 High Justice. There’s the requisite dose of grandiose technological fantasy- fusion powered tugs hauling icebergs to deserts, massive ocean thermal energy conversion projects, brain implants giving individuals instant access to computer networks, and of course space stations and asteroid mining. There is also a grim political landscape in which all governments are hopelessly corrupt and only multinational corporations run by visionary billionaires can deliver industrial development, and they only if they are left unaccountable to anyone or anything.

The characters are pure cardboard, simply illustrations of whatever tendency the author is trying to depict. When he wants to make some harsh remarks about Africa south of the Sahara, he first tells us that the people who speak them are black; when he wants to say something that could be taken as demeaning to women, he gives the lines to a figure with a given name like “Laurie Jo” or “Ann.” Not that the white men are realized any more substantially, but at least they are not always sock puppets for his own potentially objectionable views. Sometimes they are sock puppets for opinions he disagrees with.

Pournelle’s political ideas are summed up in this exchange between utterly idealistic liberal politician Aeneas MacKenzie and utterly realistic billionaire Laurie Jo Hansen:

“Laurie Jo, should power like yours exist?”

“Without power, none of this would exist. You can’t do anything without power.”

“Yes.” They’d been through it before, endlessly. “But it must be responsible power. It must be directed for–“

“For what, Aeneas? Something trite, like ‘the betterment of mankind’? Who chooses the goals? And how do you see that the choice is kept, once made? Responsible, Aeneas? To the people? You tried that.”

Jerry Pournelle, High Justice, New York 1977, page 100.

And that’s it- the dash following “directed for” is all the consideration given to political theory, the branch of philosophy concerned with the questions “Who chooses the goals?” and “How do you see that the choice is kept, once made?” And “You tried that” is all the consideration given to the idea of government in the name of the people. Books like Pournelle’s had an obvious influence on the multi-billionaires whose voices are so loud in today’s politics; his grisly vision is not the weakest of the many factors that drive their behavior.

by acilius on December 9, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Fiction, Politics, Technology
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Posted by acilius on December 9, 2025

https://losthunderlads.com/2025/12/09/high-justice-by-jerry-pournelle/

Among the nostalgists

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I would often hear my older brothers talking with each other and with my parents about Vietnam and Watergate. I would ask them to explain what those words meant, which presented them with quite a challenge when I was three or four years old. I never gave up, though, and by the time I’d figured them out I was not only hooked on those topics but on history in general, including the political history of the USA in the decades following the Second World War. I grew up to become a classical scholar, but when I’m not professionally engaged with ancient Greek and Latin literature my mind still wanders to those matters.

I’ve been spending a bit of my free time talking about such things on Twitter lately, especially in threads growing out of posts made by commentator Richard Brookhiser. The other day, for example, Mr Brookhiser brought up an interlocutor of his who speculated that right-wing Congressman John Ashbrook’s 1972 primary challenge to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign was an attempt to clear the field for Ronald Reagan to replace Nixon as the Republican nominee. In response, I pointed out that Reagan already faced a formidable rival for conservative support in Vice President Spiro Agnew, and that if Ashbrook had somehow knocked Nixon out of the race he would have established himself as a substantial figure in his own right, another obstacle to any attempt Reagan might have made to launch a bid of his own.

The national attention given to yesterday’s election for mayor of New York reminded me of another 1960s-1970s figure who captured my attention when I was a child, John V. Lindsay. When I was about nine years old, I was watching the old Batman show when the character of Mayor Linseed appeared. My mother was with me, and she laughed out loud. She said that the actual mayor of New York in those days was named Lindsay. “Linseed” didn’t strike me as clever enough wordplay to account for her laughter, and she said that indeed it was not why she was laughing. What struck her as funny was that while the actual Mayor Lindsay was a ridiculously handsome man, whose good looks sometimes got in the way of his political career, the makers of Batman had cast a plain-faced character actor as his fictional counterpart. Evidently they were afraid that even in their fictional universe, it would be too much to ask people to believe that the mayor of such a big city could look like a movie star. I’ve also mentioned John Lindsay on Twitter quite a few times in recent months.

Mayor Lindsay
Mayor Linseed (Byron Keith)

What has really kept Mayor Lindsay front of mind for me lately is not so much the comparisons I’ve seen between him and Mayor-elect Mamdani, but another item I’m checking off the list of things I was curious about when I was a kid. In those days, people ten or twenty years older than me would occasionally mention the TV show Dark Shadows, a daytime soap opera that added a vampire to its cast and became a big hit. I couldn’t imagine that- to me, soaps were the dullest things imaginable, windows into the lowest cavern of Hell, the circle of ice where absolutely nothing happens. I wasn’t a great horror fan, but I knew that vampires got people moving and couldn’t imagine how one would fit into a genre that seemed to cultivate tedium for its own sake.

I stumbled on Dark Shadows when the Sci Fi Channel was running it in the 90s, and was intrigued. I didn’t have the time to keep up with it for very long, though. So when during the COVID-19 lockdowns my wife and I found that the entire series was available for free to watch on demand, I suggested we take a look. We wound up watching the whole thing in a little more than a year. In the 2022, I realized that the calendar was the same as it was in 1966. I decided to watch each episode on the 56th anniversary of its original broadcast. So I watched episode #1 on Monday, 27 June 2022. My plan was to post any thoughts I might have in the comment sections of blogs about the show, as I had done in 2020 and 2021.

I quickly found that, while some blogs were still keeping their comboxes open, no community like the one I had participated in at Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day could be found in any of them. So if I were going to write up my thoughts about the show in the way I wanted to do, I would have to post them on a blog of my own. I decided to stick with my idea about the calendar, and have each post go live on the anniversary of the episode it reviews. At first I assumed no one would read the site, and gave it a name no one would be likely to find. But people did start reading and responding to it, so I changed its name to Dark Shadows Commentary. That’s where the bulk of my online writing as “Acilius” has been since then, which is one of the reasons this site has been so quiet. Since John Lindsay was Mayor of New York the entire time Dark Shadows was being produced in that city, it’s no wonder he keeps popping into my head.

by acilius on November 5, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in AboutTheBlog, Nostalgia, Thunderlads at Large
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Posted by acilius on November 5, 2025

https://losthunderlads.com/2025/11/05/among-the-nostalgists/

Telepathy

Aeon magazine posts a short article by Matyáš Moravec about philosophers at Cambridge in the mid-twentieth century who took a serious interest in telepathy at a time when the same university was a center of the Analytic school.

Of course it would lead to interesting places were it proven that telepathy exists. How does it work, exactly? Who has it and who doesn’t? How does one develop the ability of one’s mind to communicate directly with other minds? What have people used that power to do thus far in the history of the world? The questions just keep coming, each more fascinating than the one before.

But it strikes me that the question of whether telepathy exists is, if anything, even more interesting if the answer is no than it would be if it were yes. I can read my own mind, why can’t I read yours? Once we allow ourselves to be puzzled by that, we find ourselves facing a very weighty business. To give a full account of a world in which minds exist apart from each other, impermeable by each other’s operations except indirectly as mediated by sensory stimulus, we would need, at a minimum, the whole of brain science, and perhaps of several other disciplines as well.

by acilius on March 18, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in philosophy, Responses, Science
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Posted by acilius on March 18, 2025

https://losthunderlads.com/2025/03/18/telepathy/

More fictional presidents

An article in The New York Times Magazine reminds me of my typology of stories involving fictional US presidents. Fictional presidents appear in three kinds of stories- satires, nightmares, and fairy tales. In satires, they show that the rot goes all the way to the top. In nightmares, they show that even the highest authorities are powerless to help. In fairy tales, they stand in for the king and say the magic words or make the grand gestures that solves everyone’s problems. The most memorable stories tend to mix these three genres. So Fail-Safe, Superman II, and Independence Day mixed nightmare and fairy tale, Dr Strangelove and Mars Attacks mixed nightmare and satire, and Dave mixed satire and fairy tale. But pure forms can be effective too. Among examples mentioned in the article, Veep is pure satire, Seven Days in May is pure nightmare, and The West Wing and The American President are pure fairy tale, but they are all quite memorable.

The article mentions the apparently happy ending of Seven Days in May as a relic of a more optimistic time, but in fact it just heightens the nightmare. Sure, the president foils the coup and removes the villainous General Scott and the other plotters from the top echelons of the military, and the press corps applauds him on live television. But the president is still despised by the electorate, Scott is still hugely popular, and the president admits to Scott that he can never expose his crimes. He won’t even reveal what he knows about Scott’s extra-marital affair and complicate his public image. The Constitution will survive until the next scheduled election, but there is little doubt how that election will turn out, or what Scott will do once he has been voted into the office he was so narrowly prevented from seizing.

The novel makes this even clearer. Written in 1962, it supposes that John Kennedy lived to serve two full terms as president, at the end of which the country was mired in a war between Communists and non-Communists in a country on the other side of the world (in the novel, Iran,) crime in the streets was spiraling, college and university campuses were hotbeds of unrest, African American neighborhoods were scenes of large-scale rioting, and the economy suffered from high rates of inflation. This imaginary 1968 saw the election of a Republican president who failed to address any of those problems in a way the public could accept, and so President Lyman defeated him for reelection in 1972. Lyman ends the war in Iran with a treaty that at first seems to ensure a division of Iran like that of Korea after 1953, and that treaty is popular enough that he can persuade the Senate to ratify a nuclear disarmament treaty he has negotiated with the Soviet Union. But the Iranian Communists don’t respect their treaty, and they take over the rest of the country. Alarmed by the thought of what might happen if the Soviets don’t honor their part of the disarmament treaty, the US electorate votes for a Republican Senate in 1974, but Lyman insists on going ahead with dismantling the USA’s nuclear warheads. The coup attempt takes place in May 1975, and after foiling it Lyman moderates his stance on disarmament. The other problems are still in place, and American democracy looks like a dead duck.

The movie Seven Days in May was directed by John Frankenheimer, who not long before had directed the film version of another political nightmare, The Manchurian Candidate. That one doesn’t have a president character, just a couple of senators and some presidential candidates. But it is an unusually pure example of a cinematic nightmare. That’s clear if you try to explain the plot. How does any event in it follow from any other, how could the villains have imagined their plans would work, what are the scope and limits of their power of mind control, and why does Frank Sinatra’s character have the authority to do any of the things he does? None of these questions has an answer that even begins to make sense by the logic we use in the daylight hours, but by the associative logic of dreams it all flows with a terrible inevitability.

by acilius on October 19, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Fiction, Responses
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Posted by acilius on October 19, 2024

https://losthunderlads.com/2024/10/19/more-fictional-presidents/

The heyday effect

I teach ancient Greek and Latin at a university in the interior of the USA. I’ve often given a course on the ancient Mediterranean world in general, a core curriculum class that draws a cross-section of the undergraduate student body. When I first taught it, I was required to use a textbook by D. Brendan Nagle, called The Ancient World: A Social and Cultural History.

Teaching from that book, I spent a good deal of time talking and thinking about things that were outside my scholarly emphasis. For example, Nagle puts heavy emphasis on Athens’ relative prosperity in the immediate aftermath of the Bronze Age and its conservatism in the centuries that followed. That led me to wonder if the two were related- perhaps the Athenians so prided themselves on the advantages they once enjoyed over their neighbors that they couldn’t imagine having anything to learn from them, and so ended up as quite an old-fashioned place before their age of reform started in the seventh century BCE.

If that was what happened, it would be an example of what I sometimes think of as “The Heyday Effect.” This effect can be seen, not only in sovereign states like ancient Athens, but any group that gives its members one of the major focal points of their identities- political parties, religious traditions, families, professions, etc. When members look back on a specific period in the past and see their group doing what they think it could and should be doing now, they will tend to attach themselves to everything associated with that period.

I say “When members look back… and see” because the Heyday Effect can operate regardless of the historical facts about the period- the heyday might not in fact have been so great, indeed it may be entirely fictional, but what governs people’s current behavior is their belief that it was real. That’s just W. I. Thomas’ “definition of the situation”- situations defined as real are real in their consequences.

I say “what they think it can and should be doing now” because I acknowledge that a Heyday Effect doesn’t pop up out of thin air- it is rooted in the material interests people currently have, in what they want to keep and what they want to gain, even as it influences the way they evaluate those interests.

I say “everything associated with that period” because a Heyday Effect is not a product of sustained rational calculation. It doesn’t apply just to the practices and institutions that actually contributed to whatever success the group had in its heyday, or that could have been expected to contribute to the successes ascribed to imaginary heydays. Everything left over that reminds people of the heyday becomes precious. If it is positively destructive of the current interests of the people who look back on the heyday, they will sooner or later let it go, but they will be so reluctant to do so that they will likely spend a great deal of time trying to convince themselves and anyone who tries to reason with them that it is somehow worth keeping.

by acilius on June 8, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Idle Musings, Nostalgia
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Posted by acilius on June 8, 2024

https://losthunderlads.com/2024/06/08/the-heyday-effect/

Tweets of the Week: 24 April 2024

I saw this sequence and thought it was time to log off Twitter, that I had seen the day’s best post:

Then, minutes later, this spectacular banger showed up:

Here’s a memorable line from a great scholar and fine poet:

Avery Edison says what we’ve all been thinking:

Vinney Szopa contemplates what we’ve lost:

Samuel Biagetti sympathizes with a kind of poster that has been prominent lately:

Pinboard brings common sense to bear on some ideas about sending people into outer space:

dril pretends he isn’t already on Twitter:

Sheena Liam does nifty things with embroidery:

I promote a side project of mine:

by acilius on April 24, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Quick Links
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Posted by acilius on April 24, 2024

https://losthunderlads.com/2024/04/24/tweets-of-the-week-24-april-2024/

Tweets of the Week: 12 February 2024

Ken Layne is impressed by the British monarch:

The most important news story of the last several years:

A conversation between Otto von Bismarck and U. S. Grant:

T Greer on the Iliad as post-apocalyptic literature:

Tom Hamilton’s wife gave their child some shocking news about herself:

Ready for duty, and they couldn’t be happier about it:

Paul Schofield proves that some people will get mad at you for saying the most anodyne things possible:

deepfates says something obvious but odd about videogames:

harleyskooky tells us about one of the greatest missed opportunities in the history of the movies:

The Weekly Retro shares the greatest single work of portraiture produced in North America in the 1970s:

A tremendously sweet story from Dr Dave Thompson:
From Latif Nasser, another story that begins within the family circle, this time ending very far away:
Staroxvia is assembling a periodic table of national flags:

William B. Fuckley on one of the ways in which inclusion policies ensure that the same people get included generation after generation:

Classical Memes For Hellenistic Teens has a motivational poster to share:

No Jesuit Tricks shares the greatest moment in the history of Kingsland, Arkansas:

https://twitter.com/NoJesuitTricks/status/1745642128003260911
Cranky Federalist tells the truth:
by acilius on February 12, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by acilius on February 12, 2024

https://losthunderlads.com/2024/02/12/tweets-of-the-week-12-february-2024/

Tweets of the Week: 5 August 2023

Even when you know that Helga Stentzel did this on purpose, it is as striking as if it had occurred naturally:

Bradley Birzer says something about World War Two:

Sir Geechie may be the Afro-Fogey, but he would have you know that he is also a wild man:

I read these four Luwian words aloud and found that, quite without intending to do so, I was singing them. I found it through Shadi Bartsch, and she says she had the same experience:

A. Z. Foreman starts a thread that includes some gems.

Abby Denton has a great idea for a novel:

Ken Layne tells us that the theme song to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse was sung by Cyndi Lauper. I’d always assumed it was Mae Questel, the original voice of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, who was indeed still working when the song was recorded. Instead, it was an outstanding imitation of and tribute to Questel.

Andrea More gives voice to the real victims:


William Gerrard (alias “Bill Gerrard”) has insight into the motives of historical figures:

Frank Whitehouse lays out some facts about something Elon Musk is doing that doesn’t even have the saving grace of making him a laughingstock:

And a few of my own-

My Warren G. Harding-themed tweets never get the love they deserve, not even this one I put up on the centenary of his death:

I told Twitter something I tell my students:

by acilius on August 5, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by acilius on August 5, 2023

https://losthunderlads.com/2023/08/05/tweets-of-the-week-5-august-2023/

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