Vijay Prashad refutes claim that an article he published was AI generated

David Brophy, a historian of Modern China at the University of Sydney and a Harvard alum, who appears to be a pusher of the Uygher genocide narrative and a Xinjiang separatist, has taken to Elon Musk’s X(formerly Twitter) to accuse Vijay Prashad of using AI to write a review that has been published in the Monthly Review.

https://xcancel.com/Dave_Brophy/status/2042077191132082358

Brophy doesn’t seem especially trustworthy, having an obvious bias and I’m sure an axe to grind with Prashad given their differences in political opinion. But I haven’t looked into it myself, nor have I read the review, or the work being reviewed, or any of Brophy’s work (which at a glance does not look worth reading).

You ever notice how there were a couple measures passed to curb insider trading by members of congress and then, just a few months later, polymarket becomes a dominant force in our society?

Folks, a spadroon is a spadroon so I could be wrong but I’d swear that that sword in the OP image is a replica of Jack Sparrow’s sword from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Also, not to do a Pirates-themed version of sincere Harry Potter posting (I am about to do just that), but while I know Johnny Depp turned out to be a wife-beating piece of shit, and the Pirates movies became terrible franchise slop, I loved that first movie so much that if I had the disposable income I’d totally pay the $750–900 to get a genuine Jack Sparrow sword replica from the blacksmith who made the originals for the films, Tony Swatton.

I haven’t thought about it enough to articulate why, but I really liked Train Dreams.

I liked Bugonia, but I didn’t think it was incredible and was surprised when it was shortlisted for Best Picture at the Oscars.

Marty Supreme, OBAA, and Sinners were all good.

F1 was the worst movie I saw in theaters last years. Enjoyed Eddington, If I had Legs I’d Kick You, and Caught Stealing. Disliked Companion and Mickey 17.

If I was John Oscar I would’ve given my Oscar Award to 28 Years Later in 2025 and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple in 2026.

Really want to see Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, and the Filipino(?) film Magellan. No Other Choice wasn’t on my radar before awards season, but now I want to see it. It was Just an Accident wasn’t on my radar until this post.

FWIW, Uncut Gems is my favorite of the Safdie Good Time/Uncut Gems/Marty Supreme trio of movies.

decided to start up my old Bannerlord save. I got to a point where I was a powerful vassal in the Southern Empire, but I wasn’t so powerful that I could seriously entertain winning an independence war. I had control of one city and two castles captured from the Western Empire, and they were positioned such that anytime a war kicked off with them my holdings were surrounded by enemies.

Then the Southern Empire went and got all bellicose against the Kurzgesagt right up until the Empress was humiliated in battle. She’s captured, her army destroyed, at the time I was in Battania trying to level up smithing. The Western Empire, Northern Empire, and Aseri declare war on the Southern Empire. Kurzgesagt take Onira, the personal city of the Empress (Bannerlord doesn’t exactly have capital cities, if you’ve never played it). The Northern Empire takes the city that was held by the second strongest clan in the Southern Empire.

I try to form an army of my own and set out to take a city near my own from the Western Empire. Unfortunately I only form a 600 strong army and was narrowly defeated by defenders who came to lift the siege. Might’ve even eked out a win if my character hadn’t been wounded, though I’ll admit I’ve never had a strong grasp of M&B battlefield tactics. Lost a very strong personal army (or I felt it was strong, anyway, like I said I don’t really get the tactics), which at the time was 180 strong, about half veteran cavalry and the other half divided between veteran archers and footsoldiers.

The Empress manages to make peace with all the realms against her.

Suddenly here I am, reforming my army from the ground up, when the Northern Empire, Kurzgesagt, and Aseri declare war. I stop and take a look at the internal factions of the Southern Empire. I am only Clan Level 4, and before the disastrous wars I was like the fourth most powerful clan in the Empire. Now I’m number one. No individual clan leader can control more troops than me. With the Southern Empire facing war on multiple fronts I feel like there’s no reason not to declare independence. But I don’t know. I’ve never actually done the Dragon Banner thing, maybe I should just ignore it all and forge on with that.

Hey if it works it works.

This isn’t directly related to your post but when am I gonna get a chance to discuss woodworking on hexbear again? So I’ve got a copy of this book, Medieval Furniture: Plans and Instructions for Historical Reproductions, and the first project is making a simple oak bench (see fig. 1). The whole thing can be made out of two 10’ 1x8s. But I live in an area such that I have to rely on the local big box store for my lumber. To make this baby out of oak from the store would cost me $125†, which is too rich for my blood. But to make it out of pine would only be $25†. Trouble is I’m a big guy. A really big guy. So I’m not confident that I wouldn’t go through the trouble of making the damn thing only to have it snap in half the first time I tried to sit on it.

Fig. 1. My crude sketchup model of the bench. The original medieval bench has some decorative carving I certainly wouldn’t do, but also some more elegant curves in the legs and the long seat stretchers that I was too lazy to go through the hassle of modelling.

† Prices based on pre-war figures

The last two used bookstores I was in didn’t have a copy of Moby-Dick so I decided to buy one off Amazon. And I got lazy. I knew I wanted hardcover, so I filtered my search results to show only hardcovers and bought the cheapest one from a big publisher (because I didn’t want to accidentally buy a cheaply produced print-on-demand book). I went with Macmillan, it was only $11.50. Didn’t even glance at the item details or description.

The book arrived today and when I opened the package I was shocked and dismayed to discover that, as is plainly stated in the first line of the product description on Amazon, I had purchased a pocket-sized hardcover edition of Moby-Dick. It’s smaller than a mass market paperback. It’s nearly 800 pages long. The print is minuscule. I can read it, but I don’t know. I mean, being honest there’s a chance I’ll never read it anyway, but I wish I would’ve just paid $20 for the Penguin edition.

So I was just doing what I usually do of an evening, wasting the precious minutes of the only life I’ll ever have by doomscrolling twitter. And I came across a short series of right-wing tweets discussing, basically, misogyny in Islamic religious practices. The last of these tweets said something like “An American Professor visiting UCL for a debate refused to participate because women were made to sit at the back.”

And I thought, well, despite the tenor of these particular tweets, it’s probably good on that professor for refusing to speak there.

So I googled and I quickly learned that the professor was one Lawrence Krauss, that this happened in 2013, and that the debate in question was titled “Islam or Atheism: Which Makes More Sense.” Now I didn’t immediately remember who Krauss was but I knew I recognized the name for some reason, and I thought to myself, now, what sort of man would take part in a debate with that kind of obnoxious framing?

So I went to Wikipedia and I remembered where I knew the name Lawrence Krauss from: he was one of the authors included in the book The War On Science, which I know of because the skullboi Youtuber Shaun discussed both the book and Krauss himself at length in this video. He’s been accused of sexual misconduct, he was friends with Epstein and tried to introduce the man to Joe Rogan, and obviously he’s a crusader against cancel culture.

I guess what I’m saying is you do not gotta hand it to them.

This doesn’t seem to be what the video is really about, but it’s what I thought about when I saw the title so I made a reference to a fairy tale at work one time. I don’t remember which one, let’s say Hansel and Gretel. Something on that level of ubiquity. And a twenty-something coworker asked me “Is that from Fairy Tale?” I thought he just misspoke and meant to say a fairy tale so I said yes. Then he asked me how many of the episodes I had watched and I realized he meant the anime, which I had heard the name of before, and that his only point of reference for an honest to god fairy tale was an anime he’d watched.

It would be foolish to say, definitively, that after only three half-hour episodes I’m certain that this is by far the best on-screen adaption of any of George Martin’s work.

But it is.

I liked season one of HOTD well enough, but I had constant reservations about the show throughout. At first it was just little things, like I thought the tone or pacing or scripting in this or that scene were just a little off. Then there were some bigger missteps but it was never enough to overshadow the good parts of the season. Season two was a considerable drop in the quality of the writing, but the rest of the production held fast. Taking the two seasons together, if they were the sum of HOTD I’d say the show ranks somewhere between season 4 and 5 (S4 and S5) of GOT. The highs of HOTD are never quite as good as S4 but they are better than those of S5, and an inverse relationship for the lows. And of course GOT itself can be ranked sequentially best to worst, 1 to 8, except you swap 2 and 3 around because Qarth is quite bad in season 2.

But AKOTSK… I have a lot of fondness for GOT S1–3, but you can tell there are a lot of compromises made that alter the feel of the work overall. Whereas A Knight… is just hitting on all cylinders. The tone, the acting, the action, the score, the COSTUMES. It really feels like Martin’s vision come to life.

So funny to me that the director and writer Alex Garland, the creative genius behind such films as the terminally Trump- and Twitter-brained Civil War(2024) and the Iraq War apologia Warfare(2025) which I only know from that maudlin clip where the American weeps to himself after killing three generations of one family, collaborated with the director and writer and commercial hack Danny Boyle, creator of such visionary works as 2019’s Yesterday and 2015’s Aaron-Sorkin-written Steve Jobs, on their quarter-century old zombie film franchise to create the most touching and thoughtful film I watched last year (28 Years Later). And I saw some pretty good stuff.

Also, I don’t know if this is a one-season show or if it’s getting more seasons or what but I think the show should end with a shot of Earth from space and an alien space ship flies up, and written on the side of the ship is “pest control” and then there’s, like, Klingon being spoken and they say “lol, the stupid apes infected themselves with the psychic godhead” and they release a chemical antidote into the atmosphere destroying it.

Decided to binge watch Pluribus over the holiday. Currently on episode 6. It’s a fine show, but it seems fairly uninterested in exploring the portentous philosophical questions it raises. Also, for a show that has so far mostly been a character study of Carol, the main character seems a little lacking in psychological depth. The sci-fi elements start to feel less like intriguing questions to explore and more like a threadbare sweater pulled over a wireframe mannequin to try and poorly disguise the fact that it isn’t a flesh-and-blood person.

Assuming things continue on this track I expect I will come away feeling that this was a fine show, perhaps better suited to have been condensed as a film, ultimately lacking real heft. Fun enough, but too insubstantial to really think about much.

:ralph-wiggum.gif: I’m in danger.

Lol, Larian releasing a cool teaser for their new Divinity game and then wounding their reputation by immediately saying they use AI is very funny. You hate to see it.

Litbros and performative males in shambles.

The signs are clear. The People’s dream has come to naught. I hereby formally renounce communism on this day, the nineteenth of November, two thousand and twenty five years anno Domini and pledge myself and all my deeds to the furtherance of the free market.

jk, but feel better my dude. That’s rough.

This is the first time I’ve heard Trump speak (other than in short clips) in quite a while. He’s starting to get that old man slur to his voice that Biden had the last couple years of his presidency.