Medium Dave [ABOLISH ICE]
English professor in Fukuoka, Japan; research focus on utopias in literature with forays into science fiction, ecocriticism, & monster theory. Immigrant, grandad, LGBTQIA+(bi), intersectional equality for all. he/him
linktr.ee/azzageddi
- Sigh…I have a package in my building’s mail lockers, but my card has stopped working after almost 20 years. Can only order a new one from the website. Website won’t accept my address. (Japanese addresses can be written so many different ways, and I tried several but couldn’t crack the code.)
- Finally get the (very limited) chatbot to cough up an email address, and sent an email. Hopefully they answer tomorrow. Gave them my address so a human there can input it in whatever idiosyncratic format they use.
- I’m sorry, but there should always be an easy to find “I need a human being” button. I know people would always use it as soon as they run into any problems, but I can hardly remember ever having a chatbot solve a problem. Instead, about 30 mins to get an email address…sheesh.
- (Reads headline) What? (Reads article) “It is here where half of the samurai class were women and although they did not fight they were a vital part of the elite order.” 1st, that’s some bad writing. 2nd, being in “the samurai class” doesn’t make you samurai. www.independent.co.uk/asia/japan/b...
- Although I'm not a linguist, I'm often helping linguist colleagues by giving their papers a read, and I can't think of one single linguistics paper I've ever read, written by Japanese linguists, that isn't primarily drawing on Chomskian linguistics. I wonder if their world is being rocked right now.
- Of course, his influence on linguistics may not be affected by his association with Epstein, but perhaps criticisms of his theories might take hold more strongly now that it's known he accepted tons of money & extensively advised Epstein about the "hysteria that has developed about abuse of women.”
- I need to look up if this is available on the streaming apps I use.
- (This despite most of my respect for the Obamas having withered when they helped reform GW Bush by palling around with him, when Pres Obama should have prosecuted the biggest war criminal in US history up to that point. I just wanna make Melania mad.)
- He didn't even fire.
- Musk posted this. Maybe he'll cheer up if he realizes his misery makes millions of people happy.
- The least harmful thing the CIA has ever done was its World Factbook, a sort of proto-Wikipedia. Now it's gone, suddenly, killed by Trump. You can download the 2020 edition below, and older and more recent ones are available on the Wayback Machine, here: web.archive.org/web/20260131...
- The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions! This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
- Thank you to Simon Willison for alerting us to this and for hosting the 2020 edition!
- I wonder, are they even going to fly her home?
- And this is why I don’t share posts with links to Substack, just like I don’t share link to The Daily Mail or Fox News or the New York Post. It’s kind of amazing how few people know or care what a corrupt and corrupting business Substack is. Stop making it worse—abandon it.
- If people laid off from The Post are wondering about maybe starting a Substack, last summer I wrote about why I wasn’t. www.pbump.net/o/the-power-...
- I won’t even share Substack links to writers I really like, like Heather Cox Richardson or Law Dork. Nor will I be a paid subscriber. But when people leave Substack and relaunch on Ghost or Medium or another more ethical site, I often subscribe, like when Tom Cox left Substack recently.
