Pisha

Had to enter information into an Excel sheet for work – information that should be stored in a database and not a spreadsheet – and I had to keep myself from loudly yelling at the computer. Usually bureaucratic busywork doesn't faze me, but somehow, improperly organized data drives me up a wall

And just to drive it home: The WMF spend only a fraction of their money on IT and lawyers, i.e. the one useful thing they do for Wikipedia. The rest just goes into salaries and ominous ever-increasing funds.

They solved that problem by just making the models a bit boring. In the end, it's just another batch of space marines

I refuse to accept that 5 years have passed already

Newsweek was bought by the Moonies/a South Korean cult in 2013 and has rapidly gone downhill after that, not that it ever was a bastion of excellence in journalism

What's with political columnists getting into comics writing? I remember Ta-Nehisi Coates did the same thing. It just seems so weird to spend your whole career on short-form non-fiction pieces and then pivot into an entirely different form of creative writing mostly aimed at teenage boys.

I am once again suffering from technology. So my university has introduced compulsory two-factor-authentication using a Cisco smartphone app in order to access JSTOR and the like, which was already a hassle. I had to hand-write a letter to IT because I couldn't get to campus to set it up, lol. Now Google has updated their "integrity" standards and my cheap Chinese phone is no longer allowed to use said Cisco app at all, which means I'm forced to buy a new phone and contact IT again to set it up. All this because some IT people got it into their heads that the normal method of JSTOR authentication is nonviable or insecure or something. Frankly, I'm hoping those kickbacks from Cisco are worth it.

Ramses Ii

There's an article about that: AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism

Unfortunately, we're organized in a rather informal and egalitarian way, so there's nothing to be done except maybe be the first to post the agenda. However, someone with more social capital than me called out that this didn't follow the procedure we agreed on, so maybe we will talk about the way we do things and how seriously we take our division of tasks.

I've got to vent a bit. In my local org, we've got a subgroup (just a group chat) to prepare the agenda for the next meeting. I created a text document and put some topics in it, but received no reply of any kind. Now, there's some current events happening, there was an optional meeting I skipped and people got together and created their own agenda. And it's perfectly fine; it contains everything I wrote down and other, more important things. It's just that the work I did was completely useless and nobody even bothered to tell me. These social interactions are very stressful to me and I have to make quite an effort to contain my emotions. This is really just my own problem, but I'm upset that I'm upset for no good reason.

Substack should just be forbidden in general, maybe with some exceptions for news articles that aren't accessible otherwise. We really don't need the opinions of "leftist" outrage merchants trying to make a buck on some Nazi website on here, I feel like.