"So it's just him going on random adventures?"

Advances in weaponry meant that, for the first time, men were coming home from war with literally half their faces blown off, on a regular basis. This was not only traumatic— there were cases of men cancelling engagements or being afraid to see their families, because of their disfigurements— but also caused problems with every day tasks like speaking and eating, in which your face plays a pretty key role.

Gillies arranged for a whole ward, and later a hospital, to be dedicated to the treatment of these men, and took steps to ensure that all soldiers who received these kinds of injuries on the battlefield would be sent to him directly. He developed methods for applying skin grafts so that larger portions of the face could be repaired.

He continued his work treating wounded soldiers throughout WW1 and WW2, and when both wars were ended— just in case he hadn't done enough to establish himself as a full on hero— he was then approached by a medical student named Michael Dillon, a trans man, and was able to use the same techniques he'd developed to reconstruct the penises of wounded soldiers to give him a phalloplasty. The first one ever performed on a trans man. He even diagnosed the guy with a condition to explain the frequent operations, so as to avoid outing him.

Dillon later wrote a book about trans-ness, which inspired Roberta Cowell, who became the first British transwoman to get a vaginoplasty, also performed by Gillies.

The Timetables of History by Bernard Grun

I grew up with this book, which is frickin’ enormous, and it was endlessly fascinating to young me to pour over the side by side comparison of events taking place concurrently under different headings and in different parts of the world.

Or if you want something you can put on your wall, there’s this:

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500

✨️with a special focus on colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure✨️

It also seems like it will go off, sound and vibration, whenever someone posts. Trump is awake at 2 AM. You will not be able to shut off your phone or stop the noise until you handle this. It will also drain your battery by being a surprise 2 AM noisemaker.

Don't put it on your phone. It's actually stealing less data than I expected (I mean, yes, OBVIOUSLY it's tracking your location and sending that to any cop who's bored, but it isn't taking any credit card info, so hey, that's nice), but it still can access and fuck up anything saved on your phone, record any unlocking method you use including fingerprint and face, and seems to want to do so to force you to suddenly have an explosion of noise.

Again: this may extend to dropping a call for an ambulance.

Based on this article and other discussions with tech people, the app:

Provides your location, every 4.5 and 9.5 minutes, to Trump and company;

Can copy, modify, or delete information on your phone;

Can alter webpages you visit through them;

Has multiple security flaws;

Is creating a personal profile on users;

Can, in fact, interrupt phone calls, no definite answer on 911 but very likely;

Is showing signs of being spyware in unstated ways.

The view from Orion, looking “down” from high Earth orbit at just before noon Irish daylight time / 1049 UT.

Mission Control Houston will be waking the crew up in about ten minutes or so to get ready for the upcoming translunar injection burn (in about an hour and a bit, IIRC).

3, 2, 1 – liftoff!

The Artemis II Moon rocket lifted off from our Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. EDT on April 1, 2026. Our live launch day coverage continues on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf_UjBMIzNo