J.K. Rockin' on the tumblrphone

TIL (((the Jews))) invented the Ancient Greeks. Chanukah is so confusing now 🤪

also can there be a single solitary new movie released these days that isn’t accompanied by the most deranged Judenhass conspiracies?

in conclusion:

I’m not upset or anything, I can kinda see what you mean! If you’re expecting anything cool on the internet these days to probably be fake, yeah, the colors on the meat do look incongruous.

Let’s take a second here and use this as an educational experience for everyone. Fake animal photos are totally an internet scourge these days. If you don’t trust the OP of a post like this saying it’s not AI, how else could you check and try to find out?

Three things to help you verify not slop:

1. There’s a bunch of other photos in series with this one on my website, which allows you to see context for when and how the photos were taken. There’s also other photos of this animal and this habitat in other lighting and weather conditions. That’s generally more work than people will go to if they just want to create a viral photo, and you can look for internal consistency.

2. AI isn’t good enough yet to replicate specific stripe patterns on individual tigers, they get all wonky. The animal and her location are named in this instance and it’s easy to google to see if everything lines up.

3. You can also check to see if the thing in photos actually happens. The meatball throwing demo is a very, very common occurrence at this facility! It’s a regular activity during talks when tigers are in that habitat (it is a multi-species rotational space). They posted a video on their Facebook fourteen hours ago of their curator getting a direct shot into a different tiger’s mouth.

However I do want to note that I don't think @theswordofdamntheseknees was accusing your work of being AI, and did not mention AI at all - I think it was a joke about how painful it is to step on the sharp plastic corners of a LEGO, made with the understanding that the meatballs are the true version of events.

Someone on Bluesky a couple days ago also assumed the site/my account was either AI or a content scraper so seeing that type of commentary twice in two days was like, ah crap, I have not succeeded at my intended transparency and messaging. I must fix this immediately. And therefore I managed to totally miss the joke.

One of the things about fact-checking as a career is that man, it is waaaay to easy to take things super seriously at all times. I am very deep in a major paid project the last few months and my brain apparently only has one setting right now.

Plus like… okay, those meatballs do really look kinda fake! I could see it being genuinely confusing!

Highlights include:

For your first two years (when you were small) you lived in a foster home with people who raised you into a very polite young man. Two is like you plus me, that's what two is.

Some people adopted you before me and they called you Timmy (which is a stupid name) and they returned your ass almost immediately because you were so annoying at that age.

Like think about how annoying you are right now at seven years old, but way worse.

I'm better than them though, I don't call you Timmy and I wore earplugs to bed for three years because you love to scream at bedtime. Earplugs are like when I roll over and go back to sleep even when you are yelling so so so loud.

I got you at a time in my life when I was really sick (being sick is like when I'm up late because I'm throwing up and you are a very handsome good boy who sits with me) and they had to put me asleep for a procedure. A procedure is like what happened to you when they put you asleep and took your balls away.

I never really thought about it before but busses are one of the safest ways to commute to work I can imagine. I’m not ever worried when I take the train but if I had to pick which I’d feel more safe on it would be the bus.

I used to travel between towns late at night when I was a teenager/young adult woman and it would be straight up cozy and a nice way to end my day.

That really happened, in the US. Only instead of the villain being an evil cartoon posing as a judge, the villain was General Motors and Ford and all the big car companies. They bought public transit lines and dismantled them. They lobbied congress to fund the interstate highway system and they CONTINUE to lobby the us govt to keep trains and public transit from having any money, while making sure the roads get lots of it. They are responsible not only for the dismantling of public transit but also the public's perception that public transit is bad and even dangerous.

When your notes make a perfect cat

Janelle Monae for Paper Magazine, Oct 2025