scattershot

Please call your representatives: VOTE NO on the FEDERAL BOOK BANNING BILLS HR 2616, HR 8705, and HR 7661!

Transcript below the cut.

If you don't know who your Senators or Representatives are, you can use Ballotpedia's Who Represents Me tool! (Note: there's a field for you to input your email address on their page, but it's not necessary to get your results. They just need a mailing address to confirm who your reps are.)

Once you've got names, you can look up and save your Reps' phone numbers in your phone. I find this makes it easier when I'm wavering about feeling brave enough to place a call. Just pressing a button instead of going and looking up the phone number all over again makes it just a liiiiittle easier, and sometimes that makes the difference between calling and not calling!

Follow for recipes

Retro transparent telephone

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman 

he invaded egypt

the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”

then napoleon showed up

napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus

the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”

this did not make napoleon happy

in fact it made him jealous

…and like this…

…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…

:-D

I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…

And for those of you who would like to try audio versions, this is what is on LibriVox, the free, volunteer run audiobook version of Project Gutenberg:

Mayqo'te 2026 | 30. Cosmic

I am once again begging people to realize that AI checker doesn’t work. it’s never worked. it’s notoriously known to have flagged human-made works as AI and AI-generated works as human-made. and by feeding it people’s works, you are feeding more works to AI, because apparently the machine itself is AI.

Junelezen Day 13 - Fast Forward

Let's do this, yeah.

(Caveat: I have played all of the mainline games except Spirit of Justice. I have also not played any spin-offs. People more familiar with those games are encouraged to add their insights in a spoiler free manner)

Ace Attorney Prosecutors ranked by How Likely they are to use ChatGPT in court

#7: Simon Blackquill

I'm not confident that Blackquill knows how to use a computer at all, let alone a chatbot. He'd presumably also consider it dishonourable, but that's beside the point. He couldn't even get started.

#6: Miles Edgeworth

The main reason I don't use AI for anything is pride. And that's something Edgeworth has in spades. He knows he's good. What do you want him to do, accept help? Never. The fact that it's a machine is irrelevant.

#5: Godot

Too secretive. Would not trust OpenAI to not leak all of his machinations to Phoenix/the world. However, he is a fan of the pseudo-profound bullshit quote, so he might be enough of a sucker to fall for someone else's AI-generated nonsense.

#4: Klavier Gavin

He strikes me as the type who would have tried it right at the start, and quickly concluded that it wasn't trustworthy enough for a court of law - befitting how Klavier is practically the only prosecutor in the series who takes his job seriously. He will, of course, never admit this, because the moment people started using it for music he became a total snob about the whole subject. One of those irritating 'gold star' types.

#3: Manfred von Karma

Boomer, so probably.

#2: Franziska von Karma

Listen, I love Franziska, but you cannot deny that she's a complete Grindset Efficiencymaxxer. She's doing it so that she can appear in double the number of trials and win twice as often. It doesn't matter to her if all the evidence and citations are fake. All that matters is the sheer volume, baby. If the Japanifornian legal system wasn't completely fucked she wouldn't get away with it, but it is so she does.

And that brings me to our winner,

#1: Winston Payne