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Marian Call

@mariancall.bsky.social

3.1K followers 3.4K following 2.6K posts

Songwriter, writer writer, director of MusicAlaska / AKIMI, probably owes you an email. Still rockin on Bandcamp, Twitch, and Patreon.

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Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · Nov 3

Used to hang out on Twitter. Used to travel the world and play concerts in your living rooms.

Still writing, still singing, starting to play live shows again. Stepping into advocacy and organizing for the Alaska music scene, which helped make me.

It's nice to hear y'all's voices again.

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Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 5h

I've been aware of this since college, which is part of why I've never been a fan of the scope of our footprint abroad. It's such an awful story.

Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 5h

i did not mean to announce an album tonight. strategy? never met her

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Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 5h

They hid the lovely photo by Taylor Vidic, damn shame. Patreon's so withholding.

This is me and Kelsey Riker, we will be playing an online show on Bandcamp this Sunday, you're invited, link can be found above.

(Email coming to the Donors' Circle in the morning, now I must sleep!)

Photo of singer-songwriter Marian Call singing and playing guitar while percussionist Kelsey Riker plays cajon and grins impishly in the background.

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Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 5h

In which I announce the title of my next album, which I head to Anchorage next week to work on. You can see the basics without having to pay, you can listen to some secret preview tracks and read fresh written-tonight lyrics if you're a backer.

www.patreon.com/posts/secret...

Secret Scratch Tracks and a Sunday Concert | Marian Call

Get more from Marian Call on Patreon

www.patreon.com

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Amal El-Mohtar @amalelmohtar.com · 16h

It is once again time

Photo of a television screen showing the title card for OVER THE GARDEN WALL, the most perfect show to ever exist

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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 16h

One Battle After Another

Sophie Sherry @sophiesherry.bsky.social · 20h

During a military-style raid on a building in Chicago’s South Shore, one resident heard a knock on his door.   It wasn’t the feds — it was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for help.

He let them hide in his unit for the next 3 days.

chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

Neighbor shielded 7-year-old during South Shore federal raid: ‘I didn’t want them to take her’

During the Sept. 30 raid one tenant protected a terrified girl and her mom. Remnants at the complex, including a detailed map of all the units, offer clues to what authorities may have known before th...

chicago.suntimes.com

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Solomon @solomonmissouri.bsky.social · 20h

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Joel S. @joelhs.bsky.social · 20h

If the party leadership admits this, they have to admit that we are not in normal political times anymore and that the response cannot be to just do normal political campaigns on topics like healthcare coverage, and they are not prepared for that world.

bort @crushbort.bsky.social · 20h

is it not weird that every day there’s a new video of anonymous masked men having the time of their lives beating/shooting/disappearing people and the dem response from the top down is “republicans want to double your health insurance premiums”

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Damnèd Screamvens @thehighsign.bsky.social · 21h

Shakespeare = the ultimate "there's always a tweet"

William Shakespeare @shakespeare.lol · 21h

Would I could find a fine frog!

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Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 21h

we love our problematic ships

Pwnallthethings @pwnallthethings.bsky.social · 23h

In space news, astronomers have not just confirmed but photographed the existence of a black hole pair finding two in a locked 12 year orbit of each other www.utu.fi/en/news/pres...

Scientists capture an image of two black holes circling each other for the first time

For the first time, astronomers have managed to capture a radio image showing two black holes orbiting each other. The observation confirmed the existence of black hole pairs.

www.utu.fi

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Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 1d

Picture how big the Hoover Dam is. An absolute unit. The Hoover Dam has a power capacity of 2 gigawatts (GW).

The solar farm that the Admin just cancelled could have produces 6.2 GW of power. That's more than 3 Hoover Dams.

jael holzman @jael.bsky.social · 1d

SCOOP: The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada — the Esmeralda 7 mega-farm — has been canceled

The news was quietly dropped via a sudden website update with no public word from any of the companies involved or a statement from the agency

@heatmap.news

Esmeralda 7 Solar Project Has Been Canceled, BLM Says

It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.

heatmap.news

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Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 21h

not that i'm a fan of this, but the US has military bases in dozens of countries, and I've always been curious about the reaction folks would have to hosting a foreign military here. guess we get to find out now

The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 1d

Nothing says “America First” like letting another country put an Air Force base in Idaho

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Vividity @i-vividity.bsky.social · 1d

It was nice to have some clear skies this week.
#alaskasky #juneau #photography

Sunset over the wetlands near Lemon Creek in Juneau

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xanadian @xanadian.bsky.social · 1d

Pope condemns clickbait, has good takes on AI: I hate to inform you, folks, that we are indeed living in the future

Guardian Australia @australia.theguardian.com · 1d

You won’t believe what degrading practice the Pope just condemned

Communication must be freed from clickbait and misguided thinking, head of Catholic church tells journalists The Pope has condemned clickbait as a “degrading” part of journalism, at a private audience with global newswires. Australian media representatives were among those to hear directly from Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Thursday with about 150 members of newswire alliance MINDS International. Continue reading...

www.theguardian.com

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Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 1d

yes. always. and alienating marginalized communities, chasing them out of society spaces.

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Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 1d

Kevin Kline in those boots was a Formative Experience for me

Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 1d

Ta-ran-ta-rah!

Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 1d

WHAT

Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 1d

this longread is very worth it. there is not enough power or power infrastructure for any of this:

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 1d

Tomorrow: The AI Bubble is built on impossible promises. GPUs die in 5 years, nobody has built a 1GW data center, and they have the power to do so. Stargate Abilene won't have enough power before 2028.

Here's a link for $10 off premium.

edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

Everybody is very casual with how they talk about Sam Altman’s theoretical promises of trillions of dollars of data center infrastructure, and I'm not sure anybody realizes how difficult even the very basics of this plan will be.
Nevertheless, everybody is happily publishing stories about how “Stargate Abilene Texas - OpenAI’s massive data center with Oracle - is open,” by which they mean two buildings, and I’m not even confident both of them are providing compute to OpenAI yet. There are six more of them that need to get built for this thing to start rocking at 1.2GW - even though it’s only 1.1GW according to my sources in Abilene.
But, hey, sorry - one minute - while we’re on that subject, did anybody visiting Abilene in the last week or so ever ask whether they’ll have enough power there?
Don’t worry, you don’t need to look - I’m sure you were just about to, and had simply been busy! - but I did the hard work for you and read up on it, and it turns out that Stargate Abilene only has 200 megawatts of power - a 200 megawatt substation that, according to my sources, has only been built within the last couple of months, with 350 Megawatt of gas turbine generators that connect to a natural gas power plant that might get built by the end of the year in the event that one of the multiple construction firms involved . Said turbine is extremely expensive, featuring volatile pricing (for context, volatility fell in Q2 2025…to 69% annualized, meaning that if you had these prices across the entirety of a year you’d see swings of 69% up or down) and even more volatile environmental consequences, and is, while permitted for it (this will download the PDF of the permit), impractical and expensive to use long-term.
Analyst James van Geelen, founder of Citrini Research recently said on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that these are “not the really good natural gas turbines” because the really good ones would take seven years to deliver due to a natural gas turbine shortage.
But th…

$Stargate Abilene does not have sufficient power to run at even half of its supposed IT load of 1.2GW, and at its present capacity - assuming that the gas turbines function at full power - can only hope to run 370MW to 460MW of IT load. I’ve seen article after article about the gas turbines and their use of fracked gas - a disgusting and wasteful act typical of OpenAI - but nobody appears to have asked “how much power does a 1.2GW data center require?” and then chased it with “how much power does Stargate Abilene have?” The answer is not enough, and the significance of said “not enough” is remarkable. Today, I’m going to tell you, at length, how impossible the future of generative AI is. Gigawatt data centers are a ridiculous pipe dream, one that runs face-first into the walls of reality. The world’s governments and media have been far too cavalier with the term “gigawatt,” casually breezing by the fact that Altman’s plans require 17 or more nuclear reactors’ worth of power, as if building power is quick and easy and cheap and just happens. I believe that many of you think that this is an issue of permitting - of simply throwing enough money at the problem - when we are in the midst of a shortage in the electrical grade steel and transformers required to expand America (and the world’s) power grid. I realize it’s easy to get blinded by the constant drumbeat of “gargoyle-like tycoon cabal builds 1 gigawatt data center” and feel that they will simply overwhelm the problem with money, but no, I’m afraid that isn’t the case at all, and all of this is so silly, so ridiculous, so cartoonishly bad that it threatens even the seemingly-infinite wealth of Elon Musk, with xAI burning over a billion dollars a month and planning to spend tens of billions of dollars building the Colossus 2 data center, dragging two billion dollars from SpaceX in his desperate quest to burn as much money as possible for no reason. This is the age of hubris - a time in which we are going to watc…$

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Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 1d

i can't tell you how often i think that more community theatre could channel the worst impulses of some of the worst people

they have no idea they want to act out a fantasy, and that in some spaces that's ok

but because "the arts" are off limits for them, they do this kind of insane shit

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James Hell Brooks @kleinman.bsky.social · 1d

The divide within the Republican Party is between those who think they're establishing a thousand-year reich and those who think they'll have to work with a Democratic president at some point in their career.

Larry Ferlazzo @larryferlazzo.bsky.social · 1d

Oklahoma’s Republican governor criticizes guard deployment. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/u...

Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, a Republican and the chairman of the National Governors Association, on Thursday criticized the deployment of Texas National Guard troops to Illinois as a violation of his beliefs in federalism and “states’ rights.”

His comments, in an interview with The New York Times, marked the first time a Republican governor has questioned the interstate deployment of National Guard troops over a governor’s objections. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and other Democratic elected officials have been strongly critical of the move and have implored Republican governors to join the opposition.

Mr. Stitt on Thursday said, “We believe in the federalist system — that’s states’ rights,” adding, “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”

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Marian Call @mariancall.bsky.social · 1d

and ads for questionable supplements

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spookygorski @cpgorski.bsky.social · 1d

*applause*

Pack it up... We have a winner for today, y'all

John Rogers @johnrogers.bsky.s... • 1h
ME: Now Mom, just remember, there's a lot of disinformation and Al in your social feed and your friends' Facebook.
MOM: I know! My friend sent me this crazy post where someone used Al to make an image of a giant frog fighting Army troops!
ME: ... okay, no, that one's ... goddamit, Portland.

MotherofCorgs @motherofcar... • 22m
It's only fighting if that was a dance off.
And you know those feds can't dance.

Goo-orge W Horrors @bullcityfats.bsky.social
And if they can't dance they're...no feds of mine

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Taniel @taniel.bsky.social · 1d

a very under-the-radar thing happening in Mississippi this fall:

Bolts @boltsmag.org · 2d

A federal appeals court ruled that Mississippi had to redraw its legislative maps. As a result, 14 districts affected by the new boundaries are hosting special elections this November. Democrats may flip several.

Your Cheat Sheet to the 2025 General Elections - Bolts

Four contests have come to largely define the 2025 elections this fall: the elections to lead New Jersey, Virginia, and New York City, plus California’s redistricting measure. But there’s so... Read More

boltsmag.org

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DaddyJew @daddyjew.bsky.social · Nov 21

Really? A fucking salad??

- Julius Caesar coming back to life

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