FIFA has announced the creation of a peace prize, which it plans to award for the first time at the World Cup draw on Dec. 5 in Washington.

Frequent readers might have gotten the idea over the years that I scorn the institution of voting, that I don't think much of "my" city council when I can be bothered paying attention to it at all, and (though it hasn't come up much lately) I'm no fonder of progressive technocracy than of any other flavor of tyranny. So it might come as a surprise that I got a little smile out of this article:

I was recently informed by a random YouTube recommendation about The Secret of Weepstone, which bills itself as a "hand-drawn black and white dungeon crawler RPG inspired by classic D&D of the 80’s." That's what it is, and at least in the demo, that's all it is. It's nostalgia bait. But I didn't mind. You know how some fantasy games will zoom in to an old book or a hand-drawn map while introducing you to their story?

Elections between two contestants in America, especially national elections, tend to be very close. This wasn't always the case (Reagan beat Mondale 58-41), but the modern-day presidential election result is expected to be something like 52-48. And while one of the parties will sometimes have "control" of multiple branches of the fedgov, it tends to be by a similarly narrow margin lately; the last time the Senate saw something like a 60-40 split…

I have a bit of a TV Tropes habit. So I was a bit disconcerted to see this: I have a "dark mode" browser extension, but I have it disabled for tvtropes.org; that dark gray text on a darker gray background is their dark mode. I consider that a clue as to how much care and forethought went into their decision to turn up the adtech enshittification dial yesterday afternoon.

So for reasons which I may get into later, I wanted to hear a comedy song I vaguely remembered a few lyrics of: "Kill a Cat" by Glenn Super. I haven't yet, and it looks like I won't any time soon. I can find a few of Glenn Super's "Mr. Bullhorn" bits on YouTube, but the only song I've found is…

The AI #homelessmanprank has gone viral, causing headaches for law enforcement.

Earlier this week, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump summoned hundreds of military commanders to Quantico to hear speeches. The two men talked for a couple of hours, and they had a lot to say. Hegseth talked about physical training standards, and less sexual-harassment investigation, and grooming standards that just coincidentally bar women and at least some black men from combat, and anti-woke, and how "unity is our strength," and the "Liberation Day" tariffs, and a few other things.

The algo has now served me multiple pieces on the "AI" "actress" "Tilly Norwood" by the same outlet, Variety, which have mostly served to inform me of Variety's institutional character. First it parroted the corpo hype about "Norwood" being "the next Scarlett Johansson," only to pivot the next day when the majority of the movie industry made sour noises in response.