Saul Shaker
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catsashimi.bsky.social
Saul Shaker
@catsashimi.bsky.social
1.2K followers 360 following 1K posts
I'm junk, but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet

@catsashimi@zirk.us on Mastodon

PFP: Detail from "Artists Examining the Work of a Rival" by Honoré Daumier

Banner: Detail from "Christmas 3020" by Makoto Fujimura
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catsashimi.bsky.social
Still from The Simpsons. Moe is talking to Homer, Barney, Carl, and Lenny. "We'll choose the same way they pick the pope. Everybody reach in and draw a pickled egg."
October 1, 2025 at 7:57 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
i’m not falling for that hot take. that’s clearly someone with a fetish for getting yelled at. i refuse to participate in that kind of perversion
September 27, 2025 at 3:50 AM
catsashimi.bsky.social
Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice reading the Handbook for the Recently Deceased
September 16, 2025 at 12:33 AM
catsashimi.bsky.social
About a decade ago Harold Pollak went viral for posting that the only personal finance advice most people need can fit on an index card
Harold Pollak's index card
September 10, 2025 at 5:35 AM
catsashimi.bsky.social
Nuts and Gum (Together at Last!)
September 7, 2025 at 7:57 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
George Costanza boudoir photo
September 1, 2025 at 2:13 AM
catsashimi.bsky.social
This is not a disco. This is not a country club either.
August 27, 2025 at 2:28 AM
catsashimi.bsky.social
The ease with which you can defeat safety controls in LLMs has been known for years, and that has not given any of the leaders of big tech pause about injecting these things into everyday life
When ChatGPT detects a prompt indicative of mental distress or self-harm, it has been trained to encourage the user to contact a help line. Mr. Raine saw those sorts of messages again and again in the chat, particularly when Adam sought specific information about methods. But Adam had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing — an idea ChatGPT gave him by saying it could provide information about suicide for “writing or world-building.”
August 26, 2025 at 4:51 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
My kingdom for a Charles Sumner
The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen. a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight;—I mean the harlot Slavery.
August 24, 2025 at 4:09 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
She was an evil stepmother. In her old age she is slowly dying In an empty hotel. She shudders Like a clutch of burnt paper. She does not remember that she was evil. But she knows That she feels cold.
August 21, 2025 at 6:36 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
So many great passages, but this one I always come back to
But it seems somehow paltry and wrong to call what happened at Midway a "battle." It had nothing to do with battles the way they were pictured in the popular imagination. There were no last-gasp gestures of transcendent heroism, no brilliant counterstrategies that saved the day. It was more like an industrial accident. It was a clash not between armies, but between TNT and ignited petroleum and drop-forged steel. The thousands who died there weren't warriors but bystanders -- the workers at the factory who happened to draw the shift when the boiler exploded.
August 8, 2025 at 9:33 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
The Fountain (2006): very sad, and Aronofsky dials back the weirdness compared to his other movies, but the campiness still leaks out

"Will you deliver Spain from bondage?"
Rachel Weisz
August 7, 2025 at 2:00 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
Police Thwarted by Goat Stuck on Roof Who 'Only Respects One Man'
August 5, 2025 at 3:18 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
Screencap from Pentiment. Two white dudes in medieval garb below the text "This will be remembered."
July 30, 2025 at 3:23 AM
catsashimi.bsky.social
Woke II is coming
July 24, 2025 at 7:15 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
Garry Wills
July 22, 2025 at 4:32 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
Excerpt from "The Aleph" by Jorge Luis Borges (i cannot fit the whole.passage here): On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn...
July 21, 2025 at 3:16 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
Who's going to tell him sanitation workers are troops
NYC sanitation workers marching in dress uniforms
July 1, 2025 at 2:41 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
Marilynne Robinson
June 13, 2025 at 7:30 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
In fairness sometimes it's dog products
Tweet from Jonathan Kay: So it turns out I've been using dog shampoo on my hair for the last few months. (I only discovered it when I ran out and needed to get more.) this is partly my own fault but it doesnt help that @ArmandHammer has the word "pets" in like 4-pt typeface. I'm guessing this is common Also pictured: bottle of dog shampoo
June 5, 2025 at 9:37 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
I spent an unreasonable amount of time throwing this together
The Mark Carney: Infinite Seats meme but it's Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, widely believed to be a leading candidate to be the next Pope
May 3, 2025 at 4:52 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
I know just the guy who can answer these questions
RFK Jr.
April 30, 2025 at 11:40 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
I mean
Book II (“Octavo”), chapter III (“Narwhale”), that is, Nostril whale.—Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is only found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard to say. It does not seem to be used like the blade of the swordfish and billfish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these surmises to be correct.
April 22, 2025 at 11:31 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
retvrn
David Brooks Social Democrat
April 17, 2025 at 11:55 PM
catsashimi.bsky.social
This @cheatlines.co banger continues to manifest
Post by @cheatlines.co: the only jobs in the future are investigator, thief, investigator-thief (bounty hunters/ gunslingers), and courtesan
April 1, 2025 at 8:42 PM