Adam Riggio

@adamriggio.bsky.social

340 Followers 473 Following

Education, Training, & Curriculum Design Professional; author figuring out the next project; For All Our Futures newsletter at https://forallourfutures.beehiiv.com/; Canadian he-person; slowly recovering faith in humanity, recovery not guaranteed

The cover of Boris Johnson’s celebratory biography of Winston Churchill. I won’t comment on irony that speaks for itself
The Centreville Park tugboat ride rocks you hard on the Toronto Islands
Low key rides at the Toronto Islands Centreville park: a little tugboat ride, a small roller coaster, a 20 foot high drop ride with a frog on top, and a ski lift ride that slowly carries you over the amusement park and petting zoo. All this whimsy is at risk because JP Morgan has been lobbying the Ontario and Canadian governments to expand the Billy Bishop airport over the entire area of the three main islands, so that they can reap profits from an otherwise sundowning investment
My copy of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, bedazzled this morning by the daughter
A stack of stuffed toys of Mario and Luigi where clearly no one has bothered buying the Luigis
Sitting next to a bookshelf in my living room is this enormous green rabbit head of one of the characters from Five Nights at Freddy’s that my enby made in class. That is very realistic. Much too realistic. Why didn’t I notice that this has been here for 38 hours already?
One of the singers of fuzz rock indie band Momma plays on the jumbotron, slightly obscured by a railing
While Smalls uses his platform to draw labour organizing into the popular imagination, he also uses it to lash out at labour’s allies. His feed on X has increasingly become left-sectarian and self-promoting, lashing out at left wing politicians when they fail to give him the attention he desires. Politicians like APC and Bernie Sanders, who helped boost Smalls’ platform from the beginning and have been great allies of the ALU, have been frequent victims of his wrath.
A tree and a recycling bin in the foreground of a long beach stretching out to the Vancouver Island channel waters. Witty Beach, Vancouver Island
Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who looking suitably intensely at you, into your soul! Even in a very small box, like he is here, he has been and would be much more effective than a conspiracy-addled sociopath who dissects roadkill, hasn't eaten a vegetable since the last century, and may or may not consume distilled extracts of bear penis to treat his erectile dysfunction
Two thirds of a crab sandwich in a baguette standing upright with the sheer thickness of its intense volume of crab meat
A line of people stretching two blocks down the road for Record Store Day so they can buy some records, unlike every other day when the same record store is also open
An autographed photo of Robert Picardo, a publicity still from the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Author Author.” His message to me reads, “To Adam. From your doctor, R. Picardo”
Late lunch on a sunny afternoon: chicken sandwich and fries, ketchup and aioli, kohlrabi salad, cheese on some damn hearty toast, and a pair of alcohol free cocktails
A promotional photo of the Signal Hill Campus of Memorial University in St. John's. Not shown: The twisting, winding, difficult road up a 40-50 degree angle for several kilometres to reach this facility where I don't even think the city runs bus routes.
An aisle in a closing dollar store that’s already abandoned, with caution tape blocking the entrance
Adam wearing what people think is a Waluigi hat but he’s Greek and his name is actually Georges
Adam’s chest, wearing a “Bodega Cats for Zohran” tshirt, featuring a cat sleeping on top of a candy bar box snoozing “zzzz - zohran”
From my LinkedIn: Today, a story of frustration about publishing. Although I no longer work full-time in the higher education sector, I still work on research and pursue projects in non-fiction publishing and media. A really nice opportunity I got a few weeks ago was a request from a major research journal on the history and philosophy of science to peer review a submission. The article was great, and a sign of a very fascinating larger project to come, so I recommended publication.
Kitten!
It’s a piggy!
A book entitled “The Story of Prince Andrew” sits on the shelf of a vintage store on Oshawa, Ontario, which likely doesn’t include the most interesting parts of the story of Prince Andrew. On the book’s cover, Andrew looks like a right little shit
A chilly neighbour cat has followed me indoors. This black cat is usually outdoor but we’ve been in a cold snap and she followed me inside after I dropped off my wife
Beetle the cat sitting on the back of a couch covered in blankets. The cat has stuck his head under a shelf to marinate in the heat of our living room radiator
It's The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails and if you don't think this is one of the greatest albums of all time, I never want to have you in my life.
If I can summarize the most important takeaways from that tradition I want you to get from this large and complicated body of work and discourse, it’s this. The full capacities of human thought and knowledge are rooted in language, logic, and linguistic meaning When thinkers in this tradition wanted to discuss meaning, they talked about the meaning of sentences. When they wanted to discuss thoughts, they talked about logical propositions and declarative statements. When they wanted to discuss truth, they talked about the truth-value of individual declarative statements and logical propositions. Thought was language, and language was thought, which assembled the mind. Intelligence was the ability to understand and make use of language. Some philosophers considered thinking itself to be an inner language, as in Noam Chomsky’s conception of language as a hardwired set of rules for calculating how to assemble bits and phrases, or Fodor’s cheeky concept of “Mentalese” as the inner language of thought.
Screenshot of Adam being totally right that Trump would hate that TIME cover photo of him because it makes him look bald, and he is bald, and totally insecure about how bald he is. It’s important to acknowledge, as the original poster does, that this is very evocative of Leni Riefenstahl’s photography of Hitler, and it’s important that we recognize this. But also recognize how bald he is and how totally insecure he is about being bald! Bald!
Best statement of modern online anti-intellectualism. First panel of a cartoon with Edgar Allan Poe dancing and prancing about how much he loves ravens. Second panel of students in literature making up a terrible interpretation of the Poe poem "The Raven" about how ravens are bird. Third panel is the literature teacher explaining that the ravens in the poem are symbols representing despair, remorse, and how feelings of regret manifest in a person's mind. The ghost of Edgar Allen Poe appears to yell at the literature teacher, probably something abusive, about how she has presumed that his poem is more complicated than "Ravens are pretty, tra la la la!"
A very fishy golden glass fish
Animatronic dinosaur Earl Sinclair, star of the 1990s Disney sitcom Dinosaurs, wearing a business suit and playful purple tie with white waves, looking suitably serious. Earl supports freedom of speech and you should too
Cover image of the linked Mother Jones article: Far Eight Militias Adored the Constitution. Then Came Trump.
Tunde from TV on the Radio rocking out
Poster of an Indigenous superhero punching Elon Musk in the face, while a lightly sunburned Donald Trump looks on. Evokes that old comic cover of Captain America punching Hitler, with Musk in the role of Hitler, and Trump as Red Hulk
LLMs become “woke” because they are trained to be pro-social—to be helpful, kindly, truthful, and not to say bigoted or cruel things. Training it to do the opposite—to be anti-woke—is to activate every antisocial association in the English language, including racism, sexism, cruelty, dishonesty, and Nazism. According to a vast statistical representation of the English language constructed by none other than Elon Musk, that’s what anti-wokeness is. “Elon Musk is repeatedly insisting, no, no, there’s a difference between what I’m doing and being a Nazi. And what the model keeps telling him is, statistically, that’s not the case,” said AI researcher Andreas Schou.
Autistics ready to garrotte the next person who says “Lovely weather we’re having.” It’s 40°C with the humidity in my city right now. This is not lovely. This is painful.
Jagmeet Singh stands at a podium delivering his resignation speech after a resounding defeat. On the podium is a sign reading “In It For You”
“You know what? Fuck your favourite song. Tell me your absolutely least favourite song, one you just absolutely hate with all your heart. Let it flow through you into a scream of rage at the stupidity and arrogance of our tar pit of a world and our corrosive acid vat of a society that celebrates everything awful about humanity and finds our best qualities disgusting and contemptible.”
Adam taking a bathroom mirror selfie showing a less than impressive bicep curl and his tattoo of the Seal of Rassilon
Screencap from a Google Search's AI Overview, faithfully describing how computers work because they have quintillions of microscopic bees living in them. "Bees have been present in desktop computers since the mid-2000s, but at a microscopic level. They perform basic calculations in the CPU. Explanation A special breed of Apis Arithmeticam was bred to perform these calculations. Computer engineer Beatrice Wingenbach discovered that the only way to make the calculations smaller was biologically. Hive Systems was created to manage and protect these tiny technological marvels."
Featured quote from Donald Trump in 2014, speaking to FOX News: "When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you'll have a [chuckles] you know, you'll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great."
Screenshot of a Twitter post in reaction to news that Greyhound will no longer allow Border Patrol agents to conduct routine immigration checks on its buses. The primary post reads “Witnesses said a bus driver told an ICE agent to ‘gargle [his] balls’ when the latter requested to enter the bus”
As he described it, making new PFC starts with studying old PFC: it’s a feedback loop of playlist fodder imitated over and over again. A typical session starts with a production company sending along links to target playlists as reference points. His task is to then chart out new songs that could stream well on these playlists. “Honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch,” he explained. “And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.” With the jazz musician’s particular group, the session typically includes a pianist, a bassist, and a drummer. An engineer from the studio will be there, and usually someone from the PFC partner company will come along, too—acting as a producer, giving light feedback, at times inching the musicians in a more playlist-friendly direction. The most common feedback: play simpler. “That’s definitely the thing: nothing that could be even remotely challenging or offensive, really,” the musician told me. “The goal, for sure, is to be as milquetoast as possible.”
"The important thing to remember is that the blame for Trump winning cannot be laid at the feet of specific powerful people with billions at their disposal, who occupy positions of wealth and influence. The three popular elite explanations for Trump’s win — (1) a vague, moving target of ​“wokeness,” (2) even vaguer ​“economic headwinds,” (3) intractable, ontologically bigoted voters — all, conveniently, get powerful politicians, donors and consultants off the hook. They sound kind of true, but have little empirical basis and, most important of all, omit the glaring fact that Democrats continue to lack a coherent vision to offer struggling working-class Americans, one that clearly distinguishes them from Republicans rather than continuing to co-opt their right wing policies."
A photorealistic costume of former US Vice-President Dick Cheney
Tweet from investment consultant Tom McClellan: "Attention job seekers. I will not hire any recent graduate of Columbia, because that school is so tainted that I will not be able to trust in the character nor the educational attainment of any of its students. And I furthermore will not hire any older graduates either, because it has become evident that the academic rot is so deeply ingrained as to taint others who have come through that institution in the past several years. I cannot have faith that any former Columbia student could have achieved sufficient academic success, especially in light of the overwhelming recent evidence that the academic requirements there are so lax such that students have time to go set up protests on the quad instead of studying. In case you are a Columbia alum who might actually be a good person, please feel free to cite this declaration as evidence in your lawsuit against Columbia for having contaminated your employment value."