iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

a query to the folks at @theneedlenews.com (including the author, @artemis.theneedlenews.com): who edited this story? why are they not named? and what are the referenced measures to ensure accuracy?

In the future, The Needle intends to implement more rigorous measures to ensure accuracy and fairness in reporting.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

i don't believe this got enough attention: The Needle issued a retraction to an investigation from two weeks ago, following __EIGHT ERRORS__ that were uncaught before publication the single editor on the story was their "fiction and satire editor" (what the fuck? why?), who has stepped down god

Retraction: Adam Proffitt is Not Personally Investigating Trans People in Bathrooms
Artemis T. Douglas
The Needle Editors & Writers
Artemis T. Douglas & The Needle Editors & Writers
Sept. 1, 2026 | 11:22a EDT
·
~1,300 words

The Needle is issuing a voluntary retraction for our article “Kansas’ Investigations of Trans People in Bathrooms Personally Overseen by Democrat Appointee Adam Proffitt,” which was published Aug 22. We regret these mistakes.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

trump posting actual ragebait on truth social LMFAO

a truth social from about an hour ago, showing a ranking of the presidents. from the bottom:
Failures: Biden, Obama, G.W. Bush, Harding, Carter, Hoover
Below Average: Tyler, Coolidge, Fillmore, Taylor, Buchanan, Pierce, G.H. Bush, L.B. Johnson, Ford
Average: Clinton, J.Q. Adams, Monroe, Hayes, Madison, Taft, Arthur, McKinley, A. Johnson, Nixon, Kennedy, Grant, Van Buren, B. Harrison, Truman
Near Great: T. Roosevelt, Cleveland, J. Adams, Polk, Reagan, Wilson, Eisenhower
Great: Lincoln, Washington, F.D. Roosevelt, Jefferson, Jackson
The Greatest: Trump

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

this quiz kinda sucked but they got me!

You talk most like someone from New Jersey — about 55% of your answers match a typical resident.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

someone go to slutcon PLEASE i need to see what this track involves

TRACK 2
Rizz Under Uncertainty
Gretta Duleba
Sock Wrestling

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

some answers with shocking clarity here (see exhibit a), and some with a shocking lack of clarity here (see exhibit b). a great interview

Exhibit A

Recently, there has been some international attention to some of the violence, and even some attention to the military standing by while the violence—

That is not true. I don’t agree with that. Most of the military support the settlers. Most of the government, of course, does. But also the army and the police. They do not stand aside. They help them. They don’t just let them do what they want to do. They help them with money and roads. I will give you an example. There is a closed military zone, and the commander takes a map and claims no one can get in. And in this area, there are supposed to be no Israelis allowed—only Palestinians and the army itself. This happened in Qusra. No one could get in except the people who lived there, they said. But then the military commander allowed a lot of settlers to come in and build, and even to start committing crimes against Palestinians. When I was arrested, it was in a closed military zone, and they arrested me because I was there. But they left the settlers. These settlers had wanted to break a kind of water well that the Palestinians were using. But the army came and took me and arrested me and left the settlers there to break the gate to the well and allow their goats to drink from it. This is how the army helps the settlers with their crimes. [Meinert called me a couple of days after our interview and told me, “The settlers came to the same place, and dumped the water on the floor. The army came again and just watched the settlers do it.”]

How do you look back on your army service now?

Most of my service was in the northern area, on the border with Lebanon and near Syria. And I served in Tel Aviv. I was also in the West Bank a few times for four-month periods. I think then the situation was very different than now, in terms of the army and the Palestinians both. I am talking about the early nineteen-nineties. We understood then that we had a duty to prevent terror against Israelis, but we also felt that there was a duty not to treat the Palestinians a certain way. I said to myself that this was an illegal occupation, but that we could give the Palestinians rights. And we still fought against the settlers. I remember when I was a battalion commander around the Hebron area. We tried to stop the settlers from the violence they wanted to commit. It was one of our duties. All my life I have been on the left, even if I was never a pacifist. I thought Israel needed an army and had enemies. But an army has to be moral and follow the law. And there has been a big change.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

it feels weird for the WSJ to attribute this rebuttal (or whatever you want to call it) to druckenmiller when i know full well they can see it's AI-written and they just published as-is if a human ever writes a lede ending in a sentence with a colon -> em dash i'll eat a shoe

the lede in question:

The Treasury Department announced on Aug. 19 that it would double the size of its long-dated bond buybacks, from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, aimed at the 10- to 30-year sector and running from Sept. 9 through Nov. 4. The announcement came after the 30-year yield touched a 19-year high. Yields fell within minutes. By the next afternoon they had round-tripped to levels above where they started. The market’s verdict was swift and correct: This wasn’t liquidity management, it was price management—and a mistake far larger than $4 billion suggests.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

and can we lock in please. like please. the synthid is visible in the header

the header image has openai's synthid in it

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

dont usually comment on stuff like this but yall have genuinely forced my hand this horror of an article is ai-generated!!!!!!! it reads like a person who has never written an explainer in their life!!!!!!!!!! jesus fucking christ

At two minutes to midnight on Friday, Mark Carney did something no Canadian prime minister has done in living memory. He looked at the most powerful man in the world, checked his watch, and told his negotiators to pack their bags and come home.

Not “we’ll reconvene Monday.” Not “talks are paused pending further discussion.” Suspended. Finished. Wheels up, boys, fuck this wanker, we’re going back to Ottawa.

And here’s the part the American press keeps missing, because they’re too busy live-blogging the tantrum to read the room. Carney didn’t storm out. He timed his exit like a bloke who’s read the fixture list.

The Deadline That Ate Itself
Let’s set the scene, because you need the full panorama to appreciate this shitshow.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

yes signal that's so true i DO have two notifications please let me read them

signal showing i have two unreads but zero unread chats in the app

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

guy in my dms trying to get me to let him hit with my colleague and close friend: i was such a big fan >< using tried and true tactics such as lying ("abuser" rofl)

maia hates me after getting [person] arrested
apparently it wasnt cool to get an abuser arrested
i was a fan of hers
rather annoyed she acted the way she did anyway im not going to get you involved with that

i'm not certain what you want me to get from that

im just saying lol
im bored
and a bit out of it atm

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

elite "i get off work in 10min" dialogue skip -> catfish. learned from the any% speedrunners of the category

I hope so dear ..
when are you getting off at work.. 2m
i work the morning shift, so in 10min actually haha
1m
but it's slow around here, not very busy thankfully. so i'm basically off now
Now
Ohh that's cool ..
I will actually like to know you better if you're here to be serious..

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

as far as this person is aware i'm a 31yo man from Los Angeles. and they are 28 from "USA"

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

FYI/reporters/researchers: this dataset of UK cops has nothing special. it's by and large just a list of names of police + their force + emails there are a few password hashes + 'legacy usernames' in there, but nothing at scale (if anyone wants a cleaned version of the data, signal is in bio)

the results of a script that prints stats about a cleaned version of the dataset

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

not included in the release are the more than 55 million user records also in the breach, which i found were not in the public interest to release, nor assorted stripe transactions from late november. that stripe data does, however, give a picture as to where Suno was growing the most at the time:

Attempted Suno payments per capita by country, around Nov. 24, 2025
From 65,304 attempted purchases captured by a hacker across 27 hours in November 2025, from the late night of the 23rd to the morning of the 25th.
Including failed purchases. A small number of attempts had invalid country data.
Map: ryan fae

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

the source code is massive. it shows how Suno employees scraped hundreds of thousands of hours of music from Deezer, YouTube Music, and similar platforms to train its models — among many, many other things.

a code comment from a training session
# youtube_music: ~1h runtime
# 105,498 hours of youtube_music
# 12,168 hours of youtube_music_lyrics
# 10,363 hours of youtube_music_lyrics_foreign
# genius_hq: ~1h runtime
# 17,784 hours of genius_hq
# 41,544 hours of genius_hq_lyrics
# 17,469 hours of genius_hq_lyrics_foreign
# imslp: ~8m runtime
# 12,175 hours of imslp
# jamendo: ~27m runtime
# 3,251 hours of jamendo
# pond5_music: ~51m runtime
# 58,592 hours of pond5_music
# deezer: ~19m runtime
# 12,181 hours of deezer
# 10,132 hours of deezer_lyrics
# 6,770 hours of deezer_lyrics_foreign
# ytm_tagged: ~1h runtime
# 141,476 hours of ytm_tagged
# musescore: ~5m runtime
# 103 hours of ytm_tagged
# ytm_mb: ~12h runtime
# 1,642,164 hours of ytm_mb

tony.git/FineTuning_chirp_v4/04_make_memmaps_v4_ft_t0.ipynb

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

earlier this month, i obtained 102 internal git repositories from music ai company Suno, which was hacked in November. that source code is now being released through @ddosecrets.org in the public interest. ddosecrets.org/article/suno... 🧵

Suno AI source
Published on 2026-07-28

Article Details
Source: ellie.191

Type: Corporate, Hack

Download Size: 12.45 GB

Download: Link

Magnet: Link

Torrent: Link

Over 100 source code repositories from Suno, a generative AI platform designed to generate songs based on text prompts. In 2024, Suno was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for copyright violations. The leak reveals that Suno scraped music information from YouTube, Genius, and Deezer with assistance from the Israeli company Bright Data (formerly Luminati Networks).

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

with soundcloud's ui having updated (1st image), the "v2_layout" query parameter on the main iframe shows they toyed with a completely new site design (2nd image)

the new and current design, which maintains the old top bar and bottom player style

the "v2_layout=false" design, with the top bar turned into a textless sidebar and the bottom bar made more minimal. the bottom bar appears to be in light mode, which may be a bug.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

just terrific, terrific reporting from the staff at @lemonde.fr. chilling and shocking and angering investigative series that deserves a read www.lemonde.fr/en/french-li...

This case, much of which was captured on video, is hard to forget for anyone who comes across it. One of the authors working on this investigation followed a strict routine to protect himself: No more than three hours of work per day on the subject, preferably at the office rather than at home, with regular breaks. After descending into the depths of the case, he emerged saddened and disheartened by an obvious conclusion: When a woman's body is put on display in this way, many men rush to participate, whatever the circumstances. That was something the French Bukkake and Dominique Pelicot cases had already shown.
What exactly should we describe from the scenes of extreme violence in this case? We have decided, for the third part of our investigation, to recount in detail a weekend spent at the home of Christophe B. at the end of the winter, a period that has been given particular scrutiny in the judicial proceedings. We believe it is representative of the extremes in this case and necessary for a full understanding of what Christophe B.'s partners went through. It details the height of the predation, involving more than 15 men and illustrating the victims' complete lack of power.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

wanted to post this ridiculously cool graphic by my friends angie and aoife on israeli television broadcasting the major channels have a very... interesting history that follows israel's throughout the decades tbh (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

a timeline of Israeli television broadcasting

there is, unfortunately, too much text to fit in here and too much nonlinear information that its more confusing with than without

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

this sourcing has got to be utterly terrifying to Gallego. almost reads like an oppo

Sen. Ruben Gallego’s right-hand man quietly created a nonprofit that’s able to raise unlimited funds, according to articles of incorporation and a person who advised the senator and his staff.

Roy Herrera, who serves as legal counsel for Gallego’s political operation and as treasurer of the senator’s leadership PAC, “Juntos PAC,” created the 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization in late February, per the articles of incorporation reviewed by NOTUS.

According to the person who advised the senator, concerns that the organization, called “Together America,” might run afoul of campaign finance rules have been raised with Gallego (D-Arizona) and his advisers.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

rather striking illo in Die Zeit today (yesterday, i suppose), i believe by Paul Blickle, on the european heatwave

[text translated from German:]
Why this heat wave is particularly hard on us
Germany is sweltering, and the heat is intensifying. We'll show you what makes this heat wave unusual – apart from the obvious: temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius.
By Paul Blickle, Linda Fischer, and Claudia Vallentin

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

some editor at the times has been using AP style recently lol

new york times style on numerals: "In headlines, figures may be used for all cardinal and ordinal numbers ..."

ap style on numerals: "In general, spell out numbers at the start of a sentence: 'Forty years was a long time to wait.'"

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

GANG. we smashed scarlet's goal (thank you!!), but it's NOT OVER YET for them. her fiancée's been in and out of the ER repeatedly over the last few weeks. they still need more money for soon-to-come medical bills. help her out <3 gofund.me/7edeb1696

$6,565 raised from 87 donations, out of $6,100 goal

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

you can't convince me this photo isn't fucking hysterical LMAO

a very stretched out trump, with todd blanche reflected in the background

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

SCOOP: real estate firm CBRE is betting big on data centers as driven by the AI rush, per this message sent out to employees last week. they recently announced a program to train technicians to build Meta's data centers — a significant departure from their usual area of interest.

Global Employees,

We had an excellent start to 2026, as you can see from the press release that we issued today as well as our analyst presentation. All four of our business segments made strong contributions to our first-quarter performance, including our new Critical Infrastructure Services business line within the BOE segment.

The breadth of our capabilities for infrastructure assets, particularly data centers, is a real differentiator for CBRE, enabling us to deliver services for clients that truly set us apart.

A good example is this recent announcement of a new program with Meta Platforms. CBRE will be running training centers across the U.S. to equip thousands of workers with the technical skills required to build out the significant number of data centers that Meta has under construction and planned.

This program is beneficial on several levels. It addresses an acute shortage of skilled labor needed to build essential digital infrastructure, strengthens our relationship with an important client, and creates an attractive career path for anyone seeking a job opportunity in this rapidly growing field.

I'll be discussing this and other aspects of our business with Sanjiv Yajnik, the Lead Independent Director on CBRE's Board of Directors, during our Fireside Chat in two weeks. I hope you will join us.

Fireside Chat with Bob Sulentic & Sanjiv Yajnik
May 6 & 7, 2026
Reserve Your Spot

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

i need an alt where i just post bullshit

a bluesky draft:

[sheltered midwestern tboy voice:] mm..... green gay packers....

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

on hyphens, i was reading back Strunk & White's wonderful stylebook and came across this graf

The hyphen can play tricks on the unwary, as it did in Chattanooga when two newspapers merged-the News and the Free Press. Someone introduced a hyphen into the merger, and the paper became The Chattanooga News-Free Press, which sounds as though the paper were news-free, or devoid of news. Obviously, we ask too much of a hyphen when we ask it to cast its spell over words it does not adjoin.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

they royn cohn'd the response

11 minutes ago, from Kristen Welker:

Trump: 'A large number' of Iranian leaders were killed in strikes

In a phone call with NBC News, Trump said "a large amount of leadership" had been killed in Iran in today's strikes.

"I don't mean like two people," the president added without specifying a number.

Asked about who will replace Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Trump said, "I don’t know, but at some point they’ll be calling me to ask who I’d like."

He added, "I'm only being a little sarcastic when I say that."

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

tzofar indicating imminent counterstrikes (presumably from iran and not lebanon), which is exactly what the US appears to not have wanted in their destruction of military infra

28/02/2026 (02:06)
Home Front Command -
Early Warning
Due to the detection of missile launches, alerts may be activated in the coming minutes at Across the country
Across the country
Across the country

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

new fun one! edit by me as per usual ✨

kinemaster horrific if statement in their source code circled in red. a red arrow comes from a yanderedev tweet with the text "god i wish there was an easier way to do this" with a similarly horrible if statement

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

the most incomprehensible quote i have ever seen in a press release (sighs) openai

“Local journalism is as vital as it is valuable to connected communities and a healthy democracy — to paraphrase the late, great Walter Cronkite ‘a free press is not just important for democracy, it is democracy’,” said Chris Lehane, Chief Global Affairs Officer at OpenAI. “AI can help bolster a free press—and by extension our democracy—by freeing up reporters to spend less time on routine tasks and more time on what matters most — being out and on the ground in their communities doing the hard work of the free press — talking to people, tracking down tips, attending events and being the eyes and ears for democracy. We’re as excited as we are enthusiastic about supporting Axios as it expands local news and hires more local scribes in communities across the country. If working with Axios we can use AI to help grow the next generation of the proverbial ‘ink stained wretches’ — even if there is less ink, it will be a good thing.”

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

CBP Black Hawks are all-black with a gold stripe that goes up the back wing, as in the image. from below, you can identify it from its wide tailplane:

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

reading about precolonial chamorro fishing methods (they had upwards of 40) and found this one where they pavlov'd fish into getting caught. but like. thousands of years ago "The Chamorros had a practical application to their experiments in behavioral animal psychology. They caught fish." 🔥🔥🔥🔥

The acho' achuman was made from a large poi (spherical stone sinker) tied to an inverted half-empty ha'iguas (coconut shell). The fisherperson chewed coconut meat and forced it from his or her mouth into an opening in the coconut shell. This feeding apparatus was then lowered from a canoe into ten fathoms (60 feet) of water. The fisherperson shook the line. The resulting noise and escaping coconut mash attracted the fish.
Each day the fisherperson would feed the fish a few feet closer to the surface. Finally, when the fish were feeding about six feet below the surface, they were caught with a net. The conical-shaped net was about nine feet in diameter.
This reminds us of Pavlov, the famous Russian scientist, who trained dogs to salivate by ringing a bell before he fed them. Behavioral psychologists like B. F. Skinner have even trained pigeons to play Ping Pong with their beaks. They do this by rewarding correct behavior. The Chamorros had a practical application to their experiments in behavioral animal psychology. They caught fish.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

gbyte has you COVERED if you need elden ring runes AND to stalk your partner AND account boosting on World of Warcraft

The key provided access for what appears to be most of the source code for not just Gbyte's stalkerware and mobile forensics offerings, but also many other of their products, including:
- A GPS spoofing app with a paid subscription (ilocationchanger.com), having brought in approximately US$200 in revenue
- An MMO boosting service (igz.gg, fka igs.gg) with around 15,000 customers
- A now-defunct Elden Ring rune shop (eldenrings.com, aka eldenshop.com), which appears to use the same backend as igz.gg
- An AI copywriting and customer support tool (italks.cc), which seems to only be used internally for now
- The aforementioned three stalkerware services (spyx.com, msafely.com and spyphone.cc), which have around 1.5 million registered users in total
- The aforementioned Chinese device recovery and forensics tool (gbyte.com.cn)
- The aforementioned oversea-market device recovery tool (gbyte.com), with around 1,500 customers

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

hailey's graph shows _just_ s*, the mean sentiment of each age bin. this is not a visualization of data! it is a visualization of a summary of data! to illustrate why that's bad, enter Ansombe's Quartet. four graphs, obviously different when plotted, but same mean, regression line, etc.

anscombe's quartet. four graphs with very different shapes but with identical means, standard deviations, correlations, regression lines, and so on

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

don't get me wrong: what should be seen first is the graph's substance, d*. D should not be in the forefront of their mind. Edward Tufte, the famous minimalist, tells us that (image). but looking more into the graph should repay you, not make you ask unanswered questions about the data at hand.

induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the technology of graphic production, or something else

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

i poked fun at the unfortunate timing of this last night but i just read the comments and ........??????

@apnews.com this is wildly inappropriate.
Remove this and issue an apology immediately.

Wildly inappropriate to post this while we're bombing Caracas.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

quirk in this grossly islamophobic tweet: OP is so concerned with veiling her racism that she uses 'they' and 'one' to refer to a group she refuses to state and a member of that group, respectively the resulting failure in grammatical understanding is equivalent to an attempt to legitimize bigotry

tweet by Ashley:

They flew planes into the Twin Towers when I was in high school….

And now, one is the mayor in the city where it happened.

Try and vote your way back out of this one, New York! ✌🏼

(attached is a photo of a plane flying into the second tower on 9/11.)

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

my favorite annual music list is out. someone @ RS tell Eric Schlawin to hit my fucking line because this taste is impeccable

Eric Schlawin, Creative Marketing Associate Manager
1. untiljapan, trompe l’oeil
2. Feng, What the Feng
3. Jane Remover, Revengeseekerz
4. DERBY, Slugger
5. Playboi Carti, Music
6. kmoe, K1
7. Ninajirachi, I Love My Computer
8. Yung Lean, Jonatan
9. Water From Your Eyes, It’s a Beautiful Place
10. FearDorian, Leaving Home

2025 was one of my favorite music years in recent memory, marked by genre-bending releases from both new faces and familiar mainstays. untiljapan and Feng took the internet (and my top two spots) by storm with breath-of-fresh-air rap projects, while DERBY and Water From Your Eyes continued to captivate with inventive indie sounds. Jane Remover, kmoe, Ninajirachi, and FearDorian each delivered albums full of tastefully chaotic experimentation, and Carti and Lean reminded me that sometimes it is worth it to wait years for an album.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

i got fuckin computers clocking me now

"tgink" autocorrect options being "tgirl," "think" (correct), and "twink"

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

real parenthetical in an article for "hana hou!", a magazine produced for Hawaiian Airlines, that a friend sent to me today

"I know a lot of people don't like it, but we try to make a difference with the tools we have, and right now the chemical treatments seem to be the best option," says Rian (pronounced like Ryan) Huizingh (pronounced who knows how), a field operations supervisor with the Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle Response. The government-funded organization, now based at the University of Hawaii, was established to combat the CRB invasion soon after the beetles were first discovered in Hawai'i on a golf course at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in late 2013.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

on the other app i see Meg Brock of the Daily Caller making a fool of herself w/r/t the Vanity Fair debacle. but what concerns me the most is this comment under the post and how little pushback she's getting from other photojournalists in the thread. like ?????????????

commenter: I take pics all the time and I will find a way to make sure that there’s no outlet or light switch in the background. It looks like they hired a middle schooler from the yearbook committee to take these pics.

Brock: It’s also incredibly easy to clone them out in post production.

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

i am a connoisseur you are a lay

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

this blurb alongside @pitchfork.com's aoty pick this year is brilliant, satisfying, and above all remarkably clear in the project's impossible complexity. stunning @jeremydlarson.bsky.social

Here’s an Onion headline that is tattooed on the back of my brain, from a brief notice with the dateline September 12, 2001: “Bill Gates Finally Getting Into Kid A.” Of all the things in this mille feuille joke, I love the outmoded phrase of “getting into” records. It’s a beautiful practice to let your opinions sit on the shelf like jarred homunculi while struggling to describe how exactly music makes you feel. To say that Los Thuthanaka, the self-titled album from Chuquimamani-Condori and their brother, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, requires some time on the shelf might be an understatement. But get into it, and you’ll know this is a special record, so ahead of its time, and so worthy of your own.

Los Thuthanaka is an album about transience and permanence, the mutability of sound and its deep roots. It’s an instrumental record, a lo-fi psychedelic noise rock piece that broke the VU meters somewhere along the recording process (it was never mastered; it is not on streaming services). But there are so many voices that speak through—and on behalf of—the siblings: electric guitars, electric keytars, mid-century acoustic Andean folk instruments like the ronroco, buried samples of Música Boliviana Popular, Italaque drums from indigenous Aymara people. “Ipi Saxara” features a fried, elliptical riff over a traditional Andean huayño rhythm that is syncopated almost out of time while CDJ backspins and chintzy Yamaha sound effects rain down on the track. Surrender to the wormhole, to the sound of clipping and chaos, to the trans state where you can make out five centuries of music history dancing with each other.

And frankly, none of this would be half as good if this shit didn’t swing so hard. Chuquimamani-Condori’s career as a supersonic producer—whose imposing body of work speaks for voiceless and oppressed people around the world—culminates in this project. They and their brother Josh keep these songs off the grid by borrowing traditional Bolivian styles of huayño, like Salay and Kullawada, to introduce new and novel pockets of rhythm. The cascading drums of “Awila” and the breakneck (or break-your-neck) tempo of “Apnaqkaya Titi” feel like witnessing the birth of sound. The entire Western canon of dance music is rooted in the folk music of indigenous peoples, who brought the concept of syncopation to colonial ears and created the rhythms that moved people toward a higher power. And here it is, back from the past, like you’ve never heard it before.

Los Thuthanaka offer a new national motto for anyone who needs it: Out of one, many. It’s head music, body music, spiritual music, polemic party music, decolonized plunderphonics, or as the title of the angelic opening song is translated from the Aymara language: “The Queer People-Medicines Are Here.” In this new era where we sell the time it takes to think about things to tech companies and their large language models, here is an album that asks something from you: time, patience, reorganization, reframing, and reconnection. Maybe you’ll take an ideological read into what an “unmastered” album signifies, or maybe you’ll take a musicological read into the microtonal noise artifacts popping off in your earbuds as a new harmonic modality. None of this is told; all of this is shown through the ancestry of two siblings who made music to honor their family and their people’s history. Simply put, it’s a story about the journey home, one of the oldest stories in the world. –Jeremy D. Larson

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ryan fae @ryanfae.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

the agreement finally forces the university to "not perform hormonal interventions and transgender surgeries" on minors.

Northwestern and its Feinberg School of Medicine shall not perform hormonal
interventions and transgender surgeries, including but not limited to mastectomies, phalloplasties, vaginoplasties, and/or any other procedure intended to alter an individual's sex characteristics, on any individual under the age of 18 years old, effective immediately upon the Effective Date of this Agreement.
a. Northwestern shall revise all policies, protocols, and public-facing materials at Feinberg School of Medicine to reflect the commitment set forth in this paragraph on hormonal interventions and transgender surgeries to individuals under the age of 18 years old and ensure compliance with federal laws.
b. Northwestern shall notify all faculty and administrators of the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern's commitments set forth above regarding transgender surgeries on minors within thirty (30) days of the Effective Date.

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