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Tim P Rak

@timprak.bsky.social
346 followers 889 following 448 posts

You can't just eat food. You've got to talk about it, too, and you've got to talk about it with someone who understands that food. - paraphrased from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. "I'm certain as a lost dog pondering a signpost." - DPA MacManus

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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Hearing Steve Stone call a game for the first time in so many years is extremely nostalgic.
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Judd Legum @juddlegum.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
1. Jay Feely, a former NFL kicker and a GOP candidate for Congress in Arizona, has made “protecting women’s sports” a centerpiece of his election campaign. So I reviewed years of Feely’s podcast appearances to see what he actually thinks about female athletes. 🧵
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Grackles in conversation
Two grackles have alighted on top of a lamp post above Pearl boulevard in Boulder.
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TitaniumMan @titaniumman.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
In case anyone hasn't come across it yet, the trailer is on YouTube:
youtu.be
Musk | Official Trailer | Bleecker Street
YouTube video by Musk
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Very pleasant meal at River and Woods in Boulder. The Palisade Peach specials were quite delicious.
On a wooden table with diagonal slash marks running across it (I asked and no explanation was forthcoming regarding this design element), is a quasi rectangular plate with two deviled eggs. The egg on the right came out a bit smooshed and I am surprised they let that out of the kitchen. A picture of the special menu at River and Woods. It reads:

River and Woods
Palisade Peach Specials
A love letter to the last, best weeks of a Colorado summer.
Executive sous chef Mason Crane
- When the trucks come down from the Western Slope loaded with Palisade peaches, the whole cabin smells like August. For a few short weeks we build a menu around them - tart, sweet, sun-warmed, and gone before you know it. 
A dash of whimsy, a pinch of tradition.

From the Bar
Peach Bourbon Smash - $15
Four Roses Bourbon, Black Tea Simple Syrup, Fresh Lemon Juice, Peach Puree, Mint, Ginger Beer
Main Dish
Peach-Glazed Kurobuta Pork Tendrerloin - GF - $35
Smoked & Roasted Kurobuta Pork Tenderloin, Palisade Peach Whole Grain Mustard Glaze, Cheesy Bloody Butcher Grit Cake, Sauteed Esoterra Greens, Charred Palisade Peach, Pickled Currant Relish
V - vegan VG - Vegetarian DF - Dairy Free GF - Gluten Free
*Limited quantitiesThe pork tenderloin dish described in the previous picture.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
A normal distribution is of no use when one needs to be on point.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
An unamused squirrel.
A squirrel peers down upon the photographer from a tree branch sprouting many green leaves.
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Elizabeth Picciuto @epicciuto.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Any of us who had a kid in the NICU (and there are surely a bunch of us) has a sense of what those parents those babies are going through. Fervently wishing that everyone comes through ok. I hate them. I hate them.
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Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
As the parent to a kid who spent a lot of time in the NICU, the level of contempt I have for the MAHA folks knows no bounds.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
A duck sleeps on Sloan Lake. The photo captures a cloudy sky, the reflection of the duck and a few stray strands of greenery to the left of the frame.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 14/09/2026
crypto, car dealerships and MLMs. ripe targets for political and policy reasons.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
This is an unhappy squirrel.
Unhappy squirrel regards the photographer with consternation and, perhaps, foreboding.
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Blue Heron Farm @blueheronfarm.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
This is absolute garbage, @ginafortexas.bsky.social Do better
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
As @ryanlostintx.bsky.social used to (maybe still does, I checked his feed and didn't see it) say, time to get amongst it.
On the left of the frame, an electric range is seen with a dull blue Le Creuset Dutch oven on the front right burner of the hob. Then, on a fake wood countertop, from top left are arrayed two large yellow onions, a few blades of chives (these are gonna disappear but I always end up throwing away some chives at the end of the week so in they go), a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce (gotta grab some Crystal somewhere), a label from St. Killian's cheese shop reading 'parm 24m' (if I just had the rind there it wouldn't look like much), a bottle of Tamari, an eight inch chef's knife in a wooden, magnetized holster (the knife was manufactured in China out of Swedish steel. I'm not sure why that matters.), a head of garlic, a mostly empty bag of organic celery stalks, a wrinkly red pepper (with very limited exceptions, I neither cook nor eat green bell peppers), and a pepper mill (the ratchet thing works well enoug).  Continuing, rounding out the top row, is a large container of browning mushrooms (Jacques Pepin would go through these in, like five seconds) and a container of iodized table salt. One row down, there are (again, from left to right), a small bottle of Ortiz anchovies, jars of smoked paprika, cayenne pepper, HEB brand ground cumin, ground cinnamon, dried oregano, bay leaves and lastly a Kirkland sized container of garlic powder. (I keep this in the fridge as this container may outlive me.)

Finally, on a bamboo cutting board sits a package of Portuguese Linguica (there is not Andouille sausage readily available in the local markets), a package of crushed red pepper flakes (other than the occasional obscure vocabulary word, I can count on one hand the number of times I taught my mom something, which is, if you save those packets, you never need buy crushed red pepper. Finally, occupying the rest of the space left on the counter, are a bag of Camellia red kidney beans, a jar of Better Than Bouillon chicken stock base and a mostly empty tube of Mutti tomato paste.
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Oliver Willis @owillis.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
The Democratic Party has no interest in making the world’s second most prominent fascist leader a factor in this election. Tell me that isn’t throwing the game.
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 06/09/2026
During summer, Louisiana’s Angola prison could rise up to 115 degrees. Duncan said he experienced seizures: “There were times when I got out of bed and I didn’t even know if I was left-handed or right-handed. … I didn’t even know my name.”
propublica.org
He Spent 27 Years on Death Row as a Wrongfully Convicted Man. What Comes Next?
23-hour solitary confinement. 115-degree heat. Jimmie Duncan is haunted by the decades he spent in Louisiana’s Angola prison — and how, even after being released, he still isn’t truly free.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Met this absolute sweety on this morning's walk.
A dark colored tabbycat with white boots pretends as though she is ignoring the photographer while perched upon a boulder amidst greenery. It can't be seen in the photo but the tip of the cat's tail is white and she has white splotches on her face. Basically, an adorable cat acting like a cat. You know?
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Breakfast. I miss bacon.
On a fake wood countertop sits a plate with a dark blue floral pattern. On the plate are three eggs, sunny side up sprinkled with roughly chopped chives, Valentina hot sauce, cayenne powder and cracked black pepper atop two slices of toasted and buttered sourdough toast.  On the left of the plate is a stainless steel fork and on the right a matching stainless steel knife.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
This was pretty neat to see on my walk today.
Sidewalk art spanning across three sections of sidewalk with a rainbow at the top. In yellow print, it reads: "The way I see it if you want the rainbow you gotta put up with the rain! Dolly Parton." The quote is surrounded with blue birds, several purple and pink nested hearts and blue flowers. It is signed in pink letters, Grace. Beneath the name, is a much smaller rainbow (done by Grace's sibling?) with the letters GR and a few harder to discern letters immediately below those letters.  Someone else has carved their initials in the concrete.
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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
I think what I find really depressing about AI in higher education is how so many people didn't even wait for the evidence/research before we decided on telling students "how to use AI responsibly" which often includes things like checking grammar, and obviously, we shouldn't have been

Jill Walker Rettberg

  • 3rd+

Professor @ Center for Digital Narrative, UiB

1d • 


Follow
Did you know that even prompting an LLM to edit your grammar might alter the semantic meaning of your text and remove your human voice? If you're in Bergen on Friday September 4 you can hear Isadora White and Marwa Abdulhai present their recent paper on this. They took human-written short essays, asked LLMs to revise them and found significant changes well beyond just copyediting. This is a large-scale computational study, but the image shared here shows two examples of how this happens.

We'll also have talks by John Gallagher, whose newsletter on AI and writing I read religiously, and by Rashid Mustafin, a PhD student at NHH, and Pedro Jacobetty. And before these public talks the AI STORIES team gets to spend two days in a workshop with these and other brilliant people - I'm so excited! 

Here is the full program: https://lnkd.in/eeGUywhj
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Pupusa (stuffed with carnitas and beans) platter from the Highland's farmers market is a repeat. I'm already thinking about getting one next week. It's been too long since I had a good pupusa. (Anyone remember the Cafe Red Onion off of Kirby?)
On a round, off-white paper plate, a golden brown pupusa with a splash of hot sauce dominates the plate from roughly two o'clock to ten o'clock. To the top left is a healthy portion of curtido, also blanketed with hot sauce and to the top right are a scoop of black beans and corn nestled next to a smaller scoop of vibrant green guacamole.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
I was walking around Denver's beautiful Sloan's Lake (Sloan Lake? Lake Sloan? I'm not from around here.) As I passed an elderly white couple, I heard the man say, and I quote: "It's not about racism. It's about attitude." His second sentence answered several of my questions about the first.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Grackle with a chicken wing alighting from a roof.
It is a grackle with a chicken drumstick alighting from a roof.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Squirrels getting busy....
Two amorous squirrels on the rail of a wooden fence are rudely interrupted by having their pictures taken during an intimate moment.
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
This is such an important point about speed cameras. We have overwhelming data that the vast majority of drivers quickly learn where they are and adjust their driving habits to avoid getting ticketed. This makes them a bad way to generate ticket revenue but a super effective way to reduce speeding
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The War on Cars @thewaroncars.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
That's right.
Graphic that says "In this house, we believe: cars ruin cities, streets are for people, accessibility is a human right, honking won't help, you'd be happier biking, there is life after cars."
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Daily squirrel check-in.
A squirrel, perched atop a green fence post is pretending that if it stays absolutely still, it won't be seen. The squirrel was in the midst of eating something green.
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The Crusader Project @crusaderproject.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
JFC I am having another episode. Left: AI colourisation. Right: Original Details in ALT. Bottomline, we cannot trust this technology, it is a thieving hallucination machine. #fuckai @garius.bsky.social @curatorian.bsky.social @rafhistory.bsky.social
Comparison of an AI-generated colourisation with the original. The original picture shows a group of Luftwaffe airmen and a Fieseler Storch liaison plane with a Junkers 87 that force-landed on 11 July 1942 west of the Alamein position. The AI colourisation has imagined the Ju 87 to be a Ju 88, and given one of the three men a hat he isn't wearing in the original.
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Will Bunch @willbunch.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
The smell of death surrounds you, Donald Trump Deportees slain in Guatemala. A Haitian woman abandoned at a PGH bus stop. The bomb striking a family in Iran. Detainees in the ICE gulag. Lorenzo Salgado. Renee Good. USAID Dehumanization, then death. My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/trum...
inquirer.com
The smell of death surrounds Donald Trump’s regime from Guatemala to Pittsburgh | Will Bunch
In just a year and a half, Donald Trump’s warped agenda is killing innocent people at home and around the world.
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ashley (ravens 2-1) 🌹 @clearlyashley.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
trans rights frankly is a top 5, potentially top 3 issue for me despite not being trans and not having any trans family being bigoted against trans folks not only hurts my trans friends and every trans person but is so predictive of further bigotry
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Made a late breakfast.
On a fake wood countertop, sits a blue floral plate and there are various items including a sink which are cropped from the photo. In the center of the plate, are two pieces of toasted sourdough covered in scrambled eggs with generous amounts of chives, freshly grated parmesan cheese and a sprinkle of cayenne pepper. Behind the toast, the handles two utensils, partially obscured by the eggs, are propped up by the edge of the plate at about one o'clock.
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Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Do ICE agents have a license to kill US citizens? That's the upshot of a series of SCOTUS rulings. And it's what makes them into secret police rather than law enforcement. talkingpointsmemo.com/news/the-sup...
talkingpointsmemo.com
The Supreme Court Is Helping ICE Agents Get Away With Murder
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It...
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Annie Waldman @anniewaldman.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Thousands of Americans are getting sick from a foodborne parasite, and federal regulators have still not publicly identified the source. So what's been happening in the federal government over the past year that might be a factor in this outbreak? 🧵⬇️
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Hello.
A profile picture of a grackle is perched on a concrete balustrade with an evergreen tree in the background.
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Houstorian @houstorian.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Today in 2003, the US Supreme Court legalizes consensual gay sex in Lawrence v. Texas, which originated in a 1998 Houston-area arrest.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Made a hamburger steak atop sauteed onions and bleu cheese toast topped with, uh, rough chopped chives.
On a plate with a dark blue floral pattern, there is a hamburger steak with coarsely chopped chives on top sitting on a bed of sauteed onions all of which are upon a piece of toasted bread smeared with mycella blue cheese.The same steak on the same plate, cut open to reveal a medium cooked hamburger steak. Streaks of blue cheese, slivers of green onion and strings of sauteed onion are in the foreground of the steak.
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The Editorial Board @editorialboard.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
Make the bad guys pay: A Democratic message that the white working class will hear. They respond to gestures of power. A THREAD.
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 17/06/2026
Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But *that's* not the fun fact; *this* is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop. 1/

The Federal Reserve building, tilted at an eldrirtch angle, wreathed in mist. In the foreground looms an abandoned cemetery. Overhead flies a blood-red moon in a cloudy, ominous sky.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 06/06/2026
The criticism of Trump, Kennedy, and Bhattacharya that was so subversive that the ADA had to eject the Editor-in-Chief of their flagship journal from their annual meeting for sharing it? Prior today it had fewer than 1000 views. Do your thing.
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Jenny Staff Johnson @htownjenny.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
I like her a lot. She’s a credible messenger on the public schools issue (she got into politics when her kid’s school was slated to be closed, she ran for school board and won, the school stayed open) and she needs money and name ID and eyeballs on her message pls help us we’re dying down here.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
My morning meeting with a squirrel on a utility pole.
The squirrel on the utility pole has had quite enough and is leaving. The squirrel on the utility pole is looking directly at the camera.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
Double sausage breakfast sandwich from New Friends, served up at the Highland Farmers' Market. A great combination of flavors and texture, well worth the wait in line.
In a clamshell cardboard container, there is a sandwich with an askew English muffin on top of an over easy egg, melted cheese and two sausage patties with some greenery poking out underneath. Splashes of the house 'special' sauce can be seen here and there.
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
terrible. 20 years ago, the internet was full of hobbyist blogs and forums. over time, these have been replaced by paywalled substacks and private discord channels, each a walled garden. google's decision to prioritize AI just makes it less likely people will create free, public info
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Blue Heron Farm @blueheronfarm.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
When a company doesn't make it clear who you should write to, I always choose investor relations. Here is the email I sent to United.
I am writing to send a message to the board signifying my extreme disapproval with United's decision to sponsor the Freedom 250 Redicate 250 event in Washington DC. This is clearly a white nationalist Christian program, and the sponsorship offends me personally, and I'm sure alienates many other United customers, as well. I imagine it's too late to retract the money, but I wanted to note that this spending is not in the interest of your shareholders or customers, and I will do my best to let as many of them know as I can.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Shocked and disappointed our application was waitlisted for this. As though it weren't an obvious diversion of funds from public education for all to Abbott's special interests.
Screencap of a letter with 'TEXAS EDUCATION FREEDOM ACCOUNTS' on the letter head.

"Dear TEFA Applicant,
The Texas Comptroller's Office would like to inform you that students in your household have been placed on the waitlist for a Texas Education Freedom Account (TEFFA) for the 2026-27 school year. 
Your households [sic] approximate position on the waitlist is 50,001-100,000.
Your student's [sic][ position on the waitlist was determined by their priority tier and the lottery as required by state law.
Based on the information submitted in your application, your household was assigned to priority tier 4. [...]
 - Typos in the original
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SMBC Comics @smbccomics.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
The real punchline comes later when he marries a person who loves him, has a good boss, is respected by his children, works at a rewarding job for 40 years, travels the world for 25 years, and dies in painless repose, surrounded by loved ones. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sleep-2
4-panel SMBC comic update - A man in his boxers walks up to his bed, saying "and now that it's bed time, I'll go right to sleep." The next panel shows his face as he is sound asleep, and the third panel shows him waking up in the morning, smiling and saying "nice, eight uninterrupted hours again!" The final panel is a text box in which the following is written : "the character in the comic does not have problems with anxiety, frequent urination or insomnia. The end."
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Fietser @americanfietser.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
​As a CDL holder, I know firsthand the training required to handle heavy vehicles safely. We urgently need stricter licensing for massive, commuter-driven pickup trucks. A split-second distraction in a vehicle of that size has devastating implications for everyone and everything outside of them.
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Tim P Rak @timprak.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Pretty great raw oysters at an otherwise very empty State Fare on Gessner.
On a speckled plate sit six large Gulf oysters, two of which have already been consumed. with a charred lemon half in the center.
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Sheryl Weikal says Prosecute ICE @leftistlawyer.com · 16/04/2026
Please I beg you On my hands and knees, I beg you STOP. USING. GENERATIVE. AI. TO. ANSWER. LEGAL. QUESTIONS. OR. GET. LEGAL. ADVICE.
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