Jeff

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Their car door was covered in scratches, so they decided to turn them into art: the result was this incredible samurai.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@SandyofCthulhu Bad news, it looks like the 4th.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@StratPolitics How can they trust immigrants more than strangers? Those are double strangers! Must just be that with "strangers" they think of actual people they don't know but "immigrants" is a vague group to gesture at for signalling.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@sentientist @cremieuxrecueil Was he also around 19? Cause at that age I would have interpreted sustained interest of any kind from a pretty girl as sexual, as wishful thinking if nothing else. You only need one Y for that.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@ReubenR80027912 @DKThomp It's gotta be a disposable income thing right?

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@archon @MateriaMundi Articles like that and Why Cesar had 73 HP are why I buy your stuff.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@LadyDemosthenes I mostly agree with you, and I hold open doors for everyone, being yelled at by a woman because she interpreted your help as hitting on her or disparaging her will make you rethink. Chivalry is about being nice, doing things that make people yell at you sucks AND is not nice.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@tracewoodgrains Look, I am highly in favor of the pause, but handing power over anything important to government officials who, in today's world, are 100% highly partisan lefties, is not reassuring to the right. Lab employees are way more left than I am comfortable with, but not as left as that

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@Noahpinion It's because hostile federal regulations hold nuclear down, and the timelines of construction are such that friendly admins cannot provide confidence that they wont get rug pulled by Dems in the future. You know that.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@devahaz Giving the top 5% of a terrible inner city school which passes people who cannot read higher prio than the 6th % student from top schools in face IS locking smart qualified kids out in favor of less qualified minorities, and the policy was written that way to get that result.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@OscarVReuenthal He has 40,000 other fish to fry, let him concentrate on something else please.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@tracewoodgrains @logisti00 I am not friends with those guys, but I do read them. I'm right wing, love nuclear, believe in climate change but only at 5% the level of climate doomers and think its fixable issue if we (and China) build more nuclear.

AI Doom is different. Bring on the Butlerean Jihad.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@EWErickson I am an AI Doomer, and I LOVE nuclear, still actively mad at liberals for messing nuclear up and hopeful we can fix it. I think climate change is real, but more minor than the doomers say and addressable through things like nuclear.

AI Doom is not congenital in that way.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@tszzl I really enjoy our current LLMs and use them almost every day. And I am sufficiently concerned about p(doom) that if someone credibly raised the Butlerean flag I would join up tomorrow.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@tracewoodgrains @punishedlibtard Kirk is memed in reaction to right wingers being mad leftists are murdering they. Floyd is memes in reaction to rightists being mad leftists are rioting and arson every day for months.

That you draw equivalence is burning most of my respect for you.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@MrShermichael @SueOC_NBCBoston @NBC10Boston It is unacceptable to investigate him, and clearly motivated by his vote, but WTF does his race have to do with anything? You insult this by claiming it is about him being black (which it isn't AT ALL) and not about his vote (100% of it). Only one being racist is you.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@luke_metro @lymanstoneky Not sure Claude is meaningfully the “best”, especially with Astra out.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@DKokotajlo Would calling for the all to quit not risk evaporative cooling leaving the labs only mildly diminished in capacity and severely diminished in virtue?

[Austin Justice @AustinJustice]

Andrew Wimsatt spent his life figuring out how to make things last longer.

Roads, bridges, tunnels, pavement, friendships.

He held three civil engineering degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, spent 18 years at TxDOT, ten of them as Fort Worth District Pavement Engineer, and in 2006 joined the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, where he eventually ran the Materials and Pavements Division and its $9 million annual research program. He worked on ground-penetrating radar, nondestructive testing, asset management.

Describing the work once, he said the real challenge wasn't building new things; it was making what we already have last longer.

Andrew made what we already have last longer.

He was an obsessive live-music fan who would fly across the country to see a band. He loved Slowdive. In 2023 he was recommending "Souvlaki" and "everything is alive" to anyone who'd listen, singled out their cover of Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair," and admitted that when he heard them play it at FYF in 2014, he teared up. In 2016, when bad weather killed Levitation and Slowdive threw together a surprise show at the Scoot Inn, Andrew happened to be sitting at his computer and grabbed two $7.50 tickets in the roughly two minutes before it sold out. Then he recorded the entire set on his iPhone for a friend.

He made music too. He'd been in bands with Karl Rehn since high school, engineered their home cassette recordings in the early 1980s, and in 1990 released "Reflections" under the name the Andrew Wimsatt Ensemble, cut at Sixth Street Studio. He and Rehn made music videos that ran for years on Austin's ACTV, and contributed to the score of a 1994 documentary about Barton Springs.

Then there was the archiving, which is maybe the most Andrew thing about him. He clipped television. Constantly, expertly, for free, for people he admired. The Fifth Column crew (@wethefifth) called him "Busty Wimsatt" and, in their newsletters, "ever-alert," "indefatigable," and at least once "American hero." @MattWelch called him their most devoted cliphawker. Andrew painstakingly uploaded old episodes of "The Independents" so they wouldn't disappear. He clipped @KatTimpf's Fox appearances for her Locals community. He sent @walterkirn clips of Kirn's own jokes.

"Boy did I feel special," Kirn wrote today. "Not many strangers will go out of their way to give another that kind of encouragement."

He was not, for the record, employed by any of these people.

He contributed old photographs to @iowahawkblog's Dave's Car ID Service. He was a fixture in Austin's science fiction community and once drove Howard Waldrop home from Worldcon. He was an executive producer of Penn Jillette and Adam Rifkin's "Director's Cut," and appears in it, briefly, as "Greeting Cop." He hosted a regular libertarian beer gathering at the Johnny Cash-themed bar Mean Eyed Cat. He was, per @JTLonsdale, one of University of Austin’s (@uaustinorg) original small donors. He bought a camouflage "No Step on Snek" hat at a Texas gun show this summer and his friends heard about it.

The man lived.

He lived in Cambridge Towers, a 1965 midcentury modern building near the Capitol. Punk rock, pop surrealism, midcentury furniture, a gentle Southern manner. He loved salt to a degree his friends used as a unit of measurement.

He was, by every single account, one of the kindest people anyone had met.

@greggutfeld: supremely gentle, willing to do just about anything for another person.

@PlanetTyrus: always positive, physically slight, with a monster laugh.

@NancyRomm says he once gave her the jacket off his back when she was getting hypothermic.

A friend of 13 years and dozens of concerts tells me he never once heard Andrew say an unpleasant thing about anyone.

Both his parents were English professors. His father, James, was a Chaucer scholar at UT Austin who died in 2023 at 96. His mother, Mary, took her doctorate at Duke, ran the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, held an endowed chair as McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at South Carolina, wrote the first full-length study of a nineteenth-century novelist almost nobody remembered, and spent five years on a public radio project designed to get ordinary people reading Faulkner and Welty.

His parents spent their careers recovering things other people had stopped reading. They taught their son to make things last longer.

His mother now has Alzheimer's and lives in a nursing home in Round Rock. Andrew helped care for his father at the end, and then her. His routine was to drive out, walk with her, and then take a second walk alone.

He photographed what he saw on his walks. His Instagram is herons -- wading, fishing, one caught mid-wingspan over the water -- plus hawks in bare branches, a squirrel wedged in a tree hollow, a snail on a brick wall, bluebonnets, and a lot of Texas sky at the second it went orange.

Two days before he died, he was at a friend's house for movie night, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 do "The Crawling Hand."

He spent his whole life trying to make things last longer, and he was good at it, and he was doing it right up to the end -- the second walk of the morning, until he sat on a park bench in the morning sun.

He is survived by his siblings, Alison Ross and David Joseph Wimsatt. And by his mother, who he walked with that morning, and who does not know he isn't coming back next week.

[Jeff @browncoatjeff]

@hecate40 @Sotales @LadyDemosthenes This has always been my view. A rational but wicked person can theoretically repent and change. A crazy person is incapable of that by definition. A crazy murderer is by definition to dangerous to live.