In 1981, Mr. Rogers met Big Bird on Sesame Street, and Big Bird appeared on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood — but only in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe segment. The reason was a surprisingly vehement philosophical difference between the two shows on how to handle make-believe. (Via @kottke.org)

What do we know, anyway? For @today.yougov.com I asked Americans. Most think humanity knows a lot about math and geography; few think we know a lot about astronomy or AI. Full writeup, including some interesting crosstabs, here: today.yougov.com/society/arti...

Please don't call it that

"You ever think, Bullock, of not going straight at a thing?" "No."

I love unnecessarily sexy statues. My favorite being Thirst Trap Lincoln from the LA County Superior Courthouse.

2001 PC Game scene: “I will play it, I just won’t buy it.” 2025 PC Game scene: “I will buy it, I just won’t play it.”

CHOTINER: This game you like to play, what's it called? ME: Slay the Spire. CHOTINER: And you play it on the computer? ME: Yeah. Well, I also have it on my phone. I played another 300 hours. CHOTINER: And these other games in your Steam library. Have you finished them? ME: Now hold on a second,

We at @today.yougov.com have our fingers on the pulse of America. (You can sign up to take our polls here: account.yougov.com/us-en/join/m...)

The sound of a bald eagle you hear in movies is almost always actually that of a red-tailed hawk. That's because bald eagles sound NOTHING like what you think. Don't say I didn't warn you:

You guys, so many Romance girlies are reading "On Tyranny" that they've broken the Goodreads recommendations algorithm. 10/10; no notes. #romancelandia

"Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?" "Supposing it didn't," said Pooh, after careful thought.

The flexibility of ggplot is amazing. That said, from a graphic design standpoint, the Bars, Barstack Absolute and Barstack Relative charts are visually strictly superior to the other options here (depending on what you're trying to convey with your chart).

I will never play EVE Online but I will read anything anyone ever writes about the experience.

I know a fae trap when I see one

New survey from me for @today.yougov.com about writing — including how often Americans use different kinds of punctuation when they write things: today.yougov.com/society/arti...

Apple is on a long-term mission to force me to use Spotlight for literally anything *except* its original use as a lightning-fast app and file launcher.

I feel like there should be a name for the literary sub-genre that is sidebars in RPG rulebooks, describing a sample campaign of the game in tiny serialized fragments. It's such an odd but specific art form.

New: I polled Americans about speaking ill of the dead. Most Americans are OK with criticizing living public figures, but support falls for criticizing dead ones, especially if they died recently. A plurality says criticizing a just-killed public figure is unacceptable. 1/

look at the careers they’ve taken from us

A man going on a journey called his three servants and entrusted his talents to them

This is why they usually give shooters three names! “Lee Harvey Oswald” isn’t what his friends called him, it’s what the authorities released to avoid other Lee Oswalds getting mistaken. It’s weird they didn’t do it in this case.

apropos of this, people who want to sound smart are like "READ THE ART OF WAR BRO ITS SO IMPORTANT BRO" and if you actually read it Sun Tzu is like "do not rely on your army stealing food from the locals. there won't be enough and they will revolt on you. bring your own food. this is important"

Episode 15: "The Miracle Child" The shocking assassination of the Duc de Berry swings France to the right. New laws suspend habeas corpus, censor the press, & give extra seats in parliament to wealthy royalists. With protests in the streets, opposition leaders debate how far they'll go to resist.

The Polish air force confirms that they've scrambled aircraft to intercept the incoming attack drones. Ukrainian channels say two drones have been shot down already.

When people say "We used to drink raw milk from our own cow and it was fine," That's... usually not the case! In families w their own cow, the mom usually boiled it before using. We just forgot bc that's a boring chore that mom did. And who pays attention to that? youtu.be/vKDPast9WFk

And the reason the metal detector failed to find the bullet was because Garfield was lying on another relatively new invention (the coil spring mattress)

Eventually you have to accept that no matter how many different notebooks you buy, they won’t make you a better writer. For that, you need to spend a lot of money on the right pen.

Free idea: a college football RedZone should have a Hater's Function. You plug in a list of teams you hate, and you can get notified if those teams are having a real bad time. Like Clemson is, right now.

Alan nailed this review. It’s a fine little show. It has a lot of problems, though. And I’ll just say this: its biggest problem is format. This switch to 10-episode binge schedules is just TV enshittification, when it comes to sitcoms. I’m surprised Daniels doesn’t realize that, too. You NEED the 22

The Bryant Ave. proposal is super interesting! It clearly needs *some* traffic calming work. I'm not sure about this *exact* proposal, since it would cut people (like me) living on the 2200 block of Bryant off from car access to Hennepin — a median at Franklin also allows only turns toward Lyndale.

This story is WILD. Trump sent Seal Team 6 into North Korea to plant a listening device. The entire thing went sideways within minutes of landing when they noticed a fishing boat near the beach. They killed everyone on board, sunk the bodies to cover their tracks, and fled. Congress was never told.

President Trump is expected to sign an executive order tomorrow giving the Defense Department a "secondary title" as the Department of War. White House officials now confirming. Looks like a way to use the title while juggling the law -- the 1947 National Security Act -- that gave DoD its name.

Apparently Guillermo Del Toro has ruined Frankenstein by… being relatively faithful to the source material. Oh my.

I've never paid terribly much attention to shoes. Get a pair that's comfortable and looks OK, wear it till it falls apart, replace. Are there good tips for a better approach? Is this a field where "spend more up front on quality, save money in the long run" is true?

Expert here. What happens is the generative AI you fed this to is a piece of shit that tried to extrapolate a shadow into what statistically should be flesh, while you sat there loudly saying "ENHANCE. ENHANCE." like a dipshit.

Les Peuples Libres de la Terre du Milieu may be in trouble.

This is an interesting question. If the president ever needed serious hospitalization beyond what the facility at the WH can offer, they would have to be taken offsite. That requires a motorcade or chopper. Typically, the pool would note that.

Sometimes big structural factors don't get enough attention as causes. Things started falling apart for narrative investigative podcasts in fall 2022, did they? I wonder what else was happening in late 2022?

What are some examples of highbrow movies and lowbrow movies with superficially similar plots/setups? Looking to play a prank...

@lollardfish.bsky.social Have you heard the @histphilosophy.bsky.social episode about how the Philosophy of Disability relates to De Las Casas and the early modern debates over Amerindian rights?

Ruin a book by adding Tom Clancy's to the title "Tom Clancy's Pride and Prejudice"

One #ttrpg trick I've recently started for homebrew worlds is to assign it one of these motifs: A) Decline: The past was better than the present B) Progress: The present is better than the past C) Stasis: Nothing ever changes (until now?) D) Cycle: All of this has happened before

The “correct” map The Mercator map creates distortions. Just like the Peters map and any map with any projection on a plane. This is the story of the correct map, the map that does not exist. www.cartographerstale.com/p/the-correc...

Wrote a quick plea for a fairly simple, fairly easy, fairly non-controversial bit of community organizing: #Brewers fans should unite behind calling the team's home park Uecker Field, leaving its corporate name to those paid to use it. brewerfanatic.com/news-rumors/...

A fun piece of dataviz showing C.S. Forester’s “Horatio Hornblower” series, by setting date, publication date, and the naval ranks Hornblower held in each novel.

I think it's a "Play" by Moby writing music afternoon.

Catty, George.

We need to set some ground rules on what counts as a "Nepo Baby". A Nepo Baby is someone who has a successful career with family members being influential *in the same industry*. It's not just someone with rich or famous parents. It is NOT a judgment on the subject's talent.

Flying a big circle around MSP because there's a power outage at the airport wheeee at least our layover is long