Is there a worse word in the English language than "eighth"? Spoken, it ends in a strangled tetragraph, as if garroted midword. Typed, it alternates hands on off-home keystrokes, practically guaranteeing a typo.

Disowned by Nazis for not being a Nazi. We left the umlaut on Ellis Island.

Anytime someone suggests a technology or project involving space, ask...why not underwater? If the answer is "because space is cool", it's not a real suggestion.

You walk into this bar and show your ICE mugshot, you don't pay a dime.

You know what? I didn't teach many classes in 2025, but the ones I taught were all bangers. My classes on Cryptography, Hyperbolic Geometry, and Lie Theory were some of my best work as an instructor.

I don't think any show has stuck the landing (for me) as hard as The Good Place. Just a thoughtful and whimsical meditation on life, death, and meaning.

Heated Rivalry makes me genuinely jealous that other genres almost never lean into cozy, low-conflict happily ever afters. Where are my crunchy, lore-heavy fantasy novels where obstacles are immediately overcome and no one makes a heroic sacrifice? Life's hard and I want to imagine nice things.

Ok, while it's not in the top five things I enjoyed about Heated Rivalry, the mathematician in me liked that 24 and 81 are particularly good numbers.

I sweat through my Santa hat. What is this world coming to

That is not dead which can eternal lie, Like Tiny Tim, who did NOT die

I know this is a joke, but this is literally the example I use when I try to explain what mathematics really is.

I got half a gig of Google storage back by deleting every email that contained the word "newsletter".

I hate having to see Kristi Noem's face and remembering that she shot her dog in cold blood.

Children of Men. Great movie, once is enough for me.

Putting an instructor on leave to investigate accusations of bias is a normal thing even when the accusation of bias isn't a national news story. I'm not saying OU won't cave to political pressure, but they haven't yet. If you are venting outrage at this point, you are taking the bait.

One thing that always baffles me about early retirement inspo nonsense: Most people want to work. They just want work that feels fulfilling and doesn't take more than they are willing to give.

[instantly] I would die for the Creature [2 seconds later] I would murder for the Creature [10 seconds later] I would murder Victor specifically for the Creature

A cool thing I recently learned: RGB gives a better range of colors when mixing additively (eg adding frequencies), so it's good for light sources like screens. CMYK gives a better range of colors when mixing colors subtractively (eg absorbing light), so it's good for inks like printers.

A food is "antiscorbutic" if it helps prevent scurvy, such as limes or broccoli.

Another one I had to learn the hard way: Any reply of the form "I hilariously misread this post as..." is as interesting and funny as telling a stranger about your dreams. Just enjoy your private little moment of whimsy and move on!

STOP. This is a selfie checkpoint. You must repost with a cute selfie to proceed.

Ibsen: Oh yeah, we'll need some incidental music for the scene where Peer Gynt meets the troll king. Grieg:

These are perfectly fine, but they feel cut from the same cloth as Disney live-action remakes. The best animated media thrives from the heightening, the simplification, and the abstraction allowed by the lack of realism. Flattening that artistic expression to people in costumes just feels so sad.

The main thing I learned in my math PhD is how bad you can be at math and still get a PhD in math.

Garrett: Looks like the perp stabbed the star jammer while she was changing, and then ran away before anyone else came in. Math: I guess we are looking for someone who...[takes off sunglasses]...hit it and quit it. [theme song guitar riff]

A thing I like about mathematics is that, every time Oswald Teichmüller, Ludwig Bieberbach, or Pasqual Jordan are mentioned, the author always includes "...who was an enthusiastic NAZI." The math community never forgets and never forgives.

Split pea soup in a cauldron for maximally witchy vibes.

It's my 15 year derby-versary today! That's old enough where it's starting to blend into the horizon. Most of the folks in derby these days are pushing a decade+ in the sport, so we are all approximately equally derby-ancient.

I don't want to express myself creatively. I want to excel at a task. I express myself creatively by finding creative optimizations within said task.

oh it's time to post the Tetris story again. (short version: reporter goes to cover early e-sports, discovers that his wife is, unknowingly, the greatest Tetris player in the world) archive.boston.com/news/globe/m...

What's harder to draw: horses or kisses? We asked an expert aftermath.site/samuel-deats-a...

I'm so glad the founders had the foresight to codify the freedom for...(squints)...companies to fire you for participating in an unrelated protest. apnews.com/article/char...

I know this is the final boss from Morrowind and I've killed him, but I still have no idea who he is. My roommate and I used Morrowind's infamous jank to raise our stats by several trillion. We stumbled on this guy and killed him in one hit, but nothing happened...no cut scene, no death animation.

I ended up disliking Silksong for its punishing difficulty (expected), but also for its lack of novelty (unexpected). So much of the world and structure feels like a Hollow Knight remix. The world is pretty, sure, but I never felt surprised or curious about a mechanic or area.

This is baffling to me, I've never felt so alien. I love being alone with my thoughts so, so much.

I'm not an economist, but I don't know how the AI bubble CAN crash at this point. Money out of AI has to go to somewhere, and there's nowhere else for it to go. In 2025, AI investment exceeded all consumer spending. Bubbles are where the rich store their money now, the product is irrelevant.

I know we are eyeball deep in fascism and there is no such thing as a fair fight...but exposing gay conservative hypocrites seems ineffective (hypocrisy is a proud part of their brand) and just conflates gay with shameful+evil?

So much of modern life is trying to optimize the value you generate for capitalist systems. It feels legitimately radical to make a cool spreadsheet, or some weird art, or to drive for several hours to ref a derby game. Make the world you want to live in, not the one that pays you the most.

Demonizing content that uses genAI is valid and righteous, but I can't imagine it will have much of an effect. It feels akin to "voting with your dollars", a fantasy sold to us to distract from real solutions. If we can't regulate AI with laws+policy, it will continue to be shoved down our throats.

Unpopular officiating opinion: The tradition of assigning Sunday crews mid-tournament based on which crews did the "best" is almost always hurtful and unnecessary. Whatever marginal improvement it provides to the "gold medal game" is rarely worth the high cost in trust, comfort, and solidarity.

What's nuts about this is that congestion pricing SHOULD be a conservative position! It puts a public good behind a paywall so that the market can ration it to where it provides the most value.

There may be no more profoundly sad place on earth than the friend list of a Facebook spambot. It's always a half a dozen of loneliest men in existence, gullible enough to think that a grainy profile picture of their weird beard caught this unknown coed's attention.

If I was in charge of Google, all questions on a Form would start optional. When you tried to make it required, a pop-up would ask you "Are you sure? Really? Like, that the rest of the answers would be worthless if this is empty?" I mean, I'd probably do other stuff too, but this would be #1.

Me, watching my friends be excited about something I would absolutely hate to do: Aww, but *I* want to be excited about stuff!

"i just want to show up & skate" not me, i joined roller derby because i love cold calling warehouse owners & filling out tax forms

Our soft boy Obi is taking the arrival of our new foster dog pretty hard, so we are doing some bro bonding on the same pillow tonight.

One of my boomer-est traits is that I can't stand when a video is sped up. I don't care how impressive the act being portrayed is at any speed...if it's sped up, it might as well be a video game cutscene to me.

There HAS to be a way to hide my posts from everyone without the word "derby" in their bio.

Insane: DOGE has likely cost Musk more in personal wealth ($122 billion) than it has "saved" in government spending ($160 billion at the most inflated estimates). Every dollar he took away from libraries and cancer research was at least a dollar he personally lost. www.axios.com/2025/04/25/e...

A bit of doomerism I am fixated on: I think this is the first US government capable of starting a full scale nuclear war. Sure, we've had mean, dumb, even monstrous administrations before...but none so disconnected from reality or so dogmatically allegiant to their lies.