Another plug for Racket, proud to see them in this luminary list.

Just an absolute rake-stomp by the Tomatometer here, I don't know if it'll ever recover from the damage done to both dignity and credibility.

That one trap in Hunter's March has me never feeling safe again, in a way I can intellectually appreciate the design but I fucking hate it. That is Dark Souls rug pull shit, especially after that gauntlet.

I think this is instructive. Mainstream media decorum wants to give a fair shake to all arguments, and will print immediate fact-checks of claims made, but they need to figure out how to incorporate "Trump and Co. claim the signature is fake. They could be just straight-up lying about that."

Just installed Silksong and I shit you not I tried to pogo off the very first little caterpillar enemy and I missed and it hit me. I beat the first game. I beat radiance and that Halloween boss.

Her accent from these clips sounds hyperexaggerated in the way that impersonations sound, but I find that's kinda what I want in a movie about something ridiculous happening in rural MN? Crazy they filmed in Finland though, c'mon.

I'm not sure how to feel about this, because I had just assumed - and had grown comfortable with - that I was washed, a natural phase of the human life cycle. The problem was me, and the result was confusion-leading-to-indifference about What's Hot in Culture. I had accepted my washedness.

I can sleep through thunderstorms most of the time, but it's hard to get back to sleep when my partner's doggle jumps up into bed and wakes me, it's booming thunder and strobe lightning outside like Thor is in a titanic battle, and the power outage has killed the AC.

I'm gonna watch "26 Minutes of The Tush Push."

The Phillies made moves at the deadline just in time to embarrass themselves in front of Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins, splendid work.

Got the AC running so it's cool enough in my place right now but none of the towels are drying out because the air is water, and man, I hate that a lot.

Started seeing this post format today, and I went through 30 of them before I figured out it's "Hitting the Like Button will generate a reply," and not the colloquial rhythm word that can mean "as in." I thought it was "One (like, ONE) X opinion," emphasizing the number for some reason.

When you're up 5 - 0, a double, a walk, then two outs, then three more walks to plate 2, then giving up the grand slam that was absolutely set in stone inevitable, is I think the worst pitcher collapse I have ever seen.

The Phillies EARNED that catcher interference W and I will not hear otherwise.

When your partner is someone generally way smarter and more cultured than you, sometimes you walk out of a movie you liked and she pokes holes in a way that shatters glass for you. You struggle for reasoned counterpoints before realizing she's right, and the flaws are more flawed than you thought.

Cool, unique feature of the ASG Team HR Derby Tie-Breaker thing: the catcher is on the same team as the batter, so if everyone is really into it, you get fun celebratory body language from the catcher over a towering moonshot.

Kyle Schwarber steps in and steals the ASG MVP out of Pete Alonso’s hands. After 24 years, we finally defeated terrorism.

SCHWARBER IS HERO, I AM SO INTO THIS FOR NO REASON

NATIONAL LEAGUE SUPERIOR, ALL PITCHERS HAVE TO BAT NOW

Kershaw chatting while pitching was one of the most delightful baseball things I've seen this year.

In a few hours I'm gonna take the dog for a walk around the park right by my place, and there's gonna be an old man baseball league game, a softball game, and a queer kickball game all happening at the same time and on my way back I might stop in the cidery right by there. FoH with this shit.

"E. A. SPORTS. 'Ts in the GAME." absolutely cooked though.

Reading frickin' Rainbow, man. And also the movie Gettysburg for like 3 days.

They dropped the wonder/terror of nature theme in favor of building up the Corpo Supervillainy of an Umbrella Corp. but for Macrobiology Instead of Micro, which the first movie didn't really need. The sequels all felt like they had to write more intentionality into the horrible monster encounters.

Honeybaked Ham takeout demonstrates that you can do a ham sandwich with very mid execution - bread, iceberg leaf, pink tomatoes, and pickles were very okay - but if you do thick cut ham well and throw in packets of honey and some kinda cheese sauce to dump on there, the result is still pretty good.

Major news networks and sites would benefit from a little box in the corner of their site that's a list of stories making a big splash elsewhere but "we're not covering this in detail, because," and then if you click a headline you get a quick graf of explanation or context why it's a big nothing.

"Intense cultural wars" like the resistance to making Deadspin, a profitable brand for the company at the time, into a shitty facsimile?

WNBA Discourse, get ready for the sheer weight of Philadelphia fans, who have a chip on their shoulder because they are low key embarrassed they didn't already have a team, to completely take you over.

What actor's expression in a movie will stay with you the rest of your life?

One of the silver linings about rooting for a team as profoundly diseased as the Sixers is things like the draft with their position in the order feel kinda low-stakes, and so you can't really in good faith find much fault with taking VJ. Sure. He seems good! Not gonna heal the team but nothing can.

My coworkers absolutely are sick of my updates on Brotherly Shove Discourse, but I have to Live My Truth(tm).

I got into it with a guy who believed an oft-cited falsehood about Brotherly Shove rules (the defense can't push on each other. They can!) He cited a chatbot. I cited the NFL rulebook. He defended the use of his chatbot for this purpose, completely oblivious to how funny that was. It gave him a/

The Catch-22ness of cops saying "call 911 if the cops show up" is giving me pause here. www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/ne...

In NYC with my folks one evening, we go across a crosswalk and I see Nathan Lane passing by us going the other way, laughing really hard at whatever the person with him had said. My mom turns to me with her eyes like dinner plates, mouths "was that NATHAN LANE?" "The Birdcage" is her favorite movie.

For the life of me, as an outsider, I have no idea which side is supposed to be the easy choice for a Trump/Musk ally to choose.

Logged onto Twitter for the first time in awhile and my feed remains a drain clog of CHECK THIS OUUUUTTTTT video clips, but god damn, BlueSky has a summer block party vibe right now that I haven't felt since Trump got COVID. Makes me want to take the rest of the day off and drink at a brewery porch.

The Tremendous Content that Feeling Bad for Our Country foretold, in the Book of Rovell.

I'm usually not very moved by The Vibes are Bad posts, but this one does a good job of putting a finger on a vague uneasiness I've had with games news and culture for a couple months, and the perfect storm of contextual forces that add up to it.

Short thread, Racket editor reporting at an ICE action on Lake Street.

Man I just want to gripe about Canada without it appearing like some cryptoMAGA signalling bullshit. If there's crazy smoke here in Minneapolis, I wanna be able to joke WHAT KINDA SHIP YOU RUNNING UP THERE without it reading like I want to invade. Look what they took from us.

Walking the dog just now and the moon is tan and there are only like 4 stars visible and we might be missing some aurora activity, I'm over Smoke Season.

If you liked the posts about the Ukrainian liquor store, the local Armored Combat team, and making your own maple syrup right here in the city, then toss a coin to your Racket and also hit me up with more story ideas you want chased down.

For my Wolves buds: the more Over it is, the more Back they'll be. Look, at least your star player didn't come down with Gaseous Cerebellum or whatever the hell Embiid has now.

Justice and Democracy prevail. We are so back, America.

Star Trek is a hole in my pop culture CV, so literally the only thing I know about this guy is he is a Union Man, and I will take it. Proudly.

Resolved to block.

This is kinda what Westworld is about, at least in the early parts of the show. I had a post idea (one of many that I never wrote through) about feeling empathy and guilt over fictional characters and how I would bet most people don't actually enjoy playing with being cruel to them.

1 out, Harper on first. Pop fly to middle center. Harper, and I quote: "ASKL;DFJIOPQWEUOPKASDJ;LKFUOSIADJ;ASDKLJL;KAFJKL;SJKL;ASDJ;LKAFJL;J" tags and sprints, frothing at the mouth, to 2nd. Thrown out by, conservatively, 7 light years.

It's a really special night the clock strikes midnight and the Phillies make me want to walk into the river.