NBA Halftime is a marvel of cheap spectacle 😂😂😂

A running friend had a silly miniature track meet for her birthday, and we tried to get my then-10mo-old to do the 10m crawl. He just scooted off, looked at the grass, and ignored all the cheering. 🤷🏻‍♂️

i was watching a basketball game and they had a feed showing the in-stadium video and it was of a baby race and literally only one of the babies was able to barely reach the end before it was over and i felt even more convinced that sports entertainment is an ur-text for I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE

if only they had not had the most annoying people on earth talking straight on into built-in laptop cameras they would have really been cooking

being an adult is reconciling three seemingly mutually exclusive things: 1. people, many people, many supposedly normal people, maybe even YOU, are obviously and extravagantly insane. 2 people have also created the means of unleashing the power of multiple suns at once 2. and yet we endure

oh wow i hate this. im pretty sure this is eventually going to become a savvy thing to say at media parties; and im not even saying i don’t think it’s true; but oh wow i hate this.

there’s nothing bleaker than thinking “maybe bloggingheads was on to something” I choose not to think this

From a recent Chicago Tribune article about ICE/Border Patrol rampages around Chicagoland, woman said something like “you know how to radicalize a middle class white woman in the suburbs? You tear gas her”

And, arguably more importantly for Hochul and the incentives for other electeds, create a huge uphill battle for any primary challenger thinking of getting involved.

no sorry it’s extremely normal and not weird of me to be like “i said something and would prefer you respond to it on the merits rather than seeing my post as your excuse to get on a soapbox” and the idea that i’m obligated to keep my complaints about how ppl respond to me to myself is … strange

oh yeah you best believe these folks noticed that it took all of like 4 months for hochul, by pulling this move, to render stefanik’s campaign a laughingstock before killing it.

NBA TV has retooled by their primary studio show to people dressed casually on a couch shooting the shit in a structured way and it kind of works. The rest of the time they fill the airtime w/ beat reporters doing a show via Zoom and I honestly find it insulting. Pay for decent production values!

this is interesting and probably hasn’t happened within the D party since the late-80s/DLC movement

if i were still alive and sharp enough at 100 to write a goddamn book i cannot imagine how little id give a fuck about what anyone thought of me. goals, as they say.

Barely a blip in the news. 🦗from the New York Times editorial and opinion pages. Compare with days of Hunter Biden Hysteria about unprecedented abuse of the pardon power.

with time marty supreme is growing on me and i’m able to appreciate more what it is trying to do, and its virtues, and to care less about feeling that uncut gems is better (which i still do, but it’s not like “there can only be one” or whatever)

with great respect, i read it differently. i read it as an implicit contrast with marty, especially at that stage of the story, when not long before he has made an all-time tasteless (and funny) joke about the holocaust. i think it’s a hint of what marty will need to learn by the movie’s end.

I’m more a Kinks fan than a Beatles fan and lol Ray is being such a messy bitch here

It might not just be trauma, but just an increasingly ordinary part of everyday life for work-from-home types.

actualol this is so accurate

Real generation/culture clash when Damon Albarn randomly announced to the press he thought Taylor Swift was shit like he used to do to Noel Gallagher quarterly and instead of engaging in the kayfabe and singing a cover of Parklife but changing it to shitelife at her next show she was genuinely hurt

The very first sentence anyone said to me today was “Alicia Silverstone is offering $50k for information about baby giraffes”

i had no idea a popular British music mag had ray davies do a track by track review of REVOLVER when it was first released. what a messy bitch. bless him.

CAUTION: POLICE LINE YOU BETTER NOT CROSS Is the cop or am I the one that’s really dangerous?

I've noticed that on ESPN they've replaced some of the Around the Horn time slot with basically guys using Zoom from home with really poor production quality. It's worse than many low quality YouTube channels. And yet there it is leading into Pardon the Interruption (which is also often remote).

I remember seeing that lots of Zoomers who consume video podcasts just open one on YouTube and then tab away, listening to it while they do other stuff. it's possible that the video podcast hype is just a misreading of the fact that young people are using a popular video platform as a podcatcher

ANNIHILATION (Dir. Alexander Garland, 2018)

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

yeah, it's hard to imagine wanting to watch someone like bill simmons but i do like actual comedians who've gone to video for this reason, it's fun to see them reacting and having a good time in the moment. it's just clearly a huge pain in the ass for 99% of them

A significant part of espionage and intelligence falls under this category, which, like astrology used to be, are established parts of statecraft

it's really worth reading up on 1920s and 1930s intelligence, which was *famously* full of charlatans, and then considering how much of that still applies

i do wonder how much the market’s exuberance for static videos where two people who are not famous because of their appearance stare at each other while wearing headphones and talking into microphones is a temporary albeit still ongoing consequence of pandemic trauma - or whether this will stick

crazy that someone wrote “turn off your mind relax and float downstream” decades before algorithmically disseminated vertical videos, really makes you think

A wizard is never late, nor is he early; he arrives precisely when he means to fuck

True lol. It also just gets easier once you start seeing them as movable shapes, and not memorizing a particular fretboard fingering for each

"so did you figure out how to use 13th chords organically, or were you just ripping off Dinosaur Jr. and Broken Social Scene?" "...ripping off Dinosaur Jr."

A lot of pop music can be harmonically complex, but also, rhythm and melody will carry you 80% of the way. No one abuses the Axis chord structure more than Taylor Swift and she has one of the most beloved discographies in all of pop.

i wish i could go back in time to my teenage self and tell him to stop worrying about not knowing enough fancy chords since like 70% of the best songs ever written are D A G with a few Em and Am thrown in for fun.

turns out my guitar sounds a lot better when it’s actually in tune. wild, wild stuff.

remember all the movies, terry, that we’d go see? trying to learn how to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be.

there’s wisdom here for sure. revolutionaries always persuade themselves their authority figures have abandoned or betrayed them.

"When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy."

if you stop for a second and try to imagine a country less suited to blood and soil ethnonationalism - both in terms if its traditions, its institutions, and its demographic on the ground realities - it is hard to come up with a worse candidate than the contemporary united states of america.

We didn’t beat the British at Yorktown so I would be forced to know who Carl Schmitt is. Every time an American mentions the Friend-Enemy distinction George Washington weeps.

yes. because what MAGA extremists believe and advocate is fundamentally unamerican. not conservative. not even reactionary. unamerican. these are foreign ideas that failed at enormous human cost within living memory. these are not serious people. they are maladjusted wreckers. symptomatic.

spiritualized did a live cover a few years ago that is also gorgeous

The whole idea of the marketplace of ideas that these charlatans claim to want, inside & outside of the academy, is that we are allowed to not buy the obviously bad faith nonsense that they are selling.

Obvious euphemism is obvious. At best a waste of time, and in practice actively negative, to spend time “debating” whenever anyone introduces a new euphemism for an old, well understood idea.

this is a promise with a catch only if youre looking will it find you 'cause true love is searching too and how it can it recognize you unless you step out into the light? don't be sad; i know you will don't give up until true love will find you in the end