I have a Tribble--two Tribbles, actually--from the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations." When Terry Farrell guest hosted Talk Soup to promote it, she brought a ton of them with her. Our set was, predictably, overflowing. (I expect to someday look into my closet and see it teeming with Tribbles.)

Excerpt from a best-selling YA book, which I am enjoying, but this passage made me blink. "Chased criminals that they always caught"? Huh? Miami Vice was an *unfathomably* bleak show, in which justice was never really served. That was the whole point of the series!

I'm seeing a cluster of posts about how it's so weird that Billy Wilder was alive in relatively contemporary times, and I'm feeling odd and ancient, because Billy Wilder was a guest lecturer at one of my film classes, and I assure you, it didn't seem at all weird then. (Am I old? I'm old, right?)

Seconded. This piece is almost frighteningly insightful about Silicon Valley and our ongoing tech nightmare.

If you only watch one video in which sexy models shoot green lasers out of their butts, it should absolutely be this one. Also features the best public restroom party *ever.* Thank you, Madonna, for this big gloppy slice of ridiculous awesomeness; I needed that. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJtc...

We don't usually see each other's headers. Here's mine. Quote post with yours. (Also, please consider adding my weird neo-noir thriller The Divide to your reading list. It earned lovely reviews, including a handful of highly flattering Chandler comparisons, but it never quite found its audience.)

I ignored most of the ninth inning of the Red Sox game to watch @morganrichter.bsky.social dissect the Miami Vice episode with Frank Zappa. It was a wise choice. #weaseldust

If you're a child of that era, please go check out what Morgan has posted. She is so, so good. Her videos on Miami Vice-episodes on YouTube gave me an entirely different perspective about them. She's passionate and passionate-people are my people.

“Once you notice bisexual lighting being used, you can not unsee it” is a discarded lyric from The Dead Milkmen’s (glorious and endlessly quotable) “Stuart.” www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEp0...

If the Buffy musical episode has a flaw (it doesn’t; it’s the best episode), it’s that there isn’t *quite* enough Giles. But he knocks it out of the park with his effortless range in this number ("Is my slayer too far gone to care?"). Rest well, Anthony Stewart Head. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEZS...

I feel a lot of solidarity with this random guy I saw out walking his dog today, who was talking on his phone but saying only, in rapidly increasing degrees of both volume and agitation, "Human. Human. Human. Human! HUMAN! HUMAN! HUUUUUMAN!!!!!" Been there.

I mean, JG Ballard wrote a cautionary story in 1960 ("The Sound-Sweep") about technology causing the death of opera (the story, fun fact, inspired The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star"), but do go on about adding AI to opera, The Guardian.

“Out Where the Buses Don’t Run” might be only my second-favorite Miami Vice episode (my favorite, of course, is “Evan”), but this is my all-time favorite climactic sequence of any television show, ever. Watch these six somber, world-weary, and flawless minutes: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSAR...

When I was at USC film school, it consisted of the George Lucas Building, the Harold Lloyd Motion Picture Sound Stage, the Carson Television Center, the Steven Spielberg Music Scoring Stage... and the Marcia Lucas Post Production Building, where I edited my ghastly student films. RIP, Marcia Lucas.

Just finished @morganrichter.bsky.social 's amazing book "The Understudy." It's so good. Do you like thrillers deeply rooted in character and place? You do?!?!? GO PICK THIS UP, WHAT THE HELL, PEOPLE

This is brilliant, and angry, and hilarious.

Damn it, Google. I was searching for the website for the Don't Yell At Me chain of tea shops (which I misremembered as Please Don't Yell At Me), and instead I got Google's AI getting *very precious* about my feelings. That's nice, Google. Can you just give me my search results instead?

This is a very good description of Voyage of the Rock Aliens, a film that is gloriously bonkers.

After seeing everyone else's attempts to google "disregard," I tried it for myself and got the following. This is no way to run a search engine.

Yesterday I passed a street preacher who was prophesying up a storm about the upcoming return of Jesus and the "wrath of the lambs," and while I think he might've had a shaky grasp on the Bible, I now have a killer title for my unauthorized Silence of the Lambs sequel.

Quote with a fictional band that isn't Spinal Tap.

I told my sister that the AV Club has a new piece on the Top Gun soundtrack that doesn't even *mention* its best song, Cheap Trick's "Mighty Wings," and she replied that she's never liked "Mighty Wings," and I'm sad to report that I've been forced to disown her. www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Od...

My sister and I are not athletically gifted, but we can *destroy* anyone at pingpong. I’d forgotten our supervillain origin story, until I found this old Spokesman-Review story on our fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Miller, who trained us to be merciless pingpong fiends: www.spokesman.com/stories/2000...

I feel like not enough people know that the creepy animatronic head at the core of Duran Duran's iconic Wild Boys video, shot at Pinewood Studios, is *literally* the rubber cast of Patrick Stewart's head used in Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce, which was shot at Pinewood Studios *right* before Wild Boys.

AKIRA!!! The entire film is utterly unhinged, start to finish, and yet it has been my rock and my island since 1989.

me, buying a book written by someone who I've never met but we sometimes like each other's posts on Bluesky: my friend wrote this

No love for the Escalator of Life video? Come on, it's *amazing.* Peak 1982. Dead-eyed and sinister rich folks/animated mannequins in fancy attire singing their way through an empty shopping mall. It's at least as creepy as it is campy, and I love it madly. Song's awfully catchy, too.

I was trying to decide whether my love of/obsession with Robert Hazard's Escalator of Life video is ironic or sincere, and I have concluded, simply: Yes. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD-i...

Analog readers have voted my story, "The Emergency Contact," as one of the best of the year! I'm so proud of my little alien encounter!

The website for this pizza place in my neighborhood is a thing of beauty. A++ commitment to the bit. I was chuckling from the start, but I was guffawing by the time I scrolled down to "This site is best viewed with Netscape." www.dinostomatopie.com

I'd pick either Highlander or Big Trouble in Little China, but both are absolutely flawless films that need no remaking. So I'm going to go with Solarbabies, because *absolutely no one* will get upset if my remake (somehow) turns out worse than the original.

This morning, I was sitting on a bench with my sister on the University of Washington campus, just throwing peanuts to crows (as one does), and a squirrel popped up out of nowhere, took a flying leap, and landed in my sister's lap, and I've never been more envious of my sister in my life.

“Hmm, how can I sell an author on my transparently scammy book-marketing services? Maybe I should email her an AI-written summary of all her bad reviews, then insult her pop culture tastes!”

Just thinking about how, in my grade school choir class lo these many years ago (~1984), we sang “Sloop John B” with faintly bowdlerized lyrics (“walking all night/just seeing the sights”). To this day, I feel a faint surprise whenever I hear the original lyrics. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSAo...

@rodman.bsky.social I'm sure you already know, but in case you missed it, you make an unexpected cameo (in a thoroughly benign way) in Slate's new lengthy piece on the Black Dahlia case: slate.com/culture/2026...

My sister impulse-purchased a bag of plain potato chips imported from Mexico, and inside the bag it included packets of hot sauce, which is strangely endearing. Like, who's gonna want to eat potato chips without hot sauce?

Very good and relevant thread from the smart and wonderful @cheriepriest.com:

I was feeling grim about the ravaging effects of time, so I used a retinol cream, and it made my face erupt into puffy yellow blisters. My face is now back to the way it was, which is a relief, but I feel like there's an Important Life Lesson™ in this that I didn't actually want or need.

Going back over something I'd written yesterday, and I see I've typed "kindred soup" instead of "kindred soul," and now I'm obsessed with starting a cute little soup-only restaurant called Kindred Soup.

Period reminder: writers need to eat, pay rent & see the doctor like everyone else. If you appreciate a writer but don‘t have $15 or $30 to buy their/our book, a FREE way you can put money in our pockets is to just request that the libraries you use buy our books!

In 1990, when I was applying to colleges, I could get application fees waved with proof of financial hardship, which required a note from my guidance counselor. He asked to see my parents' income tax forms. My parents, who both worked, had a combined income of $9K, which would be about $22K today.

"Seeking experts to help shape AI's understanding of literature." Cute. For SO MANY REASONS, I'm gonna pass on applying for this one, thanks. (Not my biggest issue, but the salary range is listed as, ahem, "$6-$65 an hour + tips." That's a hell of a range, and also: a tip-based writing/editing job?)

Personally I think when a world leader announces “Tune in tonight at 8pm Eastern to watch the world end” like it’s the fucking season premiere of Roseanne we should have a different leader the next day.

who has a book coming out that people can preorder so they have something to look forward to and then be pleasantly surprised when the book just shows up on their doorstep

We all gotta have a world better than this

He has nukes. He is a damaged fool. Stop him. Remove him.

Mushroom by Can www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR5g...

Low-hanging fruit, I admit, but… youtu.be/LuN6gs0AJls?...

Hey! For no reason at all, and *certainly* not due to any spike in nuclear anxiety caused by recent US political madness: Gen-Xers, what's your go-to song when you flash back to our collective 1980s fears of looming apocalypse? Mine is Ultravox's "All Stood Still": www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW9I...