Years of delays, breakdowns, and freak accidents have imbued the city with a defensible collective angst against the MBTA. But do Bostonians take the T for granted? trib.al/bTrPqz1

You can tell that LotR was written by an academic because Gandalf disappears for like 20 years doing research to answer a single question.

Super rad thread I feel like I’ve always viewed the story of the Nativity—even as a kid—as a deeply resonant story of people in a very less-than-ideal situation nevertheless somehow making do, owing in significant part to the compassion of others

I propose that, when the urbanists win and we rip out Storrow Drive to make more parkland on the banks of the Charles, we have a festival every Labor Day where we gather to ritually sacrifice a box truck on what was once Storrow.

i like my cocktail syrups like i like my videogame protagonists

2025 Headline of the Year nominee (August)

spending my christmas eve in the way baby jesus intended: killing a train with giant beefy arms in #FFXIV

welcome to the Second Annual Bluesky Christmas Eve Snowball Fight! please drop a take in the replies and I or someone else will be along to belligerently interpret whatever you said in the worst possible light

“How can you suddenly dislike art when you find out it’s made by AI?” For the same reason I can dislike art when I find out the employees were overworked and underpaid. Because I care about people. You dipshit.

"americans overall" is a clever way to say "mostly billionaires" without actually saying it

$474k / year is a lot more money than one usually earns for being a fifth-place college swimmer. complete grift. if there had been no trans athlete in her race and she came in fourth, nobody would ever have heard of her & she'd be in dental school right now.

…which is to say, if anyone’s going to get territorial about it, Irish Christians have far more claim to pre-Christian Irish practices than random American pagans, given that the reason that we even know any of these traditions exist in the first place is because Irish Christians preserved them.)

i appreciate this account so much for its unexpected crossover between two very different fandoms

Here's a particularly juicy nugget I found in my reporting . . .

The Beaneater, by Annibale Carracci, 1580s

“Pray tell, the Baron, what sort of gentleman is he?” “Well…”

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.

I wanted to figure out what changed between the DOJ's initial Epstein Files Vol. 8 document dump (which they quickly pulled) and the version they replaced it with. I had a few hours of free time for PDF forensics hacking today. Here's my initial analysis of what changed: github.com/chad-loder/e...

Christmas Eve Eve

Lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/p...

Imagine being a Chinese admiral or general who trained your entire life for Gotterdammerung and then France blows up America for you because a senile reality TV show host doesn't understand how the Mercator projection works and therefore thinks Greenland is 87 times the size of the solar system.

No, I don't want to "quickly hop on a call with you". I want to bump into you at random on a rain-lashed heath, nod at you in silent mutual admiration as we watch a buzzard gliding smoothly over a dramatic chicane in the river, then get the fuck on with my day

All of our DHS detention facilities are concentration camps (or worse--the Florida swamp one, I think, was worse). DHS must be abolished. It's insufficient to abolish ICE, or ICE & CBP. The entire post-9/11 apparatus must end. Abolish DHS. Repeal the Patriot Act. Pass comprehensive privacy laws.

in the dungeon-crawl mode of Ehrgeiz (1998), one of your two main characters plotfully dies, permanently, near the end of the game. if you enter that room near death & hungry, you can die of hunger during the cutscene, and the NPC other-character will raise you afterwards.

I was wondering if they were going to fuck up the redaction because nobody remaining at DOJ knows how to tie their shoelaces and, well

if you flip tektites with the megaton hammer in OOT then hookshot them into a body of water they will Ascend when they unfreeze

The first Shenmue game takes place in 1986, in Yokozuka, Japan. If you beat the game once, you'll have the option to use "actual weather" from 1986-87. This will cause the weather conditions in Shenmue to precisely mirror the historical weather conditions of Yokosuka, down to the hour.

The artist formerly known as Prince was a beta tester for the first Oregon Trail (he was in third grade at the school near the developers)

We have sworn to be happy. We're militant about it. Art is a tactic. Joy is a weapon.

My silly naval combat game, Waves of Steel, is 50% off for the Steam holiday sale! Build your own warship, go to ramming speed, and kickflip over torpedoes! store.steampowered.com/app/1482750/...

they didn't need AI to make Silksong, it just needed some deeply insane guys to have a blank check for living expenses until their next thing was done, I think we should try doing more of that instead

this is just to say I have loosed  the blood-dimmed tide that you were probably saving for the ceremony of innocence forgive me the best lack all conviction while the worst are so passionate and so intense

The Dunning-Kruger Effect and the Streisand Effect, when merged, become the Bari Weiss Effect

Bro, just one more humanoid robot, bro please, this one will be the true general purpose technology bro, this one will fill any labor shortage bro, our nanas and papas will let them into their homes to help them age in place bro, it’s the future bro, I won’t put guns on them I swear bro, bro

i have a phd in robots and: yeah this

Bill Clinton releasing a statement saying 'release the Epstein files, you cowards' was not on my bingo list.

well, archivists gonna archive. torrents remain undefeated www.404media.co/archivists-p...

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In an early session with my therapist, I expressed concern that I was manipulating people into liking me by being helpful to them, and she very patiently explained to me that this is, in fact, part of how genuine friendships work.

This was my biggest tweet over in the bad place. It will live here now. 🧙‍♀️🎄

so hey are we gonna talk about how the trump admin is now threatening companies that sell binders and forcing them to register as companies selling medical devices www.yahoo.com/news/article...

Yesterday, in what I think was the quintessential #SomervilleMA transaction, I exchanged a tour of Powder House park and some Lyndell's half moons for this glorious recent photo print by @mcmillen.dev of the #aurora and the #GrandUnion flag there. A good day.

TOMORROW IS THE WINTER SOLSTICE AND Y'ALL KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS. It is time for the women (defined broadly) to hunt the Year King through the woods and tear him apart with their bare hands!

james… carville… good? v confused

A Lord of the Rings cover band called Crosby, Stills & Nazgûl

Our task is not to beg Republican politicians to turn on Trump. Our task is to crush them electorally. To fight them and win.

Not every problem but probably 60-70% of the problems online could be mitigated by understanding that people you don't know/don't like are still capable of kidding around.