I was going to say “Trevor Rogers” but that’s also a mashup of two famous comic book Steves

The Orioles used to have guys with cool Marvel Comics names like “Darren O’Day” and “Brad Brach” and “Manny Machado” and now it’s ChatGPT outputs like “Taylor Ward” and “Tyler O’Neill”

Marilyn Monroe, the famous Hollywood actress, might have slipped me her hotel room key under the table

You need to get on board with The Stairs. It's REALLY good... & it's starting to cook!! Indignity Vol. 6, No. 25, THE STAIRS, Chapter 19: A serialized novel by Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social www.indignity.net/the-stairs-chapter-19/

It's impressive how little it seems to matter whether it's sportily tailored or hacked out of cruddy plastic fleece—sleeves, no? Zipper, yes? You're a Midtown Man.

A mere 50 blocks separates "no one ever wears a zipper vest" from "all the men are wearing zipper vests"

If Duke had been a real blue-blood basketball program the boosters would have canned Mike Krzyzewski when he got humiliated by UNLV, if not earlier

Yes, my bad, and 40 years ago Raleigh did matter!

It's like saying the New England Patriots have been the most resented NFL team for the past 40 years

Forty years ago nobody outside Chapel Hill cared about hating Duke; they had a nice backcourt, zero national titles in their entire history, and a coach who seemed to be starting to build a reputation as a guy who maybe couldn't win the big one.

Remember that one where he—nope, me neither

Has Bill Maher ever had a good joke?

Indignity Vol. 6, No. 24: A Very Special Indignity Image Roundup www.indignity.net/a-very-speci...

Like: what if The Magician's Nephew came out better than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but also it was riffing on The Tombs of Atuan

Giddy experience to read a series and realize it's not just gliding down from where it unavoidably peaked in Book One

The Chrestomanci series rules end to end though

Look let's just get a Diana Wynne Jones revival out of this

"In this war, despite some varying rhetoric from President Trump, the goal has been reasonably clear and consistent"

"Since conflict with Iran began last June with Operation Midnight Hammer, the Dow is up by 9 percent as of Tuesday morning."

ME: so I have a wild idea... this one is pretty meta MY EDITOR: uh huh. and you're sure nobody else is doing this, right? ME:................................................................................................................................................................... yes

OK where do they keep the option to kill this forever?

The most influential article I ever wrote had the impact it did explicitly because its headline (by @tomscocca.bsky.social) was something that an LLM trained on American journalism would never have come up with.

When you want the zing of "secretly" but don't have the reporting

Sorry, ain't got time for "barely exaggerated," if you need to punch this stuff up you got a skill issue

Straight-up "Yanny"/"Laurel" for me. Given the pure vocal, I go back and forth between hearing "fish" and hearing "this" with each listen.

Someday you can watch the movie I sold off the story of a whole bunch of stuff that was fake and made-up

A guy wasted a lot of my time telling me fake made-up stuff in great detail, please sit down and spend your time while I tell you about the fake made-up stuff in great detail

Facebook friends, here is Indignity Vol. 6, No. 25, THE STAIRS, Chapter 19: A serialized novel by Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social www.indignity.net/the-stairs-chapter-19/

Did the AI language generator generate the exact kind of language you requested it to generate? Should we call a press conference? Should we invite Eliza??

Facebook friends, here is Indignity Vol. 6, No. 24, COLUMN DEP'T, MR WRONG: They Took Away All the Supermarket Magazines and Crude Oil Is Next www.indignity.net/mr-wrong-off-the-rack/

Not that "optimistic" is exactly what Schulz was going for when he made a young aspiring artist the focus of his strip as he closed in on his own end

OK but Andreessen was more correct about late Peanuts and Rerun than the New Yorker was

TIRED: Timothée Chalamet's heel-turn stunt promotional tour for Marty Supreme backfired by convincing the public to start rooting against him WIRED: Timothée Chalamet's heel-turn stunt promotional tour for Marty Supreme paid off by convincing the public to start rooting against Paul Atreides

I had concerns about The Athletic being able to live up to the standards of the real, now-defunct New York Times sports desk, but writing up Gunnar Henderson as a "versatile utility infielder" who delivered unexpected heroics in the WBC is classic, classic Times sportswriting

Guilt and shame were invented in Vienna

Personally I preferred Sinners to One Battle After Another

Indignity Vol. 6, No. 23, THE STAIRS, Chapter 18: A serialized novel by Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social www.indignity.net/the-stairs-chapter-18/ ALSO: WEATHER

rio grande for that generic spanish flair

Meanwhile, also, anyone ever feeling stuck on worldbuilding needs to just remember that this country features "the Rocky Mountains," "the Great Plains," "the Great Lakes" (of which the largest and northmost is "Lake Superior"), "the Great Salt Lake," and "the Grand Canyon"

“Gender essentialism drawn from evolutionary psychology” is a neatly backwards way of putting it

The argument is that nobody but Wilt Chamberlain ever reached a spot further out in the top right quadrant of the Talent x Opportunity matrix than Bam Adebayo occupied last night? Come on, now.

"Look at all the free throws!" "The Wizards were tanking!" Do you understand that the relevant points of comparison are everyone who ever played in the NBA except Wilt Chamberlain and every NBA game ever played except that one game in Hershey, Pennsylvania?

They are trying to do to "slop" what they did to "woke"

the logic of kobe's 81 point game being represented as a career-capping accomplishment itself demands that someone scoring more points than him is ipso facto legitimate. the feat is impressive because the number is high. someone else has higher number? strictly better, sorry.

Although it's really more like demanding Ripken have stopped when he was tied with Everett Scott

"Bam Adebayo should have stopped at 81 points" is the silliest cope since the people who wanted Cal Ripken Jr. to sit out and let Lou Gehrig share the consecutive-games record

Saw someone attempting to salvage the notorious stat-padding fraud Kobe Bryant compared to Bam Adebayo and the thing is, Bam Adebayo did it the only time he ever tried to do it

Does the curiosity-gapped "world's most contagious disease" headline really get better results than a "measles" one would have?

I'm not sure there's a lot of evidence to support the choice of Reihan Salam as an expert voice on what Zohran Mamdani's best political interests are