i’d die for her

Spending New Year’s Eve with family, including two boys under six who love binging YouTube videos, including some AI-generated stuff. They just went over the moon for the climactic cabin-on-the-cliff sequence in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. It’s going to be okay, I‘ve decided.

The only matter of note in the 2010s was that there were multiple popular dark fantasy characters known as “Onion Knight.” This was our greatest achievement. Here’s hoping we manage something better in the latter half of this decade, but I’m not holding my breath.

it’s all i’ve got

Walking out of my hotel on a trip to New York, Richard Kind walked past me with a group of dudes. He was dressed in very old and dirty clothes.

We noticed a rising interest regarding the use of AI in browsers. To be clear about our position on this: Zen currently is disabling all AI features included in Firefox and will continue to do so.

About just this cliche that’s highlighted…I can understand the feeling that a consensus opinion has calcified because a large number of people simply get on a bandwagon. But when people say the below, it’s almost never that they want “honest debate.” It’s that they want their side to win.

shopping for food is so clutch. you can put it together to make meals

Books, poems, film, etc. may require retraining a brain to slow down. And it's important bc while scrolling social media pushes the happy button, it rarely provides actual happiness. It's like food with no nutrients; your brain ate a lot but it's still starving for things that scrolling can't give.

And it's Christmas!

The thing is, writing advice doesn’t really work in general. Art is personal and innovative by nature. Try to follow any piece of advice slavishly and you will probably find yourself unable to write at all…which, I guess, is my advice.

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 mean, 1) books are different than movies, 2) Sauron is pretty clearly an immortal celestial being, some kind of dark god or demon type thing, whereas Palpatine is in theory a human man. A less silly phrasing for him would be “Palpatine isn’t dead.”

I have no business talking about this--haven't even read much of the novel--but I just realized how much the "It" in Stephen King directly represents adulthood. It eats children. Duh.

There should be a constitutional mechanism for removing a president. Not impeachment, something that actually works, maybe like a catapult

It's always fun when the teens and tweens make a seemingly nonsensical thing vault into the public consciousness and force twentysomethings to realize they're only going to keep getting older.

The work prep/well-rounded education discourse is pretty astounding to me. The most mercenary student/graduate/admin should absolutely be interested in well-rounded education FOR mercenary reasons because the economy is so dynamic. You don't know what you need for work until you hire your weakness.

Maybe my favorite Tim Minchin lyric is “And the weirdest thing about [my body] is/ I spend so much time hating it,/ But it never says a bad word about me.”

Maybe the greatest murder mystery ever written about handjobs and MILFs (these are both genuinely load-bearing plot points)

Spotify is garbage on every count: Its treatment of artists, its ICE advertising, the CEO's investment in military AI, its leading role in the commodification and AI slopification of music, its terrible audio quality—you name it. So I quit, and put together a complete guide to getting off Spotify:

I heard that now they're placing people who criticize ICE under surveillance. I want it to be known to the entire world that I despise ICE to the core and I think their entire institution should be abolished. They are cruel, inhumane, and are examples of the worst of humanity Fuck ICE Fuck Fascism.

You will also be confused if you rely too heavily on “X is a metaphor for Y” as a means of narrative analysis!

I think what a lot of debates about whether or not something is a Christmas movie miss is that almost every movie is a Christmas movie. It’s movies that are not Christmas movies that are the exceptions.

R: Do you think Death could possibly be a boat? G: No, no, no… death is not. Death isn’t. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not be on a boat. R: I’ve frequently not been on boats. G: No, no… what you’ve been is not on boats.

If I may add my own point that will convince or educate exactly no one, books written in 1930 (1931 starting in January!) or earlier are free, no piracy necessary. There are a lot of these. Some are pretty good!

One of the frustrating things about people making highly ”principled” political arguments online is they often seem to have no understanding of how things actually work. Reminds me of that old Pratchett quote: “Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn’t always beat actual thought.”

“The dream is over and the insect is awake.”

<totters out onto porch> <settles into rocker> <thumps cane a few times> Let's talk about what the process of submitting short fiction used to look like, shall we? And about what it looks like now.

The end goal of any for-profit enterprise is to offer instead of any particular product the cheapest possible simulacrum of that product, that consumers may nevertheless be convinced will be close enough to that product that they will buy it. The ideal product would be literally nothing.

jokes about bill maher being a creep feel hack but as a white man of mediocre intellect and accomplishments whose politics are probably less radical than I believe them to be I'm upset with how Bill Maher misrepresents our vibrant community

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oh god sorry but I’m raising money to make a short film inspired by my experience w cervical cancer. i’m sorry but there are only 8 days left to pledge. somebody help meeee seedandspark.com/fund/girlie

I've noticed the opposing team's fans only cheer when the opponents score on us. To win those fans over, I recommend we score on ourselves repeatedly; that will surely make them so happy they'll start supporting us. And I'm sure all our fans will keep cheering for us—who else is there to cheer for?

KEEP CALLING

Now that Democrats won and the current administration has been repudiated etc. do you think the hip stores in my neighborhood will start stocking toothpaste with fluoride in it again?

one of the things I have come to believe is that the failure state of capitalism is not exactly the material phenomenon Marx describes so much as a kind of nihilism that comes from having enough money to buy anything you are legally permitted to purchase

It does seem like this should be a bigger story: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/u...

I think it almost doesn't matter how "evil" one considers the White House--we all know it's supposed to be a SYMBOL of something benevolent and democratic. And he's literally taking a wrecking ball to it, with the stated intent of building something obviously more evil.

Something maybe worth noting is that all the frog costumes and signs and good-natured memeing came about because a wide spectrum of Americans saw someone in direct, brave confrontation with ICE—getting pepperballed and standing their ground—and thought “that’s awesome. That person is a hero”

A lot of the value of old books is in their historical and anthropological aspects. You get a perspective on being human from an old book that you just can’t get from a new release (regardless of how much you like the particular book!).

Simplier times

from the latest print edition of ‘The Onion’

Kenvue, which owns Tylenol, is issuing mildly worded statements when they need to say “we are going to sue you into the middle of next year.” There is no scientific basis whatsoever for people with zero medical expertise telling anybody to not take Tylenol, cut and dried interference-with-commerce

The best thing about the ABC/Disney boycott is that zero point zero percent of participants are involved because they love Jimmy Kimmel so much and really want him back on television because's so funny and great. It's a movement of pure political principle.

Poetry is legal

We could be 5 to 10 years from toothpaste that can regrow tooth enamel. The scales are beginning to tip in favor of Mars once sustaining life. We’ll potentially know for sure by 2040. The blue macaw is up to 160 individuals from an all-time low of 7, and confirmed to be breeding in the wild.