As the Medici Podcast winds down, I feel wistful. Not because the project is ending (I'm already excited for what's next, to be honest), but because it reminds me that my project is to write the first English-language biography of the last Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany, Gian Gastone de' Medici.

It's not just that he's a pedophile, he was the least popular pedophile

Times like these I remember that Massachusetts Democratic candidate who was a gay man and was kneecapped by his own party because he *dated an undergraduate student (who went to a different school no less) while he was a graduate student* and I feel a hot rage that could power a continent.

Tiamat has entered the phase every anxious Venus fly-trap parent knows. "Oh God I hope it's entering dormancy and not dying."

I'm suffering from writer's block and I'm seriously considering writing some erotica to try to summon back the Muses, a genre I've wanted to experiment with for years.

Great piece by Zadie Smith. When the right talks about classics or "Western" culture, these works are only important to the extent that it demonstrates their superiority, they have no interest in art in and of itself beyond that www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Rec time: I've really been enjoying OBITUARY on Hulu, a recent Irish dark comedy/drama about an obituary writer who decides, after losing her salary and being paid only by the word, to indulge her serial killer inclinations.

As someone who has been exploring old-school Western RPGs from the '80s and '90s more (having played only a few in my youth outside ULTIMA), I really do need to play more of the Gold Box D&D games.

The Joyce Carol Oates and “books written between 1890-1930 are so ALPHA” thing struck home because it showed how many elites nowadays lack the ability to be moved or find meaning in art beyond what we did watching John Wick and going fuck yea this rules and that explains why they believe in AI art

We don’t use generative AI at Strange Scaffold and I can confirm that a *lot* of other studios are not—whether indie or AAA. Get outta here with this normalization bullshit.

i spoke to LOADS of people about this very recently, and the only people using it regularly were the dipshits in charge

I got a reprieve from the dentist. I needed to answer a confirmation email, and my wonderful brain confused planning to do so with actually doing so.

I gotta say, even I am tired of the amount of politics were are forced to consume, and I do this for a living.

begrudging congratulations to bari weiss, who manages to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of 2025 with "what's the point of standards?"

we are living through the consequences of elected dems explicitly not treating it like an existential fight against fascism while holding both the legislature and the executive branch. it’s an obvious disaster. we cannot make that same mistake again.

Interesting convo with a friend who owns a hip NYC record shop about a sudden renewed interest in CDs, which were a negligible part of his business till recently.

I'm seeing a dentist for the first time in I think two years and it does feel a bit like I'm being geared up for an execution, although I also feel a bit of leftist guilt at being lucky enough to have dental insurance for the first time in a long time.

Did we get an ACA extension in the bill? No. Did we protect Article 2 from Presidential overreach? No. Well, what did we get? Josh Hawley can sue for millions over Jan 6th and they recriminalized hemp products. Oh sweet...

this is literally never not accurate

Democrats helped Republicans kill a ten billion dollar industry in order to cave on the shutdown.

i have not watched GDT's Frankenstein but i am firm in my belief that it needs a tie-in adventure/fighting game like the 90s Kenneth Branagh one did on the Sega CD. and they need to keep in elizabeth's roll attack

I'll play. Thankfully I'm much more of a reply guy, because there are so, so few things I have been wrong about.

I can't help but wish I was an expert in 19th century economic and/or social history because I'm pretty sure there has to be a quote from some Victorian about how clothing is cheap thanks to factories so it's okay rent and food are expensive that will exactly parallel what W*ll St*ncil is saying.

history will ultimately decide this but i think joyce carol oates might have just landed the most devastating burn in human history. like the death star trench run of posting

I present the UK’s one and only TV show about books. We feature readers & writers from across Scotland, around the UK and all over the world. It’s commissioned by BBC Scotland & made by IWC. Public broadcasting is a shared space for sharing stories & building bridges. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Lots going on but from outside it seems that at least part of the calculus was that flight disruption for middle class and up travelers matters more than life disruption for untold numbers who’ll be deprived of health care.

"The peasants are too stupid to know they have it good compared to the 1820s or whatever and poor people like them always existed anyway" is such an amazing argument to make, especially now that we live in a world where there's been a historic mayoral race won *because* of the affordability crisis.

One clear lesson from the outrage at the Eight Enablers in the Senate: normie Democrats online want Democrats to fight too, not just the left. The fight/not-fight dichotomy isn't so much an ideological one as a difference in views of what it means to be a party, including a legislative one.

I actually do feel for House Democrats as much as they suck because they universally held the line aside from one guy who I get the sense they no longer talk to and as a result you now have bland centrist frontliners releasing absolutely furious statements calling to burn down the Senate

even when the democratic party has leverage and one of the craziest election swings the party intentionally self immolates it’s just so exhausting what is even the point of these people

My family has been without half our income for 40 days. It has been.. very hard. We are willing to feel that pain so people can have health care next year, or to undo these illegal recissions. We are not willing to have been put through this for NOTHING.

People are (rightfully) talking about politics a lot tonight so here's a timeline cleanse.

Van Hollen a No, and suggesting they might drag this out and make it painful

I cannot tell you how annoying it is to know that basically everyone I know is smarter than the most powerful people on earth

Maybe instead of politics people want more historian shitposting from me here. "IMAGINED COMMUNITIES? More like imagine a book that's actually written by a historian who has at least a freshman college student with a C average's knowledge of history before 1820."

These guys are constantly saying that Dems need to abandon identity politics and run on kitchen-table issues. They get the most kitchen table-ass candidate imaginable, spend months saying he's secretly radical, then as soon as he wins they say he's secretly moderate.

I have absolute raging hatred for these people, like nothing else in my 50+ years. If we get out of this, I don't just want justice, I want vengeance and a reckoning like the world has never seen. I want retaliation so severe, no one will ever consider doing something like this for centuries.

It's so cool that when the right person lands a direct hit on ol' Elon he can't stop from lighting up and spinning his bowtie like a carnival game clown

Fellow history lovers, a German history YouTuber has been doing (in English) an excellent series on the partitions of Poland, which to me is one of the most fascinating yet overlooked (at least in the English-language world) episodes in early modern history. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rbY...

*whispers* It is a faithful adaptation of an early 1800s novel by a woman about an arrogant self centered man Why are people

Mr. Bonestripper is the compromise

This perfectly encapsulates how I feel living in the US. The republican party is an insane death cult, the democratic party is 3 corporations in a trench coat, and the "socialists" are just the completely normal left-wing capitalists you'd find in any of 2 dozen European nations.

We're in this weird era of problems being obvious but inconvenient to solve so the "solutions" are seemingly random ideas that have nothing to do with the actual problems.

It's state-wide not local but I always fondly remember the famous Virginia Lady Luck ads. youtu.be/cbCLvqoZno4?...

This man was photographed outside the Broadview ICE facility He and his wife were following procedure for her immigration status She was taken into an adjoining room and has vanished He was told to "look up her name online"

Dem senate candidate follows attractive women on Instagram: how dare you, sir don't you know there are children around? VP JD Vance follows literal nazis, white supremacists, and pedos: crickets.

“0% woke shit” a black man with a physical disability leads an environmental terrorist cell trying to save the planet from mega-billionaires and you play as a cross dressing twink femdomed by two different women ending and the final boss against the gayest angel of all time

A panel from X-MEN that's apropos to our current moment.