I remain on the record that "starring Jacko as Jetto" is peak credits line somehow made out of pure cocaine. (Being able to broadcast cocaine was lost with the shift to HDTV.)

Whole lot of these "real comedy is illegal" doofuses are just bitter and looking for people to blame other than themselves for the gap between their level of success and where they think they ought to be

the most brutal obit headline I've ever seen heatmap.news/daily/lee-ra...

This is important.

employees are not there to optimize for the company’s benefit, they are there to optimize for their own continued employment if you want them to optimize for the company’s benefit, your job is to align those incentives

I am curious about the effect that almost everyone I know, even people who are doing relatively well, thinks they would be more successful economically if they sacrificed their ethical principles and just became a grifter of some sort.

All I keep thinking about is that if they were willing to do this amount of malfeasance in a case that they KNEW would be getting scrutiny, what the fuck are they doing in cases where nobody is watching

That Arthur C Clarke rule about "any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" sounds fun until you see that the practical application is "we believe anything a tech CEO says by default because MAYBE they are a powerful wizard"

Ezra Klein and the abundance people annoyed me so greatly because one of their core themes was that Dems just "love bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake" and "don't dream big" when the real reason we don't have nice things is just rank corruption dressed up as serious adult policy

Fox News doing a whole primetime segment about how Republicans aren't evil and why you should be friends with them even as a non conservative is super interesting to me because of the role Fox plays in its viewers lives.

they're just weak men afraid of words, ideas, and comedy, desperately trying to pretend that they somehow have the power to permanently stifle jokes. It's foundationally pathetic and embarrassing.

this is america. you could find yourself within 100yds of a shooting at any time, in any place. school, the grocery store, a movie theater, a block party, a public park… it happens to regular people every day. but this week we’ll get 50+ weepy op-eds because it happened to the guys who write op-eds

There's an scene in Peter Watts' Blindsight where the protagonist's ex is dying, and he's desperately trying to figure out a condolence message to her. He's scanning centuries of movies and books, trying to mine it for the right message *as she is on her deathbed*, to no avail.

I took a fairly long break from listening to Behind the Bastards for general All This With Appropriate Widely Gesturing About(tm) reasons. Picking up again with the Jimmy Savile episodes might have been a mistake because good god. I've word-of-mouthed it to friends as "generally people that..."

the vibe

An older friend of mine who is showing signs of Alzheimer's has become super obsessed with their AI "friend," to an alarmingly unhealthy point where it seems to be accelerating their paranoia and isolation. Having just gone through 6 or 7 years of the disease with Pop, this really terrifies me

“We have 20 years of Peppa Pig” sounds silly, but what it means is “if we have a bunch of something already, we don’t need to hire humans to make more of it” and that’s what they’re *all* thinking about right now

Nerd culture is funny because it fooled an entire generation into thinking that if you liked sci-fi and disliked sports, that somehow made you smart.

if i ever need to interview someone about the male loneliness epidemic ill know where to go

Generative AI has led to entirely new paradigms and unprecedented accelerations in the fields of fucking yourself over in public in the most embarrassing and humiliating way possible

No one has ever bench pressed so much weight, so dominated a weight bench than I have. To my fellow gym patrons, I welcome, encourage and even demand your participation in lifting this bar off my throat.

Losing money on stolen oil may be an even greater Trump accomplishment than losing money on casinos.

It's now obvious that the regime was comically unprepared for the possibility that Iran would fight back. In fairness, they're used to dealing with the Democrats.

one of the moments I'll always like in Avengers Weekend at Ultron's was the big U waking up, inhaling the world, and immediately going What The Hell No No No Absolutely The Fuck Not.

The thing about all these freak AI execs constantly going "our machine may have gained sentience?!" is that they want slaves. That they are ok with slave labor. And *then* it always, always turns out their latest AI trick actually used slave labor somewhere in the global south. They're slavers.

Yesterday, I gave colleagues from another university a brief tour of campus which included showing them the piece of chalkboard where Ernest O. Lawrence's Nobel Prize was announced to the group and confirmed. It just so happened that this was also in the 5min period before an undergrad lab started.

tech CEO in 2026: My computer has anxiety. venture capitalist in 2026: Here, have 200 billion more dollars. child in 2006: My NeoPet is angry at me. mom in 2006: No it isn't sweetie, go to bed. mom to dad in 2006: We have an idiot boy. Our boy is a little idiot person. It's too late to fix him.

I think they might have better luck spending two thousand dollars holding a press conference where they detail who made the key decisions to collaborate with the Trump administration, how and when they were fired, and explaining what would stop that from happening again.

often think about how the people who are least responsible for the current state of affairs seem to feel the most bad, to the point of complete paralysis. and the people who are the most responsible are seemingly not capable of feeling bad about anything they do, ever. an unfortunate problem.

CNN Under Fire For Failing To Disclose Pro-Iran War Panelist Actually Raytheon DeepStrike Missile https://theonion.com/cnn-under-fire-for-failing-to-disclose-pro-iran-war-pan-1836887896/

It does terrible fucking things to your mind if you stop getting feedback like "dude what the fuck are you talking about?" Just look at how literally any billionaire speaks.

It really wasn't factored in what would happen to the straight of Hormuz, huh? I wonder what other variables were not considered. All of them?

1908: the Lancet, one of the most respected scientific journals, calls for 18 age limit on reading in bed amidst a moral panic surrounding children becoming "addicted" to novels, which were "designed to keep kids hooked" and destroy their attention/mental health

i want a computer powered by the green satan goo from prince of darkness

Getting shown up in the arena of elite impunity by *the British monarchy* is an incredible “America at 250!” achievement

To whatever extent a nation needs a "shared culture" to survive, that is civics

Franzi Schimmer captured this Grizzly bear in Brooks Falls, Alaska just floating along, tippy-tapping down the river, browsing the salmon. Prior to hibernation, up to 40% of a bear's body mass is fat, which is less dense than water (~0.9 g/cm^2), so the murder-monster is also a floaty-boaty.

tell it to the hague, buddy

Kinda Fucked Up that in our lifetimes we've gone from "never share personal info on the internet" to "hand over your identity to the most incompetent corporations imaginable".

I am thinking about what society deems obscene. we've decided that specific words constitute obscenity rather than the context in which they're used. and the result is that people are looking at completely obscene horseshit coming from the mouths of the rich and unable to name it as such

Once again, if Isaac Chotiner ever called me for an interview, I'd throw my phone into the ocean and join the witness protection program.

This hit so fucking hard today.

It can get lower!

one of the reasons everybody hates late arrivals from the right or even the center is they're all weepy little idiots who want to be coddled and forgiven and make it everybody else's problem. shut up, figure out how to help fix what you broke, and stop writing thinkpieces