Is anyone out there making clap-back AI slop videos in response to the ones the president posts? I uh have some ideas.

Wikipedia is the best single thing the Internet has ever given us and it's not even close

Season 2 of the English Teacher is great — totally chaotic like Robert Altman or After Hours. Or 1941, ha.

I used to be so intimidated by huge spice racks until I realized that most of them are just licorice or pine needles.

WE DID IT!!!

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT REASONS - Anti-Freeway - Anti-Dip - Pro-Toontown - Pro-Comedy

Pete Hegseth is a youth pastor but for Satan

My 2nd grader just made an astute observation: “I guess SO-ciety is better than ANG-ciety”

YoU WouLdNt sTEal A CAr unLESs tHE OwNeR haSnT OPtEd oUT YeT

As an aside, I was taken aback by your affront

Spooky season upon us….

The villains in today’s U.S. are, almost without exception, “entitled individualists” who see themselves as counter-cultural mavericks while simultaneously expecting full societal admiration and support. But this doesn’t seem new.. and maybe this is just (almost) every real villain in history?

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

I became a dog person late in life so I’m still perplexed by the idea of an omnivorous little mooch creature that eats anything it finds on the ground yet somehow is also allergic to every third thing.

Enough of this and we’ll get “coffee shop” interviews of regular Joe working liberal Americans with headlines about how the elites need to better understand the country

Dam been writing a book about this and she just TikToked it in 90 seconds.

Every time it rains in summer in SoCal I’m like the kid in Magnolia saying “this happens!” or whatever about the frogs raining.

8 corporations in a trenchcoat-ass country strikes again

The defining experience of fascism is familiar to anyone who has written stuff on the internet. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/getting-ye...

Honest question: isn’t it ok/good for a yuppie cishet white male like myself to sign up for this? I don’t want to get more emails, and this march isn’t going to change the universe… But if the regime is going to get a list like this, isn’t it good for it to be full of privileged normies like me?

Every other post on my feed for weeks has been pointing out some hypocrisy of the regime or its defenders. And no criticism at all to those posts/posters of course but it’s starting to make me really anxious bc I want so badly to be at the next phase (not that I know what that is, of course).

Where will SB 79 apply in LA County? There are a lot of imperfect maps going around that give a good idea, but only tell part of the story. Today, I set out to create the most-accurate map possible, based on my knowledge of the final draft of the bill

“Should we aim to emulate the world of a Paul Verhoeven sci-fi movie?” Thread shut down by moderators after destroying the most powerful nation on earth.

If I could find my community I would mostly post packaging takes

I haven’t had time to make sense of the amendments to SB79 (maybe there’s a good thread out now?), but the simplified way I’ve been explaining the bill to LA people who have no idea about it is that it will mostly impact single family homes in walking distance to transit. Is this accurate enough?

A framework I’ve held since the 2000s that has helped me not lose my mind: 66% of the U.S. pop has no discernible coherent political ideology; 33% express an ideology but are making it up as they go to serve their immediate interests; only 1% actually tries to align their interests to an ideology.

The founding fathers have locked all of MAGA in independence hall and won’t release them until they can come up with 7 out of 10 amendments of the Bill of Rights. No phones allowed!

Reminiscing about the simpler times when Facebook news stories came in print.

SB 79 has the votes!

Really feeling this today. Mass internet / social media adoption has really broken this country in uniquely USian ways.

And there it is! #SB79, Sen. Scott Wiener’s bill to legalize multifamily housing near major public transit stops across California, just passed the state assembly! We are one vote away from the most significant shift in land-use policy California has ever seen!

It sucks that saying things are like ‘1984’ is so cliche bc, man, we are in it

Unseasonably nice light lately

Italian-a wine-a from the Valle di Silicon

When I started with the LA Bureau of Street Lighting four years ago, I set a personal goal to create a public map of all of BSL’s historic/decorative street lights, along with the historical context, in time for the Bureau’s centennial this year. It’s now live!: experience.arcgis.com/experience/a...

The Mayan Theater is closing! See our pics at esotouric.substack.com/mayan then book your Exotikon: Super Shock Show ticket to explore this 1927 masterpiece TODAY, with ghosts, magic acts, history talks, burlesque, Sven Kirsten tours, garage rock & merch! www.exotikon.com

I think we could benefit from talking more about what it is that the ultra-rich hope to achieve under fascism. It’s not “more money” — they already have too much and it’s clear that fascists are tanking the economy. As others on here have said, they are seeking powers *beyond the law.*

To remove a dictatorship that has consolidated power, many die and there are years of excruciating violence that marks a country for generations. To remove a dictatorship that has **not yet** consolidated power, all you must do is not be his unpaid intern and show how much the country hates him.

Figueroa Arms at Fig and 41st is such an odd building. I had assumed it had to be from the 1910s to be so weird but it’s from 1927. I can’t think of anything remotely similar to this from the 1920s in LA (or anywhere else for that matter).

Each year I invariably look up the FDA Novel Drug Approval list to have a laugh at the names, and I hoped this year’s list would help cut some gloom… but 2025 is pretty weak, especially compared to 2024 when we had Crenessity, Unloxcyt, Flyrcado *and* Lazcluze. And who can forget 2023’s Beyfortus.

Google AI below sounds like it’s taking a high school essay test and didn’t do the homework. “The first battle of bull run was a famous battle at the site of bull run. As the first battle to take place at Bull Run, the battle has often been compared to subsequent battles that took place at bull…”

I have come here to live, laugh, and love. And I’m all out of all of those things.

“I refuse to spend my time on Elon’s website” was all that it took for me. I literally never think about these other things.

The fact that we Angelenos don’t take pride in the fact that the Hass avocado is from L.A. County (La Habra Heights) is one of those inconsequential things I regularly get angry about. Why does this place have so little pride in or even awareness of itself?!? So many L.A. things like that.

Wrote about the feeling of living at a literal fever pitch for the last decade, and how every day things somehow get worse but stay the same. houseofmirrors.substack.com/p/we-live-in...

This is good: With Trump/RFK destroying CDC, JB Pritzker's officials are exploring the possibility of buying Covid vaccines from manufacturers and distributing them in-state themselves, source tells me. Dem govs must step up and fill the void. New piece from me: newrepublic.com/article/1998...

American conservatives don’t care at all about the structure of government — they care about the structure of society.

I predict that we are less than a decade away from standard phone/text/email communications being substantially abandoned due to vulnerability to the overwhelming amount of spam/scam that ubiquitous LLMs/AIs will deliver. I just don’t see how the platform providers will be able to keep up.