Pointed out by my friend @carloshasanax.bsky.social . There's something weird and unsettling about a fairly homogeneous culture spread out across Europe that then collapses into an orgy of genocide. www.science.org/content/arti...

Happy Thanksgiving, America!

Long ago on the hell site I made long list of historically interesting things to use in dnd ttrpgs and I'll start dragging them over here starting with 2000 years-old sapphire ring presumably belonged to Roman emperor Caligula, depicting his fourth wife Caesonia.

just learned we won an award for our blog post about Tom Holland and stormwater management. remember, when you see an article about stormwater management, you repost it. i don’t make the rules.

me throughout Predator: Badlands (it's great, Trachtenberg is 3/3)

The truly maddening thing is that, unlike when I was a young man in science and the materials and engineering just weren’t there yet, the future is *right there.* The problem is *solved*. What’s holding us back is not just greed, but this bizarre nostalgia, an obsession with petro- masculinity.

You have to survive. There are graves to piss on that haven't been dug yet.

"I asked ChatGPT" "I asked Grok" ok well I asked Gandalf and he said he has not passed through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a witless worm

It’s still remarkable that Disney produced - and released - this segment in 1940. A horror short that should rank with its Universal monster movie contemporaries… The animation is lush and experimental, and really shows off the Disney special animated effects team…

Kind of amazing to think about how different the world might be today if PayPal had just... failed early on and shut down. You can trace so much nonsense today back to PayPal getting bailed out by eBay.

this tweet turns 10 today 🎂🥳

Drew Struzan made everything look cool. I was shocked when I realized (much later than I should have) that he had a whole career as an album artist before finding wider recognition with movie posters.

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

Taylor Swift announces next album title: The Queen in Yellow. She told Variety: "A few years back I came across this amazing play and I was so inspired. It's been living in my head for years. I even dream of it, of the city in the play."

I think Clark Kent might be Superman.

OK, this is wild. In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them. It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*. What the HELL? 1/

"please rate your package delivery" i mean ill click the smiley face because i assume it impacts the poor bastard who delivered it but i must impress upon you that forcing both him and i into this situation is an act of utter inhumanity and furthermore that god frowns upon your deeds

@jeffcannata.bsky.social for Food That Built America, Kevin Smith is also a huge fan and did a loooong deep dive with the host Adam Richman on his podcast www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVRn...

most things are bad, but Elton John singing Stonehenge is good

American brands: We paid an AI slop company to make a chat bot that won’t load French brand: We hired the best living comic artist to make an original short film with a top director and Production IG

Reminder that one thing that made this site good initially was that we sorta agreed to not re-post a bunch of objectionable crap by assholes into our friends’ TLs, even if just to say “look at this asshole.” The vibe was better when we just blocked those chumps and moved on.

"…and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel.”

never mind the VMAs, there are way better Ozzy tributes

Happy Labor Day

To summarize -waves are not seasonal -vaccines are waning -people are getting long covid -it’s still not an endemic disease -very young kids are at increased risk because they didn’t go through the initial vaccine series Oh and it turns out, Covid Cautious people have been right the whole time.

"i just use AI for-" say no more, i already think less of you

If you're using AI to write essays, eulogies, a text to your wife, I do think less of you as a person. Ceding your mental and creative abilities to a machine is an embarrassing thing and people should be ashamed to admit doing it in public.

this was the best part of the movie

In this week’s new The Weekly Show episode, Jon is joined by Tony Gilroy & @mikeduncan.bsky.social. Topics discussed:    >> Andor >> Revolutionary Ingredients >>Those Slippery Epstein Files >> Project 2029 (oh God)   NEW YouTube video out now. m.youtube.com/watch?v=SUUw...

In trying times, remember that there are small ways to make a difference.

Perpetual mood

What a strange delight this has been. Having told the story of a number of real revolutions in ultra-longform podcast format for ten seasons, Mike Duncan synthesizes the elements and style into a new, fictional revolution. It’s tremendously good, and worth your time if you like sci-fi and history.

there is a lot to love about Andor, not the least of which is the music

No, say it louder. It's absolute bullshit how Across the Spider-Verse made over $300 million in profit, yet neither Marvel nor Sony could be bothered to defray the hospital bills of the man who co-created Miguel O'Hara. Instead they left his wife and family scrambling to afford to live.

5 years ago: “An incalculable loss” Today: Banning masks and restricting vaccine access

Generative AI has helped me to understand why, in Star Wars, the droids seem to have personalities but are generally bad at whatever they're supposed to be programmed to do, and everyone is tired of their shit and constantly tells them to shut up

I swear I didn't pay Chief Justice Roberts to say, on publication eve, that the rule of law is "endangered" because ... people are "trashing" the justices. Definitely not bc he said presidents are above the law & immune from crim-eing. Never their fault! Only yours! bookshop.org/p/books/lawl...

Feels like just in my lifetime the tech industry went from solving problems to pretending to solve problems, to creating problems

It’s weird to live in a time when basic principles like cruelty is wrong, cheating is empty & the idea that curiosity, generosity, originality, the satisfaction of earned accomplishments & loving intimacy are the center of a good life feel like countercultural concepts

I am still not over that #Sinners juke joint scene in which they broke temporal and spatial boundaries, and I doubt that I ever will be. Just genius.

post the best panel of X-Men you can think of right now.

the movie for today

finding a restaurant is one of my least favorite things to do. why is it so hard? 😫

vaccines are miracles! we should talk about them like sci fi cyberpunk implants. you know what's more impressive than titanium bones? Immunity to the diseases that wiped out entire chunks of generations in every period of history previous to this one.

you know what i have a hankering to rewatch? the Willow tv show. you know what i can't rewatch because a fucking streamer deleted it from existence for a fucking tax break?

Speed Racer is an excellent movie, and has been since day one. The critical drubbing it got at the time was utterly bizarre and completely unwarranted.

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

rewatched Synecdoche, New York and it's so sad that Charlie Kaufman has spent 20 years directing his own movies, all 3 of which are infinitely inferior to his work when directed by others