Brave denizens of #spidersky, can you help me identify this gorgeous beastie? She's been making a large web in my front garden for the past four or five days. Pretty big, too, probably the size of my pinky joint.

I'm realizing the best thing about this, as i move around the Mall, is that those protesting veterans are the only soldiers I've seen all day! I haven't seen a guardsman since yesterday

@ianboudreau.com, @itswil.bsky.social : i couldn't find the dumb trump statue. I think it was a temporary thing made of foam. But what I found where I expected it to be was much better: a small but raucous assembly of Veterans For Peace

What are your favorite sci-fi/fantasy novels in French? I'm getting copies of my favorite english-language books (CJ Cherryh's FOREIGNER; DUNE; David Brin's STARTIDE RISING) in French just for the sake of stretching my vocabulary while reading something familiar. But I'm down for whatever!

Everything is antifa and nothing is antifa, therefore: This cake is an enemy of the state because it is small and also delicious

I was just talking about this with Jillian on our after-dinner walk. If I'm Seth Meyers, hell, if I'm Stephen Colbert, I'm gonna bring Jimmy Kimmel on as *co-host*, or maybe give him the chair for a week, just for *starters*.

get hype, nerds: youtu.be/IBts7GmEIBs My friend Jules's game has a story trailer, OUT NOW FOR YOU TO WITNESSSS

I get notification pings on Khan Academy for comment threads that are, at this point, a decade old. And I go back and I watch a snippet of video that I don't entirely remember making—and I gotta tell you, I can't believe I got away with going Full Basement Uncle here. youtu.be/wiXhK7aEuGY

We went to a specialty market in the suburbs and still no dice: is anyone else, in dc or otherwise, having a ton of trouble finding dutch process cocoa?

They've started carrying chicken feet at my local Costco, so i bought a package, pressure cooked them in water for four hours, and then strained and boiled down the resulting elixir into the most collagen-rich liquid I've ever seen. I decanted it into jars, and they're cooling now.

We got incepted by a subway ad for a lobster roll place, but by god I'm not a Rockefeller. But they've got those split top buns at the trader Joe's, and thus: SHRIMP ROLL

On a whim, I got a big sack of green plantains today; the only thing I know how to make with plantains are tostones. What else should I make? What would you make with them as they ripen?

Two of my dearest friends in all the world are bringing this story ⚡TO LIFE⚡ this October! Help them bring the lightning. Let's go!! www.backerkit.com/c/projects/c...

On top of everything else, having to think about the president's impossible iniquity, his vileness as a person, is a psychic wage I wish none of us had to pay. It must be paid, it must be revenged, it must be acted upon. But the acts themselves, I think, corrode us when we contemplate them.

Bought a buncha fabric today for a new project. It's time to start working on a Halloween costume!

I loved seeing an episode of TFG in my Hysteria feed, @eringloriaryan.bsky.social! I know it was meant to drive subscribers to youtube, but I'm already cross-subscribed, and I appreciated getting it in an audio format. Are there plans to continue those feed drops, or was the Nancy Mace ep a one-off?

Watching the latest mission impossible movie, and I think Angela Bassett is the only person alive aging even slower than Tom Cruise

Listening to the Maintenance Phase episode about the seed oil panic, and something has at last finally crystalized for me about the crunchy-to-fascist pipeline that I'm sure has been articulated many other places: it's a hygiene cult!

Tom Clancy's Swann's Way

I liked this a lot! Thanks, Elizabeth! This has also kind of been my experience with producing educational content, as well—it's best when I'm allowed to be authentic and weird, strange in a way that makes the children-viewers say, "Oh, he's being truthful here!"

I haven't listened to this in years—but a colleague reminded me that it existed the other week. It's a guided meditation of a sort—you're a lighthouse keeper, and you're ready for anything. It felt right to do in November 2020 and it feels even more right now.

It's been a pretty bad summer for me here in Washington, but you know what's been great? WORK. I have the opportunity to bring you EIGHT count em EIGHT glorious financial literacy videos. www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMrA... In this one, Darnell and I play scammers who teach you the ropes.

A ray of sunshine today: a very cool Ukrainian jazz-fusion band asked if it could use one of my and Paige's old grammar videos in one of their songs. I hope we can make it work! Sorry to vaguepost; I'll elaborate once all the legal rights-wrangling is squared away.

What an unbelievably shitty day, spent at the animal hospital and wrangling with unremittingly bad news for our sweet little dog. She was crying on the ride home, and we weren't sure why—because she never cries! And we thought, oh god, poor Phryne, you must be in pain, but that wasn't it at all.

Here are some puns from the marché Jean Talon that i remembered and liked: Qui Lait Cru, which was a cheese shop. Literally "Who, Raw Milk?" (as in raw milk cheese, don't be a nudnik) but also "Qui l'ait cru?" meaning who'da thunk it? And en tout k Which had a picture of cranberries

Sick with whatever Jillian caught on the plane home from Montréal. Feel like boiled shit. What do y'all like to do when you're feeling crummy, besides stay in bed?

yeah I'm unreasonably proud of this one. youtu.be/NOnfk09tB8I Here's a lil teaser! This one'll come out in full sometime next week featuring the voices of my colleagues Darnell, Alyssa, and yours truly

I think this "scams and fraud" Khan financial literacy lesson is going to end up being one of my favorite things I've made this year. I'm having a blast.

Oh dang okay that was just me gassing up my friend. If i were to Augment The Band Yes i think I'd just call it Hell Yes

YES

THE HEPTANGLE

Scrupulously Fairport Convention

ADAMANTINE DAN

Slightly diminish a band: Stephen Malkmus and the Jocks

Slightly diminish a band: Wallonia and Swann

Slightly diminish a band: Cast Iron Dan

Slightly diminish a band: Gentle Regular-Sized Guy

Slightly diminish a song: An Augmented Fourth of Beethoven

Belated, half baked thought now that I'm home from Montréal: Metropolitan French is to Quebecois French as Standard Mandarin is to Beijing Mandarin. It is Dongbei French. This observation brought to you by intrusive rhoticity. Maybe living in the northeast just gives you a pirate accent.

I sat next to a very well behaved kid on the flight home. We exchanged brief pleasantries; later, after takeoff, she pulls out a clipboard. Very serious expression on her face. Puts up a piece of graph paper, gravely scrawls the word HAIRDOS. And then she doodled anime hairstyles the whole flight.

I would like to stay in Montreal, please. Who do I speak to about extending this vacation By several decades

Great. 🙄 Great great great. So excited to come home to this nightmare shit. Thanks for putting a turd on top of the last minutes of my birthday, Mr president

Jesus christ, what happened while i was out of town?? What am I coming home to?

There's a hotel not far from where we're staying called David, with a kind of inscrutable tagline: "everybody knows"

Midnight poutine at la banquise. Happy birthday to me! What a glorious, stupid, wonderful thing to eat

My employer, being nonpartisan, does not have enemies. So I am speaking purely for myself when I say that I consider this organization to be my nemesis. I make videos for children because I love them and i believe in them, but also to combat garbage like PragerU.

Saluuuuut Montréal. Digging the tiles in the metro!

soundcloud.com/david-rheins... Cleaning up the random files that have cluttered up my desktop for years and I stumbled upon this unhinged little podcast intro from 2019, almost exactly 6 years ago. Happy almost-birthday to me <3 I miss sending you these goofy files, @itswil.bsky.social !

I can't remember if I put this one in there, but here's an 8th grade vocab video about The Imp of Contradiction: youtu.be/czpweFYym9g

There's a dead espalier behind the baseball diamond, reaching for a fastball it can never catch