I am starting to get back into Magic: The Gathering and it's weird to read people parsing out the exact correct mana cost to damage ratio for a card to be worthwhile when back in the day I made my deck with the premise "God I love thrulls."

"And I say HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA, I said hey, what's going on?"

every book by Andreas Malm includes at least one mention of another forthcoming book. does he ever sleep?

extending my subjective lifespan by watching unskippable YouTube ads

someone should make an effort to reclaim nihilism from the violent misanthropes and antihumanism from the tech bros. humanism is looking more appealing every day.

all my excuses for bad habits and poor life choices start with "well, then the pandemic hit and..." it used to be grad school.

after I stopped posting regularly on twitter there was a big debate over whether everyone who writes "anti-white" books is Jewish, and I came up as a counter-example. I don't know what influence I could have over there.

Someone at the other place posted this screenshot from #Wrestlepalooza

Utopian proposal: divert 100% of the military budget to brass bands

saying that a certain group of voters "made" the Democrats lose by refusing to vote for them is like saying someone would be a winning tennis player if the ball didn't move around in so many directions

the right is really overplaying its hand at a moment when Trump's approval rating is polling at its lowest

I thought I'd hung up my spurs, but here I am formatting Chicago-style footnotes again

all-time best VHS cover though:

what is going on in critical theory right now? what should we be following?

Classic VHS cover

there's no worse itch than when you get shown an inexplicable advertisement for a product you've never heard of and you have to resist the urge to immediately google it because then you'll just get a million more ads for it from the algorithm

today's intrusive thought: "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the TikTok Man

would that Baudrillard were alive to see this

in the 2000s we were told that we had to be quiet and compliant after a national tragedy. anything other than reflexive obedience was said to be disrespectful if not downright treasonous. we gave up many of our rights and became mired in two disastrous wars as a result. should be a lesson learned.

Network executives and university presidents agree: It's good you wished him into the cornfield, Donnie, it's real good. And tomorrow...tomorrow's gonna be a real good day!

…huh. What do you all make of this?

I post so little about my actual day-to-day life on here. it would be funny to see what if anything my mutuals think I am up to these days or what my life is actually like.

Call for Contributors! @michaelwdurrant.bsky.social and Cynthia Johnson are co-editing a new Routledge Companion to Book Studies, and are seeking chapter proposals! Deadline: 30 September 2025 More info here 👇 ies.sas.ac.uk/news/call-co...

Although in fairness whatever political formation comes next will probably look back at presidents and say the same thing

Funny that LOTR features a series of mad or otherwise unfit hereditary rulers and the upshot is not that maybe democracy would be better but that they need to install a better king

rewatching Lord of the Rings. 95% of it totally holds up, but then the remaining 5% feels like this

Sigh... when even Bill Maher is calling bullshit on your rightwing talking points, that's a bad sign.

wait, so Aristotle ranked animals based on which ones were the hottest — am I reading this right?

as little as a month ago I was trying to be very careful about describing Elon Musk's racial politics as eugenicist without going further but I think it's clear he's going mask off white supremacist now

Brian Kilmeade endorses euthanizing homeless people: "Involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them."

to understand why the Silicon Valley right has embraced racism, elitism, and exterminationism, you have to realize that they think that in ten years AI is going to knock most people into the surplus population by automating their jobs. they don't want to pay the unemployed UBI forever.

there's something especially horrific about killing and dying for the purpose of getting the attention of other internet shitposters

can someone explain to me why groypers apparently spread some antifascist memes? I know the answer is probably randomness and nihilism, but do they see themselves as the REAL antifascists?

and that's why social media is not a good forum for political discussion in the age of Trump

Prove you’re a human by beating Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time

if that news is true, don't say anything you wouldn't want to see screenshotted and spread all over right wing media

look to your left, look to your right, one of you will be AI in 2030.

Sen. Eric Schmitt's statements are not only white nationalist but they betray a deep familiarity with alt-right ideology including its conceptualization of nationhood. You don't say this stuff without spending a lot of time reading internet Nazis.

I know *we* don't care about protecting him, but I'm going to be so mad if a few years from now we find out that the Dem party apparatchiks avoided pressing the Epstein line of attack sooner because it might catch Bill Clinton out, too.

are we just supposed to accept all of this?

is it just me or are they ripping off the Arensbak trolls?

I'm happy to announce that I'm the new associate editor of the sf section at @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social. So I'm open to good review/essay pitches that fit LARB's audience. I've been quietly doing this for a few weeks and already commissioned some things I'm excited for you to read!

I saw a post explaining that if a large language model gives you the wrong answer for the first prompt, you just need to ask it several more times in different, increasingly complicated ways. so the trick to getting a good answer from AI involves already knowing the correct answer in advance

I was wrong on the internet. I’m sorry. It’s never happened before and I can promise with 100% certainty it will never happen again.

Smith Brothers will do this once a week

Highest level of support since Gallup started asking this question a quarter century ago

we seem to have lost the sense that a public office requires you to put aside some of your private feelings and responses in order to fulfill your duties to the citizenry. this is of a piece with Trump running the government like a family business based on personal loyalties.

I'm already quite good at repressing my emotions, Gabor Maté

I think if Musk hadn't bought Twitter and if the Democrats had run a better campaign, we would have all been writing the far right's obituaries in November 2024. The far right has never represented the popular will, and there was nothing inevitable or irresistible about its rise.