"I’m glad you kids love going to this zoo every weekend, but with each trip around your favorite enclosure, I’m reminded of my mortal limitations. I have to shamefully admit: I am running out of facts to tell you about red pandas."

Someone just recommended this to me!

Went to Target for the first time since January to spend some gift cards (if they already have the $ from the gift card and you don’t claim any merchandise, they win). Smaller than average crowd for a weekend, but what really struck me were the empty shelves. Haven’t seen it like that since 2020.

Happy Caturday, or maybe I should say Kittenday?

If you’re having feelings about Disney rn, the new Knights of Guinevere is a great watch, because Dana Terrace has an even more complicated relationship with Disney than you do. Weirdly beautiful and instantly intriguing, it’s anti-capitalist art, pure and uncut. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCAd...

does anybody else feel like they are watching a mass psychosis

Thank you all for the amazing kitten name suggestions. I didn’t expect to get so many! Arthur says hello and bless you, his Bluesky subjects. (We’re calling him Arthur because he hitchhiked a ride to my workplace and that’s how I got him.)

Hindsight! It ran for one season in VH1, of all places. Think Peggy Sue Got Married for Gen-X. Cruelly cut short after one season and left off on a cliffhanger.

Timeline cleanse. I brought home a kitten from work this week. He still doesn’t have a name. We’re taking suggestions.

Since we didn't get the fun reading we all wanted today and I'm stuck in a car for a couple of hours....BEHOLD THE MIGHTY GARIBALDI, CALIFORNIA'S STATE FISH!!!!

Since I’m now back to working in an office I missed dropping off my kids for their first day of high school (at a very famous high school). I love my husband but he didn’t take any good pics and now I’m bummed.

We’re deeply disappointed negotiations for a global plastics treaty have ended without a final agreement. Over the past 3 years, the momentum has been undeniable. The world now understands, plastic is a full lifecycle problem that demands systemic solutions, & that its health impacts are profound.

Getting back into work after only like 10 months away and the tools I used to use (Airtable, MailChimp, Canva, etc) are now infested with useless AI “helpers.” They’re 10x more frustrating and harder to use. I can do things myself, let me opt out!

Felt the Sunday scaries creeping up (it happens when you’re unemployed too, because it means getting back to searching and applying for jobs) but then I remembered that I work at the zoo now.

Someone (or several someones) could create an amazing and popular media site by scooping up some of the talented writers out of work right now. It’s possible to do it in a non-exploitative, reader-forward way. The big companies just don’t want to because it give creatives too much power.

I'm not watching WAR OF THE WORLDS and I don't think you should either. Why? Because the bean counters at Amazon don't see hate-watching as a bad thing. In fact, they are playing to that.

Trouble captivating readers from the start? In today’s newsletter, take a look at some great first lines from a range of novels, and pick up some tactics for how to make your own opening stand out. nepheletempest.substack.com/p/opening-se...

Personal news time! As of today I’m starting a new position as Senior Editor managing publications for the L.A. Zoo. For now I’m going to enjoy the excitement of this new adventure, but one of these days I’ll get into the state of entertainment media and my mixed feelings about leaving it behind.

Floating home after seeing JCS at the Hollywood Bowl. What a sublime experience. Cynthia and Adam were the standouts, obv, but Phillipa Soo and Raul Esparza also slayed. A bit annoyed they didn’t have any programs, though. Not even the expensive glossy ones.

We had a lovely trip up the coast to Monterey this past week. So lovely that I forgot to post pics. We touched grass. We touched sand. We touched purple sea anemones in the tanks at the aquarium. It was good to get away. Anyway, here are some nice shots.

Amazing thread. Definitely taking notes for future travel.

Foley artist. I would like to be the person making the footsteps, rain sounds, doors closing, fight noises, etc., for movies and TV shows. I don’t know if it’s even a real job anymore, but I think it would be fun.

I can't believe I get to witness this in a little over a week 🤯

Look, go ahead and use LLMs or GenAI if you must, but for the love of whatever deity you worship please stop insisting or suggesting other people use it too. It’s insulting. I can think, research, and write for myself, and I did fine before these chatbots showed up. I even *gasp* enjoy the process.

The first press junket I ever covered was for this film (for SCI FI Wire, back before it was SYFI) and I got 1:1s with both Pfeiffer and Ford. I don’t know how green little starstruck me ever got through it.

OMG yes. What is that about? Anyone who knows me knows I can’t handle eye trauma. Just no.

nathan fielder was right

The year is 2045, the entire population of the planet is applying to the single remaining job opening.

Uh… spoiler warning!

Hot take: Can we retire the whole Christmas in July bit? Like, it already takes up like a third of the year. Can’t we just leave it at that?

Disrespectfully, I need anyone who has not looked for a job within the past year to shut up because shit has changed. Your advice and experience doing this in the past means nothing. You have not job hunted like people are job hunting right now, don’t give people false hope with your outdated ideas

Have you all heard about this dating sim called Date Everything? Where you can date personified household items and abstract concepts like existential dread? I swear I’m not making this up. The teens insisted we take them to a signing today to meet some of the voice actors.

Yay! ART is coming! Maybe they’ll give Worldhoppers the Sanctuary Moon treatment next season (intentionally cheesy with fun cameos).

Happye Daye of the Bot of Murderes

The Writers Guild of America East will no longer be active on X.com.  Please follow the Guild on BlueSky: bsky.app/profile/wgae... and on Instagram, TikTok, and Threads at WGAEast.

The return of HBO Max is making me wish for the kind of magic that rewinds everything back to April 2023, when it became MAX. Some real do-over opportunities there if we played it right.

What a headline.

This article crystallizes why watching THE PRISONER right now feels *so very correct* Working in online journalism is like being a prisoner of The Village. Forced to bend and break, contort into constantly changing positions that stifle any individuality. Rules always changing, goals always moving.

We did a walk-through preview of the new LACMA building today. No art yet but they had signs showing where some of the pieces will go. Have to say, I’m not sure about the material (oppressive grey concrete) but the design is kind of cool.

There aren't nearly as many TV episodes set about Independence Day as there are about Christmas or Halloween, but there are some really memorable ones. I picked my 10 favorites, some very much about the holiday, some just set on the day:

Today Noel and Liam Gallagher will play as Oasis for the first time in 16 years!! So I decided to mark the occasion for @ebertvoices.bsky.social From LOST to SNATCH, here are the 10 best film and television needle drops of the band's music. Read: www.rogerebert.com/features/the...

Time to repost this pic I took of The A.V. Club’s short-lived L.A. office on the day G/O Media sold the site. (I had such high hopes for better things but I was so, so wrong.)

Please stop assuming that too many em dashes means AI written. Some of us are producing grammatically incoherent work the honest way!

Attended a lovely destination wedding in the Eastern Sierras this weekend. Look at these gorgeous brides! One of them is my ex-sister-in-law, who will always be family to me. My brother was there with his new wife, celebrating with everyone else. Funny how things work out sometimes. ♥️🏳️‍🌈

Rachel Zegler has been in a few major films now, including Steven Spielberg's West Side Story. Why not name her in the headline? Are they trying to avoid triggering her haters? It's weird. Also, for the record, I think this stunt is cool and makes sense in the context of the show.

Money problems: have we had enough of TV shows about rich people?

I would love for Allison Janney to learn this and lip sync to it at some point during the campaign, a la The Jackal.

Establishment cats like Old Deuteronomy are terrified by the possibilities of ranked Jellicle choice voting and what it could mean for the future of the party

It’s so hard to plan ahead for anything right now. Tickets for Chess on Broadway go on presale tomorrow but how am I supposed to know what the state of anything will be come Oct/Nov?!?!