2025 In Micro-Blogging | Notes, Tips, Musings 002

Yesterday, I conducted my yearly ritual of revisiting Anne Carson's Short Talks and selecting a prose poem from among them to serve as my North Star for the year to come. Maybe I'll talk more about what I chose in a later post, but one thing that strikes me every year about this collection of pieces from 1992 is just how current they feel. Anne Carson is basically doing video-essay-think-piece-micro-blogging-type-shit. You have to imagine she could clean up on BlueSky in true Joyce Carol Oates fashion should she desire it.

So, in honor of Anne Carson and in an effort to make it easier to check for myself if I've posted about something before, here is a collection of all of my "skeets" (yes, I call them that) from 2025 in one place. I have written out any threads as one continuous section, either combining lines or creating paragraph breaks as needed. I'm excluding comments and replies, and I'm also excluding a set of notes I had about playing Super Mario 64 since that's still in progress. Wherever relevant, I'll include some context to explain what may have been topical at the time of posting.

JANUARY

01/01

• 12:09 AM - Andy Cohen was an obnoxious NYE host when i was sober but as i kept pace with him he became a much cooler host love this messy lad
• 12:11 AM - enjoy this, the only perfect square year you will experience in your lifetime
• 12:16 AM - let's all admit The West Coast was invented by Hollywood to sell those walls of clocks with the cities next to each one
• 12:18 AM - big year to be The 1975
• 12:56 AM - they're gonna try to convince you that a whole new kind of White Guy is hot in 2025 but don't let them, don't fall for it
• 12:58 AM - gonna wait until July to make the final call on what kind of Summer it is this year
• 01:03 AM - any love for the Mountain Time Zone?
  
  yes, I love it. Let's name more time zones after the average geographic feature (from West to East): Beach Time, Mountain Time, Road Time, Bookstore/Cafe That Closed An Hour Ago Time
• [at this point I seem to have slept for a solid 8 hours]
• 09:27 AM - wait is the past tense Hoobastank or Hoobastunk i can never remember
• 09:35 AM - everyone's celebrating Popeye and Tintin joining the public domain (as they should) but i'm most excited to publish a reimagining of the classic Hemingway novel for the modern day called Dude, Where's My Arms?
• 09:36 AM - a retelling of A Farewell To Arms starring Popeye called Oh Here They Are where he beats his way, spinach-fueled, through the trenches of World War I
• 10:48 AM - start teaching that the Constitution wasn't the product of some divinely inspired epiphany, it was a patchwork of messy compromises that reached completion at an arbitrary point determined by how sweaty it was that summer and how much drinking money the delegates had left

01/05

• 12:51 PM - the closest experience i have to ingesting microdoses of poison to gain an immunity is increasing the speed on my podcast player by .1x every day

01/06

• 09:08 AM - for work reasons, grabbing a bus this morning that stops near the bull statue in Lower Manhattan
  
  it's a special people watching joy to watch everyone patiently take their turns to stoop down and take pictures with its strikingly golden balls

01/07

• 10:55 AM - here's my unsubstantiated theory: our social fabric has been damaged by the fact that, since people carry around cash far less often, we're making fewer small-scale social bets
• 06:48 PM - was about to post an RIP for Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary but then did my obligatory "hold on let's just check for controversies before endorsing this guy" due diligence and welp...
  
  ...turns out in 1970 he was convicted for "taking improper liberties" with a 14-year-old (which is a wildly restrained euphemism for sexual assault) for which he was pardoned by (did you guess it?) Jimmy Carter
  
  i hate it here
• 07:32 PM - any Bim Skala Bim fans out there? just did some copyediting on their Wikipedia page to make it less opinionated but now that I'm bopping along to 1999's The One That Got Away i'm thinking i've made a huge mistake

01/09

• 07:38 AM - try asking Alexa or whatever little creepy voice you have in your house (we like that Alexa responds to "Computer" like it's on Star Trek):
  
  "Computer, who's your favorite billionaire?"
  
  the canned answer they programmed in is pretty goofy stuff
• 07:39 AM - i've been loudly proclaiming "FUTCH!" at times when i might say "FUCK!" and i highly recommend it
  
  it's like i'm in one of those sci-fi futures where they have different curse words but it's not one of the cool ones
  
  still cooler than Firefly being like whoa get this what if in space all the white people swear in Chinese
  
  don't steal this, but just had an idea for a fish out of water story where a person from the current day goes to a space-faring future and then plops down in a cockpit and shouts "Let's get the futch out of here"
  
  their future-native companion: "What the fuck was that?"
  
  "What?"
  
  "What the fuck is futch?"
  
  "I...I dunno, I just figured you'd have different curse words in the future"
  
  *rolls eyes, slams hard on the lightspeed thing to overwhelm the past person with G forces and make them barf their guts out*
• 05:43 PM - is there an amendment in the Bill of Rights that has been used as a cudgel to suppress more rights than the First?
  
  sorry i can't be bothered to treat you with dignity, empathy, and respect, it's against my freedom of speech/religion

01/10

• 12:30 AM - hardest kiki/bouba analysis for me lately has been the two main guys from that show White Collar
  
  there's like a quantum superposition thing going on there that just doesn't happen with any other TV duo
• 09:03 AM - saw a news report that Musk is creating a company town with SpaceX
  
  makes me think the end game of crypto this whole time has been company scrip
  
  scrypto, i coined it first
• 11:03 AM - the thing that is tough for our brains to grok is that whether or not a bureaucracy is too big for us to conceptualize is a completely separate consideration from whether or not it's the right size to do its job
  
  the other thing is we conflate bureaucratic complexity with bureaucratic friction
  
  we tend to experience bureaucracies in conscious ways exclusively through moments of friction, which are much more often a product of UNDER-funding rather than...funding them so much they somehow become worse?
  
  OR, in the case or our byzantine tax filing system, the result of corporate capture
  
  it takes an inconceivable amount of coordination and effort to make systemic social resources seem effortless, and common sense is in no way a good rubric to apply in order to understand if that's working well or not
  
  the vast majority of us don't even understand the bureaucracy or our own bones
• 11:14 AM - i feel like part of the psychological appeal of autocracy is that it's just easier to imagine how it functions, and it's easier to project oneself onto an autocrat- you as a self are as big in your conception as the autocrat, even if your power is greatly reduced/suppressed
  
  whereas a much more complicated, bureaucratic state is more challenging to conceptualize and makes you feel very small when you compare yourself to it, even if you actually have more agency provided you learn how to navigate and leverage your power within those systems effectively
  
  this is not me being an incrementalist/centrist type, but i will concede some wonkishness. the challenge for leftists is how to articulate policy positions in a way that's as easy to digest as "this one guy is in charge of everything now" even if the actual implementation is, in a word, complex
  
  this is the benefit of universality in social services
• [this article is helpful context for the following: https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-hate-speech-content-moderation/]
• 02:00 PM - fuck mark zuckerberg and his abhorrent agenda
  
  setting that aside for a second to have a different conversation
  
  if you asked me in high school why i was using Facebook i wouldn't have said "to express my political speech" i would've said "to poke"
  
  FB was supposed to be a utility, not a town square
• 10:13 PM - a musical about technological changes in the Y2K era
  
  Give My Regards To Broadband

01/11

• [I wrote this next one after seeing this classic viral video for the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XebF2cgmFmU]
• 06:14 AM - chickitty China, the succulent Chinese meal
• 08:25 AM - had a dream where i really wanted to take a photo with Hugh Laurie but various technical difficulties and whatnot made it so he had to wait a long long time with me while i figured out how to get the picture taken and you know what he was so patient about it, love that guy
• 06:07 PM - impress your crush by showing them how to find the Warp Zone in Super Mario Bros World 1-2

01/12

• 10:03 AM - if someone starts off saying "with all due respect" you just know that next remark is going to be positively cutting

01/14

• 08:31 AM - instead of thumbs-upping my text to show they read it (makes me anxious, are you mad at me?), i want people to send me a crispy mp3 of Worf saying "Acknowledged."
• 10:42 PM - the thing i really don't understand about the Pete Hegseth nomination (there's plenty i find infuriating and reprehensible, of course) is...why would [h]e want this job?
  
  seems very busy and complicated, much harder/more stressful than bullshitting on TV for a living.

01/15

• 11:10 PM - i'm not sure if this is a great idea or not but i'd be interested to see a world where every cabinet secretary is an elected position
  
  the obvious downside would be creating more chances for adversarial relationships between departments or friction between a president and the secretaries...but also sometimes that might be pretty good

01/16

• [I'm reacting here to the release of this "First Look" trailer for the Nintendo Switch 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itpcsQQvgAQ]
• 09:13 AM - it's super lame to me that "sequel" video game consoles are always like "we're the same as the last one but all white/all black with tasteful accent colors and basically just better/sexier/more boring"
  
  certainly some needed improvements and quirky features implied by Switch 2 but not camp enough
• 09:37 AM - most exciting thing to me is the rumor/implication that the joycons will now have a mouse mode which is peak "nobody asked for this" in the best way possible
  
  sadly it will probably go the way of motion controls and touch screens where games are afraid to cater to specific gimmicks because they need to be playable in every controller configuration, but i can't wait for the Mario Party mini games that mandate mouse mode
  
  the other thing that's a sleeper feature is the second USB-C port, which to me indicates a couple things:
  
  1) less awkward position for charging while playing handheld
  
  2) you can charge and use a wired device (headphones, e.g.) at the same time
  
  3) hopeful: an alternative way to connect to the dock? so we can do Wii U shit?
  
  4) the return of weird ass, chunky attachments like rumblepaks/microphones/link cables that add some one-off functionality which can now move with the console between docked/handheld modes
  
  5) hyper-specific peripherals that can travel between Switches and serve a different memory function than an SD card - for example, a little thumb drive with your Animal Crossing island or your Pokemon PC
  
  6) are we porting DS games over here?! a second screen I can plug in for handheld mode?
  
  7) along with mouse mode, more of a catering to this as a device that can switch into doing "computer"-esque things. plug in a keyboard, baby
  
  8) with all the AR they've been toying with, also seems like a way to slap a camera on that sucker and do Kinect/3DS things
  
  9) new ROB somehow, somehow this gets us a new ROB
  
  my point overall is that it's not as if a second USB-C port adds new technology to the Switch itself, but it now means a USB-C port is ALWAYS available regardless of console mode, which opens up a wildly expansive design space
• 01:43 PM - "If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes. Put them on 3-by-5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a feature film."
  
  RIP David Lynch
• 02:06 PM - sad to watch news outlets condense David Lynch's work down to an adjective and land on "surreal", because i think that misses the point.
  
  he conveyed with unflinching clarity the truth that reality itself is frighteningly, stunningly dissociative. the closer you get, the further you've gone

01/19

• 06:37 PM - COVID wiped our collective memory of the fact that in 2017-2019 we thought we were living the worst possible years you could live, and now we're being reminded of that feeling every day
• 06:43 PM - starting to think we may be having the Second and Third Gilded Ages back to back

01/20

• [this was presidential inauguration day]
• 12:23 AM - unironically i think this is the ideal political climate for Teddy Roosevelt to win his third term with the Bull Moose Party, we're gonna be real hungry in 2028 for a trust-busting conservationist who also satisfies this weird "won't somebody please think of the men" discourse
• 09:14 AM - gonna swear in myself as president of my own little ass today

01/21

• [I'm reacting here to discourse around Elon Musk's Nazi salute and fascism's ascendancy with the inauguration of Donald Trump]
• 06:01 AM - it's honestly staggering to watch the US do a speed run of On Tyranny right now
• 06:06 AM - when i was a US History teacher and would teach about the Nazis, i would talk about the Nazis' admiration for and emulation of Jim Crow/American race science, i would draw comparisons between Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum
  
  we've had fascist systems and ideologies baked in for centuries
• 06:24 AM - that was a Nazi salute, anyone quibbling and calling it a Roman salute is missing some key points:
  
  1) fascists really like the Roman Empire. the term fascism is literally a derivation of the Latin name of a Roman symbol used by Benito Mussolini
  
  2) also, if you visit Rome itself there's a huge road connecting many of the city's monuments, most critically a direct path from the Piazza Venezia (where Mussolini gave his speeches) to the Colosseum
  
  3) a lot of early discourse about American constitutionalism (espoused by oligarchs as it may have been) was predicated on the desire to emulate the Roman Republic without succumbing to the rise of a Roman Empire.
  
  4) hot take here i don't think the Roman Empire were neutral and cool they were just history's most successful fascists
• 06:25 AM - it's gonna be exhausting when we need to argue the case for "no no no the Moon landing was real but the Mars landing was completely staged"
• 06:31 AM - for the party that loves to gleefully prod gender expansive folks by asking "tee hee define a woman you can't do it!" this executive order's definition of the female/male binary is not only fucking vile, it's also an incredibly stupid definition
  
  also, chilling that it ties sex to fertility
• 07:24 AM - we're less than a year away from a 5-4 Supreme Court decision declaring the Reconstruction amendments unconstitutional, those arguments are out there which i know because my conservative step-dad was making them on his blog 15 years ago

01/22

• 11:05 AM - we've been listening to a lot of the Wicked songs on repeat and the one that blows me away on many listens is The Wizard & I
  
  wish i was a literature teacher so i could use it to discuss dramatic irony
  
  yes, there's the obvious "I'd be so happy I could MELT!" and "a celebration...all to do with me"
  
  but what i keep thinking about is the triple entendre in the discussion between Elphaba and Morrible, when they discuss the idea of her "making good"
  
  on a first listen, you might think "well, that's a weird way to say 'doing good' or 'making things better' but they say things weird in Oz"
  
  maybe you even gloss a second meaning, "making good" as in "succeeding" - certainly, Elphaba's fatal flaw as conveyed in this song is that her ambition for personal status/recognition are tightly wound up in her sense of justice. she's going to make the world better...and everyone will be grateful
  
  but, with more knowledge of the story and Morrible herself, you realize what she's really saying: you'll be making good (on this promise/deal)
  
  to Morrible and The Wizard, Elphaba's mere existence is a quid pro quo - you have these powers, you are alive, and you owe the powers that be
  
  it's such a genius way to inject some dread and further layers of meaning into subsequent engagement with the song, i love it
• 04:10 PM - have to send something via USPS today - scrawling the address, peeling and placing the cheery stamp, asserting my own existence up in the corner, licking the yucky part to close it, i'm genuinely feeling emotional at engaging in this tactile ritual of using a public service
• 09:42 PM - just saw 1972's Solaris in a theatre and i gotta say Andrei Tarkovsky completely ate Stanley Kubrick's lunch, the greatest "hold my beer" in cinema history

01/26

• 01:06 PM - last night i experienced the quintessential 30-something Saturday night, starting with a cheese-tasting dinner birthday party and ending with nodding along to songs i didn't know at Emo Night
  
  chasing it with a Sunday full of thinking about chores i should be doing and eating a McFlurry instead

01/27

• 07:42 PM - i can't explain how badly i wish i could have a bat as a pet
  
  like same keep-to-myself-but-sometimes-snuggle-with-you vibes as a cat, plus it can fly
  
  sitting on a Zoom call, an ominous shadow flits across the wall behind me: "sorry everyone, that was Maurice"

01/28

• 08:39 AM - feels like a big issue dividing liberals and conservatives is their attitude towards acronyms

01/30

• 01:21 AM - to every single conservative politician, judge, lawyer, reply guy out there treating the 14th Amendment like it's a fucking riddle and all they need to do is find the right technicality to overturn its essential, enduring spirit, its protection of birthright citizenship:
  
  fuck you you fuck
• 01:25 AM - every single Democrat needs to be screaming from the hilltops "yes, the government also does that and needs money to do that", this awful plane crash being the latest example
• 08:22 AM - gonna fuck around and double down on radical education, they made that patriotic stuff sound lame as hell
• 08:34 AM - as someone in the education sector working on social studies curriculum and teacher education, if you want me to abandon trans kids and embrace jingoistic mythology in place of historical empathy, good luck! revive the HUAC and read back this skeet, including: "i'm a big poopyhead. me, a poopyhead!"
• 11:37 AM - the only true American Patriot i recognize is the picture above my desk at work of my cat's [head] photoshopped onto an astronaut's body

FEBRUARY

02/22

• 03:59 PM - so glad i watched Conclave this cause now i can really empathize with sort of the pope experience
• 04:01 PM - just bought a thick copy of the Chicago Manual of Style at the local bookstore and the cashier said "wow you're about to get really into the Chicago Manual of Style" in a way where she wasn't making fun of me but rather as if she saw a flash of my future and in an instant knew the nature of my death

02/23

• 07:56 PM - in the vein of actors doing rewatch podcasts of shows they were on i want a whole podcast subgenre of everyday people who were coworkers at a random day job 10 years ago recounting that experience

MARCH

03/02

• [here, I'm reacting to the results of the Oscars]
• 10:36 PM - calling it now Brody Quest will top the Billboard charts tomorrow
• 10:59 PM - i am so happy Anora won all of the awards it did and so upset The Substance didn't win any of those same awards and so relieved that Emilia Perez didn't win any of them and that about covers the Oscars
• 10:59 PM - Dune: Part 2 won for Best Sound this year and that sound was BWAAAAAA

03/04

• 09:33 AM - sometimes i get so deep into a hyperfocus on the subway that when i emerge from the station i get jump-scared by the morning sun like oh fuck this is the START of my day

03/05

• 10:44 AM - on my way to a conference upstate, gonna check whether or not steamed hams is really an Albany expression

03/08

• 09:55 AM - it's funny to me when places try to get cute with their gender normative bathroom signs and then you have to ask yourself well shit am i having a silhouette with a top hat sort of day today
• [later this day I break my arm, which goes unmentioned on BlueSky for a while]

03/22

• [I think this may be my most-liked skeet of the year]
• 07:02 AM - Ash in Indigo League is relatable because he's perilously unaware of the logistical and bureaucratic requirements of the adult world
  
  watching the episode where he has to take the Pokemon League entrance exam and he's like oh fuck there's a test?! and i felt that
  
  another example: in the second episode Officer Jenny is like dude show me your ID and he has no idea that his Pokedex is itself his ID
• 01:18 PM - millennials don't identify as subs and doms they just tell you whether they were more attracted to Officer Jenny or Nurse Joy yup go ahead you can send that one out i'm happy with it
  • [The next day, at 10:23 AM, I added]: on review this would have been funnier if i said tops and bottoms but we live and learn

03/25

• 12:29 PM - Halloween is the best holiday featuring candy but Easter has the best holiday candy
  
  nothing hits better than when they make the Whoppers look like little bird eggs for a month just cause

APRIL

04/02

• [I'm reacting here to the April Nintendo Direct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrTVeYm4iIM]
• 11:23 AM - Kirby Air ride sequel is proof that the Zillennials are finally stepping into the decision-making positions of our media culture and will soon deliver us 5-10 glorious years of Tumblr pitch-posting made real before the Water Wars
  
  expect to see Dexter and Mandark as gay dads co-parenting, Bionicle Classic, our first Senator who starred in a DCOM, cellphone screensavers that are 75% bouncing logos that always hit the corner, mealkit-like services that instead deliver the ingredients to cook plastic bugs in a small toy oven
• 12:24 PM - curious to see what more Mario Kart World will have to offer my partner who is looking to relive Burnout: Paradise or role play as the cast of Fox's cancelled-too-soon-Death-Race-drama, Drive
  
  a lot of the newness of it feels like catnip for me and "why would I want that" for the casual kart racer
  
  *who isn't
  
  crucial crucial typo
• 11:44 PM - if you're not a jpg with four emotion variations or a 3D catgirl avatar i simply do not want to hear your Magic: The Gathering deckbuilding advice
• [between this post and the next I got surgery for my broken arm. This, again, goes unmentioned.]

04/19

• 10:28 AM - Very Hungry Caterpillar to gender queer pipeline

MAY

05/02

• 01:00 PM - not 100% confident which came first popcorn chicken or popcorn shrimp

05/08

• 02:52 PM - huge missed opportunity to be Pope Bob I

05/11

• 03:53 PM - have been haunted for days by the unfullfillable yearning to have a pet cat the size of a wolf to just sort of scavenge in the dark depths of the woods with
• 03:54 PM - wondering what's in the place where my womb would be and sad that it might be nothing but guts
• 03:56 PM - first day on Welbutrin today so if my Art, my Life's Work, begins to Lose It's Maudlin Edge lemme know
• 06:41 PM - they gotta start putting more foods on the cob

05/17

• 09:23 PM - hate to admit this but i've soured on the word morsel

05/30

• 06:50 PM - if you're giving me fried calamari with no little squidy pieces you might as well just fucking slap me

JUNE

06/04

• 09:47 PM - the wall at physical therapy: "GET BACK THE LIFE YOU LOVE!"
  
  my newest range of motion exercise: *involves a wooden cane
  
  me: *determined to dance like the WB Frog

06/05

• 02:37 PM - how did cats get so good at yawning?

06/12

• [The below is a lyric from "Brian Wilson" by Barenaked Ladies in reaction to the death of Brian Wilson]
• 12:45 PM - So I'm lying here, just staring at the ceiling tiles
  And I'm thinking about
  Oh, what to think about

06/13

• 09:50 PM - just played Final Fantasy Magic Sealed and won 3 separate games by tripling a creature's power with Tifa's Limit Break (one of them ended up being a 33/33 Fat Chocobo)
  
  every time my opponents lost like that they grinned

06/22

• 12:05 AM - horn if you're honky

06/24

• 08:16 AM - they put sunglasses on me at the dentist for the bright lights felt like a bit of mask work, my character is a guy is unbothered by the fear of drowning in that water they squirt in your mouth
  • 09:33 PM - sorry for the typos here i blame fluoride
• [this day was the NYC Democratic Primary]
• 09:30 PM - infuriating and funny that so much of the rhetoric against progressive/socialist/leftist candidates like Zohran boils down to: "they're too young and attractive and likable and their ideas make too much sense and would be too popular so they must be here to murder you personally boo"
  
  plays off a "truth" inculcated by capitalism that everything must suck, that suck is reality and reality is suck, so anything not such is not real. we know this, you must distrust that which feels okay and pleasant
• 10:12 PM - i speak for all italian americans when i say we deserve a spicier (more socialist) meatball (italian american politician running for major office)
• 10:14 PM - i know the mainstream media loves their electoral college maps and all that but the drama of ranked choice feels much more fun
  
  it's also so fun to see the little alliances and rivalries in a ranked choice field
  
  "hey vote for me and also they're my pal so you can vote for them too"
  
  "hey you could vote for me but what i'm really here to say is fuck that guy in particular"

06/25

• 12:29 PM - headlines before last night essentially said
  
  Guy You've Heard Of, a guy you've heard of for specific prestigious reasons and maybe one bad reason, might probably defeat Guy You've Heard A Ton Of Good Things About, who we insist you haven't heard of and who we refuse to properly inform you about
  
  headlines today are saying
  
  Guy You've Heard A Ton Of Good Things About surprises everyone by defeating Guy Who You Realize You Haven't Heard A Positive Thing About Since The Bad Things He Did Came To Light Five Years Ago And Ruined His Political Career
  
  the sheer cognitive dissonance between how i experienced this primary as a voter and the way it was framed in major media outlets is still breaking my brain
  
  it feels like the surprise baked into today's headlines is not reporting on voters' surprise, but rather continuing to insist upon the worldview that nobody has ever heard of nor would ever want to vote for a socialist to both try to restore that reality and also save face over these outlets' utter disconnection from what has really been happening here on the ground in NYC.
• 12:38 PM - mustaches are cool again, beards are starting to comfort the voters, we're entering an era of Facial Hair Acceptance the likes of which we haven't seen since the 19th century
• 12:51 PM - the thing i'm taking away from Mamdani's win is not necessarily "people want a more leftist candidate" (that would be awesome but i don't want us to get out ahead of our skis) but rather "people want a more participatory candidacy"
  
  establishment Dems have settled on a rhetoric where they imagine the people delegating powers to them, where the argument is "you can trust me with this power so that you don't have to think about this stuff at all"
  
  the assumption there: "ah shucks nobody likes to argue! or think! or do stuff!"
  
  but, the truth is, everybody loves to argue and think and do stuff. those things feel important and fun and build connection with others. "trust me, this is my job" is so much less compelling than "come with me so we can figure out how i should do this job"
  
  there's a meritocraric elitism inherent in thinking that the reason we have representatives is because they're just the best and most experienced thinkers. nah, man. i can think just fine - i need a representative because i have my own fucking job and life and shit to deal with. it's for efficiency.
  
  i hope Dems walk into 2028 realizing we can't keep running people who "deserve" it or whose "turn" it is. your power as an elected official comes from the mundane fact that i need to eat a burger right now. your duty is to share some of that power back with me as often as you can.

06/26

• 03:07 PM - while introducing an all-staff DEIA session, a colleague of mine (who, let me be clear, i respect and admire for her expertise on this sort of people work) noted that June includes many identity-related observances: Pride Month, Juneteenth, Men's Mental Health Awareness Month...
  
  brother if that's not the comedy rule of thirds at work i dunno what is

06/27

• 03:49 PM - summaries of multiple TV crit articles i passively saw today boil down to:
  
  "Season X of Popular Show is doing more of what Popular Show does, and that's a Bad Thing"
  
  this is a bit of a straw man on my part to be sure, but i think that's a bad critique to levvy so often and with such certainty
  
  this evolve or die attitude we have towards television these days drives undermines the value that sameness can bring, unique to the medium.
  
  1. formulaity reduces the cognitive load for viewers, which allows you to direct their attention to places besides "wait, what's happening?"
  
  2. predictability and comfort build our tolerance for confronting moments of unpredictability and discomfort. it also helps us to more acutely feel the difference between those two things.
  
  3. characters can grow slowly, changing in increments that more closely resemble the pace of life.
  
  4. there's a lower barrier to entry - I can start at a random point in the show's runtime with minimal elevator-pitching or lore-dumping.
  
  5. characters or settings can have a "deal" explored radially rather than linearly. you don't need to "progress" so much as approach from a "new angle"
  
  6. creators get multiple attempts to communicate the same thing. they can revise and refine as they get to understand the text and the audience's relation to it.
  
  7. actors refine their performances, and the text of the show may even warp in intriguing ways around the performers themselves.
  
  i'm sure i've complained on Chatz many times about episodes of a show feeling boilerplate or not offering much novelty, so this is a critique as much of my own criticism as of a few random headlines i saw today.
  
  still, i challenge the utility of saying "this is the same as it was and that's bad"
  
  TV is unique in that you spend large amounts of time over long amounts of time in its worlds, and thus it has the potential to access a kind of sameness that film simply cannot. that sameness has proven across the medium's history to be plenty virtuous and artful, if we respect it as such.

06/28

• 07:20 PM - a lot of people who want to sound thoughtful, intentional, considerate use the word "humans" to describe "people."
  
  i get the poetry of it, we center a lot of our moral goodness linguistically in our "humanity."
  
  that said, isn't "human" by definition a less inclusive word than "person?"
  
  just feel like we should future-proof this vernacular for when we want to widen the tent to include all sorts of funky ass non-human people
• 07:25 PM - we're fostering a kitten right now who refuses to eat anything but fish and shrimp fancy feast which is just so peak

06/29

• 10:16 AM - just gave myself the gender euphoria version of when you order something and forget about it then it shows up like a little present from outside time
  
  opened up Max and forgot i had made my profile photo Hawkgirl with her helmet off

JULY

07/01

• 12:16 PM - new life goal is to have maven listed among my posthumous nouns

07/02

• 04:31 AM - just saw someone in a YouTube comment write "box standard" instead of "bog standard" and i really like that, it makes way more sense
• 12:34 PM - just saw a sign on a store with two doors:
  
  "Please Use The Other Door Sorry For The Inconvenience Management"
  
  not sure why they're apologizing cause i think their inconvenience management was fairly effective. if anything i would expect them to apologize for the inconven- oh.
• 12:40 PM - more songs should follow the example of "No One's Gonna Love You" by Band of Horses
  
  they do the classic Verse/Chorus/Verse/Chorus/Bridge/Verse/Chorus sure sure
  
  but then they go to the Bridge again
  
  it mixes resolution and non-resolution, end and so
  
  things start splitting at the seams and now...

07/03

• [for the discussion below, I'm responding this New York Times article and the discourse surrounding it: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/nyregion/mamdani-columbia-black-application.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Tk8.dq-_.OgG4Ktak82Hp&smid=url-share]
• 10:02 PM - the NY Times just delivered a helluva source reliability lesson to social studies educators in NYC
  
  let's push past the shortcut that "this is reliable because it's from a ~newspaper~" and close-read the bit about the data coming from "an academic" who writes about "IQ and race"

07/04

• 06:17 AM - the nyt mamdani story can only masquerade as news when its readers and writers accept the premises that:
  
  1) affirmative action is unfair
  
  2) any claim at one's own identity is suspect, is an attempt at manipulation or jockeying for advantage
  
  3) one's relationship to identity markers cannot change
  
  4) 18 year-olds fill out paperwork with the kind of legalistic clarity to which we can apply the same scrutiny that we do to the public policy positions of adult mayoral candidates
  
  the parallels to NYT coverage of trans issues is undeniable - it was never a distraction, it was a rhetorical project
  
  oh and also:
  
  5) whether or not you actually gained material advantage has no bearing on this situation - the transgression is that someone got the vibe that you tried
• 06:23 AM - today i'll be celebrating the 4th of My Ass, commemorating the fateful day when my posterior dislodged from the rest of my body, dramatized in the YA classic The Day My Butt Went Psycho
  
  one time in elementary school a classmate convinced our substitute for the day that we as a class had been reading from The Day My Butt Went Psycho after lunch every day and that he was going to read aloud from it today
  
  he got a few pages in before she shut it down. absolute legend behavior

07/08

• 09:31 AM - macklemore came the closest any white person will to reclaiming honky
• 04:48 PM - Edge of Eternities looks like precisely my shit and i cannot wait to build the lobster Dexter Jetster deck

07/09

• 06:23 PM - few artists have a four album run to match Weird Al in the Y2K era from Bad Hair Day ('96) to Straight Outta Lynwood ('06)
  
  it's no coincidence that this is also the highest concentration of rapping Al in the discography
  
  it was a perfect storm for him culturally because the ascendancy of lyrics-forward popular music genres (hip-hop, pop punk, adult alternative rock) preceded the proliferation of the tools necessary for people to flood the market with half-baked, shitty YouTube parody songs
  
  i mean i love "Smells Like Nirvana", but there's only so much comedic juice you can get from "it's hard to understand this guy" genres before you kinda just want higher lyrical density to pack more jokes per minute
• 06:31 PM - when people respond to "hey we should make public bus fares free to riders" by saying "well that would cost X dollars and there are actually these better ways to spend X dollars on transportation" i say "sweetie it sounds like we should spend 2X dollars on transportation then"
  
  like the whole tack of tearing down a desire for a public good by saying actually we could spend our money better elsewhere concedes in advance the premise that we only get a little bit of money to play with for the public good when that amount is more arbitrary than it is non-arbitrary
  
  also, even if good things have some inefficiencies or negative externalities, some good things are still good because they're good and we should have them and then sort out the problems once we have the good thing going. this like 1890s Taylorism applied to every left-leaning policy is not helpful

07/10

• 09:13 AM - hey doctor by the way i thought this might come up organically but i'm doing a show downtown tonight if y-
  
  oh yeah i mean i wouldn't call it "comedy" it's technically clow-
  
  no, no yeah it'll be fun-
  
  we don't call them "clown names" but you can say you're there for Pagli-
  
  it's a family name
• 09:14 AM - aglio e olio but it's pagliacci e olio and it's just a slick and slippery clown
• [I saw Weird Al at his Madison Square Garden concert over the summer, so the following are my reflections as I listen to his music in preparation]
• 09:41 AM - something i appreciate about Weird Al's version of comedic heightening is that sometimes he'll blend lyrics that heighten through hyperbole and litotes mixed together. it's a "see what sticks" approach that doesn't get tied up in the "rules" governing comedy songs that are essentially sketches
  
  take "Confessions Pt. III"
  
  there are 2 types of confessions in this song:
  
  1) things that are so mundane that they needn't be confessions (which is why he didn't mention them before
  
  2) things that are so outlandish that they are complete deal breakers (which is why he didn't mention them before)
  
  you could easily give Al the note of "hey these are kinda muddled, you should pick a 'game'"
  
  that's the kind of thinking that locks us in to comedy that only ever escalates, gets more and more absurd until you get to what some improvisors call "Crazy Town"
  
  by weaving together escalation and deescalation, Al is able to give the song a more unpredictable and intriguing pacing, able to play multiple "games" and rest them in alternation while still strengthening the central game: this guy has a LOT of confessions!
  
  many of Al's great songs are funny for this reason, not that things get zanier and zanier, but that the list of highly specific examples (ranging as they may do in intensity or significance) is never-ending, the structure of the original song being parodied is insufficient to contain it
  
  each verse doesn't have to be "more X" or "more Y", it just has to be "more"
  
  the fact that items come haphazard and unorganized only gives us further insight into the narrator and either their inability to make sense of the world they've created or their willful refusal to do so
  
  when the "Confessions Pt. III" singer says he dropped your toast and fed it to you and then says by the way that wasn't a cold sore, the disjunction of undercutting then overshadowing gives the impression that either this guy has no moral intelligence at all or that he's recklessly manipulative
  
  you can copy and paste this analysis to "eBay," "White & Nerdy," "Hardware Store," etc.
  
  of course, Al sometimes does pick a lane, but even when he does that he does so in a clever way
  
  in "A Complicated Song" the verses heighten in consequences for the singer - the choruses also change to match
  
  even then, part of the humor isn't just that the situation got way sillier and more intense, but that the original song can't quite contain that shift. the same chorus melody takes us through him eating too much pizza and getting constipated as takes us through him getting decapitated on a coaster
  
  what was once dramatic over-exaggeration in the first verse/chorus becomes dramatic under-exaggerstion in the final verse/chorus
  
  comedy can have more shapes than just line go up or line stay flat
• 09:53 AM - hey guys on the subway if you're gonna give a lingering stare to the carrot shaped clips in my hair (despite the fact that i look like a guy what the heck?) the least you can do is give me a very slow nod and thumbs up
• 09:55 AM - band names might have peaked with Moxy Früvous
• 09:59 AM - Sapphic Pop Polka would go so hard
• 12:29 PM - me talking to gen alpha
  
  when i was a kid i had Weird Al, you have Weird AI. we are not the same

07/11

• [here I'm reacting to the release of Let God Sort Em Out by Clipse]
• 08:27 AM - Malice is absolutely filthy good on this new Clipse album
  
  Pusha T does a lot of the legwork of making the songs song-y (hooks, table-setting first verses, the tone of his delivery/performance) and then he and the beat both get out of the way like it's surprise feature and it lands like one
  
  it's as if part of the project of every song is "hey you haven't forgotten about Pharell and Pusha T because we haven't let you, but you forgot that Malice was nice like this and that's a mistake you'll never make again"
• 09:11 AM - love that there are multiple therapy bars on the Clipse album and there's now a way to make going to therapy "tough"
  
  Kendrick says - "Therapy taught me to open up/It also taught me that I don't give a fuck"
  
  Tyler says - "LaFerrari doors open up like therapy"
  
  lots of poetic space to explore
• 09:19 AM - it's taken a few decades, but i've almost figured out the gender awakening i experienced when the Powderpuff Girls blew up the Rowdyruff Boys

07/12

• 10:33 AM - new shirt idea
  
  don't gender me till i've had my coffee
• 01:55 PM - livin la vida (code) lyoko
• 02:30 PM - you couldn't throw a stone in Astoria last night without hitting a bar hosting a Love Island watch party
• 03:32 PM - being in your 30s is constantly making the calculation at the end of the function of whether to say "nice to meet you," "good to see you," or "congratulations"
  
  i'm being informed this may be a neurodivergence thing and not a 30s thing
• 03:34 PM - witnessed two guys greet each other by slamming their palms together as hard as possible and holding them there
  
  no clasp, no shake, just eye contact and sting

07/17

• 01:43 PM - had a Baader-Meinhof phenomenon two days in a row with the word "thalassophobia"
  
  something (or someone?) is calling me home to the deep

07/21

• 12:34 AM - stop telling me the gen z stare is a thing please i am going to lose my mind on the internet dot com
• 08:54 PM - Julia Roberts is far and away the MVP of this airplane's movie selection, even considering the noticeable exclusion of Ocean's 12 in which she plays her greatest role of pretending to be Julia Roberts
• 08:56 PM - Steven Soderbergh never saw a shade of yellow he didn't like
• 09:02 PM - new gender goal unlocked and it's Erin Brockovich unclipping her neck brace so that it's easier to eat canned fruit

07/31

• 09:46 AM - it would be pretty useful if English had two different words for the "you and I" we and the "they and I" we. in spoken conversation people will resolve this need with hand gestures but especially for texting it would be clutch
  
  my proposition is we/us stays for the 1st+2nd person combination (and, i would assume for people who use plural pronouns for themselves or things like "The Royal We", but perhaps that choice would be more of a rhetorical flourish)
  
  and then for 1st+3rd we can use "wey/wem"
  
  of course, some possible hurdles:
  - accents where "we" already sounds like "wey"
  - accents where the distinction between "way" and "wey" would be hard to notice
  - the lose of pronouncing the "h" in "wh" leading to "wey" sounding just like "whey"
  
  this also hinges on which "we" use case is more common, and thus should keep the current words, leaving the other to only matter in cases where the shift needs to be made for clarity or emphasis
  
  if the 1st+3rd "we" is more common, for example, perhaps the 1st+2nd "we" can become "w'all"
  
  again presents some problems (sounds like "wall", in some accents it might sound like "while"), but in this case the apostrophe may create enough of a micro glottal stop to clear up that ambiguity
  
  in either case, creating separate pronouns undermines cases where ambiguity is the main goal
  
  for example, when someone speaks about a group in the collective 1st person and you slowly realize that they are including you in the we, and that this was all intentionally subtextual on their part for the sake of sharing a wry smile before you head out on your life-altering quest
  
  so maybe the best solution is to keep a "general we" for when the context is clear enough or one desires an air of formality and/or ambiguity
  
  and then use these emphasis we's for the situations that demand them:
  
  you and I = w'all
  they and I = wey/wem
  
  another issue with w'all that i just realized is that, since it's already a contraction, it messes up common we-based contractions
  
  do people who say "y'all" say "you all would/had" as "y'all'd"? probably
  
  "you all will" as "y'all'll"? probably not?
  
  now "y'all're"/y'all've" i feel like i've heard

AUGUST

08/01

• 02:26 PM - here's how i hear this whole "the left needs more influencers telling people how to get laid" discourse
  
  i'm going to use a cooking analogy, you're looking up a video on how to cook someone their favorite meal
  
  alpha male cooking influencer: everybody's favorite meal is boiled chicken. this is the natural order of things. only i know how to boil chicken - i will tell you guys how to do it too. now that you know how you must do it with me every day. anyone who doesn't want it is lying or stupid.
  
  person giving you helpful cooking advice: everyone has different taste, including you. you can learn some generally useful basic techniques, but only through trial and error and an openness to failure for the sake of growth. it's essential to ask people what they like so you can be attentive to that
  
  scared and insecure viewers: hmmm, i'm going to watch way more of this guy who is giving me a simple solution that immediately makes me feel justified in my aggrievement and cynicism
  
  clickbait headline writers: oh no! there's no cooking advice in the world! it's all right wingers teaching YOUNG MEN how to cook boiled chicken! why aren't there any leftists teaching these YOUNG MEN how to cook boiled chicken?!
• 02:35 PM - the alpha male "how to get laid" grift is rhetorically identical to the alpha male "how to get paid" grift
  
  the only difference being that grifting about how to get paid gets you paid but grifting about how to get laid doesn't get you laid
  
  how to get paid does not equal financial advice in the same way that how to get laid does not equal dating advice
  
  these are two distinctly different kinds of communication with two distinctly different goals.
• 02:41 PM - ewwww i should have of course known Magic was gonna do shiny foil ultra exclusive Infinity Stone cards but for some reason this is the only Universes Beyond cash grab thing that has upset me

08/02

• 08:03 PM - people are always like what's your favorite season but i think we should ask what's your favorite 3-month run
  
  see cause for me October/November is an undefeated duo but can't say i feel a deep love for the entirety of September or December

08/06

• 11:22 AM - lately i've been identifying more as a mammal than a human, like i'll see a picture of a deer and be like damn that's my fucking boy right there bet you were born live and lived off milk for a bit eh
• 11:27 AM - a piece of wisdom i learned a while ago about ensuring people will want to continue working with you is that you need to be at least two of these three:
  
  1) good at what you do
  2) kind
  3) on time/present/consistent
  
  this explains the enthusiasm with which people take up "collaborating" with an AI
  
  some people might just not care or be convinced to stop using an AI by the output being utter slop because hey it's nice to me and it's here and that's good enough for me
  
  the grassroots, person-to-person case against generative AI probably has to focus on arguments against its consistency
• 12:16 PM - i made a joke awhile ago about fuck marry kill diners drive-ins or dives but that's also a good way to euphemistically say fuck marry kill
  
  i notice videos strategically saying "frick" or "unalive" or whatever but you can just say which person would you take to a diner, drive-in, or dive
  
  this creates some fuck/kill ambiguity.
  
  diner seems like the obvious "marry" analogue (it's a long, nourishing meal, probably a brunch), but the others are up for debate.
  
  "fuck" usually denotes either a generic silver medal-er ("I like them but not enough to marry them") or a choice that is best in a "fuck"y way (more focused on passion/fleeting and intense connection instead of something that feels like a holistic partnership)
  
  so is that "drive-in" (2nd best food, a place where you have something quick and delicious that you shouldn't have much of) or "dive" (a place that takes you as you are and embodies the spirit of a risky, bacchanalian night)?
  
  on the other hand, "kill" also has shifting connotations.
  
  sometimes, you "kill" because it's the only option left and it's the only way to say "3rd best." other times, "kill" is the easiest to determine because it's a contest of undesirable options and you have a clear least favorite. ("well, i would definitely kill X")
  
  is that "drive-in" ("get this over with as quickly as possible") or "dive" ("take them to the worst place because i prioritize them the lowest")
  
  in actuality, i think diners, drive-ins, dives eliminates "kill" and creates two kinds of "fuck" - one of safe indulgence and one of risky passion
  
  "dive" opens up a dimension that fuck/marry/kill can't access: a person who you want to have an intriguing adventure with because they make you feel safe. the dive is the place that feels most uncertain, least safe, so i need someone there with me i can really trust. maybe someone i would..."marry"?
  
  the closest fuck/marry/kill can get to this would be going out of your way to interpret "kill" as "they are my greatest rival and killing them is how i show my respect." that's an intimacy based in competition easily evoked by "dive" that you need to bend the base game to access
  
  diners/drive-ins/dives is arguably more ambiguous than fuck/marry/kill, but the floor of it is more positive (you don't have to make anyone upset because there's a rosy spin to all the options) and the ceiling is more creative
  
  another advantage of diners/drive-ins/dives is that it's more easily expandable. sure, it refers to a fixed title, but i would have an easier time listing out d-led eating scenarios than short verbs that fit the mold.
  
  in it's current state, you need to arbitrarily shrink groups of 4+ for fmk
  
  the best expansions i can think of are lesser fucks (kiss, hug), lesser kills (slap), or other life milestones that aren't as entertaining/fun (divorce?)
  
  but for diners+? who are you taking to the deli? the donut shop? the dessert place? the dining room? the dinner party? the Dominoes?
  
  non-food: Dollywood? the disco? the dirigible? the darkness beyond life itself?
  
  each of these connotes a different kind of relationship, allowing you to expand the game to the size of a Power Rangers team, a Star Trek crew, a Greek pantheon, etc.
  
  this, good people, is the future of hangout boredom
• [here I started watching content from Smosh's various channels associated with their "Summer Games" event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eatt7iSlUNk&list=PLShD8ZZW7qjkM8qpX8ku4x1ooucVrf8r7&index=14]
• 12:29 PM - it's really hard to pick a team to root for in Smosh Summer Games this year because Angela is my GOAT so you'd think Hollywood Hotdogs but the Downtown Dairy Cows are more well-rounded and have a much more fun name/logo
  • 07:29 PM - a rough first outing for my Dairy Cows but in the crucible of failure they are forging the team they need to be
  • 02:29 PM, 08/07 - day 2 was also heartbreaking but the resilience the team showed here is beautiful, especially in contrast to the friction under the surface with the Hotdogs
    
    Courtney's emerging as the people's hero protagonist of the Games, can't wait to see them step into their leadership power and crush
  • 03:28 PM, 08/07 - oh wow didn't see this coming but shout out to the number 12 for having so many factors
    
    Detention Degenerates for life

08/07

• 09:22 AM - and the Lord said "let there be verbs" and then was like "wait fuck i guess let is a verb in that sentence? but then who's doing the letting? am i talking to myself? this whole situation is...dang, might need a group of words for that too"
• 07:21 PM - show me 6-16 queer-coded neurospicy millenial ambiverts with distinct hairstyles and i will show you a media empire
  • 10:24 AM, 08/08 - hey past me i have a punch up for this, say "zillenial cuspers" instead of "millenial"

08/08

• 12:01 PM - it's so funny to see these Gollum movies described as what he was "up to" between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings because that's just not a compelling way to sell me on a Story
  
  "up to" is the stuff of vlogs and podcasts and white noise parasocial entertainment (which i love and make myself!)
  
  but i'm of the opinion that a book or a movie or something like that that's proclaiming "hey i have a Story to tell you" should take us through an unusually transformative day/week/month/year of a character's life
  
  i can suspend disbelief for the prequel pitch of "hey, before Life Event A this person experienced Life Event B and that made them into the person they were before Life Event A"
  
  that doesn't guarantee that it makes sense to tell the story in that order, but it at least sounds story-ish
  
  but the midquel pitch of "oh also, between Life Event B and Life Event A there was also Life Event C which was hugely important but they never talk about it and they have to go in and come out essentially the same person to make the B to A connection make sense" is a non-starter for me

08/15

• 05:41 AM - Chance the Rapper continuing to wear the "3" hat to me represents that you're always making your third album, no matter how many you've made. you're always reckoning with who you were and how that squares with who you are now; always reconsidering.
  
  STAR LINE, in that way, is a fantastic 3rd album

08/17

• [this skeet happened in the context of Gavin Newsom experiencing a moment of virality for doing an online Trump impression]
• 05:12 AM - i can't put much trust in a politician who has the same haircut as James K. Polk

08/19

• 12:49 PM - Kirby Air Riders strikes the perfect balance between not touching a hair on the head of my precious inner child while also doing something new for God's sake
• 12:53 PM - i'm running for president everyone i have no policies i'm just your Daddy and i'm Home now and you'll need to Earn my Fleeting but Sardonic Love
• 12:59 PM - me making small talk
  
  so, hear any good spiels lately?
• 01:00 PM - i know i'm the alpha in this house because all of the cats follow me from room to room to scream at me and slap me and nibble on my flesh and such
• 04:21 PM - my new Siblings or Dating is Siblings, Dating, or You're In Brooklyn And One Person Just Took Out Their Headphones To Listen To Someone Explain A Petition
• 04:23 PM - precipitous coolness drop from Gwen to Gwendolyn
  • [this is the one over which I feel the most regret for posting]

08/20

• 05:13 PM - the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists episode where they act like the podcast is AI-generated is delirious catharsis

08/21

• 04:53 PM - not sure why but when someone says "do X in 3" i expect "3...2...1" but a lot of people have been doing "1...2...3" lately and to me it's like that's more of a "on the count of 3" than an "in 3" or am i wrong?
  
  am i the wrong one?
• 05:02 PM - just got the craving to chomp into a bell pepper like it's an apple which i've never done and won't do now
• 05:03 PM - 72 Hours is the most hyperbolic amount of hours you can say something will take because it's the threshold of hours quantities you can say and people will actually know how much time that is

08/24

• 06:13 PM - you can't step on the same banana peel twice

08/27

• 07:38 AM - had a dream last night that i couldn't fall asleep so what the fuck is that

SEPTEMBER

09/01

• 10:13 PM - listen to my porkcast it's sort of a ham show

09/02

• 06:02 PM - i think i experienced my first micro-aggression as a nonbinary person today and i honestly felt kinda nonbinary about it

09/04

• 06:00 PM - i'm fairly confident that when Magic does the silly thing this month of re-skinning all the Spider-Man cards for Arena, they're going to re-contextualize many of them as being from New Capenna (feels like a slam dunk)
  
  the early multi-color lands spoiled point this way as well...
  
  a Bant land that helps do the flicker things that the Brokers like, a Grixis land that wants to be discarded like a lot of the Maestros's shenanigans, plus even the Ally color pair lands that you can pay into to Surveil echo their Capenna counterparts that you can sacrifice to draw a card
  
  if nothing else, this set is clearly meant to play well with Streets of New Capenna. but i'm baffled by one thing: each of the Capenna family color trios is going to have a major Spider-Man character who is mono color on one side but then you pay a three-color cost to flip them to their super selves
  
  Peter Parker for the Brokers, Norman Osborn for the Maestros, Eddie Brock for the Riveteers, Miles Morales for the Cabaretti. amazing, these guys will get flavored as big players in these families i bet, or new cards for characters we've seen before.
  
  BUT! they fucked up the cycle!
  
  the Gwen Stacy/Spider-Gwen card is Red to Jeskai! there's no Esper card for Obscura!
  
  i dunno, feels like a strange asymmetrical choice, given:
  - the clear salute to Capenna going on here
  - the fact that Jeskai just got tons of love/cards in Tarkir
  - there are two entire other mono-red Spider-Gwen cards in the set, and i'm not sold on that character being THAT definitively red
  - i especially am not convinced that Gwen Stacy at the outset of her character journey is Red, so centering her in Red as a civilian seems wonky (and fucks with the sort of Betty & Veronica color identity work you can do with her and Mary Jane) (side note: why is Mary Jane not a Red card?)
  
  they better give me five more three color flippers or i'm gonna keep ranting on the Internet about this
  
  my beef is of course not with Gwen Stacy - i think they did my girl dirty here. she should have been Blue flipping to Esper. i think what happened is they committed too hard to Grixis being the villains such that they made a Blue Norman Osborne who flips to a GREEN GOBLIN WITH NO GREEN
  
  OUT, AM I?!
  
  Red for Gwen feels like they process of eliminationed from the other cards. Peter as White to Bant is great, Miles as Green to Naya is great.
  
  we gotta move Norman off Blue and make a mono-Green Green Goblin card instead of being scared, we can't let fear control us like this
  
  i mean come on, you're giving this Norman Osborne card the signature Obscura mechanic (connive) on a Maestros card! this is not my beautiful city!
  
  i like Eddie Brock as Temur/Riveteers, those are good Symbiote colors. make Eddie Red to align back to the center color for this cycle and represent his hot-tempered frustration with Peter (he shouldn't be Black BEFORE the Symbiote bonds to him!)
  
  then that leaves a different character for Black flipping to Grixis.
  
  i'll be honest, i don't know who that should be. make that Harry Osborne or something, that could work.
  
  anyway, i'm hoping they don't reskin the bagel card and make it canon that they have bagels in New Capenna

09/05

• 08:18 AM - best thing about the start of the school year is the crossing guards

09/06

• 04:14 PM - look i don't love how 90% of online Magic discourse is people complaining about vibes in a way that seems unpleasable, but i'm gonna participate in that for a second because i gotta say it seems like this Spider-Man set doesn't want to be hundreds of cards large
  
  the non-draftable mini-set format they did with Assassins Creed was clearly overpriced and a non-starter as a product (how do you explain to a new player how to "play" with those cards out of the box?) but regardless of playability it was the right number of cards to exist for Assassins Creed
  
  it's fun to see just how many Spider-People they can get to crawl out of the woodwork but this set could be like a third the size and just as Spider-Man-y
  
  the starter decks they're doing seems like a good idea, but if you gave me a Magic magic wand i would make the set Standard-legal Jumpstart
  
  you can sell Jumpstart sets that are playable out of the box, that function both as teaching tools for new players and some randomness/novelty for experienced players
  
  you preserve the "cracking packs" feel by varying what Jumpstart packs are actually available in each box
  
  honestly i think the Clue product was a brilliant idea for a tie-in nobody but me wanted. it could be played as Jumpstart but also had cards that were always in every box as part of the alternate Clue game you could play that also had a designed-for-Commander feel
  
  Final Fantasy being an awesome, draftable set feels like the exception for Universes Beyond rather than the rule. what other properties have that degree of source material to draw from, game-like ideas to experiment with in design?
  
  the UB model really needs to be hey here's the Spider-Man Magic Game, it can be played out of the box and feels like its own board game but also oh wow you can take the pieces and bring them to Standard night how fun.

09/08

• 12:25 PM - while theoretically different, a 0-day week and a 1-day week are functionally identical
  
  feels like the kind of thing where there is some fancy math term for it. it's got something to do with the fact that we define a week as a set number of days, so when a week is the length of a day it's pointless

09/09

• 08:34 AM - calling my shot right now that everyone is gonna rag on this Spider-Man set as they are and then next year we'll get an X-Men set that is going to be mech[a]nically clever and widely beloved

09/11

• [This is my first post after the assassination of Charlie Kirk]
• 02:16 AM - the thing that will continue to baffle me is the liberal rhetorical assumption that the more craven the person, the more rational and even-handed everyone will think i am if i treat them with respect
  
  it creates this inversion of reality where the cruelest mediocrities receive the kindest praise

09/15

• 09:00 AM - the dream i just ended wrapped up with needing to roast a horse (like comedy roast) and the one i said straight to its face was "it's giving seahorse on land"

09/16

• 08:50 AM - flying my ass at half mast today to make it easier to kiss
• 09:32 AM - i get that the whole "performative males" thing is meant to stigmatize being a poser creep who tries to trick women into thinking they're harmless when they're not
  
  BUT it also kinda feels like a back door way to police the boundaries of masculinity and stigmatize nonconformitivity
  
  like i just saw a video of a dude mocking performative males for "faking queerness" by having painted nails and that's a hop skip and a jump from one of the phobias
• 09:43 AM - starting a petition to make the new national anthem that bit from Make Some Noise where Anna Garcia does the national anthem in Simlish
  
  woof *pledge of allegiance that was embarrassing

09/18

• 09:38 AM - the fascist hammer coming down on people's speech rights should instruct those who had any doubts to not take conservative agrievement seriously
  
  whining about feeling "silenced" by cancel culture has never been about egalitarian values and has always been about crafting the pretext for retribution
  
  the logic is "i want to do thing X to you and feel justified, out of a sense of my own superiority, to do that to you" -> "thing X is stigmatized, so i'm going to wildly exaggerate/lie about my first chance to blame you for thing X" -> "i nurse the narrative that i've been thing X'd" -> "i gain power through this victim narrative and through posing as a reasonable party who's against thing X" -> "with power, it seems only right to punish you for thing X'ing me by thing X'ing you" -> "when there's accountability for thing X'ing i say stop thing X'ing me! that's bad!" and repeat

OCTOBER

10/08

• 08:20 AM - watching Steven Universe for the first time with my partner and feeling a deep kinship for Pearl
  
  sort of a "believe me sister i was anxious about that too but there's some social cue we're missing right now so put a pin in that"

10/23

• 06:17 AM - if Dante Alighieri were alive today he would be the sickest Dungeon Master

10/28

• 04:43 AM - the thing i think folks are missing in the discourse about the possible hybrid mana change to Commander is centering that discussion on what it means for Commander
  
  hybrid mana is a great design tool for Limited that designers are discouraged from using because of its restrictiveness in Commander
  
  this is a change that would free up card design to be LESS beholden to Commander-conscious design rather than creating a glut of color pie breaking power creepers
  
  from a color pie perspective this is also more intuitive than people are giving it credit for
  
  a red-green card is not "red and green", it's "red-green" - an abstract concept of a color which is red, green, and red and green
  
  teal is not "green and blue", it's a shade of blue and a shade of green and a shade that combines green and blue. we already have this kind of thinking in actual color

NOVEMBER

11/04

• [this was Zohran Mamdani's election as the next Mayor of New York City]
• 09:48 PM - can't tell you how proud i am of my city and how excited i am to see just the worst takes possible tomorrow morning
• 09:53 PM - non-zero chance that we're on the cusp of an era of American city-states led by hot socialists. just some real Carthage shit

11/05

• 06:56 AM - obviously there's the relative population context here but Mamdani won more votes than Eugene Debs in any of his presidential runs, and i think that says something powerful about both of them and about where we are now and what's possible if we hold fast to these convictions as the times get tricky
• 02:18 PM - just finished the main series of Steven Universe and sometimes it's great to experience a queer story where the protagonist says "fix your hearts or die" and the antagonists say "okay babes you got it, hearts fixed"
  
  we could get into the ickiness of monarchy and empire but a point of the show is that political systems and family systems are not exactly separate, you can't treat them the same but you also shouldn't treat them not the same
• 06:48 PM - seen some places try to frame Mamdani/Cuomo as Cuomo won "native New Yorkers" (people born in NYC) and Mamdani won people who've lived here 10 years or less
  
  the thing is, Mamdani also won people not born here but who have lived here for more than 10 years
  
  and the margin with "native New Yorkers" was 11%, a margin which can be accounted for by all sorts of other cross-cutting demographic factors.
  
  this is just weird xenophobic framing masquerading as anti-intellectualism

11/08

• 11:08 AM - my fashion style is speculative fiction establishing shot-core
  
  "the road to [current place] has been long and full of perils and also we wore these cool ass shawls the whole way here that we're gonna take off now"

11/12

• [this was a big day for micro-blogging related to the death of the U.S. Penny]
• 03:03 PM - the death of the penny will have the most damaging effect on the idioms market
  
  how are we going to buy thoughts or offer opinions in bite sized quantities?
• 03:08 PM - inflation under this administration has been unconscionable, wishes are now 500% of their previous cost!
• 04:40 PM - i know people had mixed responses to Mario Kart World but playing game at full kitsch, full ska and driving off every cliff in sight i think i might have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God
• 04:47 PM - if pennies cost three cents to make just call 'em thrennies baby don't worry about it
• 04:51 PM - there was a crack team of numismatists in the 70s who tried to shut down the penny to raise the value of their pennies
  
  one of them is dying from copper exposure but watching TV while his old partner, the current head of the mint, lifts aloft the very last penny
  
  "he did it. the bastard did it..."
• 04:54 PM - never thought "shooby dooby" would be the most intelligible part of "Pennies from Heaven" but here we are

11/18

• 06:02 PM - what would you do if there was a big sandwich just like, right there

11/19

• 07:58 AM - my latest bit has been to say "an excellent choice, sir" like a sommelier in response to very mundane choices and people like it, feel free to take that
• 08:01 AM - let's get the numbers on how many Pop-Tarts make it to the microwave at all cause i know i pop those babies right out of the foil

11/29

• 11:50 AM - the previews at the movies today have convinced me that we may be making too many movies
  
  except for that wuthering heights movie that looks pretty good
• 11:52 AM - love that it's not enough for the villain in Now You See Me, Now You Don't to have an accent (Belgian), to be a diamond profiteer, to be very mean, she also happens to personally hate magic and think it's lame
  • 11:59 AM - Rosamund Pike is way too good as a villain for this movie, she delivers the "I hate magic" monologue with real gravitas
• 11:56 AM - my movie pitch is you make Now You See Me, Now You Don't but you don't make the first two movies so just make the audience feel like they're constantly missing something
  • 12:04 PM - the fact that they keep saying the old crew is the "Four Horsemen" but there are like 7 people they refer to as horsemen and they use the phrase "The Fifth Horseman" many many times is a perfect gag for this false threequel premise
  • 10:03 AM, 11/30 - okay my movie is gonna be like "Something Something: The Rule of Threes" and their group is gonna be "The Three Stooges" but there's like 11 of them and they each have a comedy power like oh i have amazing spatial reasoning because i make balloon animals or i'm a martial arts master of pratfalls
• 12:27 PM - PLEASE make a Now You See Me 4 this movie was so dumb and bad and good
• 01:01 PM - Black Friday weekend in 2025 is a BOGO deal on the Skibidi Toilet Funko Pop

11/30

• 08:48 PM - The Cowardly Lion deserved better

DECEMBER

12/01

• 11:23 AM - this is a PSA for all the guys on Instagram doing "X song from Wicked if Lin Manuel-Miranda wrote it" - that is a very particular impression and writing style that you need to nail 110% otherwise you are much more cringe than being Lin-Manuel Miranda is cringe because he is very skillful
  
  and you can't do that impression from a place of spite or cynicism because it reads on your face. you can't hate on theater kid energy and channel it at the same time
• 11:26 AM - we watched Booksmart for a @chatzpod.bsky.social bonus episode yesterday and i've not stopped thinking about adapting The Hero's Journey for the teen party-jumping comedy
  
  it fascinates me how even though these movies need to END at a party they also need to FEEL like a party with parties on the way
• 11:47 AM - recently started using a vertical monitor and this should 100% be the default monitor position
  
  it makes every productive task much easier and most distracting tasks less fun

12/04

• 08:43 AM - in DC this week/weekend for a conference so expect some hashtag takes
  
  difference between DC and NYC professional class commuters is the difference between a liquid and a gas
  
  people here will flow through stations and onto trains along a path of least resistance even if it takes longer
  
  commuters here are optimizing for their movements to be less effortful. as such, if you're willing to walk faster/further you might actually get yourself a less crowded and more efficient experience. you can "outsmart" the crowd by acting like a new rivulet of the peopling flow
  
  in NYC, everyone is hell bent on spending the energy to get places faster with less people in their way - they have already dispersed themselves in the ideal ratio of path to effort. if a bunch of people aren't in a certain car or aren't going a certain direction, it's a bad idea to do so.
  
  you cannot outsmart a gas. you can only slowly wither to inertness when you ping away from consensus

12/10

• 03:39 PM - syd and olivia are very funny and are like if you found out lauren lapkus was a gem fusion this whole time

12/15

• 08:40 AM - my new pet peeve is these accounts that are like next year is full of vacations if you just use your PTO next to a long weekend
  
  like no man it's not a "4-day vacation", i would already have two of those days off on a normal week! it's more like having two back-to-back "busy weekends"
  
  and also how condescending and corporate propaganda-y, right? like, as if nobody had the bright idea to give themselves an extra-long long weekend before?
  
  at the school i used to work at that was either explicitly not allowed or at least frowned upon depending on the holidays we're talking about
  
  this bothers me deeply as someone who often needs (but has a hard time feeling good about using) the "break glass in case you burned yourself out and didn't realize it until today" PTO days
  
  get outta here with trying to make my PTO-use hyper-productive.

12/16

• 09:38 AM - someone should do a statistical analysis on what percentage of comments on videos with a woman above 40 in Hollywood are "it's so nice that she's allowing herself to age naturally"

12/17

• 05:25 PM - was doing some primary source research and found a newspaper published by a KKK branch in MN that only had two issues
  
  in their first they have a bit of "this is us this is our deal" and the idiom of it was identical to one of those Trump tweets clearly written by Stephen Miller or whoever the fuck
  
  it had the Capitalization quirks, the MOMENTS OF SHOUTING, the vacuous invocations of American ideals/religion/"native"-ness, the angle of "we do nothing wrong and everyone against us is a criminal", the sickening mix of agrievement and entitlement
  
  100 years old, could have been written yesterday
  
  also feels important to emphasize that at the height of its membership in the 1920s, this vehemently nativist second wave of the KKK had 4-6 million members in a country with a population of 100-110 million

12/18

• 03:44 PM - the last sentence of Patrick Stewarts "Personal life" section on Wikipedia says that he's a fan of Beavis and Butthead and i really hope he's seen that

12/19

• 09:36 AM - shaving my face clean hasn't increased the frequency of people they/theming me but it has increased the frequency of them apologizing after he/himing me

12/20

• 02:14 PM - kid walked by on the sidewalk saying "Mom, can we open presents today?" and you gotta respect the hustle

12/22

• 03:27 PM - just booked an appointment where i had to get through this robot voice on the phone first and they put these fake ambient office sounds behind it - i would rather it be like "hey man i'm a robot" than go through what was an uncanny, unnerving conversational experience

12/23

• 04:21 PM - walked into a record store earlier where the guy running the place was sneering on the phone at someone asking if they carried any Steve Miller Band
  
  the space around us thrummed with what i can only describe as the most anxious jazz i've ever heard
• 04:22 PM - one of melon's ways of communicating she's hungry for her cat food is by chewing on the leaves of a big fake plant, as if to say "look what you've reduced me to, father - an HERBIVORE!"

12/28

• 10:18 AM - as the new year approaches i encourage everyone to try this:
  
  go to the "crafts/hobbies" section of a used bookstore or the book section of a thrift store and see what calls to you
  
  there's some truly idiosyncratic shit in there that may inspire whatever needs inspiring for 2026
• 05:35 PM - lots of reasons to hate AI sloppification of Google search, but my latest deep frustration is the AI overview starting with "[search term] generally refers to..." when i have, in fact, typed a search term that is a list of words not yet assembled in that combination or sequence - a search term that is, in fact, not intended to be a coherent phrase so much as a list of words i want the engine to scrape for at the same time.

12/29

• 07:46 AM - intuition tells me the tongue must be a very strong, tough muscle on the off chance it gets bit
  
  assuming that's true, here's a sci-fi dystopian idea:
  
  genetically engineered super-human gladiators who have been given a full body of buff tongue muscle
  
  super strong, but every inch of them tastes
• 08:30 AM - they offered me (and then gently implied that i had to wear) sunglasses at the dentist today
  
  which, i suppose is an innovation meant to increase my comfort
  
  instead, it filled me with existential rumination
  
  "do i need to wear these? why is my head so wide? is it rude to give them back?" "why don't i like wearing sunglasses? why do other people like wearing sunglasses? is there something wrong with me that i don't wear sunglasses? are these sunglasses feminine? will my feelings about wearing them determine if i'm feminine? why would they give sunglasses AND put a TV up there?" "how is it that i host a TV podcast and don't know what i want to watch on the TV at the dentist? why am i so estranged from my own wants? do i give these back at the end or is this like my toy from the toy box? do they clean these between people?
  
  this did, ultimately, distract from the dentistry
• 08:44 AM - business idea: a dentist's office that's "alien abduction" themed
  
  staff are in-character as highly intelligent and benevolent extraterrestrials and on the way out you can get some photos to show your friends that "don't prove anything"
  
  everything is beef flavored - they "studied our earth food"

12/31

• 10:00 AM - i've talked about this before, but i think at the end of a Chatz episode and not on BlueSky
  
  i recently rediscovered the j-hope song "on the street", that's has one of my favorite bars from J. Cole's legendary feature run. after reflecting on whether or not it's time to retire, he says: "And so I shall, but first, I been honing my style/Coldest around, with more quotables than what the quota allows/You see a Top Ten list, I see a Golden Corral"
  
  this is some brilliant slant rhyming: "And so I shall", "honing my style", "Coldest around", "quota allows", and "Golden Corral"
  
  all of those rhymes come at you syncopated, broken up by other rhythmic irregularities so your ear doesn't get tired:
  
  the swing of "quotables" forming a repetition with "quota" (very clever linguistics connection there also)
  
  the ta-ta-ta of "Top Ten List" that both alliterates and punches with "T"
  
  my favorite part though is the double entendre in the contrast between Top Ten List and Golden Corral
  
  before getting to meaning, we know from the sound of the words that "Top Ten List" is hard and sharp, "Golden Corral" is slow and open
  
  TTL is defying expectations, GC is following the pattern
  
  and yet, grammatically, we're being told that this punchy phrase that breaks the pattern is actually the misconception, it's actually the more commonly held view
  
  the pattern that J.Cole has established in the rhyme scheme is a message about the truth that was there but we weren't attuned to before
  
  the most obvious read is that Golden Corral is a buffet, you see all these great rappers but i see food to eat up
  
  that said, he goes on to call that a "strange kind of hunger" - he isn't happy with this urge to scrap and prove himself, he knows it's gluttonous in its way
  
  Genius has a comment about a reading that incorporates the cow jumping over the moon from earlier in the verse which is onto something but i disagree with
  
  what we know for sure for a second read is that J.Cole has already compared himself to a fabled cow - "as the moon jumps over the cow"
  
  the rhyme scheme actually continues: "As the moon jumps over the cow/I wait to contemplate if I should hand over the crown"
  
  this "Golden Corral" is tied with the image of Cole being surpassed by something (the rap game itself? the passage of time?) and his uncertainty about whether to retire
  
  he's IN the Corral right now, he's already on the "Top Ten List" from before. now we understand the contrast to mean people saying "hey it's a good time to retire, you're one of the greats!" to which he says "you see greatness but i see captivity"
  
  Golden Corral = Gilded Cage
  
  in that way we can see J.Cole's artistic dissatisfaction and restlessness born out of both a push and a pull, a contemplation and a hunger, a desire to both escape the inertness of canonization and continue to pursue an ephemeral legacy
  
  how do you stop when you don't "feel" done? will you? can you?

That was a fun reflection exercise, but it took all day so I don't think I'll be doing this again next year. Anyway, Happy New Year!