Jack of all trades, Master of none

Providing insight into the potential causes underlying the unhealthy behavior, a Duke University study released Wednesday has discovered a strong correlation between binge eating and feelings of stress, contentment, depression, joy, boredom, anger, and relaxation. “Our data indicate that a highly positive, negative, or completely neutral emotional state is associated with a drastic increase in the quantity of food a person will consume in a single sitting,” said the study’s lead author, Helen Ermel, who noted that feelings of anxiety, self-confidence, embarrassment, grief, relief, hostility, composure, envy, pity, pride, and regret were also found to be linked to overeating.

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I take immense schadenfreude in Elon Musk spending $25 million to try to influence an election in Wisconsin only for the candidate he was backing to lose by a larger margin than was predicted before Musk got into the race. Like how tf do you dump that much money into a state supreme court election and get not only nothing out of it but LESS than nothing. That's a truly impressive level of failure. I'm watching Elon become the most hated man in America like the Sickos yes hahaha yes comic

The latest news out of DC is that everyone in the federal government, up to and including all the MAGA ghouls cannot fucking stand Elon Musk

lol. lmao, even

I applaud the effort that went into this seconds-long bit.

(THE LAMP IS STICKING STRAIGHT OUT FROM THE WALL!)

For anyone who wants a side-by-side comparison to appreciate everything that moved, here you go:

My favourite detail is the plants on the windowsill getting rotated up sideways

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is kinda funny in how mean it is to Han's character.

Like, after A New Hope you can be like "Han is cool! He's a rebel, doesn't take any shit, he's that quintessential bad boy who does the right thing in the end". There's jokes about him not being as cool as he might seem, but sure. He's a cool dude with a sweet-ass car!

Then Empire starts with "Han is an idiot who can't talk to the girl he likes, and can't fix his car".

Then towards the end we meet Han's old buddy. We get that he goes way back, that him and Han were on the same path once...

Lando is now a mayor. That cool car? It was his, Han swindled it out of Londo somehow.

The movie is like "oh, you think Han is cool? Han's bud is now running a city, while Han is stuck doing Craigslist gigs in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. He's a loser! And Han's bud is objectively hotter."

And I mean the "objectively": I would argue that they cast/dressed/made-up Lando as "guy who can be the most handsome guy in the room while standing next to 1979 Harrison Ford".

Then Han gets tortured, used as bait to trap his new (second) best friend, and gets turned into a popsicle. The End.

This is unrelated to anything else with the silly “Dire Wolf” controversy but them putting these images in all the articles give me the weirdest uncanny valley discomfort. Like it is hard for me to take these photos seriously. Do you know why?

Wolf pups just do not look like that. Because wolves typically have their pups in underground dens, it is an evolutionary advantage for the vulnerable pups to blend in with the dark earth of the den. If they were born white, they’d be sharply contrasted and easier for predators to spot. Even arctic wolves are born dark and gain their typical white coat a little later (though not all arctic wolves are white either).

Fun fact in Game of Thrones they used domestic dogs to play the dire wolf pups; puppy Ghost is cute but he’s clearly no wolf!

Giving birth to pups that are darkly colored is a pretty basic adaptation in a lot of canids that litter underground. Red foxes and arctic foxes are also born a very nondescript shade of dirt. Exceptions exist, but this is just a thing that a lot of wild canines do. Here are various canids (red fox, Ethiopian wolf, maned wolf, and African wild dog) that do this

I don’t know if we have any proof that dire wolves had their pups in dens but it would be kind of weird if they didn’t. So even if the dire wolf had a light coat as an adult they would likely still be born with a darker color to act as camouflage.

So when I keep getting this image

blasted on all my feeds you can understand why my brain has trouble registering it even as a gray wolf pup. It’s just weird. It looks like what chat gpt would spit out if you requested an arctic wolf pup. That thing would stand out like crazy in an underground den. You can make something look like something else all you want but the evolutionary history of a species is too complicated for us to ever faithfully recreate from scratch.

I can't wait for anime watchers to experience Steel Ball Run I will never get over how Araki developed "hamon, except it's even stupider" used it in one part and dropped it pretty much entirely for Jojolion

“Slopsquatting” in a nutshell:

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal, that’s how you get math packages and stuff but

2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but

3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So

4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

how they will probably handle the horses in steel ball run:

way funnier ways they could handle the horses in steel ball run:

actually, wait.

Item: thousand-year-old drinking game

ok the peter navarro thing is funny but every time people are trying to discredit a trump advisor they fall back on this idea the person is unqualified because this allows them to condemn the individual while retaining confidence in the professional certifications system that produced them it's very transparent. the man has a phd in economics from harvard the problem isn't that he didn't come up through the prestigious channels it's that the prestigious channels are bourgeois ideology and nepotism lol

tagging every post #politics to demonstrate my understanding of the driving force of society as a whole

#she really did breast boobily down the stairs (via @boxingcleverrr)

It's hard to do that in clothing from that period - that's bad costuming.

No, that's historically inaccurate costuming. It is good costuming in that it is doing exactly what it is trying to achieve. It's just that what it's trying to achieve is BOOBS.

so dig this; in this movie (which is Clue, if you don't know) she's not actually a french maid, she's a call girl who is playing the role of a french maid, and in all likelihood provided her own uniform from either her "work" closet or that of the brothel where she was employed

Excluding the crucial fact that office jobs pay you an income….if staying home to raise children and do chores and bake bread was really so much easier and more joyful than working in an office on some objective level, why aren’t men doing it? Why aren’t they chomping at the bit to be ~leisurely house husbands~ to a working wife? Why aren’t they stepping up to depend solely on someone else’s income in exchange for round-the-clock domestic labor, if it’s really as blissful and their propaganda suggests? Curious.

Thank you! This is such an important reminder.

the "dire wolves are no longer extinct" stuff is gonna be the most annoyingly persistent science misinformation for the next decade at least

All right. I'll take a crack at weighing in.

Is Jurassic Park a movie about frogs? Are frogs the reason millions of people spent hours of time and billions of dollars watching those movies?

Based upon the "facts" of the story, you'd have to admit that this is technically correct, but is it true?

The argument being presented here is that these aren't really Direwolves, because they have a basis as Gray Wolves and they have subsequently been modified. I'd argue that adding the essence of what a Direwolf is to what was the essence of a Gray Wolf changes and destroys the necessary defining properties (essence) of Gray Wolf, making the creature's new necessary defining properties Direwolf.

In other words. If the essential properties of Direwolf are added to Gray Wolf, isn't it now Direwolf and not Gray Wolf?

I'd go even further and say that since direwolf and gray wolf DNA is virtually identical, they have actually de-extincted the direwolf simply by making a gray wolf the size of a direwolf

The argument being presented is not that these aren't direwolves because they have a basis in gray wolf DNA. It is that these aren't really direwolves because they have no direwolf DNA. None. Not any at all.

These are gray wolves that have been GMO'd to look like direwolves.

The premise in Jurassic Park is that the dinosaurs used actual DNA of the dinosaurs that were revived. Frog DNA was used to fill in the gaps, yes, but even in the films, Ian Malcom and Alan Grant--who never agree on anything--agreed that the parks dinosaurs were only kinda-sorta revived dinosaurs specifically because DNA from other animals was spliced in. If direwolf DNA had been used in the creation of these animals, we would be having the Jurassic Park debate. It wasn't.

They aren't direwolves just because they've been modified to look like them. In order for direwolves to be revived from extinction, they would've needed to use actual direwolf DNA and they didn't.

This effort is distinct from efforts to revive the woolly mammoth, which do in fact use mammoth DNA. Or to revive the Pyrenean Ibex, which also use DNA from the extinct species. Or to revive the thylacine, which also use DNA from the extinct species. That wasn't done in this case. They didn't pull a Jurassic Park because they didn't do the same thing as what was done in that franchise.

almost every comment I've gotten on this post, both arguing for and against these being dire wolves, is making the same mistake that i alluded to several times, which is assuming that a dire wolf is the fantasy creature that looks like a normal grey wolf, as portrayed on game of thrones. Dire wolves, the real animal, are not wolves. "wolf" is just the common name of the animal, akin to "mountain goat". The dire wolf was a species of wild canid that wasn't particularly closely related to grey wolves; no more than a wolf is related to this:

at the very least the animal's head shape was much different to grey wolves, and even if it looked anything like them at all (ex. both having similar coat patterns), they would still be recognizably distinct animals, ala mountain lions and african lions or ostriches and cassowaries. No, "sharing most of their DNA" does not mean two different species look like the same animal (unless you think humans and gorillas are the same thing), and that certainly wasn't true of dire wolves and grey wolves, given the former, again, have massive disproportionate heads among other anatomical differences:

The animal they've bred here has not been "GMO'd to look like a direwolf" or "given the essential properties of Direwolf", it's just a normal looking wolf, allegedly going to grow bigger because pop culture portrays dire wolves as bigger than grey wolves (they aren't) and only white because the wolf on game of thrones is white (what are the chances a large mammal from a temperate climate would have pure white fur?) The equivalent here isn't "a literal jurassic park dinosaur that technically has frog dna"; the equivalent would be if someone edited a infinitesimally tiny amount of a frog's dna to match the *hypothetical dna* of a dinosaur and claimed the completely average looking frog they hatched was a resurrected t rex. The argument here - "it's a dire wolf because it looks like one" vs "it's not a dire wolf, it just looks like one" is completely ignoring that the jurassic park t rex of the situation looks exactly like a normal frog.