THE RESIDENCE  (2025—) 1x05 “The Trouble with Harry”

The Game Changer season premiere is out now on Dropout! 🚨

Once you admit capitalism is a problem, the answers and alternatives are easier to digest.

Too many people are afraid to admit capitalism is killing us and destroying the planet.

This post legitimately knocked me out of a doomscroll. Had to put down my phone and everything and stare at a wall.

I really do regret my inaction the most. Every time. All of my future problems are always caused by things I failed to do in the present. And every time, I get so mad at past Me for not even trying because I’m so afraid to fail.

Like. Damn. Didn’t expect pixel art of some planets to hit me so hard.

okay but if you ever see a male creative who had a string of great work and then everything else he did was dogshit, go to the "personal life" part of his wikipedia and look at his relationships. you'll either find a major tragedy he didn't recover from (completely understandable) or, more likely, there was a woman in his life doing uncredited shit editing his stuff or contributing generally and she's not there anymore.

I told a friend about this phenomenon in literature and he called me weeks later like, I remembered what you said about women doing uncredited work when tim burton came up. he made a string of bangers then everything else just was nowhere near as good. the timeline matches perfectly to when he was with this german visual artist (lena gieseke). he's done some good work in collaboration, but if things were dug into I suspect we would find she did a lot more than people realise.

so yeah whenever you look around like wow women didn't work in history, or, women aren't auteurs, or, there just aren't as many great female writers - societal reasons for that aside, half the time they absolutely did.

Hell yeah

⏳TONIGHT! ⏳

An episode of Game Changer over a year in the making - "One Year Later"

Premieres at 7pm ET / 4pm PT, only on Dropout

Starring host Sam Reich and contestants Jacob Wysocki, Vic Michaelis, and Lou Wilson

You have never seen anything like this

Commission work. Drawing a client's WoW character.

I'm dying.

This is like the study where they added the comedically oversized tail feathers to (I think) male birds of paradise? Some bird species that sexually selects for tail length in males.

And despite the tail extensions being so enormous that the birds in question would have been hard pressed to fly or do much at all, they still got laid a ton.

TIL that cowboys are actually a species of bird

TARIFF OF THE PENGUINS (March of the Penguins parody)

this one too

THE CASUALNESS OF THAT COLLIE SLIPPING RIGHT OUT OF THEIR COLLAR. That dude is a Willing Participant of this walk and by god everyone else is going to follow the RULES.

im a fan of the moment where the husky is like 'wait you're not authorized to do that' and the collie is like 'THE FUCK IM NOT'

LET'S GO

I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.

For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.

Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."

Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.

And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.

I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.

I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.

On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.

It's been 16 years since I took that test.

I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.

But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.

The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.

My favorite part of this is the little “Yet I’m still failing” at the bottom of the screencap. It’s not yet occurred to you to change something you’re doing? Maybe try not using ChatGPT?

Tesla is tanking so hard it is dragging the entire EV segment's sales down into the negative. When you omit Tesla from the equation, EV sales are up 13% across the board.

Don't let anyone tell you EV sales are in a slump.

So Crawford won. Elon is, as far as I know, still being investigated for ~election crimes~ in Wisconsin. Canada is still investigating Tesla's alleged fraud with rebates. Illinois just elected a bunch of Democrats for local offices. Louisiana rejected a bunch of Republican proposed changes to their state constitution. Cory Booker held the floor of the Senate for 25 hours, breaking the record of racist shitheel Strom Thurmond and in the process, listing out the sins of the Trump administration in the Senate records and delaying their vote for some other Trump asshole. And Speaker of the House Mike Johnson got embarrassed by House Republicans joining Dems in opposing him and threw a baby hissy fit and shut down the House for a week.

We didn't get Florida. But look at all that up there.

Oh and tomorrow, Tesla has to share information about how many cars it actually delivered in the first three months of the year, which unless they fudge the books, is going to be a lower number than they would like, and might make their stock dip some more. Or just drop. Forbes has provided a little graph of their sales.

Edit: and oh shit! Mike Waltz fucked up again and got caught using fucking Gmail for work discussions. Gmail. Because Google never spied on anyone. (He has a government email address.)

Puerto Rican Boa (Chilabothrus inornatus)

Puerto Rico

Status: Endangered

Threats: loss of habitat, historical hunting

snake spotted!!