- I finally saw Captain America: Brave New World and will say that, at the end of the day, it was a fun movie. I think Anthony Mackie works as Captain America and he’s a fine actor. Harrison Ford is brilliant, of course. The plot is actually great. But — just like pretty much every MCU offering since Avengers: Endgame — I left feeling like I have no idea whether Disney and Kevin Feige have a plan or if they’re just pumping out movies.
- A Cheeto shaped like the Pokémon Charizard sold at auction for over $87,000.
- I cannot imagine a scenario in which Stephen A. Smith is worth $20,000,000.00 per year, but I also cannot imagine paying $87,000.00 for a Cheeto shaped like a Pokémon character, so I guess that’s why I am not in charge of contracts at ESPN.
- Two men were charged Wednesday in the deaths of three Kansas City Chiefs fans whose bodies were found in a backyard two days after they got together to watch the final game of the regular season in 2024.
- I am almost certain that I read Always Go To The Funeral when it was published (or aired on the radio) two decades ago, but it just popped up in a recent issue of Links You’ll Love and it’s worth sharing again.
- I one hundred percent did not see the sudden political twist coming in White Lotus S3E3 but I am f’ing here for it. Kudos to Mike White and HBO for going there. I can’t wait to see the next episode. (And, yes, I know it’s MAX now.)
In other news:
- POTUS signs executive order to establish government bitcoin reserve.
</bangs head on desk> - It’s Tax Season – The Perfect Time for POTUS to Sell This “Critical” IRS Computing Center: Last year, the IRS Martinsburg site was “viewed as a high priority.” Now it’s suddenly “functionally obsolete”?
- The CDC is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, despite extensive scientific research that has disproven or failed to find evidence of such links. – via @boghuma.bsky.social
- Maine officials said the Social Security Administration did not provide any explanation for the abrupt end of the decades old registration process, or for the sudden reversal. – via @crampell.bsky.social
- I really hope in a hundred years there will still be people left to cringe at this headline: Half the World’s CO2 Emissions Come from 36 Fossil Fuel Firms
- POTUS signs executive order to establish government bitcoin reserve.
Posts tagged “Captain America”
- Less than 1% of Catholic nuns in the United States today are 30 or younger.
- The sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale starts on April 8, 2025.
- Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared” I feel like there was probably a powerful confirmation bias at work here. This seems like exactly the sort of thing you’d think was obvious, but… as strongly as I would expect the correlation to be, I am guessing we’ll soon hear of all sorts of problems with the statistics.
- I’d forgotten that Taylor Swift hosted SNL a few years ago and performed a ten-minute version of All Too Well. It’s been a long, long time since I needed to convert a YouTube video to mp3.
We’re dealing with actual Nazis.
- What “Center” Is That, Exactly? is an essay by A.R. Moxon of The Reframe that includes the wonderful line, “I think of how twisted I would have to become, for the spectacle of diversity and equality and freedom to traumatize me into suicidally-counterfactual reactionary nonsense.” This echoes some of the Kübler-Rossian questions stuck on my mental treadmill since that somehow-malevolent escalator ride that foreshadowed so drastic a national decline. How do you watch Footloose and root for John Lithgow? How do you watch The Muppet Movie and root for Doc Hopper? How do you watch Captain America and root for Hydra? How do you watch Star Wars and root for the Empire?! Or – maybe more terrifying – how do you transform into a stormtrooper but think you’re a Rebel?
- When you’re done reading that, check out It’s The Fascism, Stupid, in which Moxon talks about how “the First Buddy, a Nazi apartheid billionaire/corruption mogul whose name means Flair Odor, who was not elected to anything at all, seized control of our federal infrastructure.”