- The death of Brigitte Bardot, 1960s sex symbol turned militant animal rights activist, means there are now only three people mentioned in the 1989 Billy Joel song We Didn’t Start the Fire who are still alive: Chubby Checker, Bob Dylan, and… Bernie Goetz. – via Simon Kuestenmacher
- There’s really no way to explain to anyone under the age of about forty what a big deal MTV was when it launched. It’s not at all surprising — I haven’t watched in at least twenty years — but it’s still a bit sad to learn they’re shutting down all music-only channels as of December 31.
- Also nostalgic: The HTML Elements Time Forgot
- Prepare to waste some time playing the Top 10 Free Browser Games of 2025.
- Rome just unveiled two new subway stops that transform its metro into a museum experience. – via Ciao Bella
- Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a runaway supermassive black hole ten million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at 2.2 million miles per hour.
- I had no idea there was a sequel to one of my favorite SNL sketches.
- “That first post-game sacrifice only aired online, but the explosion was immediate.”
- A new study suggests moderate fitness appears to act like an insurance policy against alcohol’s long-term negative health effects. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
- It’s hard to believe that Steven Spielberg has made only four studio films about aliens, primarily because his first two were so incredible. Disclosure Day, coming in 2026, will be his fifth.
- “If you want a job in the moisturizer industry, the best advice I can give is to apply daily.” – via Cassidy Williams
- Not securing domain names before announcing something idiotic has been a perpetual epic failure of the current administration.
Posts tagged “video games”
- A study of 500 diners found “attractive servers earn approximately $1,261 more per year in tips than unattractive servers.” Mostly because of “female customers tipping attractive females more than unattractive females.” – via 52 things I learned in 2025
- A recent randomized trial on exercise for cancer patients breaks new ground in showing the life-extending powers of a workout.
- Scope Creep is an online horror video game about being a project manager.
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“Time is indeed a cruel mistress.”
History and the Passing of Time is a brilliant (and short) essay by Daniele Bolelli, host of the History on Fire podcast.
- This is your annual reminder that the album Sugar & Booze by SNL alum Ana Gasteyer is chock full of fantastic holiday music and you can stream it on Alexa.
- I have at least eight of these Wyze smart plugs and they are great for scheduling holiday decorations. (I have two Wyze outdoor plugs, too.) This year I bought two more of these battery-to-plug adapters. (They let you convert battery-powered decorations—like snow globes and animated Santas—so you can plug them into the wall.)
- And you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?” (This is actually a fabulous explanation of how the Internet works and not, sadly, a site about Talking Heads. Coincidentally, I just learned a few days ago that David Byrne was at RISD at the same time that my dad was at PC, and my dad said Byrne used to work in the window of a New York System place grilling hot dogs.)
This might be the most wholesome thing on YouTube. Dad, How Do I? is a collection of videos teaching you how to do all sorts of basic things. – via Jason- It’s hard for me to believe it’s been a decade since the release of The Force Awakens. (I still love BB-8 and was pleasantly surprised to learn he was imagined into existence by J.J. Abrams himself!)
- In Bolivia a team of paleontologists have discovered and meticulously documented 16,600 footprints left by theropods, the dinosaur group that includes the Tyrannosaurus rex.
- Dave Barry wrote a lovely essay on what it was like to learn from Google’s AI-powered search results that he’d recently passed away. Allison Parrish wrote a bonkers analysis detailing more than you wanted to know about how Game Boy cartridges work. – both via cassidoo
- If you still have any subscriptions on their platform, send the author this detailed piece on how and why to leave Substack. – via kottke
- Related: Substack has once again revealed itself to be a Nazi bar.
- Some notes on the iPhone’s New Satellite Messaging Function – via @sweat_science
- New research reveals that Americans have abandoned a simple daily habit that reduces stress as well as — and, at times, more effectively than — exercise, meditation apps, or massage. Taking just 15 minutes to read for pleasure can reduce your stress levels by 68 percent — but 84 percent of American adults no longer do it daily. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
- Related: More than half of American adults now read below a sixth-grade level. – via Kimchi & Gabagool
- Nobody Knows How to Make a Pencil is a brilliant essay from 1958 which I first read on Jason’s site forever ago. (The original link is gone but I found a copy on the Internet Archive.)
- I Am An AI Hater
- Help save Ned the snail!
- Introduction to AT Protocol – via cassidoo
Things Can Only Get Better:
- The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. – via Laura Olin
- Scientists say flesh-eating bacteria cases are rising because of climate change.
- Every Frame Is a Goodbye is a lovely little essay on photography – via my dad
- I am relieved to report that Happy Gilmore 2 was fantastic. I was worried it might be terrible, but it was a masterpiece sequel and loaded with incredible cameos and great jokes.
- A Friendly Introduction to SVG and a Priority Compass – both via the always brilliant cassidoo
- Someone has put together a compilation of awesome video game maps. – via hiro.report
- Here’s a handy hack to keep squirrels out of your garden.
- “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” I’ve seen that attributed to William Butler Yeats, but Quote Investigator can’t verify it.
- Related: Stop living this way. Make the smallest bit of effort. Be your own person. Research. Take pride in the words you repeat, and … attribute them accurately.
- We truly owe Thomas Jefferson mad, mad props for wonderfully irreverent things like the Season 27 premiere of South Park.
- I’ve been using Markdown for around twenty years now and still often forget what’s what. I love a good cheat sheet.
- Just Give Me Some Normal Damn Dinosaurs
- Mysterious Antimatter Physics Discovered at the Large Hadron Collider
- Military leaders aghast as Meta founder Zuckerberg crashes classified Oval Office meeting
- FEMA response to deadly Texas floods delayed and deficient with Noem in charge
- If you can’t get excited about Jack Black as Steve, you really need to spend more time interacting with elementary school children.
- We need to work on bringing the phrase, “the whole megillah,” back into regular use. I feel like abandoning this wonderful expression was a bad idea, even though I’ll freely admit that I thought it was spelled “magilla” until about ten minutes ago.
- I have started listening to the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast and really love it. Of course, the three episodes I’ve heard so far were ones featuring interviews with Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, and Jeff Goldblum, three of my favorite actors, so my opinion may be biased. But all three had me laughing out loud at one point or another and it’s nice to hear Conan’s voice again.
- A month after the death of his mother, Tiger Woods says he’s recovering after surgery to repair a ruptured Achilles, likely ending his 2025 season.
- An 11-year-old boy who pulled the Paul Skenes MLB Debut Patch card will likely sell it for more money than Skenes will make from his 2025 Pirates base salary. – via @jacksongagne.com
- Tim Walz to launch national tour of town halls in Republican House districts. (Go get ’em, Tim!)
Madness:
- The Pentagon Keeps Pouring Cash Into Golf Courses – Even As [Administration] Slashes Government Spending
- USDA ends program that helped schools serve food from local farmers
- Department of Justice Official Says She Was Fired After Opposing Restoring Mel Gibson‘s Gun Rights
- Pete Hegseth is expected in the coming weeks to start a sweeping overhaul of the judge advocate general’s corps as part of an effort to make the US military less restricted by the laws of armed conflict. – via @jamellebouie.net
- NIH officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research. – via @kwcollins.bsky.social
- You can now play the classic 1982 Atari 2600 game Pitfall! in your browser.
- I’ve been using FontAwesome in web projects since late 2012 and they are still the best.
- Scaling Our Rate Limits to Prepare for a Billion Active Certificates – Let’s Encrypt protects a vast portion of the Web by providing TLS certificates to over 550 million websites. They currently issue over 340,000 certificates per hour.
- The parents of a 22-yo Wisconsin man who died after an asthma attack have filed a lawsuit against Walgreens and UnitedHealth Group after they said the price for his medication suddenly rose from $66 to $539.
- Just dropping this here for no particular reason: Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, Revised Edition
- Aides to [the man] charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.
- “The impotence [of the left] is as staggering as the abdication is sickening. But the current message from elected Democrats is loud and clear: You’re on your own. And the message from the … administration is even clearer: You’re next.” – via Marisa Kabas
Apparently federal employees are using Milton’s red stapler from Office Space as a symbol of resistance, which is awesome on so many levels.- An outbreak of tuberculosis in the Kansas City area has grown into one of the largest ever recorded in the United States, with dozens of active cases of the infectious disease reported, according to health officials. (Be alarmed.)
- Newly-appointed U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy signed a memorandum which directs the NHTSA to immediately initiate, “a rulemaking to rescind or replace all existing CAFE standards.” I just can’t get over the fact that this guy got his start on MTV’s Real World: Boston.
- You are the captain of a starship, about to embark on a long journey to a strange planet. You must hire a crew and buy supplies for the long journey ahead, then deal with all sorts of adventures and problems along the way. Space Awesome is a lovely little retro game similar to Oregon Trail* or Zork*. (You can play a complete game in a few minutes.)
- The Comprehensive Guide to Building a Realistic R2-D2 Replica
- A wall of ice the size of Rhode Island is heading toward a penguin-packed island off Antarctica.
- Once again, fans of the Buffalo Bills are the class of the NFL. They’ve raised over $100,000 with a GoFundMe for a diabetes charity supported by Mark Andrews, the Baltimore Ravens player who lost a fumble and dropped what would have been a game-tying catch in his team’s AFC divisional loss to the Bills.
- JK Brickworks is a site with instructions for lots of fun LEGO MOCs.
- “Wikenigma is an encyclopedia of known unknowns. That is, a listing of ‘scientific and academic questions to which no-one, anywhere, has yet been able to provide a definitive answer’.” – via kottke
- Oh, wow. This is awesome. The Public Domain Image Archive is a hand-picked collection of thousands of out-of-copyright works, free to browse, download, and reuse. – via @austinkleon
- If you ever find yourself hungry in Amsterdam, I urge you to try the pink mayonnaise french fries at ‘t Pareltje.
- Explaining how fighting games use delay-based and rollback netcode – How to design your game for optimal play over a network
- Bad news for insomniacs. New research highlights how chronic, insufficient sleep can impair your body’s ability to manage blood sugar – even if your weight stays stable. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
- “The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.”
- Another good example of enshittification: Companies tend not to pass cost savings from efficiency gains onto consumers… they just sell people more of it. – via kottke
- The Ten Commandments of iOS Development
- At some point I really must make these artichoke soufflés. They look delicious and have been on my to-make list for years.
- When My Father Talked About Larry Bird: The Boston Celtics legend was the north star of my youth, present in every debate and stretch of silence with my dad. This was true on the night when my world stopped, leaving me on a sidewalk seeing stars.
- Were Back to the Future and The Goonies set on the same day? – via kottke
- Here’s a faithful recreation of me in the 1980s explaining my IT job to my grandparents at Christmas. It also perfectly mimics how I imagine I sound any time I talk to my teenager about pretty much anything. (But the danger presented by a poorly-maintained turbo encabulator is no joke!)
- Reverse Engineering Call Of Duty Anti-Cheat
- There are some hidden gems on this MacStories Best Apps of 2024 list.
- I have a generic digital photo frame at home that’s on its last legs. I got it well over a decade ago and was never thrilled with its buttons or input options, but at the time it was pretty awesome. Since then I’ve purchased multiple Pix-Star frames (website, Amazon) for far-off family members; I’m not a huge fan of those, either, and I don’t feel they’re worth the price tag. I just saw the Aura frame recommended in the hiro.report newsletter and it looks pretty nice, but it’s also pretty expensive. I’ve got at least two ancient iPads Mini collecting dust and am going to try repurposing those instead. (I’ll keep you posted.)
- To age on the internet is to exist in an accidental version of [a] time tunnel.
- I’m wondering for how long what you don’t know can’t hurt you. It’s definitely not forever, but it is still for today.
- I just received a text message that read, “Please be advised that we are currently conducting a lockdown drill at [your son’s high school]. This is a routine practice to ensure student and staff safety. Thank you for your understanding. STOP to end”
What a utopia it would be if simply texting STOP to end was actually the solution.