Posts tagged “YouTube”

  • 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.
  • “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.)
  • Dad, How do I?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.

  • Martijn Doolaard is a photographer, filmmaker and travel writer from the Netherlands who is renovating and living in a remote stone cabin in the Italian Alps. – via @thepharmdfoodie
  • MacKenzie Scott (ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos) has now given away more than $19 billion, including more than a quarter of a billion to historically black colleges and universities.
  • The recently-published list of the Top 100 Comedies of all Time (from Variety) is an abomination. Bull Durham deserves to be in the top ten and it’s not even on the list! (And where is Trading Places?!)
  • Man Keeps Strange Rock for Years, Hoping It’s Gold. It Turned out to Be Way More Valuable. (See also: Scientists Cracked Open a Lunar Rock and Found a Huge Surprise)
  • Requiem for Early Blogging doesn’t resonate with me as much as I know it does for many. (I think it’s because I started far, far earlier than the blog boom and, y’know, still haven’t stopped.)
  • “User behavior suggests people are finding LLMs more convenient for finding answers than Googling, where they must leap over hurdles of ads, dive several pages into the search results, and then pogo in and out of websites to find answers to some of their most banal questions.”
  • We Asked Golfers for the Best Place to Buy Used Clubs. – via my dad
  • All’s Fair, the new series from Ryan Murphy, is an atrocity.
  • Why Is Dad So Mad?
  • Vocalist and a-ha front-man Morten Harket recently shared that he has Parkinson’s disease.
  • Charlie BrownBlack Friday:
    • “Imagine the quality of an architect that Trump would pick – and who would want to work for him. Even *that guy* thinks this project is too grandiose.” – via @helenkennedy
    • “It should go without saying, but the president has no authority to do this, and anyone reporting the story needs to say as such.” – via @tomtomorrow
    • This is, quite literally, what the Germans did. We all agreed it was a big deal and nobody should ever be allowed to do it again. So for anyone in any uniform to allow it to happen by the United States of America is inexcusable.
    • Charities that help people pay for medical care say demand is way up, and that’s before scheduled cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare enacted in the new GOP spending bill take effect.
    • “The guy shot two random people with a gun, I don’t think you can say he wasn’t assimilating into our culture.” – via @internethippo
    • A Story About Illegal Orders is terrifying.

  • 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 in the endgame now.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.”

  • The music industry traded tape for hard drives and got a hard-earned lesson. Roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives from the 1990s sent to Iron Mountain are entirely unreadable.
  • My son got me hooked on New Rockstars. Erik Voss and his team produce amazing YouTube recaps of all sorts of things in pop culture. The Jessica Clemons breakdown of the Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl LIX halftime show is great.
  • The Onion headlineA moving new trailer has been released for Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, an ambitious documentary that explores the final years of John Lennon through archival footage, never-before-seen interviews, and firsthand accounts.
  • A new study shows you can lower your risk of cancer by eating just one serving of cruciferous vegetables per day. Vegetables appear to do the most to help fight gastrointestinal cancers, such as colorectal and stomach cancer, but the protective effects extended to lung and breast cancer as well.
  • Climate change is causing hotter temperatures to become more frequent in the four West African countries responsible for producing approximately 70% of the world’s cacao — the key ingredient in chocolate.
  • Former Florida Gators and Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Kadarius Toney is facing multiple charges, including aggravated assault, following his arrest in Georgia last week.
  • White House says it has the right to punish AP reporters over Gulf naming dispute. (I am rapidly running out of canaries, people.)
  • Was I the only one a little concerned that NASA increased the odds of that asteroid hitting us in 2032 from 1.2% up to 2.3%? This brilliantly simple explanation at Scientific American from astronomer Phil Plait should ease your mind a bit.
  • Recent Media
    • Black Doves (Netflix) was incredible. Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw can act. Splendid plot. A+++
    • We watched the penultimate episode of Skeleton Crew and I am all-in on this show. Fantastic fun. Jude Law is perfect.
    • Four episodes into Slow Horses and love this show, too.

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