Billy Crystal’s apartment in When Harry Met Sally is over the top even by NY movie apartment standards. That’s a billionaire apartment. Billy is clearly money-laundering. As is Hugh Grant in Notting Hill — no way he affords a flat in Notting Hill based on income from a failing travel bookstore.
In the 80s, VHS video dating services were the future.
At a bar downstairs at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, I recently found myself next to a 67-year-old man who had come to town to get a tattoo on his shoulder. The tattoo in question was of Yosemite Falls, in California. As best I could understand it, he was getting branded with the landmark because he was enmeshed in a situationship that wasn’t working out. He and this woman had apparently taken a memorable trip to Yosemite earlier this year, and he hoped that—after he showed her the tattoo—a tarnished spark would be rekindled. I wished him all the luck in the world as he took his leave of me, and for a few minutes, I was alone among the chirping slot machines, nursing a gin and soda and pondering how no place on Earth can make you believe the impossible quite like Las Vegas.
I know more people who hate Las Vegas than love it, and I’ve never been able to construct a convincing argument for why they’re wrong. We are granted only so many vacations in this life, and it might seem ill-considered to spend one of them watching the Blue Man Group in an Egyptian-themed hotel in the Nevadan desert. But here I was, at the Luxor, on a quest to renew my love affair with this city.
A well-reported, well written article.
Let’s Call a Murder a Murder. By John Gruber at Daring Fireball.
Arista’s Ullal: Ethernet is the ‘eventual winner’ for AI networking. Ethernet is overtaking InfiniBand in AI data centers as inference and automation reshape infrastructure, says Jayshree Ullal, Arista CEO and chairperson. My latest on Fierce Network.
Video shows ICE agent in Minneapolis fired at driver as vehicle veered past him. The video shows that the ICE agent was next to the vehicle, not in its path. He was in no danger.
‘I’ll Hear About It Eventually.’ So-called news avoiders aren’t really skipping out on the news
The news is depressing and stressful and many people avoid it. But these news avoiders get their news secondhand, writes Mary Retta at Columbia Journalism Review:
This can involve hearing about the news from friends or family, or “seeing discussions of things that happened in the news on Facebook describing ‘that thing that Trump said’”—that is, indirect exposure, [says Benjamin Toff—an associate professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota and the author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism.] “After all, you need to be exposed to news often to be able to actively avoid it.” …. So-called news avoiders are, he argued, for the most part still regularly consuming information: “What makes them news avoiders is having this experience of regularly avoiding it, but that isn’t the same thing as screening out news altogether from their lives.
Life under a clicktatorship
One of the strangest moments to emerge from the U.S. kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro was the flurry of images posted by President Trump on Truth Social. It felt a bit like a student who can’t decide which spring break photos look cutest, so they just upload them all…. It felt as if a group of twelve-year-old boys in a basement had been handed control of the most lethal military in history—and were using it to boost their online brands.
A primary motive of this administration is boosting their clout on social media. It’s simultaneously pathetic and terrifying. “… standing out online often demands being awful—channeling negative emotions like anger and outrage, usually based on misinformation or conspiracy theories.”
What I’m arguing is that the Trump administration isn’t just using social media to shape a narrative. Many of its members are deeply addicted to it. We would be concerned if a senior government official was an alcoholic or drug addict, knowing it could impair judgment and decisionmaking. But we should be equally concerned about Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk’s social media compulsions—just as much as their alcohol or ketamine use, respectively.
Overexposure to online engagement has cooked the brains of some of the most powerful people in the world. This is not exclusively an American phenomenon…. But in the US government, poster brain feels endemic. The Trump administration is made up of a cabinet of posters. For many, that’s how they won Trump’s attention. The head of the FBI, for example, is a podcaster—that’s his main qualifier for the job.
Parker Molloy, a trans woman journalist, received death threats and suspended her BlueSky account for a day after she made a post that it was weird that somebody modified an Animal Crossing cartoon mascot to give it boobs.
Why Young Men Are Souring on Trump.
The disaffected young men who helped elect Trump are fed up with high prices, worried about A.I., and frustrated by the president’s neocon turn. And, according to exclusive new polling data, they’re souring on Trump just as they turned on Joe Biden.
Encouraging news — not just about waning support for the bumbling crime boss, but also that young men have good reasons for opposing him.
Now the Democrats have to get their thumbs out of their asses and start supporting the people instead of oligarchs.
I discovered this separately myself and am pleased to see validation. Articles on how to beat insomnia tell you that if you’re having trouble sleeping, you should get up out of bed and do something else. That is 100% not true.
John Scalzi:
No one was asking for a pop art scifi movie that was ostensibly about shooting big damn alien bugs but was really a meditation about the quiet mainstreaming of fascistic thought and imagery into everyday life, and how all that glossy, idealized ubermensch aesthetic and thinking falls apart once it meets the chaos of war. But surprise! Here it is! Would you like to know more?
Maybe I’d enjoy the movie more if I saw it again today. Maybe I’d find it too painful to watch.
The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Eighteen: Starship Troopers