Josiah Sutton

...and we're back Catching back up on a few weeks of media

new media round-up

Median villain: someone driven by complex but flawed motivations that are broadly relatable to the viewer

Median Bong Joon-ho villain: I love pollution so much its unreal

Me: man, these 1984 comparisons are too-heavy handed.

GOP: Hold my beer

As end-of-empire scenarios go it is so much more dignified to get your capital city sacked by the Visigoths than to have a bunch of illiterate rich people in their 70s doing it through a series of incomprehensible tantrums because their brains were defeated by their phones.

We’ve discovered a literal miracle with almost unlimited potential and it’s being scrapped for *no reason whatsoever*. This isn’t even nihilism, it’s outright worship of death and human suffering.

this may literally be the one subject on the planet on which everyone is aligned in this way

I’m not sure you could get these poll numbers with “the sky is blue” or “two plus two equals four”

President Lula, my people yearn for freedom

Sure why not whatever fuck it

Lol

All through the fall and into winter Buckley was haunted by the exchange with Vidal in Chicago. Vidal had seemed amused and even triumphant. He would boast about the incident to the end of his life and continue to search for evidence that Bill, the bigot and bully, was also secretly gay. Others were saying, or insinuating, similar things. Buckley’s wife, who traveled in Manhattan circles populated with famous gay men—Truman Capote, the designer Bill Blass, and many others—knew exactly how her husband’s performance was being received in their social world. “I’ll tell you how I am,” Pat Buckley had said in Chicago when Murray Kempton asked her how she was holding up. “Two hundred million Americans think William F. Buckley is a screaming homosexual.”

Lmfao

It was just this stretch of pages where I was slowly starting to laugh more and more because it’s so obviously he’s about to snap and say it on TV. You can see it coming for a mile away.

I gotta hand it to Tanenhaus. He builds up to that exchange so fucking well. He peppers in Buckley’s growing habit of calling Vidal a "pink queer" in private, being discouraged from putting it in writing. And then the day of the debate he arrives cranky after getting no sleep bc of protestors.

I somehow never realized that the infamous exchange where Buckley called Vidal a queer and threatened to punch him was during the 1968 DNC in Chicago. That whole chaotic backdrop adds a lot to the story lol

Screenshot from an ebook of Sam Tanenhaus’ Buckley biography: "Asked time and again where his “good friend” Buckley was, Vidal feigned surprise. “Mr. Buckley? Oh, Buckley. He’s over at that Wallace headquarters stitching hoods.”"

Vidal’s hatred of Buckley is one of the funniest parts of Tanenhaus’ biography.

but does Pritzker have the GUTS?

Guy writing this post

[Materializing out of nowhere] um actually we live in a republic not a democracy 🤓

Discovered today that not everyone considers this nine year old viral tweet a seminal text in the field of social media studies but I do

A hand angrily pointing a pistol at Reza Negarestani’s “Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials,” a work of theory-fiction which posits that oil is a malevolent, sapient, eldritch entity trying to destroy the earth and turn mankind against the sun.

-Solar and EV credits abolished
-Solar and wind on federal land banned
-DoE tweeting “she is the moment” about a sparkly lump of coal
-“Drill, baby, drill!”
-CO2 isn’t bad, global warming is a hoax

God fucking dammit

Screenshots of a notification from Iowa News app We Are Iowa saying "Air quality alert. Wildfire smoke to affect air quality across Iowa Thursday and Friday"

Cool

New Patreon episode of Fruitless. We wrap up Christian Rock Summer 2025 on a somber note by exploring the legacy of the Columbine shooting in Christian media. Check it out.

Columbine and Martyrdom | Fruitless Get more from Fruitless on Patreon

Link: www.patreon.com/posts/134976...

I'm about fed up with sam altman "oooh the computer is so scary the computer we are making is so scary it's going to give me nightmares" then stop making it man. Shut up.

Probably fine

This entire summer in Iowa has been a constant back and forth between heat advisories and a flood watches. I think for a month now it’s just been going back and forth from one to the other

the only way for this to be objectionable is if you think there was some greater-than-zero-sum supernatural response to his prayer which might conceivably influence him, instead of understanding that "pray about" essentially just means "reflect upon"