Aric Toler

(The post is about Sabrina Carpenter hosting but it's better out of context imagining a dude sneaking looks at Miss Piggy)

Videos Show Moments in Which Agents Killed a Man in Minneapolis

Ha, @devonlum.bsky.social has it handled. I've been snowed in.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Videos Show Moments in Which Agents Killed a Man in Minneapolis

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Decisecond?

From @robinsteinnyt.bsky.social, @devonlum.bsky.social, @dimakhavin.bsky.social, Alex Cardia, Jeff Bernier, and me.

No paywall on the video.

Video: Video Analysis of ICE Shooting Sheds Light on Contested Moments Newly available videos and existing footage synchronized and assessed by The Times provides a millisecond-by-millisecond look at how an ICE officer ended up shooting and killing a motorist in Minneapo...

New from the @nytimes.com Visual Investigations team: Detailed, second-by-second video analysis of all of the video footage of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...

nah it's way too try-hard

preview of my followed communities to see what Reddit is really for: gawking

I love r/shortguys, half of the posts are "a tall man did a crime and yet women still love him" and the other half are going through post histories of women married to short guys or short guys who say they're married to "prove" that the wife is definitely cheating.

There is definitely more engagement here, for better and worse! But most people are lovely of course

Big Brutus - Wikipedia

Southeast! It's all pretty miserable, and not worth visiting on purpose (I can say as someone who's lived there and around Kansas for far too long)

Except Big Brutus!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bru...

everyone is so tedious and turned up to 11 about everything

✅

They found out about the Problematic Men in Agriculture Google Doc that was going around......

Just saw a farm truck with a decal of an American flag that said "You cannot cancel all of us" in a rural Kansas town of 187 people.

Usually they watch for lolcow reasons (though they get sentimental/attached to them after a while). It's definitely a niche within this whole world. And honestly, I can understand why people watch these more than a generic guy playing for 4 hours quietly auto-spinning slots.

And for people a generation or so up, my age, there was some Runescape gambling mentioned :)
(That's actually how the founders of Stake/Kick first met -- organizing Runescape betting decades ago)

How Online Crypto Casinos Use Celebrities and Livestreamers to Recruit Gamblers (Gift Article) Using exploitative marketing strategies, the illicit gambling websites have profited and lured in a young generation of gamblers.

Crypto casinos have become wildly popular with young people. Here's how the sites built an exploitative online marketing machine using celebrities like Drake and an army of livestreamers:
w/ @aric.bsky.social Jenny Vrentas, Leo Dominguez and
@iamrumz.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

All these photos of these IDs/"verification proof" are sold to people who mass-create accounts and then sell them off at a huge markup to underaged gamblers or people in the US (or just link their gambling referral codes to the accounts so they get a percentage of all of the buyer's future wagering)

There's a whole longform piece you could do on just this phenomenon that we didn't have space to go into. There's a huge industry of people going into villages in India, Kenya, Philippines, etc. and gathering up tons of IDs and having guys hold up papers with casino names on them for verification.

your piece was great! shouted it out at the end of the thread. and yes... basically zero has changed, just escalations from all sides.

Great to see the New York Times picking up on my investigation from a couple of years ago at Sky news.sky.com/story/from-d... but how frustrating to see so little has changed in the time that's passed since my report.... A brilliant read from @aric.bsky.social and the NYT team also

5-8 is generous, it peaked 15 years ago with the one where you played MJ's career

An entire thesis about the consequences of the digital attention economy could be written based on this post alone

'I lost half-a-million dollars, but I kept playing': Inside the new online gambling craze 'I lost half-a-million dollars, but I kept playing': Inside the new online gambling craze

It was amazing to work with Leo Dominguez and @iamrumz.bsky.social on this story, with their crazy work around the visual design.

Also another good story on crypto casinos/streamers if you're interested in this topic, from a couple years ago: news.sky.com/story/from-d...

How Online Crypto Casinos Use Celebrities and Livestreamers to Recruit Gamblers Using exploitative marketing strategies, the illicit gambling websites have profited and lured in a young generation of gamblers.

There's much more about these crypto casinos that we wrote about, including the trouble states have in regulating these sites.

Read the full investigation here: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The spokesperson for Snoop Dogg, who had a deal with Roobet that ended shortly after we sent him questions, gave this response. The other celebrity streamers we reached out to didn’t respond.
x.com/Roobet/statu...

Stake and Roobet, two of the largest casinos, disagreed with many of our findings about their marketing tactics and measures to prevent underage gambling. Stake noted that its collection of sponsorships “reflects the high standards to which we operate.”