Julia Glassman

Online recipes love to say "You'll never believe how delicious this simple, four-ingredient recipe is!!!" and then one of the ingredients is butter and one of them is cream....Like, OBVIOUSLY if half the ingredients are butter and cream, it'll taste good!! That's neither impressive nor surprising!!

Any Chicago residents know where one can get a good zhengyalov hatz??? One of the few things I miss from Glendale specifically is being walking distance from a fresh, delicious zhengyalov hatz! (If you live vaguely near the Glendale Galleria and are not taking advantage of this, you're missing out!)

Science is on the verge of creating a travel stroller so compact, it can fit inside the average pants pocket. Unfolds in just 5 minutes of vigorous, frantic flapping. Folds up in just one hour of impossibly grueling origami.

The constantly-pleasant temperatures of LA are nice, but the euphoria of getting a 55 degree day after months of freezing temps is truly something special

HOW?!

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue

But that was about to change with the introduction of Neopets. The website, launched in 1999, was essentially an attempt to ride on the coattails of Pokemon’s massive success. Users could adopt cartoonish pets, give them names, and battle with them. While it seemed like a game on a surface level, it was something slightly darker: proto-social media for children. The pets were the reason everyone was there, but each user had an individual profile and the ability to send messages to others. It even had its own version of an endless feed in its “NeoBoards” feature. This is where the real hooks sunk in. Some threads were conversation starters, but most were just people’s loose thoughts. Each press of the refresh button refilled my screen with more strange perspectives to embody. Over twenty five years later and I still remember thread titles like they’re my friends’ old phone numbers. There was so much to read, so much to consume, and the time would flow away like it was nothing. It silenced my thoughts and without knowing what I was giving up, it felt like a respite from the developing neuroses that I was still mostly keeping to myself. The screen became a bright, beckoning light in my living room, a sun I could stare into with impunity and vanish for a moment. When I did, I’d lose myself for a moment, becoming everyone and no one. Eventually, it was harder to pull myself away.

Wrote about internet addiction, how it hijacks impulses towards anxiety or compulsion, and of course, Neopets.

Adobe discontinuing Animate out of the blue is nuts. Many television productions, games, and all sorts of animated media still rely Animate/Flash pipelines. They're all supposed to just...pivot to entirely new software and pipelines?!

Ultimately you're not supposed to believe it. It not mattering is the point. The bolder the lie, the greater the impunity. The ultimate victory for evil is not convincing you, it's the truth being irrelevant.

Empty words. The president is obviously not going to do anything about this; he does not care that people are being murdered. Asking him to change is meaningless. Our politicians need to take ACTION. Action beyond saying "hey this is really bad and we don't like it."

peeschools! fucking preschools! I hate these people down to my bones

ICE is terrorizing the public. In the country in which they live. Terrorizing...domestically...I wonder if there's a term for that. An organization that domestically terrorizes...

It's not complicated. Any politician/govt official who says ICE shouldn't be abolished needs to open their fucking eyes

Minneapolis Is in Mourning. It's Also Very, Very Pissed Off In the hours after an ICE officer shot and killed Rennee Nicole Good, the city came together — and found a difficult balance of grief and rage.

Minneapolis Is in Mourning. It’s Also Very, Very Pissed Off

In the hours after an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, the city came together — and found a difficult balance of grief and rage.

Minneapolis Is in Mourning. It's Also Very, Very Pissed Off In the hours after an ICE officer shot and killed Rennee Nicole Good, the city came together — and found a difficult balance of grief and rage.

Last week, I drove to Minneapolis to spend a few days reporting on the aftermath of Renee Nicole Good's murder for Rolling Stone. What I saw was a city forced to grieve a horrible loss while simultaneously strategizing to protect itself from the ICE reinforcements to come.

Full Story Here:

I’ll be on the ground in Minneapolis for the next few days for Rolling Stone. If you or anyone you know is helping to organize your community to protect itself from ICE (or just helping them cope with the tragedy of Renee Good’s death), I’d love to speak with you

Phones are the great pacifying device of our time. No single human invention has ever been so capable of transmuting raw emotion into useless things. Great ideas become middling posts. Friendships become group chats. Political fervor becomes shareable infographics. Their greatest trick of all is turning time into less time. They are the crucial ingredient that allowed for the Smooth World’s formation, an anesthetic that can be poured on every wound. Our phones and the endless scrolls of social media they provide are perfectly designed to maintain a baseline level of addicted malaise, a promise that if you just scroll a little more, you’ll find whatever it is you’re looking for. The problem with phones isn’t just that they’re bad for us2 , it’s that they make us feel too good. Looking at your phone feels better than nearly any activity you’d otherwise be doing. There is no small, quiet, moment of our lives we won’t joyously skip over given the chance. It’s like we learned nothing from Adam Sandler’s Click.

As the Difficult Year project begins, I'm thinking about how our phones serve as an escape hatch from even minor moments of discomfort and how having instant access to that escape harms our ability to live in the real world

I’ve felt for a long time that our lives were beginning to take place not in the real, physical world we embody but in a parallel space that exists partially digitally, and partially in the perception of each individual. This other world is not a literal place so much as a sort of bubble that convenience places around us, protecting us from the exertions of other people upon our reality while also giving us the illusion of control over our own. Disruption of this world is often met with confusion, frustration, and even anger as those within it are forced to occasionally reckon with the fact that it’s a delusion they’ve placed themselves in. I call it the Smooth World.

The Smooth World, as it is currently and continually designed, is meant to avoid friction at all cost. In it, food can be delivered to your doorstep by unseen butlers, cars turn every excursion out of the house into an isolating door-to-door commute, and in whatever small ways you’re forced to interact with others, you now all have the option of doing so while simultaneously anesthetizing yourself with an unending stream of short form video content. But hey, those things are chores! Surely optimizing them out of our lives has left more room for leisure! But the optimization hasn’t stopped at chores. Where once games, entertainment, and hobbies were a way of blowing off steam, now many opt instead to remain submerged in that unending stream of content. Our attention is no longer ours to give, having become a new frontier for those who wish to sell targeted advertising. So often, we look up from our phones during our two hours of free time each day only to realize that one of them is gone, that we’d made a second screen out of our lives.

My little project for the year is making my life harder on purpose. I talk about it a little bit here, but the long and short of it is that I think excessive convenience has eroded the quality of everyday life at great cost to our sense of self. I've been referring to it as The Smooth World

Let's have a difficult year This year I'm making my life harder on purpose because I'm a genius

Each month, I'll be abandoning some modern amenity in hopes of figuring out if a line exists between excessive convenience and drudgery. Social media, screens, car travel, delivery, none of it is off the table. I'm dumping modernity upside down until I can figure out which part went rotten

Don't mind me weeping big ol' sentimental tears over here. I had no idea Dan was writing this. It's perfect.

Who's A Good Boy has its final packaging! Look how slick this is!

It REALLY DOES though!!

Can't believe it's already that time again: TOILET WRAPPED 2025!!

I Am Not a Wolf - Andrews McMeel Publishing One of the Best Humor Books of 2021! (Vulture)You are a HUMAN MAN navigating every day life, dating, bus etiquette, and other important human concerns. You are definitely NOT A WOLF.  Life is good. Yo...

Pick it up at any of the sites listed here!

It's extremely funny, was way more timely than it got credit for, and has been very close to being a television show twice now so that has to count for something.

If you're shopping for the fervent anti-capitalist or exhausted office worker in your life (maybe they're the same person?) consider I AM NOT A WOLF

It was part of the Vulture's Best of 2021 coverage and its about how office jobs are an act of violence upon the world itself. It's also very funny.

We're running a sale through Monday!!

Here's a direct link to the pledge manager where you can pick up a late copy! www.kickstarter.com/projects/its...

Who's A Good Boy: The Game Where Dogs Can Sin A new card game for 3-5 players. Do sins and good deeds, earn traits, and race your friends to answer the question: "Who's A Good Boy?"

You can get your copy at DogsCanSin.com, just be sure that the address you fill out is the one you want your card and game sent to!

A holiday card featuring two christmas theme dogs explaining the promotion: anyone who goes to www.dogscansin.com and purchases a copy of the game this weekend will be sent a holiday card that tells their intended recipient that they've been gifted the game

WHO'S A GOOD BOY? will be in production until early next year but it can still be a great gift!

Anyone who purchases a copy from our Kickstarter this weekend will receive a holiday card letting the recipient know they've been gifted the game! Give someone you love the gift of sin!

Did you know that an infant can poop so loudly that the sound rouses you from slumber