The Joke Calculator

My matchup in fantasy this past week is so tight. It's a league where we put 9 prop bets on other fantasy players. One of my props was that my opponent would win their matchup, and that depends on how we resolve the prop. But we can't resolve that prop until we figure out who won

My matchup in fantasy this past week is so tight. It's a league where we put 9 prop bets on other fantasy players. One of my props was that my opponent would win their matchup, and that depends on how we resolve the prop. But we can't resolve that prop until we figure out who won

Alas, I have depicted you posting "Young Sheldon? Inconceivable! ;-)" as Louis Malle from My Dinner with Andre and my own slight revulsion as Wallace Shawn from My Dinner With Andre

(And pointing out that "Vanya on 42nd Street" is a modern but powerful rendition of Chekhov that showcases his range or pointing to that play he wrote about drones or his essay about socialism just feels like I'm playing into the same reductive framework of cultural telephone)

(like, it's not even that they know Shawn as the guy from that movie they fondly remember. But it feels weird that whenever he comes up in any context, people are like "Don't forget that this guy played Vizzini in Princess Bride." Pulling out Grand Nagus just feels like an equally reductive counter)

(It's hard to get into this without fatally dissecting the joke logic, but this has always been a pet peeve of mine and it's funny to me that there's a meme that perfectly describes the situation, but about the same guy in a different role)

My favorite "Wallace Shawn from Young Sheldon" is "Wallace Shawn from Princess Bride"

yeah i totally get what you're saying. i'm more peeved at a) those on the left dismissing it as "censorious hall-monitor liberalism" and b) the guy himself for apparently not doing due diligence and leaving himself an opening to avoid damage. that's a pretty low bar if you're running for office!

In Brian Wilson/Van Dyke Parks' original draft of Kokomo (whimsical, genius, spiritually enlightened, referential) the lyrics were "Key Largo, Montego, I know there's an answer".

But Mike Love (fascist, corporate hack, jealous Salieri) insisted on "Baby why don't we go?"

the simple answer to all of this bullshit is that we're not a monarchy and we don't and shouldn't base our values or our assessments based on whose genes are being carried. as humans we're all goddamn cousins, and we are all cousins to every other lifeform on this planet

like at a certain point of pedantry, are we going with "that's not your uncle, that's your aunt's husband"? or "that's not your aunt, that is your father's adopted sister"? what the fuck are we doing here

("aunt" meaning "dad's female cousin" isn't even stretching the truth. it means you share a great-grandparent instead of a grandparent and she is one generation older than you. it is the exact same concept. no one outside of genealogists has ever made this distinction before today)

Players to reach base safely 9 times in a game, reg or post, all-time:

2025 WS G3 Shohei Ohtani (postseason record)
8/9/42 Stan Hack
7/10/32 Johnny Burnett
7/7/1922 Max Carey

h/t @EliasSports

screenshot of a Justin Klugh tweet from October 28, 2015: JOE BUCK: Welcome to the top of the 47th [Sun rises] [Sun keeps getting bigger] BUCK: yes [World engulfed by flames] BUCK: oh god yes

oh my god, The Tweet is exactly ten years old tonight

I mean, I've gotten on base 8 times in a postseason game, so it wouldn't be the all-time record, but Shohei's thing is pretty good too

See i told you it would be a hot take

But I'm trying to get at why this place doesn't yet feel like a true substitute for what the other site used to be. It feels like it's in the grip of maladaptive psychological and ideological strategies that were once necessary and are now seemingly just habitual.

(Whereas on the other site fascists doxx and threaten you and the Department of State openly posts wrongthink as the sole reason for revoking someone's visa. It's orders of magnitude worse, don't get this twisted as some kind of apologia)

Part of it is just a sense that when the discourse is venting and overwhelmed, it sort of flattens everything into a useless and affectless space where everything and nothing lands but it's all important and urgent. I'm starting to recognize this as just an unproductive and unhealthy state of mind

Being on this site for any length of time feels like the quickest and surest way to diagnose problems with my politics and psychological baggage that I bring to the table. I feel an unusual aversion to posting substantive stuff here. It feels creatively stifling. And I don't totally understand why.

Like we haven't figured out how to draw the line between good faith and bad faith disagreements and so we just default to treating disagreements as being in bad faith or (more perniciously) good faith but revealing unaddressed character flaws

The real problems with this site have nothing to do with excluding bad actors and everything to do with the upstream habit of scrupulously identifying bad thoughts as a substitute for politics.

My hot take (not this post) is that the right is offering nothing positive to the discourse and mindless "viewpoint diversity" for meritless positions does more harm than good.

Salesforce Offers Its Services to Boost Trump’s Immigration Force

Salesforce pitched ICE on tripling its staff www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/u...

me when i'm physically at the U.S. Capitol building and being asked about extrajudicial political violence that I'm in the process of supporting:

Screenprinting to keep this live after LC deactivates (assume he's ok with that, if not let me know)

"The reason the Ship of Theseus is important because it applies to everything."

Umm, only if you change a bunch of stuff: A body instead of a ship, cellular regeneration instead of replacing parts, etc.

Is it even still the same concept at that point?

the writing is on par with the Brass Eye episode. can't think of higher praise than that
bsky.app/profile/benc...

YouTube video by The Onion The Onion Investigates: Jeffrey Epstein

Welp, here it is: maybe the funniest thing we've ever done, in its entirety.

🏈 GB 40 - 40 DAL
0:00 OT

This game has a 100.00% chance of ending in Scorigami.