“Hiccups (Body Go Crazy)” from Adults has absolutely no business requiring this much of my attention. i respect a comedy that understands… Read more
At a time when our understanding of pleasure outside of penetration continues to expand, many are realizing that frotting is essentially mutual… Read more
At a time when our understanding of pleasure outside of penetration continues to expand, many are realizing that frotting is essentially mutual masturbation on steroids. And while it isn’t entirely risk-free, frotting generally carries a lower risk of transmitting STIs than penetrative sex.
link for more: Them
a minute of candy corn history from Candy is Dandy Shorts, for anyone who needs some background before the annual argument. Read more
a minute of candy corn history from Candy is Dandy Shorts, for anyone who needs some background before the annual argument.
none pizza, left beef is nineteen today. legally old enough to vote. still no sauce. still no cheese. a remarkably consistent platform.… Read more
none pizza, left beef is nineteen today. legally old enough to vote. still no sauce. still no cheese. a remarkably consistent platform.
Steven Molaro’s original pizza-ordering experiment went up on The Sneeze on October 19, 2007. the website let him remove the cheese and sauce, then assign the remaining beef to one side. he wanted to see whether the pizza would arrive correctly oriented. the internet received a cultural artifact.
the best part is that the form accepted this. every individual option made sense. together, they produced a small edible argument for considering the whole situation.
nineteen years later, the original post is still there. a little bread. some beef. an enduring contribution to the arts.
Photograph: Steven Molaro / The Sneeze.
this week’s life-changing hack is to buy a sliced loaf from the bakery section and make grilled cheese with it. that’s the… Read more
Illustrative photograph: Mack Male, “Simple grilled cheese” · CC BY-SA 2.0. Resized for display.
this week’s life-changing hack is to buy a sliced loaf from the bakery section and make grilled cheese with it. that’s the hack. we can all go home.
the internet would like every minor improvement to arrive with a methodology, a specialized appliance, and a man explaining why you’ve been doing lunch wrong. sometimes the answer is just different bread.
i’m not starting a bread discourse. sandwich bread has done nothing wrong and remains employed. i just made one small upgrade to a thing i already liked, without turning it into a new hobby.
there is a useful category of improvement between “change nothing” and “become a different person.” move one aisle over. make the sandwich. enjoy your extremely local renaissance.
graham norton’s theme song sounds like the party is already happening and you have made the correct decision by showing up. all… Read more
graham norton’s theme song sounds like the party is already happening and you have made the correct decision by showing up. all this just to introduce some people sitting on a couch. exemplary use of everyone’s time.
(more…)
meet Telly, Facet, the tiny pencil-wielding version of me, and Hitch from moots. the sites are getting ready for a little optional… Read more
i’m getting the websites dressed for halloween. apparently having several sites also means coordinating a group costume, so this feels like a good time to introduce the little people wearing them.
there’s a vampire, a bat, a wizard, and a little mint gecko. the halloween looks are still being finished across the sites, but the cast is ready.
telly is the blue television-headed host of taco ’bout it. you’ll see him around the blog, usually looking like he has something to say. his halloween costume adds a cape and tiny fangs. unfortunately, becoming a vampire has done nothing to reduce the talking.
facet is trove’s purple crystal-headed mascot, with the round gold glasses. trove is where the movies, shows, books, albums, comics, and games go. facet’s halloween outfit is a bat costume: same glasses, additional wings.
the purple-haired character on schweg.xyz is the illustrated version of me. he normally has a pencil. for halloween, he gets a plum wizard outfit and the pencil gets a promotion. useful range for one piece of stationery.
hitch is moots’ little mint gecko, the newest face in the group. his halloween outfit adds a patched jacket and a collar with silver bolts for a little frankenstein dress-up. still considerably more approachable than most things associated with a block checker.
the new experience being finished starts with a small animated character floating over the page after a short pause. clicking the costumed visitor will turn on the dark halloween look, with orange accents and animated backgrounds that lean spooky, whimsical, and a little camp.
it’s optional. the invitation can be dismissed with ×, and the appearance can be reversed. the controls are being brought together in the header, where the light and dark choices live, so changing the look has one place to go.
i’m keeping the character small and the page usable. keyboard access, reduced-motion behavior, dismissal, and getting back to your previous appearance are part of the final checks before the whole family is ready.
trove’s halloween shelf styling is getting its own attention, including portrait images for sharing a shelf in stories. i’ll give those a closer look separately; this introduction belongs to the little bat supervising the collection.
the sites share the seasonal groundwork, but each keeps its own character. christmas is planned next, in november. for now, the dress code is capes, wings, and a little gecko.
i enjoy watching baseball. i also forget baseball exists until the playoffs every year. apparently my fandom has a flowering season. Read more
i enjoy watching baseball. i also forget baseball exists until the playoffs every year. apparently my fandom has a flowering season.
there is a particular pleasure in turning up when the stakes are high and immediately developing opinions. do i have the longitudinal data? no. do i suddenly care very deeply about this man reaching second base? absolutely.
sports people sometimes make casual fandom sound like stolen valor. sorry i didn’t complete the summer internship before enjoying the game. i am here now, i have a snack, and i would like something dramatic to happen.
you’re allowed to like a thing seasonally. not every interest needs to become a second job. see also: my annual return to knowing what an inning is.
Featured photo: Robert Bye / Unsplash.
watching someone walk up to the most famous lectern on earth and treat it like an unprepared oral report is a profound… Read more
I spent years believing that imposter syndrome was a sophisticated personal affliction. You treat it like a delicate psychological tax on ambition: you read books about quiet confidence, you practice pausing before answering questions in meetings, and you spend twenty minutes drafting a three-sentence email because you are convinced that using the wrong preposition will reveal to the entire department that you have been faking your career since 2018.
Imposter syndrome relies entirely on a foundational assumption of general competence. For you to feel like a fraud, you have to believe that the room is full of people who are not frauds. You have to picture the other participants as people who received the secret memo, mastered the enterprise software without consulting YouTube tutorials, and earned their chairs through rigorous intellectual superiority.
Then, yesterday, the new White House press secretary walked up to the podium for her debut briefing.
It was not merely a rough day at work. It was an interpretive dance of institutional malfunction. Dubbed the “Zachbot” across social media within roughly eighteen minutes of taking the lectern, Katie Zacharia stood before the White House press corps with a massive three-ring binder, visibly short-circuited on basic procedural questions, and radiated the specific, unmistakable panic of an eighth-grader giving an oral book report on a novel they only read the jacket copy for during homeroom.
Watching it in real time was deeply, spiritually restorative.
There is a moment in every high-stress job where you freeze. Your pulse spikes, your throat gets dry, and your brain offers up the helpful suggestion that you should perhaps fake your own death and move to an unincorporated township in Idaho. That fear is driven by the belief that high-stakes environments demand flawless, encyclopedic mastery.
The White House press briefing is supposed to be the apex predator of high-stakes environments. It is a small theater in the West Wing designed entirely to project imperial authority. You have the blue backdrop, the Great Seal, forty hardened political reporters whose mortgage payments depend on catching you in a contradiction, and a bank of cameras beaming your pores to foreign embassies in twenty-four time zones.
If competence were the baseline barrier to entry for holding that microphone, no human being would ever take the job without six advanced degrees, a photographic memory, and a nervous system made of tempered steel.
Instead, we watched a woman who is theoretically the voice of the executive branch of a nuclear superpower flip through a binder like someone frantically looking for a dry cleaner receipt at the bottom of a tote bag. She dodged softballs, stared blankly at straightforward follow-ups, and treated the entire briefing like a hostage negotiation between her notes and her vocal cords.
It was glorious. It was the single most liberating piece of workplace therapy available without a co-pay.
The dirty secret of institutional authority is that confidence is almost never downstream of competence. It is downstream of access.
The people who run things—the people who sign off on company-wide reorgs, approve enterprise software migrations that ruin everybody’s Thursday, and represent national governments on cable news—are rarely the people who stayed up until 2 a.m. making sure the spreadsheet was formatted correctly. They are simply the people who did not flinch when someone handed them a lanyard.
Half of growing up is realizing that the “adults in the room” do not exist. There is no shadowy council of experts reviewing your work against a grand master rubric. There are only people who walked through a door, realized nobody was checking badges with any real enthusiasm, and decided to keep standing near the water cooler.
When you struggle with imposter syndrome, you constantly audit yourself against an impossible standard that nobody in power is actually meeting. You worry that you don’t know enough about the budget forecast to speak during the Q3 planning call, while the person chairing the meeting is currently trying to remember whether Q3 comes before or after July.
I am not suggesting that preparation is useless or that doing your job well is a sucker’s game. Excellence is great. Knowing what you’re talking about is a polite courtesy to everyone who has to listen to you.
I am suggesting that you lower the emotional stakes of your daily existence.
If someone can walk into the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, face fifty hostile journalists, stumble through fifteen minutes of pre-scripted evasion without reading the room, and still collect a federal paycheck on Friday, you are entirely qualified to unmute yourself on Zoom. You can pitch the project. You can apply for the job even if you only meet six of the eight arbitrary bullet points on the listing. You can send the email without asking three trusted friends to proofread the greeting.
The bar is not hovering in the upper stratosphere. The bar is lying flat on the linoleum, and somebody just tripped over it on live television.
Pick up your binder. You’re going to do fine.
Featured image: The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. Photo: White House / Wikimedia Commons.
Kitchen Glow Up, Worth the Hype, and Forking Delicious show why Tastemade’s free channels deserve more than background-rerun status. Read more
a free food channel could easily spend the rest of eternity showing somebody chop an onion in an episode from 2009. Tastemade has decided it can also make new television. this is an encouraging development for both television and the onion.
Tastemade’s free streaming channels carry food, travel, and home programming. they are also homes for original shows, with scheduled premieres rather than just an endless supply of rescued reruns. here are three starting points for figuring out whether that particular variety of television belongs on your screen.
Kitchen Glow Up pairs Ellen Bennett’s cooking and design perspective with homeowners whose kitchens need to function better. its first two episodes premiered on Tastemade’s streaming channel on May 28, 2024. the current show page lists two seasons.
the premise is appealing because a kitchen has actual work to do. there is a difference between a room that photographs well and a room where you can drain pasta without performing a minor obstacle course. renovation television is much more interesting when that difference makes it into the brief.
this is the first stop if you want home television with a specific point of view. a useful counter needs to survive contact with dinner, not merely an arrangement of lemons.
Worth the Hype sends Frankie Celenza around cities to explore restaurants, dishes, and the people making them. Tastemade’s show page now lists three seasons, with recent stops including Charleston, San Antonio, New Jersey, and San Francisco.
food travel is an excellent television format because the stakes are comprehensible. somebody made a thing, somebody else would like to eat it, and we might learn something about a place in the process. no cinematic universe needs to be consulted.
choose this one if your preferred background television occasionally becomes foreground television because a sandwich has appeared. I respect the sandwich’s ability to secure an audience without a season-long mystery.
Forking Delicious turns an audience-ranked list of 100 dishes into a discussion among comedians and food personalities. Tastemade’s launch announcement names Margaret Cho, Dulcé Sloan, Eric Wareheim, and Nyesha Arrington among the participants. the first two episodes aired in a double premiere on February 25, 2025.
this is food television for the part of the internet that can turn a completely ordinary lunch into a constitutional dispute. the comedy comes from giving people something concrete to disagree about. finally, a panel discussion where the subject might improve my afternoon.
use Tastemade’s where-to-watch page to find a free channel on your platform, then check that channel’s guide for the show. the network also sells ad-free, on-demand access. its subscription help page explains those paid options; they are not required to watch the free linear feed.
the practical distinction is selection versus price. the free schedule chooses what is on now. a paid on-demand option may make selecting a particular episode easier. you can decide whether that convenience is worth anything to you.
I like that Tastemade has a recognizable purpose. food, places, and homes are broad enough to provide variety, but related enough that leaving the channel on does not feel like a programming accident.
This is part 2 of Stuff You Can Watch Free. The series covers original shows on free networks and channels that recreate cable’s put-it-on-and-leave-it-on experience.
