Every few months, Ben descends from his secret hideout and sprinkles goodness all over us and then disappears again. Thanks for the great puzzle as always!

Such a great game. So many little details, so many funny ideas. It's so well-designed that it doesn't really feel constricting at all that it only scrolls vertically. I remember Mark Cerny talking about the technical challenges. But it ended up being such a flawless port.

He died?! I loved his music. I'm listening to the Amiga Dune soundtrack right now as I read this. Man :(

700, 6m39s. Are we long lost twins? And yes, Ben is back to his old form. Feels like things are slowly going back to normal again. The world is healing.

If you do this in earnest and still feel that cities should be patrolled by masked, nameless government agents for no reason, with "absolute immunity" as per VP, to whom the 4th amendment doesn't apply, who can randomly escalate situations and kill people, then your values really fucking scare me.

That's really something everybody should do once in a while. But with something this blatant, the time is now. (2/3)

If you feel that Renee Good or Alex Pretti are domestic terrorists, now would be a good time to stop and try a reset. Reassess everything you believe, why you believe it, who told you that. Think "what if it were one of 'the others'". Compare situations. Listen to arguments from others. (1/3)

View from above of the Lake San Marcos Dam with water running over the top.

Long exposure view of the Lake San Marcos Dam with water running over the top.

Lake San Marcos at sunset.

Side view of the Lake San Marcos dam with water running over the top.

The Lake San Marcos dam often overtops after heavy rainfalls, which is pretty cool.

Both Search Engine and Hard Fork are decent podcasts if you're into that sort of thing. It's kinda funny watching the Forkiverse and seeing people discover the Fediverse like it's a new thing. But I doubt that this is going to change the landscape one bit in the long run.

Imho the philosophy of Mastodon is what did it in. Existing social media sites use aggressive growth strategies for a reason. Social media networks in particular only work with a crazy amount of engagement. Even Google fucked it up when they tried it.

Are you following the Forkiverse experiment? Basically, PJ Vogt and Casey Newton set up an instance to show their listeners the Fediverse. It's kinda cool and seems like a lot of people heard about it for the first time. But that's unlikely going to make a dent in the long term. 1/2

Deception! You didn't even post this on the Forkiverse so we can't compare.

THE WHITE HOUSE Washington, D.C. 20500 Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a "right of ownership" anyway? There are no written documents, it's only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

Imagine reading this incoherent garbled nonsense and proudly thinking "that's my president!". As long as a sizeable portion of the population thinks that this is what strength or leadership look like, this country is doomed.

Ben is back!!! You were missed!

The $100k price tag on H-1B visas once again shows that We ArE oNLy aGAiNSt iLlEgAl ImMiGRaTiOn was always bullshit.
Removing geography questions from the citizenship test is 100% on brand though.

Lisa Murkowski Suddenly Realizes She Got Played on Trump Budget Bill The Alaska senator clearly thought the leopards would never eat her face.

I don't get it. How do you not see this coming after all these years? newrepublic.com/post/198157/...

Malcolm-Jamal Warner

💔

Just for fun, name two completely unrelated movies that share the same director.

The 7A clue of Saturday's NYT mini puzzle is... something.

"They're good T-shirts, Brent."

How can you say that? $5 of the $30 go to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. Clearly they're just doing this for a good cause and have everybody's best interests at heart and are not trying to profit from this at all!!

Now we have Alligator Alcatraz, people sent to CECOT, and disabled veterans getting their health care funding slashed so we can better fund the immigration Gestapo and his people are super cool with it. Yeah, fuck this. (2/2)

Humanity is on a downward spiral. 8 years ago he already ran on an anti-immigrant platform and people voted for it, but when images of people in cages and separated families started making the rounds, there was a backlash. (1/2)

You don't have a travel bird feeder that you take with you wherever you go?

That reminds me of the visitor counters on websites from the 1990s that were often just numbers that just randomly slowly ticked up over time.

Even better. They do have a queue. But I guess its size is very limited. Is it managed on a ZX Spectrum? That would be on brand.

British Airways chat. "speak to agent" "I'm sorry, all my human colleagues are currently busy... wait a few minutes and type 'speak to agent'".

The concept of a queue hasn't made it to the British Airways chat system yet. Just... wow.

The Tech Guys Are Fighting. Literally.

This industry has officially jumped the shark, parachuted off a plane with the shark, and then grilled and eaten the shark. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/11/t...

Brilliant | Learn by doing Get smarter in 15 minutes a day with thousands of interactive, bite-sized lessons in math, science, data analysis, programming, computer science, AI, and beyond.

Now that Duolingo is a bit questionable, has anyone tried brilliant.org? It's set up very similarly but for learning various skills, like math. I'm two days into it and it's really cool so far.

I never bought into this "are we in a simulation" nonsense. But this is so absurd that it just has to be a scripted event.