What’s your “Smilin’ Stan” editorial voice sobriquet?

A bar with two TVs over it. The left one is showing a baseball game, the right one shows Earth out of the window of the Integrity spacecraft.

Mets game on one bar TV, Artemis II splashdown on the other. I believe they call this a happy place.

We can talk it over in DMs. The G-Man is one of those foundational character archetypes at this point - he's crossed the blood/brain barrier.

We did it, JUICE. We did it.

In the early 2020s, bimbofication and its definition of the bimbo spread, like so many other things from the older internet, to TikTok. And it was hard to reconcile the fantasy image of the transformed bimbo with the real world where she now had to exist. We got a round of thinkpieces on bimbos, plus a second volley about himbos. We got a Bimbo Manifesto. The “bimbology” wasn’t uncritical, but since it was centered on the “seggs” app, it couldn’t deal with the reality that this was a niche online sex thing before it was a serious social phenomenon. Which was a problem that’s gotten worse. Because in 2026, most of culture can be directly traced back to niche online sex things. Our slang is incel doggerel, our media diet is a collective goon cave, and our government is insecure memelords.

Today I'm talking bimbo politics. See more behind the paywall, if you dare.

www.garbageday.email/p/bimbos-in-...

At last, we have created the creature wanting form from A Creature Wanting Form

Spookperson/Goth Ms. Frizzle

The death stranding of the video game industry Read to the end for The Peg

The Epic layoffs today are another sign of the same reason we're all talking about DLSS 5. The video game industry is showing signs of a mass extinction - a death stranding, so to speak.

I wrote about it last week:
www.garbageday.email/p/the-death-...

The Manosphere YouTube video by Paul Leonard-Morgan - Topic

It is with some regret that I report Paul Leonard-Morgan did a first-rate original score for the new Louis Theroux manosphere doc.

Imagine blasting this and then having to say its name out loud: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxqn...

The painter of right: Jon McNaughton and the conservative challenge to visual culture In the last decade, conservative artist Jon McNaughton has gained notoriety. This essay reads McNaughton to make better sense of conservatism's relationship with liberal democratic visual culture. ...

There's a whole academic paper about him by @rhetoricpj.bsky.social! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NGAN2...

Waging war for the lulz Read to the end for Zooey Deschanel’s Crumbl Cookie review

"Can you ironically use Halo fancams to inspire a draft? Can you entertain your CHUD followers with fashwave Agartha edits when gas is $10 a gallon?" www.garbageday.email/p/waging-war... @bumas.bsky.social @garbageday.email

A review of Paul McCartney: Man on the Run (2025) It’s crazy; like a period of my life flashing before my eyes. It’s wonderful because it’s full of different emotions and facets. One of the big things for me is seeing so much of Linda, which is great...

The rare almost uniformly good comment section, on Paul McCartney's personal Letterboxd (yes, really)

letterboxd.com/pmccartney/f...

WAGE!
FUWY!
CAWNAGE!

THWOOD! Follow youw instincts! Aheheheheh

- Elmer Fudd 2077

Here's @bumas.bsky.social on dark woke.
www.garbageday.email/p/an-edgelor...

Discord itself isn’t helping with the misinformation. Their official announcement states the pictures used to estimate your age will “never leave the user’s device.” Despite this, after the usual exploits for faking these pictures were found, X users noticed that the platform is verifying some users’ ages with Persona. That’s a startup funded by Peter Thiel (him again!) that stores all the personal data it analyzes. Discord later said it was only using Persona partially in the UK, and they would only store the images for “up to seven days.” Which means, even in the face of all the backlash, Discord’s promise to protect their users’ identities held strong for about three days. There hasn’t been any update as prominent as the initial announcement.

Discord has already quietly broken its promise that its new age verification tools will keep your data on your device.

Here's the basics - read more behind the paywall in today's Garbage Day. www.garbageday.email/p/clavicular...

Handsome at Any Cost

Hey, @nyt-first-said.bsky.social, you've got your work cut out for you with this profile of Clavicular.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/s...

Thanks for the ping! This video gets at least one thing wrong: There ARE separate apps for TikTok outside the US on both Android and iOS. This isn't just Douyin, it's two apps both called TikTok.

Anything I say about the algorithm would be speculation, but that I know for sure.

403: Man vs. Man
404: Man vs. Nature
500: Man vs. Self

"For the good of upholding family values, men should be empowered by medical science to carry a mixed species baby to term!"

-Scott Adams (RIP) & Larry Charles

Dilbert mpreg update (thanks to @synnviks.bsky.social) - this is both Dilbert mpreg and Dilbert forcefem.

Note the bottom right cel - 1.7 million live viewers for Part 2.

Wikipedia descriptions for the last two episodes of the Dilbert animated series, where Dilbert gets pregnant.

I, for one, didn't know the short-lived Dilbert animated series ended with an mpreg two-parter.

We Were at ICE’s invasion in Minneapolis YouTube video by Panic World

@ryanhatesthis.bsky.social and my reporting for this very different Panic World ep
youtu.be/8cjxGMJIAS4?...

There are plenty of other "pretty ring times" than springtime. When donuts come out of the fryer, for example

Beyond the discourse, though, it also convinced a lot more people to play the game. Data from SteamCharts shows that after the awards, the game’s concurrent player count went from a daily average of 14,000 to 45,000 within a few days. Sales estimates from SteamDB show that the week after the awards, Expedition 33 went from Steam’s 12th best-selling non-free game to number two, behind Arc Raiders. This is exactly what awards are supposed to do. Whether or not you think Expedition 33 counts as an indie game, The Game Awards are accomplishing their most basic goal of giving attention and distinction to their winners. This wasn’t always the case — from the records we can find, there wasn’t any comparable bump back when the awards were called the Spike TV VGAs.

As @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social reports from on the ground in Minneapolis, I'm holding the fort at @garbageday.email with our monthly Garbage Intelligence issue.

We have all The Game Awards numbers, including how much attention all those wins gave Clair Obscur.

www.garbageday.email/p/the-oscars...

I've spent months writing about how Bluesky's silent majority is mostly people here to draw and/or view horny cartoons. When I reported on this past week's dust-up over Isabelle from Animal Crossing, I knew I had to take a moment to mention the only contingent who emerged unscathed.

Last month, I diagnosed the problem with Bluesky as one of entrenchment. Virtually every user has migrated to the site from somewhere else. Since Bluesky prioritizes personal curation and confines algorithmic popularity to the Discover feed, it’s easy for your entire timeline to look the way you’re used to from back in the day, whether that’s Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook. And Molloy isn’t just a big Bluesky account, her posts stand astride all these communities — she’s a trans woman and prominent ex-Twitter poster who frequently writes about politics and media. The range — and rage — of the reactions to her post show what happens when all these subcultures that usually keep to themselves are forced to share the same reply section. “Old Twitter had its own pile-on dynamics, but the sheer speed of this felt different.” Molloy said. “I saw something I thought was funny and weird, posted about it, and within hours I was being called a Nazi and getting told I should die.”

@bumas.bsky.social spoke to @parkermolloy.com about the curvier Isabelle drama that's been tearing Bluesky apart all week
www.garbageday.email/p/the-sexy-a...

A bird of prey on top of a baseball foul pole.

Fowl pole

Thank you so very much to each and every one of Garbage Day’s 100,000 followers. It’s an honor and a privilege that I’m able to be so online for a living.