“It’s a couple of things that work beautifully in concert. First: no music. Audiences are so sophisticated, but what they’re not accustomed to is not being told how to feel,” Wyle says. “You take all that out and it forces a level of engagement where you’re now looking for clues within the frame of the screen, which forces you to look up from your phone. And I think that is extremely engaging, especially to young viewers who aren’t accustomed to being asked to participate in a nonpassive way in the viewing experience.

“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”

Wyle makes eye contact for his next point, delivering it with a Robby-esque matter-of-factness. “Fourth point: The election went the other way,” he says with a shrug. “We could have been a really good show with a lot of nice things to say in a perfectly normal Kamala Harris universe. And instead we became almost a beacon of hope and humanity in an alternative universe. But in the midst of that, fifth point—this is essentially competence porn. You’re watching really smart, dedicated people do what only they know how to do at a level that you don’t know how to do it, and you’re so fucking glad that they’re there doing it, and compartmentalizing their own stuff to put your broken pieces back together. You’re so reassured by knowing that there are people out there that laugh and joke and have the ability to lock in like that.”

this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...

sometimes this place is really unpleasant but I suppose everywhere is these days

.............or the bo-ats have been at sea long enough they're down to the mediocre meals, and APO/FPO mail is blooey because the whole region's normal supply lines are fucked at the moment

I'm gonna start a starving tripoli sailor botnet, someone get me molly shah

this is exactly why I get so annoyed by people who say “oh I live in a blue state, it doesn’t matter who I vote for so I’ll protest vote for the Green Party”

when you’re up against fascists, you need as big of a margin as possible

I hate to inform people but Palestinians aren’t perfect victims and some of them may even be annoying and running scripts because they were software engineers before they lost everything in a genocide

the scammers are now compromising accounts to get their spam in front of more eyes. but it's just scripts!!

anyway it's good that after a year Molly has figured out that she needs to start walking back her shit. it's worth thinking about how many people's money she's funneled to crime rings in SEA

Maybe another way to put this would be that after you've done all the necessary things to be in a position to win at all, including making necessary compromises to get your coalition to around half the voting population, you have a tiny bit of budget left over to do what's right over what's popular.

I’ve run campaigns and worked on campaigns. If you don’t vote, do you know how much we worry about what you think? Zilch. Zero. We don’t waste money contacting you, knocking your door, trying to figure out what you want. You’re a political nullity, triaged away in favor of consistent voters.

I wrote something: sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/03...

It should be legal to send a 800V pulse down somebody’s TCP connection.

Moderation decisions should be based on behaviors performed inside your own environment and offsite activity shouldn’t count, unless you can figure out a way to do that and avoid brigading, faked screenshots, and AI-generated falsehoods (everything after the “unless” is basically impossible).

We just need to force all new Trek writers to mainline Horatio Hornblower, Master and Commander, and Victory at Sea before they’re allowed to write a page

It’s an object lesson in how one sufficiently compelling, sufficiently polluted source of information can change politics by getting into the heads of all the right people. I think this site is a meaningful driver of the new left obsession with Israeli influence in the US

Pretty flabbergasting how much of the fringe left is now openly in the thrall of this antisemitic conspiracy site and its carefully distorted data

I'm building an ultra-realistic soccer simulator, ama.

A lot of people have been kinda befuddled by the phenomenon of "every white pro baseball player is a Republican" but it makes sense once you understand "your parents are rich enough to think spending $25k/year and countless hours on travel baseball seems reasonable" is the filter for participation

Anyway, my opinion about Star Trek, which is Good and Correct, is that two things have gone wrong: it is best served by 22 episode seasons, which streaming has killed, and also it is a franchise that needs you to inhabit the worldview of a Centre-Left Army Guy that few in modern US TV do.

I firmly believe the root of all brain poisoning is social pressure: people get pulled towards increasingly crazy views when speaking out against those views (or the people that hold them) would result in social sanction.

I feel like the amount of brain-poisoning among people on the left has sharply increased recently for no clear reason, including a lot of folks who I respect

Re: the red triangle substack, which is as multiple people have pointed out, evil corrosive to one’s soul, and “troublingly detached from reality.”

it’s not helpful to the Israeli cause to argue in favor of genociding Palestinians and it’s not helpful to the Palestinian cause to argue in favor of genociding Israelis

if you haven’t seen what this is about, might want to skip Substacks with a red triangle preview image for a couple of days

9.1C in a ten kilometer radius would imply that an average data center has a heat and energy density on par with some of your cooler stars, and I dont think thats likely?

On some level I’m not sure my mind can quite grasp the raw stupidity of conducting a massive decapitation strike against Iran with no day two plan whatsoever, and then immediately finding yourself in a worldwide energy crisis with no off-ramp because you didn’t expect Iran to react

Remember, the war with Iran is necessary because it’s unacceptable to have aggressive governments run by theocratic lunatics launching unprovoked attacks on the rest of the world

“This whole thing smacks of gender” I say as I ignore every member of the National Domestic Workers union in favor of angry oyster guy

“It is better to remain silent and be considered a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

Claude is so slow tonight that I understand how Codex users feel.

The vast majority of the desperately poor people in this country are most certainly not regularly posting on bluesky dot com. They are single mothers trying to get through their grueling hourly shift and then post work childcare duties.

it's nice that janet mills and graham platner are the first two people you meet in the far harbor dlc, but they should've put ed in too, there's only 12 mainers. show some effort, todd