responding to an absurdly stupid take by saying “these are the people i have to share a highway with” has replaced saying a lot of not very nice things about people with said takes. for me

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i don't do bad sauce passes

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祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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DEAR READER
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roma★
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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@istudypirates
responding to an absurdly stupid take by saying “these are the people i have to share a highway with” has replaced saying a lot of not very nice things about people with said takes. for me
this is going around twitter rn but im also super curious: please tell me your top four comfort movies that you’re always down to watch bc my friend thinks mine are ridiculous and now we’ve realised everyone’s version of “comfort” is hilariously different
There was recently a copyright infringement case in YA and I need everyone to know that the following sentence was in the legal decision:
“Hot, sexy, dangerous boys, central to virtually all young adult romance novels, cannot be copyrighted.”
“Regarding setting, the court held that both works taking place in Alaska high schools was not protectable because Alaska is a public place and setting a teen novel in a high school is a common genre convention.”
Freeman v. Deebs-Elkenaney | Loeb & Loeb LLP
I've read the entire decision (skimming over the purely legal precedent/definitions bit) and here are some of my favorite bits:
“indeed, it seems that the Pacific Northwest (Twilight) is a common locale for finding vampires and werewolves at a high school” oh my god
for those who are (rightfully!) concerned about animal welfare in tik toks: Wildcat Ridge Sanctuary is a true sanctuary and this animal is safe and happy!
Wildcat Ridge is not only an accredited sanctuary, they have a policy of not displaying their residents to the public. It is a retirement home for cats that should never have been pets or attractions. There is no pressure on the animals to be in front of people, they interact as they choose with the sanctuary staff and vets and that’s it.
who remembers this tweet
this is your annual pride month reminder that queer rose is real
what do you mean my childhood affected me
i have terrible news
this trend of shitting on peer-reviewed academic studies in favor of tweeting “we already knew this was happening” is so soul-crushing. not to be an elitist cunt, but we have got to open the schools again. people genuinely seem to have forgotten that their personal lived experience isn’t indicative of the larger population, AND IF IT IS…… then you need researchers to support these assertions from a relevant data pool instead of a blog post from 2013 💀
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
Edited down a long tweet. (x)
[Video description: Gritty is turning the crank on a flagpole to raise the Progress Pride Flag. He gesticulates angrily that the flag is not blowing in the wind, then gestures offscreen. The flag begins blowing. As Gritty begins raising the flag more, the camera pans out to show a man in a suit and sunglasses, looking like a stern Secret Service agent, is holding a leafblower that points at the flag. End description.]
text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]
you learn something new everyday. unless you're a historian. then you learn something old
Pickleball — sport's continued explosive growth, October 2025
So like, the thing about pickleball that nobody who writes about pickleball actually wants to engage with is that it's a real estate story before it's a sport story — the whole reason you've heard of it, the whole reason it has the cultural footprint it has rather than being one more retiree hobby alongside mahjong and pinochle, is that it solved a specific problem for a specific class of property owner at a specific moment, namely: what do you do with all this fucking tennis infrastructure.
Because here's what happened. Tennis participation in America peaked in the late 70s/early 80s (the Borg/McEnroe moment, the wooden-racket-to-graphite transition, all of it) and then declined more or less continuously for thirty-plus years, but the courts didn't go anywhere. The courts are capital improvements, they're on the books, they're part of the amenity package the HOA sold the units on, the country club's dues structure assumes them, the municipal parks budget allocated for them in 1978 and the line item never got removed. So you've got this enormous installed base of tennis courts in America — public, private, semi-private, the whole spectrum — built for a participation level that no longer exists, sitting there racking up maintenance costs and producing no revenue, and the sport that was supposed to use them has been bleeding players to golf and (briefly) to running and (more durably) to literally just sitting indoors.
And then somebody figures out — and this part is genuinely beautiful, in a depressing way — that you can stripe four pickleball courts inside the footprint of one tennis court. Four. The conversion costs almost nothing (paint and a portable net), the new sport is dramatically easier to pick up (the underhand serve, the small court, the fact that anyone with intact knees can play passable pickleball within an hour where tennis takes years to be non-humiliating), and crucially the demographic that already owns property adjacent to tennis courts — suburban, aging, time-rich, looking for low-impact social exercise — is precisely the demographic for whom pickleball was designed. The sport is a key cut to fit a lock that was already there.
So the explosion you've been reading about for five years now isn't an organic cultural movement so much as the resolution of a long-deferred capital allocation problem — what do we do with the tennis courts — meeting a long-deferred social problem — what do retired Boomers do with their afternoons now that the kids are gone and the golf course is six hours and seventy bucks. The HOAs were going to do something with the tennis infrastructure regardless. Pickleball was the path of least resistance.
Which is why, by the way, the lawsuits — and there are a lot of them now, this is a real legal subgenre — are mostly about noise. Pickleball makes a distinctive percussive pock sound that the suburban built environment was not engineered to absorb (tennis is much quieter, the felt ball, the longer rallies), and the courts get built right up against the property lines because they were already there as tennis courts and nobody thought about the acoustic profile when they restriped. People are losing their minds in Naples and Scottsdale and the inner-ring suburbs of basically every metro because the amenity that was sold to them as "courts, beautifully maintained" has become "courts, beautifully maintained, in continuous use from 7 AM to dusk by people who could not possibly care less about your home office's Zoom calls."
And the manufacturer story is its own thing — the paddles cost forty bucks to make and sell for two hundred, the carbon-fiber paddle market has the same profit margin structure as golf clubs which is to say criminal, the pro tour situation is its own consolidation story with the PPA absorbing the MLP — but that's a different essay. The real story is that you're watching the fungibility of recreational real estate get arbitraged in real time, and the question worth asking is what happens to all this pickleball capacity in 2040 when the demographic wave that drove the conversion ages out of being able to physically play, because you can't easily stripe a pickleball court back into a tennis court (the surface degrades differently, the lines confuse everyone), and you definitely can't stripe it into anything else productive, so what you've actually built is a one-generation amenity that's going to sit empty across an enormous geography, racking up the same maintenance costs the tennis courts did, while the next demographic cohort — which is going to want something we can't predict yet, because nobody in 1995 predicted pickleball — looks at all this striped concrete and thinks, well, what the fuck do we do with this.
saw someone trying to roast this guy on reddit but all the comments were just like "fuck off, that's based"
nature is healing
FUCK YEAH.
They say ooooh be a good boy for daddy and you'll get a reward. But then the reward is just gay sex. This is bullshit. I wanted a skateboard
Then they say if you're a bad boy daddy will punish you. But what's the punishment? More gay sex! You can't escape it. This whole damn place is in the pocket of Big Sex
i love the implication behind the blair witch project (1999) that someone found the filmstock that was the last earthly remnants of three college film students and thought you know what would really honor these people? if we edited this record of their madness and gruesome demise up real nice and sent it to film festivals
#well yeah they were film students. it's what they would have wanted
(via @big-ass-magnet