Fences are failing all over the park
The race to the bottom continues
I suppose you could construct a house of cards such that the removal of one card at the base, or even perhaps two or three, would not result in the disintegration of the entire structure. I don’t know this for a fact; I’m not an engineer (or a house-of-card-builder). It just seems to me that it must be theoretically possible, or at least be the sort of thing that people, more knowledgeable in these fields than I, have tried.
I mean: switching analogies, Jenga towers exist. Sometimes they teeter and totter and fall down. Sometimes all that weird randomness acts in defiance of layperson physics and keeps the sucker standing, even as the players remove brick after brick after brick. Sometimes you remove a brick so adroitly that in your glee you immediately punch The Nooner clean across the jaw, not intentionally but so resoundingly that you remember it years later. These are just the things I know about that.
But for all of this, woof, it sure does seem like if you pull a couple of key bricks, a couple of key cards, a couple of key components out of the system, the whole thing dominoes apart (another analogy-switch!) nightmarishly fast. Like it was never meant to be standing in the first place. Like our entire understanding of the structure was a consensus mass hallucination by our ape tribe in the face of a vast and unholy science.
Like maybe we, yes we, are too often dreaming of surety where none exists, for no reason other than that the house of cards hasn’t fallen yet, so surely, it cannot. Stability as habit, not proof. The sunk cost fallacy, extended lengthwise.
The Harry Potter shit list
Updated August 12, 2026
- Nicholas Hoult
- Bel Powley
- Tim Horton's
- Peter Serafinowicz
- Warwick Davis
- Lambert Wilson
- Anton Lesser
- Andy Greenwalt
- John Lithgow
- Janet McTeer
- Nick Frost
- Paapa Essiedu
- Simon Pegg
- Johnny Flynn
- Daniel Rigby
- Bertie Carvel
- Hugh Laurie
- Matthew McFadyen
- Riz Ahmed
- Mark Addy
- Michelle Gomez
- Kit Harrington
- Keira Knightley
- Alex Hassell
- Iwan Rheon
- James McAvoy
- Ruth Wilson
- Bill Nighy
- Cush Jumbo
- The New York Times
- Francesca Gardiner
- Jon Brown
- Mark Mylod
- Casey Bloys
- David Zaslav
- J.K. Rowling
Zaslavision
I was reading this piece on Deadline, and I give David Ellison a lot of well-deserved shit, but the unfortunate reality is that he’s just the awful, plasticine face of a corrupt system that has been destroying Hollywood jobs for decades. The blocking — or not blocking — of the Warnermount merger will not fix everything that’s been eroded away. The die is already cast: if the merger fails, Warner goes back up for sale as an even more distressed asset; more people don’t work, and maybe in the meantime the petulant manboy with the face of the Engineer from Prometheus pulls Paramount out of California entirely, because that’s apparently a thing a guy can do.
Anyways, it sucks. We’re well past the point of retrieval, now; kind of like how, even if we stopped burning fossil fuels today (spoiler: we won’t), we’re in for generations of climate catastrophe, just to pay back how feckless and stupid we and our parents have been for at least the last fifty years.
This is why my mother ends almost every conversation about these crises with “well! at least I’ll be dead!” — which, to be clear, is not a joke (assuming it even is a joke) that I morally or emotionally agree with.
Things I actually do like
I know what you’re thinking: what’s with all the doom and gloom, pal? Well!!! It’s not all bad!
- This TikTok account. Like most things TikTok I’ve jumped aboard way too late to really know what’s going on here but I think this kid’s father is a professional chef and occasionally she cooks something astonishing for him and the main reason I like this channel is the consistent, “Hey Paige, can you _________?” setup and Paige’s absolutely dry-toned “Sure.” I use that “Sure” a lot, these days, when receiving insane requests.
- This visit to our fairly comics-saturated city. I tend to forget! Also it tallies with my experience that the Silver Snail, once the home of my entire comics interest, is now so little a comic shop that it barely bears mentioning in a survey of the Toronto’s offerings. (Weird City)
- This. You gotta admit, I posed the shit out of this:
Let's all take some of Vi's energy into our future encounters.
