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Adam Bumas

@bumas.bsky.social
1.5K followers 499 following 217 posts

Pronounced "BYOO-muss". He/They. adambumas.01 on Signal. Head of Research and Assistant Editor, @garbageday.email. Researcher, @panicworld.com. Other research and journalism elsewhere. The perfect level of online.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 21h
Ten years ago this week, Mark Zuckerberg revealed his darkest secret: He likes smoking meats. Celebrate the anniversary with me on Friday! partiful.com/e/gM2eOaRwZt...
partiful.com
“Live grilling in my backyard” at 10 Years: A Symposium | Partiful
Note: This event is on Zoom. The link will appear at theater.jacobford.com when the doors open. ❦ On Sunday October 9, 2016 at 4:30:42pm in Palo Alto, CA, Mark Zuckerberg went live. “Hey everyone. ...
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
@dmmaus.bsky.social congratulations (a little belated) on finishing Darths and Droids! I'm an internet culture journalist, would you be interested in talking about it?
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Reposted by Adam Bumas
Ryan Broderick @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Of the 14 songs that broke the same record "Choosin' Texas" just broke, nine of them were this century and six were in the last decade. Is a hit song still a hit if it climbs to the top of streaming charts and gets algorithmically stuck there for sixth months?
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
hey "nice" manbun haha it fucking sucks you hipster asshole (he turns around to reveal he is a parautilitarian from the federal bureau of control) oh fuck
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Next year you can do 🎶CAKE! CONTROL!
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
What is Verity, and are your children safe from him? I explain the algorithm's latest creation behind the paywall in today's @garbageday.email. www.garbageday.email/p/how-verity...
garbageday.email
How Verity became the new Skibidi Toilet
Read to the end for your granddad Cyclops
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
We’re independent, baybee! www.garbageday.email/p/an-update-...
garbageday.email
An update from your friendly neighborhood garbage man
Read to the end for a really good video about garlic bread
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Judges in Mega-City One don’t even say they are the law anymore, they just look at you like this
Brendan Fraser in The Whale with a Judge Dredd helmet
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
When you're dead, you can't post, meaning the algorithm has no interest in you, meaning it's a lot harder for anyone to mourn your passing. My latest for @garbageday.email: www.garbageday.email/p/you-have-t...
garbageday.email
You have to keep posting, even if you're dead
Here's your Garbage Intell
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I read the Dramione book for you but I can't follow you here.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Thanks for talking! Gift link for the Saturday morning cartoon crowd: www.garbageday.email/p/miles-mora...
garbageday.email
Miles Morales probably couldn’t happen now
Read to the end for a very good dog video
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
There's a lot more to the memes about Niu Lai than you might think. Behind the paywall today, I'm talking about everything from the stock market to The Shawshank Redemption, and throwing a little cold water on the idea that this is our anti-AI rallying point. www.garbageday.email/p/can-chines...
garbageday.email
Can Chinese AI cows be anti-AI?
Read to the end for the Tumblrpillar
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Got interviewed by @walthickey.bsky.social for the weekend edition of his excellent newsletter Numlock! I'm there to talk fanfic, but the interview got, shall we say, wide-ranging. www.numlock.com/p/numlock-su...
The counter example, of course, is that we finally got people to buy into Web3 and crypto and prediction markets and everything the Silicon Valley weirdos have been banging on about for 15 years by saying, “You can use this to make watching sports more exciting.”

And now we’ve found the thing that’s actually making sports more exciting to new audiences and it’s fanfiction about the boys kissing each other.

Exactly. Yeah, and I assume there are already bets on it. If Heated Rivalry was real, if that glorious moment after Scott Hunter won the Stanley Cup happened, you can bet there would be gay pools for every single player in the league.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Fans of this might be interested to see the Minecraft Mamdani which was on display this past spring at the NYC Video Game Festival.
A cardboard standee of a Minecraft avatar designed to resemble Zohran Mamdani
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
I'm in your ears! Thankful to @slate.com and Kate Lindsay for the chance to talk about the existential questions raised by Jimothy the Raccoon on today's ICYMI podcast. slate.com/podcasts/icy...
slate.com
We Need To Talk About Jimothy
The Seattle raccoon is not like any viral animal we’ve loved before.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
This feels like the right place to mention my pitch of "Elliot Page is Number 6" - keep literally everything the same and the metaphors all shift while retaining their commentary on Britain/culture/TV/etc.
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Reposted by Adam Bumas
Lisa Tozzi @lisatozzi.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
The definitive story of how a little raccoon dominated our feeds in the span of just five days. www.garbageday.email/p/how-to-go-...
garbageday.email
How to go viral in 2026, as told by Jimothy
Read to the end for some real good 'Project Hail Mary' fanart
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Not sure about that, but a quarter of the way in, they sure seem like the defining popular art form of the century; like film for the 20th or the novel for the 19th.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Nixonmaxxing is as overstated as many rightward trends. The Nixon Foundation, which started this all off earlier this year, has been getting way less engagement since then compared to both the JFK Foundation and Reagan Foundation. www.garbageday.email/p/the-piggie...
garbageday.email
The piggies eventually get sick of slop
Read to the end for some really good Backrooms fan art
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Mad respect for the QBlepon cards. Real heads know the law offices of Feedems, Feedems and Feedems!
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
My ring Atreides, my sietch Fremen, my ghola from Ix, let's go Knicks. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndvq...
youtube.com
Dune: Part Three | Official Trailer
YouTube video by Warner Bros.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
I wrote about betting on social media engagement for Bloomberg Businessweek a couple weeks ago, for anyone who missed it: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
bloomberg.com
Polymarket Lets You Bet on Vibes
By taking bets on social media clout, the prediction market has made itself vulnerable to bots.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
I wrote about FreddyLA7, the apex predator of World Cup tourists. Is he some kind of fake? Complicated question! More behind the paywall in today's @garbageday.email - link here: www.garbageday.email/p/the-intern...
Was Freddy’s Ronaldo posting calculated for maximum engagement? I don’t think that’s unfair to say. Does that mean he’s a fake? That’s more unfair — not to get philosophical, but if someone is this dedicated to Ronaldo, calling them “not a real Ronaldo fan” feels pretty silly. But either way, it shows that Freddy’s popularity wasn’t more or less organic than anything else you see on X. He wasn’t a nobody who exploded on our feeds, he’s a savvy, hardworking poster who knows to stick with a trend, and got in on a massive trend at the right time.

That might be enough to call him a psyop for a lot of people, though, just like with the whole Geese thing a few months ago. People have finally understood that they shouldn’t take everything that they scroll across at face value. And to build up any sense of collective media literacy for our algorithms, it looks like we’re gonna have to take it one level at a time. Right now we’re at “anything that gets too popular online is a fake/psyop/industry plant” — and it just isn’t that simple.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Lisa's contributions to digital news couldn't fit in a Bluesky post. So I'll just say how excited I am to be working with her!
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
Congratulations to canonical Knicks fan Homestar Runner (cc @strongbadnofoolin.bsky.social)
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Excited to make my debut for @bloomberg.com Businessweek! I'm writing about some hyper-online crypto communities and the effect they're having on the rest of finance. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
bloomberg.com
Polymarket Lets You Bet on Vibes
By taking bets on social media clout, the prediction market has made itself vulnerable to bots.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
YouTube's autodubbing is now so universal that the algorithm served me a @claireforny.bsky.social ad dubbed into Russian. Only recorded the last few seconds for all of Comrade Valdez's fans out there:
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Russia has ruled a K-pop omegaverse fic to be illegal, sentencing its author to 18 months in a labor camp. So is it worth reading? Get the link I tracked down in today's @garbageday.email and decide for yourself! www.garbageday.email/p/everything...
On May 8th, a Russian woman named Alexandra Kuzyk was sentenced to 18 months in a labor camp for posting gay fan fiction. Even though the fanfic was free, it was found by a court in Yekaterinburg to be illegal pornography. Ever since 2023, when Russia declared the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group to be an extremist organization, they’ve made multiple efforts to criminalize anything gay on the internet.

Naturally, the biggest question on my mind was, “can I read this criminally gay fanfic?”
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Another day, another concept I first learned from The Simpsons.
A Frinkiac screenshot of Krusty The Clown looking pained. The caption reads "We knew it contained spider eggs, but the hantavirus?"
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
My first ever scoop, such as it is: The DHS is treating a random shitposter X account like a legit news source, giving it exclusive info about foreign relations. www.garbageday.email/p/exclusive-...
garbageday.email
EXCLUSIVE: DHS gave a scoop to a random shitposter
Exclusive
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 03/05/2026
I unfortunately have meme news regarding the Saudi blockbuster: boxd.it/ee11qT
boxd.it
A review of Desert Warrior (2025)
The credits and location titles for this movie are all in white Impact all-caps. Way to make all the lavish location photography look like something reposted onto Truth Social.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
What’s your “Smilin’ Stan” editorial voice sobriquet?
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
Mets game on one bar TV, Artemis II splashdown on the other. I believe they call this a happy place.
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.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
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.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
We did it, JUICE. We did it.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Today I'm talking bimbo politics. See more behind the paywall, if you dare. www.garbageday.email/p/bimbos-in-...
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.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
At last, we have created the creature wanting form from A Creature Wanting Form
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
Spookperson/Goth Ms. Frizzle
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
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-...
garbageday.email
The death stranding of the video game industry
Read to the end for The Peg
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
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...
youtube.com
The Manosphere
YouTube video by Paul Leonard-Morgan - Topic
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
There's a whole academic paper about him by @rhetoricpj.bsky.social! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NGAN2...
tandfonline.com
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. ...
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Reposted by Adam Bumas
Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 09/03/2026
"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
garbageday.email
Waging war for the lulz
Read to the end for Zooey Deschanel’s Crumbl Cookie review
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
The rare almost uniformly good comment section, on Paul McCartney's personal Letterboxd (yes, really) letterboxd.com/pmccartney/f...
letterboxd.com
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...
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
WAGE! FUWY! CAWNAGE! THWOOD! Follow youw instincts! Aheheheheh - Elmer Fudd 2077
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Ryan Broderick @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
Here's @bumas.bsky.social on dark woke. www.garbageday.email/p/an-edgelor...
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
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...
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.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
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...
nytimes.com
Handsome at Any Cost
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
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.
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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
403: Man vs. Man 404: Man vs. Nature 500: Man vs. Self
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Syn @synnviks.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
"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
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