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gr🥚 💩los 🎃

@gregpoulos.com
91 followers 181 following 645 posts

Let me be outraged and annihilated, but may Thy enormous Library be justified, for one instant, in one being.

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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 17/09/2026
highly unlikely ... but you never know
Nábrók or nábuxur (calqued as necropants, literally "corpse breeches") are a pair of pants made from the skin of a dead human, which are believed in Icelandic witchcraft to be capable of producing an endless supply of money. [begin highlight] It is highly unlikely these pants ever existed outside of folklore. [end highlight]
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 05/09/2026
The context of this quote strongly implies that constraints will *negatively* affect the writing, but … he can’t actually mean that, can he? daringfireball.net/2026/09/writ...
“It's sophistry to argue that one can write within a constraint without the constraint affecting the quality of the writing.”
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 29/08/2026
sure, why not
Wikipedia article for "List of cities nicknamed after fruit"
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 16/08/2026
thank god for IHOP teaching America’s youth the things that really matter
Kids’ menu with a “Draw a Cool ‘S’” activity and two immaculately drawn cool “S”es in red crayon
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 11/08/2026
I’m genuinely baffled at how someone trying to promote “AI investigative journalism” thought it was a good idea to publish this. It’s embarrassingly bad work.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 16/07/2026
english football fans are a special breed
Personal life [edit]

Oatway's full name is Anthony Philip David Terry Frank Donald Stanley Gerry Gordon Stephen James Oatway. The reason behind this rather unusual name is the fact that both his parents were Queens Park Rangers fans, and decided to give their son the names of QPR's entire 1973 team. When his parents told his aunt the proposed name, she said "he'd look a right Charlie", and the name stuck. His son, also called Charlie, spent
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 12/07/2026
mitch taught us that a broken escalator is just temporarily stairs. i feel like a broken bench is … still just a bench?
a bench with a sign that says “bench temporarily closed”
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 06/07/2026
i found it. the most phoned-in “did you know?” placard of all time
DID YOU KNOW?

The mound is covered in slippery clay which would have been hard to climb.

The Castle motte is known locally as 'hangman's hill' but no one was actually hanged there.

300,000 people have visited the mound since it was opened to the public in 2006.

Oxford Preservation Trust received a grant of £4 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund which has allowed St. George's Tower and the Mound to open to the public.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 05/07/2026
dream is one day to get out of the bounty hunting business, find somewhere far away from space pirates, and open up a little coffee shop. maybe serve some brunch
a brunch/coffee shop named “aran”
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 25/06/2026
ronly honly bing
Bing's parents intended to name him after his father, which would have made him Rupert Henry Bing Jr., but his mother felt this was "too British for Texas" and compromised by abbreviating it to
R. H. Consequently, R. H. does not stand for any first or middle name.

When Bing applied for a visa, he was told that initials would not be accepted. He explained that his name was "R-only H-only Bing", and received a visa made out to "Ronly Honly Bing". A similar incident occurred when Bing became a professor at Wisconsin; asked what name to put on his nameplate, he answered "R only H only Bing" and later found his door read "Ronly Honly Bing".
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 06/06/2026
@ryannorth.ca demonstrated surprising restraint in refraining to share this paragraph from Wikipedia re: the gun-powered mousetrap
^ Reception
The United States Patent Office has issued more than 4,400 mousetrap patents.The gun-powered mousetrap proved inferior to spring-powered mousetraps descending from William C. Hooker's 1894 patent. However, the
1882 patent has continued to draw interest-including efforts to reconstruct a version of it-due to its unconventional design. In 2015, Vox listed Williams' device as Number 5 on its
list of "7 horrifying attempts at building a better mousetrap", and in 2012 Business Insider called it "the best mousetrap ever" While entirely impractical by today's standards, it is still insightful as it gives us a glimpse of an early form of what would become "Redneck Engineering"
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 04/06/2026
nice little “wait what?” moment from the Wikipedia article on Jack Russell terriers
A Jack Russell named Bothie made history in 1982 as part of the Transglobe Expedition.
Owned by explorers Ranulph and Ginny Fiennes, he became the first dog to travel to both the North and South Poles. (62] [631 This feat is unlikely to be repeated, as all dogs have been banned from Antarctica by the Antarctic Treaty nations since 1994, due to fears that they could transmit diseases to the native seal population.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 01/06/2026
The "see how much your account will grow" line chart on trumpaccount.com breaks when you slide it all the way to $0. I get that $0/month is a degenerate case, but the UI should either support the setting correctly or disallow it entirely. Amateur hour
a line on a chart that shows a sloping increase in value from $0 to just over $1k when you add $5/month to the accounta flat horizontal line when you add $0/month to the account, but the chart axes have disappeared for some reason so it's just a floating green line segment
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 16/05/2026
your periodic reminder that modern LLMs still do not pass the Turing Test
A prompt asking ChatGPT Pro to complete an ASCII art letter S.ChatGPT’s response:
I’ll preserve the same thick, slanted ribbon style and continue from the exact point you left off.

(after 2m 43s of processing time)

ASCII art of something that is definitely not an S
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 02/05/2026
absolute banger of a wikipedia lead section
Harry Grindell Matthews (17 March 1880 – 11 September 1941) was an English inventor who claimed to have invented a death ray in the 1920s.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 29/04/2026
I knew about Anscombe's Quartet, but this is next-level: researchers at Autodesk used simulated annealing to generate 12 datasets of visually distinct patterns which all have near-identical statistic properties ... and their starting set was a DINOSAUR (paging @ryannorth.ca)
12 plots of data points in different shapes: a blob, five horizontal lines, five vertical lines, an X, a star, two horizontal lines, nine dots, a circle, a bullseye, five lines slanting up, five lines slanting down, two vertical lines Data points on a grid plotted in the shape of a T. Rex
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 24/04/2026
i often think about my very first interaction with generative AI
Me: Can you tell me a short story about a killer whale named Oliver who lives under the ocean at a coral reef?ChatGPT: Once upon a time, in the depths of the ocean, there was a beautiful coral reef where a killer whale named Oliver lived. Oliver was a curious and playful whale, and he loved to explore the vibrant colors and teeming life of the coral reef.

One day, Oliver was swimming through the coral when he spotted a group of fish darting and weaving through the colorful coral branches. Oliver loved to chase fish, and he began to swim after them, darting and twisting through the water with ease.

As he chased the fish, Oliver suddenly realized that he was swimming into a dark and dangerous part of the coral reef. The water was colder and murkier here, and the coral was twisted and broken. Oliver hesitated, unsure whether he should continue.But just as he was about to turn back, Oliver saw a flash of silver in the water ahead of him. It was a huge, shiny fish, unlike any he had ever seen before. The fish was beautiful and graceful, with shimmering scales and piercing eyes.

Oliver was captivated by the fish, and he forgot all about the danger. He began to swim faster and faster, determined to catch the fish and make it his own. But as he drew closer, Oliver realized that the fish was not what it seemed. It was a trap, set by a cunning and ruthless predator.

Oliver tried to turn and swim away, but it was too late. The predator had him in its grasp, and there was nothing Oliver could do. He struggled and fought, but the predator was too strong. In the end, Oliver was forced to submit, and he became the prey.

The end.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 19/04/2026
Incredible that the guy who changed his legal name to LivingForGod AndCountry isn’t even the most deranged person running for California governor
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 19/04/2026
There are always a bunch of governor candidates in the California Primary Election Voting Guide whose blurbs are a bit unhinged, but this is the first time I’ve seen one come with A DISCLAIMER
Photo of the voting guide with the candidate statement of Don J. Grundmann, with a disclaimer that reads “The views and opinions expressed by the candidates are their own and do not represent the views and opinions of the Secretary of State's office.” Followed by two paragraphs of absolutely deranged antisemitic white nationalist garbage
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 12/03/2026
what is this, Monopoly for DOGS??
BARK PLACE
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 27/02/2026
TIL (from worksinprogress.co/issue/animal...)
Most monoclonal antibodies are generated using Chinese hamster ovary, or CHO, cells, which initially descended from cells taken from a hamster’s ovary and were later immortalized.8 Robert Briggs Watson, a Rockefeller Foundation field staff member based in China, smuggled these hamsters out of the country on one of the last Pan Am flights from Shanghai, just before Mao Zedong and the Communists took over. Today, CHO cells make about 70 percent of all therapeutic proteins sold on the market.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 22/01/2026
My "Order of the Arrow is not a secret organization" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.
Scouting America maintains that the Order of the Arrow is not a secret organization. It instead utilizes the “attractiveness of the unknown” in its ceremonies to create a perception of mystery among non-members.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 21/01/2026
it is as the prophecy foretold www.bbc.com/news/article...
The famous Far Side "Cow tools" comic
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 14/01/2026
from @hiphination.bsky.social
I don't think it is an accident that very young children have a very high familiarity-dependent aesthetic, while adults have a higher surprise-dependent aesthetic. That children want to repeatedly listen to Cocomelon at an age where they still get sad every time mom or dad leave, and want to eat spaghetti and meatballs every time they go to the diner, has to be a feature of cognitive development. Part of maturity is to move out of familiarity-dependent aesthetic toward surprise-dependent ones. One of the things to lament about the dominance of pop and short-form is that it is a kind of arrested development. The transition to surprise-dependent aesthetics is not easy. I know people who are in their 30s and refuse to touch Indian food (their loss) and I knew people in their 60s in my family who refused to eat raw lettuce (because in China, they always cooked their lettuce.)
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 07/01/2026
in case you were looking for something else to feel bad about
Analyst Insight: The consumer purchasing a non-certified Mexican avocado in a U.S. supermarket is participating in a supply chain that is functionally identical to the drug trade. The profits from these "blood avocados" are commingled with fentanyl revenue, purchasing the same weapons and bribing the same officials.
The U.S. demand for year-round guacamole is, in effect, a subsidy for the CJNG.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 05/12/2025
TIL about mandatewashing
According to historian Susan Pedersen, colonial administration in the mandates did not differ substantially from colonial administration elsewhere. Even though the Covenant of the League committed the great powers to govern the mandates differently, the main difference appeared to be that the colonial powers spoke differently about the mandates than their other colonial possessions.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 02/12/2025
i always try to get my wordle to tell a little story
BUTTS
DRAIN
POOPY
CHALK
LEACH
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 21/11/2025
i know there are differing opinions on how to punctuate possessives on words ending in S, but Kotaku’s approach is a new one on me
screenshot of text with a single open quotation mark being used in place of an apostrophe
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 20/11/2025
my daughter has got a book out from the library called “After the Kill”. it is about what happens after lionesses kill a zebra on the savannah. this is the final page
An impressionistic watercolor of a zebra skeleton on the ground. “The smooth bones shine white under the setting
African sun. They will lie there on the Serengeti Plain until they slowly turn to dust.”
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 19/08/2025
this is a big moment for me. alea iacta est
a Jeep Rubicon from one sidea Jeep Rubicon from the other side
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 12/08/2025
I love a good Wikipedia table of contents
Contents
(Top)
Phoenix
Central Avenue Corridor
Cemeteries
Historic structures related to “The Trunk Murderess”
Landmarks
Museums
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 09/08/2025
I know it’s the oldest news in the world, but the fake president names that AI invented still crack me up languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70401
William H. Brunsen 
Abraham Lingdin
Rutherpord G. Haves
James A. Garpald 
Thebdore Rogsevest
Henbert Bowen
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 22/07/2025
three delicious birria tacos in a to-go box
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 10/07/2025
It's this thing
The panel from Bea Wolf pointing at the thing I'm asking about.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 29/05/2025
the coat of arms of the Dutch town of Hensbroek is a hen wearing trousers
a hen wearing yellow trousers, on a red field
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 09/05/2025
I’m pretty sure the numbers come mainly from the water used by electricity generation, not used by the data centers directly. docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy04ost...
There are substantial regional differences in the use of hydroelectric power, and therefore a thorough understanding of local conditions is necessary to properly interpret these data. There are river basins where evaporation is a substantial percentage of the total river flow, and this evaporation reduces the available supply both for downstream human consumption as well as having environmental consequences for coastal ecosystems that depend on fresh water supply. On the other hand, consider the case of a hydroelectric project on a relatively small river, which provides the fresh water supply to a major metropolitan area. In this case, the reservoir may be a valuable fresh water resource, especially if evaporation as a percentage of the river flow rate is low. If the downstream consequences for human consumption and coastal ecosystems are low, then the water consumption from hydroelectric projects would be irrelevant-whether or not electric generation occurs, the evaporation will still happen as a necessary consequence of providing fresh water supply to the region. These issues are beyond the scope of this paper, but must be considered when interpreting these results.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 14/04/2025
low key one of the greatest movie posters of all time
Movie poster for THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN with the caption: “UNWITTINGLY, HE TRAINED A DOLPHIN TO KILL THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 21/03/2025
there’s some deep movie trivia on its imdb page
Jamie Lee Curtis helps a spy in this movie, but she was married to a spy, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, in
1994's "True Lies.'
1C
Helpful • 0 90 4
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 18/03/2025
nnngh
2000 day streak for the NYTimes crossword
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 12/02/2025
the best thing about being a millennial is that you probably have a Calvin & Hobbes that was published the day you were born. much better than a horoscope!
Calvin: Hi Susie! Guess what I brought for lunch 
Susie: No! Go sit by someone else, OK? You always say your lunch is something revolting, and I don’t want to hear it!
Calvin: Gee whiz, what’s wrong with you? My lunch is peanut butter. What’s so disgusting about that?!
Susie: Hmph. I’m glad that one day out of the year you can be civil.
Calvin: It’s my DESSERT that’s gross! Look, a thermos full of phlegm!
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 01/01/2025
so long 2024
San Francisco skyline from a departing ferry at sunset
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 30/11/2024
I don’t know if this sign is as reassuring as the TSA thinks it is
Sign at the airport that reads: “On October 29, 2024 a TSA Officer Prevented this handgun and loaded magazine with 6 rounds from getting onto your flight at PVD” with a picture of a handgun
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 20/11/2024
Junior Mints, the candy that makes you say: “Eh, I guess I won’t throw it out”
photo of a small box of junior mints on a wooden desk
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 14/11/2024
looted cranachs
a screenshot from Wikipedia with a heading that says “Looted Cranachs”
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 25/10/2024
tfw you’re reading a Wikipedia article and suddenly a factoid comes out of nowhere that’s just like “It is interesting to note that Richard Nixon sucked”
Sports. It is interesting to note that President Richard Nixon (an armchair coach) once
"recommended" the team run an end-around play by wide receiver Roy Jefferson. Allen agreed, choosing to run the play against the San Francisco 49ers in the 1971 NFC Divisional playoff game. Jefferson was tackled by the 49ers' Cedrick Hardman for a 13-yard loss on the
play, a game the Redskins lost by four points.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 20/10/2024
if Anguilla passed a law prohibiting the use of copyrighted work in training AI models, it could revoke SO MANY .ai domain names
A .ai domain can be suspended or revoked, if the domain is involved in illegal activity such as violating trademarks or copyrights. Usage must not violate the laws of Anguilla.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 02/10/2024
please excuse me while i walk into the ocean
The point is, the scale of your world and the problems it addresses are key predictors of adoption and commercial potential. Think of the difference between Lord of the Rings and A Wizard of Earthsea.
Both have much in common, but LotR focuses on a larger-than-life struggle between good and evil, while Earthsea is a personal psychological journey. Saving the universe from an evil overlord will always outshine overcoming childhood trauma in Boring, Oregon.
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 29/09/2024
reading this title and subtitle made me feel like I was having a stroke
Wikipedia title card showing a picture of a car and the title “Lagonda Taraf” and the subtitle “British luxury saloon”
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 16/09/2024
i’m very special
I’m user #33,078 on bluesky
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gr🥚 💩los 🎃 @gregpoulos.com · 13/09/2024
I hadn’t made this connection before. the juxtaposition here is truly heartbreaking
Aaron died in 2013. He took his own life, having been hounded by the Department of Justice for years over the crime of (literally) downloading too many articles from JSTOR. Upon his death, the entire internet mourned. Books have been written about him, documentaries have been produced. It felt back then as though there was this massive, Aaron-shaped hole. There kind of still is, even today.
Sam Altman and OpenAI have scraped practically the entire Internet. JSTOR,
YouTube, Reddit... so long as the content is publicly accessible, OpenAl's stance appears to be that copyright law is only for little people.
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