iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026

I also feel like I am losing what’s left of my mind when smart people who work in media use Facebook’s apps and discourse about it on Twitter as if they have no theory of how media has worked for two decades or agency in the process.

Katie Notopoulos
@katienotopoulos
This makes me feel insane! This is faux-hallmark pap
and if you believe for 1 sec that he cares about
helping people "spending more time with family" or
"opening a bakery" you don't need to wait for Al to kill
us; you're stupid enough to drown from looking up at
the rain

Quote post from Alexandr Wang
@alexandr_wan • Sep 25
Here's to the wanting. Here's to the dreaming.
Here's to everyone.

Katie Notopoulos • @katienotopoulos
To be clear: I am very much enjoying using
Muse and find it helpful but I do not believe it
is born form some idealistic self-help dream of
empowering aspiring bakery operators

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

Minor league baseball is such an awesome feature of America

Pano shot from a minor league baseball stadium

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026

Well. We had a good run. Quite possibly the greatest return on a $0.99 investment I’ve ever made, the fidget toy and security blanket that’s been ride or die since 2009, doesn’t seem to load on iOS 27. RIP Strategery, you were a real one.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026

Exceedingly, perhaps a bit *too*, proud of this plywood sheet-cutting benchtop I put together to fit on my Bora Centipede workbench. Broke down TWENTY SIX full sheets of plywood by myself his weekend thanks to this bad boy

A 4x5 sheet of plywood with two pieces of rigid foam attached and a jig hanging in the center about a foot off the ground. A full sheet of plywood slots into the hanging jig and then lets you tilt the full sheet onto the table

Two dowels on the underside at either corner allow the tabletop to fit into the dog holes of the portable workbench.

A view of the portable workbench with the benchtop taken off. You can see two clamps on the underside made from some scrap boards, they secure the benchtop to the workbench via a 2½” bolt and a couple of wingnuts

The bench with a full sheet of plywood, a cutting guide for size, and a track saw

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026

This summer, I’ve commissioned a series of portraits of artists and writers important to me, to be completed by a hyper-local artist interested in subsidizing their lavish lifestyle (my older son)

Portraits

James Baldwin
Ursula le Guinn
Octavia Butler
Tressie McMillan Cottom
bell hooks
Michael Pollan
John Coltrane
Stevie Wonder
Thich Nhat Hanh
Nina Simone
Mark Bittman

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/06/2026

Was it worth the lost sleep and general disruption to my evening to get a huge unironic thank you and hug this morning? Every damn time.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/05/2026

This morning I woke up and our son had brought our ski gear up from the basement and had a list of places in Chile and Australia fit for June skiing. He’s bored and funny, I also think he’s internalized he’s not going to be able to do his favorite sport in 20 years.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2026

It would be a massive failure of democracy if we let AI companies get away with paying residents to just build data centers. The “obvious solution” is strong environmental regulation and if they want to build new capacity make them pay for green infrastructure upgrades.

To that point, Ben Thompson suggests (in today’s subscriber-only Stratechery column) that the industry simply pay residents:

Instead, the most obvious solution is the most crass: simply start giving people money. If data centers are a resource for our AI future, then start paying people for that resource. If that data center up the road weren’t sold to my neighbors based on amorphous tax benefits that my local government may or may not spend appropriately, but rather were to result in a check in the mailbox every year, I suspect you could get a lot more people on board!

Just to put some numbers on this, the data center up the road was expected to be 1.6 GW, which could generate around $3 billion in annual operator revenue. DeForest, the village it was to be built in, has around 11,500 people. You could pay every person in DeForest $10,000 a year for 3.8% of annual revenue grossed by the data center — I bet that proposal would have been approved, and I bet that the operator could very easily pass those costs on to the actual data center users (it also highlights how relatively pathetic QTS’s $50 million commitment was).

I do get how ridiculous this sounds, but ridiculous is how we do things in America.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/04/2026

Most nights I’m excited to start my shift as short order cook and discover a new random bit of detritus left in the kitchen that will be somewhere between mildly annoying and outright poisonous.

My cutting board littered with does-not-occur-in-nature pink plastic egg shell pieces.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/03/2026

“Cool mornings, warm evenings: a study in contrast” (2026, mixed media)

The coat rack in my home office, containing no fewer than five jackets, workshirts, and/or shirt-jackets, as well as a beaten up cap that has been used as a toy by the resident sheepdog.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/02/2026

It’s important to know how to communicate with your partner

A message from my wife in Spanish. I have responded “¡Ok!”

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/02/2026

If you see this guy do NOT let him into your home he WILL break something.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/02/2026

The best time to federate with Threads was never. The best time to defederate from Threads is right fucking now. www.npr.org/2026/02/19/nx-s1-571853…

ALLYN: Well, he was on the defensive. A
lawyer for the family suing Meta drew his
attention to several internal documents
obtained through discovery, and one of
them showed how Meta knew about 30%
of 10- to 12-year-olds in the U.S. were
using Instagram. And a strategy document
showed how, quote, "if we want to win big
with teens, we must bring them in as
tweens.
" Zuckerberg now said, you know,
his words were being taken out of context
and that some of these memos were being
misrepresented. But he did admit, though,
that many young people lie about their
age to get on Instagram and that cracking
down is just really hard.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/01/2026

Bier, like his boss, is an artless troll. He built a product that directly incentives slop spam to juice his numbers and now he’s desperate to walk it back. 🤡

Screenshot of a tweet from Nikita Bier, Twitter’s head of product:

We are revising our developer API policies:

We will no longer allow apps that reward users for posting on X (aka “infofi”). This has led to a tremendous amount of AI slop & reply spam on the platform.

We have revoked API access from these apps, so your X experience should start improving soon (once the bots realize they’re not getting paid anymore).

[highlighted by me]
If your developer account was terminated, please reach out and we will assist in transitioning your business to Threads and Bluesky.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/01/2026

I wonder if there will be any reflection by leadership at the Times about how they managed to get duped by not one but two of the most obvious charlatans of the era www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/business…

Privately, Ms. Weiss has been deeply frustrated by the negative reaction to her decisions, and has blamed some subordinates for not stanching the criticism, three people familiar with internal discussions said. Ms. Weiss’s wife, Nellie Bowles, *a former reporter at The Times*, openly mocked the objections of the “60 Minutes” staff who had clashed with her spouse in a column published by The Free Press, which Ms. Weiss continues to oversee.

“My lovely wife asked some 60 Minutes producers to report out a story a little more, literally Hey guys make a couple more phone calls and then we’ll run the piece in a week or two,” Ms. Bowles wrote. “No! the media collectively shrieked. We shan’t!” (CBS News declined to make Ms. Weiss available for an interview. Referring to Ms. Bowles’s column, Ms. Weiss said in a statement that The Free Press was “completely editorially independent,” and added, “Also: My wife is the funniest writer in America.”)

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/01/2026

Lololol engineers at Musk’s xAI, parent company of both Grok and Twitter, were using Claude Code but they just got shut off. Begs the question: when will Anthropic’s engineers stop posting to the synthetic CSAM-on-demand app formerly known as Twitter?

Simultaneous with the technical crackdown, developers at Elon Musk’s competing AI lab xAI have reportedly lost access to Anthropic’s Claude models. While the timing suggests a unified strategy, sources familiar with the matter indicate this is a separate enforcement action based on commercial terms, with Cursor playing a pivotal role in the discovery.

As first reported by tech journalist Kylie Robison of the publication Core Memory, xAI staff had been using Anthropic models—specifically via the Cursor IDE—to accelerate their own developmet.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/01/2026

“Excuse me SIR. It is currently 5:02pm and I have been neither fed nor walked.”

An Old English Sheepdog in a home office approaches the camera

The Old English Sheepdog has jumped on to the lap of your humble narrator, a middle aged man

The Old English Sheepdog is vigorously kicking the face of the man. The tongue is ridiculously prominent adding to the comedic effect of the photo.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/12/2025

My ongoing frustration with smart people who work in media is a kind of steadfast refusal to understand how platforms work. The idea that Instagram’s algorithm has a functionally different effect on our culture than Spotify’s is not exactly borne out.

Headline: “A YEAR OF LISTENING BEYOND THE ALGORITHM”

Highlighted text from the article:

“Each Thursday, I share a playlist of my favorite new songs on Instagram. I’ve maintained this habit for years, though it feels more important to keep up now, as the platforms through which we consume music try to seduce us with the comforts of what we already like. The ritual has become a way to resist the nefarious designs of the algorithms that wish to remind me, again and again, of what I loved once, until I don’t see fit to love anything else.”

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/12/2025

You’ve heard of Elf On The Shelf, get ready for Christmas Eve With

An at-home testing kit. For RSV, wheeeee!

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/12/2025

Good boys and girls (who happen to be our neighbors) got a little something extra this year

My family and I, making deliveries. There’s a dorky dad, a hot mom, and two awesome kids. Not pictured: Nathaniel Pawthorne, the Old English Sheepdog

A box of ginger snap cookies and a carafe of coquito. There are a few cookies on a candy cane themed plate.

Zoom in on the coquito label. I’m quite proud of the label because I made it without AI and also I love my little brother label printer. The label says:

Coquito

Coquito is a traditional Puerto Rican Christmas cocktail made with rum and coconut. We hope it brings you joy this season! Happy Holidays from the Ray Family.
KEEP CHILLED

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/12/2025

I nearly screw this up every. single. time. It’s not the big blue check mark in the upper right that adds the event to my calendar, it’s the white on gray button at the bottom.

The add to calendar confirmation screen in Safari. In the upper right corner is a giant blue checkmark button, the tapping of which dismisses the dialog and — crucially — does not add the event to my calendar nor does it tell me this. The actual action I want to perform is activated by the much smaller pill at the bottom of the screen, a white text in gray button, that helpfully says Add to Calendar.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/12/2025

Between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s, I Mister Rogers into a shawl collar cardigan pretty much every day at work. Even days I’m already wearing a sweater as part of my ensemble. Currently theorizing the possibility of a third sweater.

Your humble narrator in an Oxford cloth shirt, merino sweater, and chunky wool shawl cardigan.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

The night before Thanksgiving it’s important to have a light meal to prepare.

Two Detroit style pizzas, one pepperoni one cheese with a few racing stripes of tomato sauce on each.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/11/2025

Youngest brought this “fairy wand” home from school and I’m afraid to throw it away because the last thing I need is two dozen crazed elementary school kids tearing my house apart.

A stick with some colorful ribbons tied to the ends. As seen in the movie WEAPONS (2025)

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/11/2025

People think I go on about the death of privacy because I hate Facebook — and look, I really fucking hate Facebook — but it’s also this. Why does a car dealership I’ve never interacted with even know I have a lease? This ceaseless drip of bullshit is about 37% of why we’re all so miserable.

A bit of junk mail I received today:

Dear James,
Now is the time! Your lease is expiring in only 9 months. Based
on your excellent credit history, you are pre-approved to
finance a new Nissan at the lowest rate possible or lease as low

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/11/2025

Bonus blooper take featuring Nathaniel Pawthorne.

Same loaves featuring the snout of a mosey sheepdog

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2025

All three D’Angleo albums are masterpieces that changed music in subtle and profound ways. Truly a legendary artist.

Portrait of the artist D’Angelo, wearing a hat draped in an American flag.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2025

Incredible framing by the paper of record of yet another unconstitutional budget runaround of Congress.

Trump Says He Will Pay Troops Despite Government Shutdown

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2025

Seems only fair, given my professed love for Thanksgiving, that the neighborhood turkeys should turn my newly seeded lawn into a buffet.

A rafter of turkeys cozies up to the patch of lawn I spent most of the day prepping and overseeding.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2025

If a bunch of pissed off redditors stage an insurrection because the president canceled funding for a promising baldness cure, it will confirm my suspicion we’re living in a footnote of an unpublished David Foster Wallace novel […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Screenshot from an NY Magazine story about a potential cure for baldness that may be delayed or just never arrive because the of the Trump administration’s war on higher education:

Then again, that may not come to pass. This summer, the Trump administration abruptly froze $584 million in federal grants to UCLA — citing alleged civil-rights violations tied to antisemitism and affirmative action — and is now seeking a $1 billion settlement to restore the money. “My current basic-research grant from the National Institutes of Health, which is a continuation of the work that led to this discovery on alopecia, was suspended last week,” Lowry tells me in early August. “I don’t know what interesting discoveries won’t be made the longer this thing stays suspended.” Even if that funding returns, there’s another threat looming. Congress is considering a bill, proposed by Republican representatives in New York and Florida, that would bar federally funded research from using animals, including lab mice.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2025

Do we have a word for when people defy Congress, the branch of government that makes the laws? Something like unlegal? Alegal maybe?

NY Times homepage

Defying Congress, Trump Moves to Cut $4.9 Billion in Foreign Aid
The White House notified Congress that it was planning to use a legally untested maneuver to circumvent lawmakers and claw back more

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2025

I’d like to propose something similar to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines for these. Whenever a feature is attempting to figure out a nuanced rationale for why someone has fully committed themselves to American fascism, the answer is: it’s a grift.

NY Times story:

How Did Jillian Michaels End Up Here?

America’s toughest trainer was a proud Hollywood liberal. Now, she’s become a defining voice of the “Make America Healthy Again” era.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

The literal first word of the America by Design uh… manifesto? is a failure of the most basic design principle of text design. As in, I would literally fail my undergrad page layout course if I turned this in.

“What's”

The apostrophe is not typeset.

I actually had to try to make the alt text reflect the text in the screenshot since every text editing app made in the last decade automatically sets apostrophes properly.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2025

My favorite thing I’ve learned this week is America’s most reliable source of road trip diarrhea was founded by an oil exec to get Americans to buy more gasoline.

Screenshot from the Cracker Barrel Wikipedia page

Founding: 1969–1980
Cracker Barrel was founded in 1969 by Dan Evins, a representative for Shell Oil, who developed the restaurant and gift store concept initially as a plan to improve gasoline sales. Designed to resemble the traditional country store that he remembered from his childhood, with a name chosen to give it a Southern country theme, Cracker Barrel was intended to attract the interest of highway travelers. The name comes from the barrels of soda crackers that could be found for sale in small-town stores across the American South in the early 1900s; people would stand around the barrels chatting and catching up, similar in purpose to contemporary office water coolers.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2025

“Constitution suspended due to missing XML tag” was a funny joke on slashdot in 1998. mastodon.social/@404mediaco/1149830…

"Due to a technical error, some sections of Article 1 were temporarily missing on
the Constitution Annotated website," a spokesperson for the Library of Congress
told 404 Media in an email on Wednesday afternoon. "This problem has been
corrected, and the missing sections have been restored."
Later on Wednesday, the spokesperson added:
"We regret the confusion resulting from the missing content on the Constitution
Annotated today. It's been our priority today to re-publish the content and
determine what happened. The online Constitution Annotated is an educational
tool which includes discussions of the Supreme Court's latest opinions linked to
the text of the constitution. When updating the site to reflect our constitutional
scholars' analysis of the impact of the latest cases on Article 1, Sections 8-10,
the team inadvertently removed an XML tag. This prevented publication of
everything in Article I after the middle of Section 8. The problem has been
corrected and our updated constitutional analysis is now available. We are
taking steps to prevent a recurrence in the future."

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2025

Officially “must fetch my reading glasses to order back to school supplies” years old. Also why doesn’t every one of these pages have a QR code?

A double spread of a Land’s End catalog featuring all the latest accessories for their line of backpacks and lunchboxes. Not a He•Man, Transformer, or Care Bear to be seen, smdh

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2025

I subscribe to too many magazines because I want my kids to have access to this kind of thought provoking, hard hitting, and unflinching look at the issues of the day that shapes the prevailing intellectual discourse. And also The New York Review of Books.

A print copy of The New York Review of Books next to a print copy of The Onion.

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/08/2025

I will always pronounce this band like the French pastry.

Album cover for
KHRUANGBIN
Con Todo El Mundo

Indie Rock • 2018

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2025

I know we increasingly live in a world where words have no meaning but this headline does not say what the graphic conveys

Headline: See Trump’s New Tariffs on Every Country

Graphic is a global map with countries colored according to the following criteria:

• New tariff threat
• Baseline or paused “reciprocal” rate
• Preliminary deal

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2025

Wow, these classic sites are something else. This snapshot from Daring Fireball really takes me back. mastodon.social/@daringfireball/114…

A screenshot of daringfireball.net taken mere moments ago. A throwback to the classic web of yesteryear!

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/07/2025

Pop culture had us believing global warming meant melted polar ice caps and Florida vanishing into the ocean. The reality of climate change looks like storms that drop a month of rain in an afternoon, flooding everything (on top of the droughts and wildfires).

80 people rescued from
flooded homes near Eno
River in Durham County

First responders rescued dozens of residents
from homes and apartments near the Eno River in Durham County Monday morning after
relentless rain caused the river to overflow.

Timelapse footage shows how
quickly Texas flood waters
rose over causeway -
Timelapse footage provided by a witness shows
flood waters rising over a causeway in Kingsland,
Texas, and completely submerging it in the span
of a few minutes. The flooding occurred after
torrential rain fell in the central Texas area on
Friday 4 July, the US Independence Day holiday.
The death toll from catastrophic floods reached at
least 78 on Sunday, including 28 children, as the
search for girls missing from a summer camp
continued and fears of more flooding prompted
evacuations of volunteer responders

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2025

I’m not saying your summer cookout playlist needs this specific seque but the coolest dad at your party will think you’re dope.

Screenshot of two tracks from an AMAZING summer playlist:

Genius of Love
Tom Tom Club

Fantasy
Mariah Carey

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2025

I’m 100% a media theory guy who could talk for days about why corporate consolidation is terrible for pretty much everything and nothing I could ever say would be as impactful as “this merger is fucking up South Park” […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

IN RESPONSE TO THE PRESS RELEASE FROM COMEDY CENTRAL ABOUT THE CHANGE IN PREMIERE DATE FOR SOUTH PARK TREY PARKER & MATT STONE SAID:

"THIS MERGER IS A SHITSHOW AND IT'S FUCKING UP SOUTH PARK. WE ARE AT THE STUDIO WORKING ON NEW EPISODES AND WE HOPE THE FANS GET TO SEE THEM SOMEHOW."

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jimray @jimray.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/06/2025

Impossible to overstate Sly Stone’s influence. Rest in peace to a legendary artist whose music reveled in everything it means to be human.

A black and white photograph of a youngish Sky Stone smiling beautifully with giant lamb chops and an incredible afro, wearing an embroidered floral shirt.

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