PicoBlog

I love when the internet goes absolutely batsh*t. The latest trend to make me look up from my phone, aghast, and sense check with the nearest IRL human that I’m not the one losing it is ‘golden retriever boyfriends’.  Like most viral zeitgeist categorisations, this took off on TikTok, with girls and young women referring to their ‘nice’ boyfriends as golden retrievers. Yes, as in the dog breed. This is not some niche trend- with 182.

In July 2023, rapper Lil Baby canceled 10 dates on his 32-date “It’s Only Us” tour without explanation. Variety soon reported that it was likely due to low ticket sales: Upon closer examination of the ticket sales charts on Ticketmaster.com, venues for pre-existing dates like Memphis (Sept. 7 at FedExForum) and Seattle (Aug. 12 at Climate Pledge Arena) appear to be less than half-sold … How is it possible that Lil Baby would struggle to sell out an arena?

For so many people, 2023 was the year of empathic distress—the pain of feeling others’ pain, while feeling helpless to do anything about it. To kick off 2024, I wrote about why empathy often drains and restrains us, and how compassion can help. The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it. Even if you can’t make people feel better, you can still help them feel seen.

First, thanks for voting in the Bruce Springsteen poll. With almost 3,000 votes, The Boss was awarded ‘Phony Baloney’ by a 2-1 margin. Many thanks also to reader Janet Sullivan who touted Tom Petty as an antidote and recommended the documentary “Running Down The Dream” in the comments.  I watched Part 1 this week and it’s excellent.  Thank you! Now I’m going to tell you about a place where fakes, shady sellers and scams flourish, and where your hard-earned money is at the mercy of clever, fraudulent schemesters.

Much is made of the notion that “silence is complicity.” The saying suggests that, once an injustice appears in the world, if you DO NOT use your voice to speak against it, your silence makes you complicit with the injustice. Some even take this further and cut off any dialogue with those deemed complicit (by their silence). It is a mantra that carries much currency among justice movements everywhere. The complicity accusation motivates multitudes to quickly run onto social media and decry acts of injustice.

Where we came from and how we came to be have been central questions of the natural sciences and philosophy for centuries. When Charles Darwin published his earth-shattering theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859, human origins were no longer the realm of religious doctrine, but now in the realm of science. Provocative human ancestor fossils have been growing our family tree for well over a century, but in the last 20 years since the human genome has been sequenced, we’ve made remarkable progress in understanding human origins and our evolution since our split with the chimpanzee line around 8 million years ago.

I was reading and article from Matt Hanlon’s Coaching Volleyball Substack where he mentions an internal debate over systems for youth teams. My response to him: Matt, do you have much experience with the 6-3 system that Kessel briefly mentions? I particularly like the version where the setter sets from 2 and 1. I like a 6-6 for true beginners, but, like you, I think there is a lot of value in teaching the concept of roles and responsibilities.

Whenever we turn on the TV or play a video online, we're bombarded with ads. Pre-rolls, mid-rolls, post-rolls, ads of all shapes and sizes come at us whether we like it or not. And let's face it, Google and YouTube specifically are companies that run on ad revenue. This is vital to their bottom line and even if you're paying for a subscription, you're likely still seeing some type of advertisement when using their services.

I have a confession to make. When I first came up with the “You’ve Never Read…?!” gimmick last year, it was with this particular comic book run in mind. J.M. DeMatteis and Sal Buscema are two legendary comic book creators. Just looking at their Marvel bibliography prior to their run together on Spectacular Spider-Man (which began in 1991) is astounding. DeMatteis had already had successful runs on Captain America and Defenders, and he wrote the “Fearful Symmetry” story (better known today as “Kraven’s Last Hunt”) that stretched across all three Spider-Man titles in 1987 that is widely regarded as one of the greatest Spider-Man stories ever written.