cara

online dating is kind of broken in opposite directions.

a lot of women get more attention than they want.

a lot of men get less attention than they want.

one side is filtering through noise. the other is trying to be noticed.

somehow both leave exhausted.

the 2026 vmas somehow felt like pop culture looking backward and forward at the same time.

taylor swift became the most awarded artist in vma history, madonna won seven awards, snoop dogg hosted, and nirvana received the video vanguard award. there was even a tribute to dolly parton.

kind of wild that an awards show built around “what’s next” ended up being one of the biggest celebrations of artists who have already shaped decades of music.

cancel culture feels very internet age, but the basic idea is ancient. societies have always used public shaming, boycotts, and social exclusion to punish people who break accepted norms. social media just made it instant, searchable, and global.

james gunn was fired by disney in 2018 after old offensive tweets resurfaced, then rehired months later. kevin hart stepped down as oscars host that same year after old homophobic tweets came back into circulation.

that’s probably why the term is so hard to define. sometimes it looks like accountability. sometimes it looks like a punishment wildly bigger than the original mistake.

one person’s accountability can easily look like another person’s public pile on.

might be the internet’s weirdest public archive.

he loved her like the sea loved the stars. from afar; and from her perspective, quietly. reflective and beautiful, a silent ballet of ripples and smiling patterns scattered across the waves.

from his, it was a roaring and chaotic love. constantly moving, and always full. swells and crashes of emotion when he would see her. he'd hide from her behind the clouds and feel his storm inside him, and when the clouds would clear, and the waves would fall back, he would peek through the clouds and see her again, calm and beautiful as ever.

and then when the sea was still, each star reflecting perfectly on its surface, sometimes she would smile back. the twinkle of a star flitting across the sky. a wink that said "i love you too."

but they would never touch.

biggest free to use video streaming platform, released in 2005. originally started as a dating website, failed catastrophically, and was bought by google 18 months after its initial launch to become the massive video sharing platform it is today

dune. https://www.imdb.com/..._sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_0_in_1_q_dune

before becoming known for children’s books, roald dahl was a fighter pilot in world war ii and later worked in washington during the war.

that part of his life makes his writing feel a little different in hindsight. the danger, dark humor, strange adults, and sudden cruelty in his stories probably didn’t come from nowhere.

beautiful state situated in the northeastern united states. best known for such landmarks as the statue of liberty, empire state building, central park, and times square. new york was the 11th state to join the union by ratifying the united states constitution in 1788. (see: new york city)(see: albany)

i leant upon a coppice gate
when frost was spectre-grey,
and winter's dregs made desolate
the weakening eye of day.
the tangled bine-stems scored the sky
like strings of broken lyres,
and all mankind that haunted nigh
had sought their household fires.

the land's sharp features seemed to be
the century's corpse outleant,
his crypt the cloudy canopy,
the wind his death-lament.
the ancient pulse of germ and birth
was shrunken hard and dry,
and every spirit upon earth
seemed fervourless as i.

at once a voice arose among
the bleak twigs overhead
in a full-hearted evensong
of joy illimited;
an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
in blast-beruffled plume,
had chosen thus to fling his soul
upon the growing gloom.

so little cause for carolings
of such ecstatic sound
was written on terrestrial things
afar or nigh around,
that i could think there trembled through
his happy good-night air
some blessed hope, whereof he knew
and i was unaware

thomas hardy the darkling thrush

art is the human attempt to turn experience, emotion, imagination, or reality into something another person can see, hear, feel, or interpret.

“we have art in order not to die of the truth.” friedrich nietzsche

funny how “nothing personal” is usually followed by something extremely personal.

the only social network where getting laid off becomes “excited to announce my next chapter.”

everyone is humbled, honored, thrilled, grateful, and somehow always learning leadership lessons from a coffee meeting.

nstagram is where people pretend their lives are perfect.

linkedin is where people pretend their careers are.

one of those rare internet personalities who somehow became trusted by both toddlers and exhausted parents at the same time. the videos look extremely simple, but that is kind of the point. slow speech, repetition, facial expressions, songs, pauses, and direct eye contact are all designed around how very young children actually learn language. to a toddler, she is entertainment. to a parent trying to make dinner while their kid learns a new word in the background, she is basically infrastructure.

a term that started as a fairly literal description of someone fighting for social justice and eventually turned into an internet insult.

by the 2010s, especially around online culture wars, “sjw” became shorthand for someone seen as overly performative, moralizing, or obsessed with identity politics. dictionary sources now label the term as disparaging in common usage.

the sociological part is more interesting than the insult itself.

take a college student who cares about racism, sexism, or lgbt rights. activism can start as genuine concern, but once that activism moves onto social media, it also becomes visible to an audience. now there are likes, reposts, status, group approval, and punishment for saying the wrong thing.

at that point, you are not only expressing a belief.

you are also performing membership in a group.

that does not automatically make the belief fake. humans have always signaled values through religion, clothing, rituals, politics, and community behavior.

social media just gave moral signaling a scoreboard.

that is probably why “sjw” became such a loaded term in the u.s. it stopped describing what someone believed and started describing how other people thought they were performing those beliefs.