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Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

I had to go check for myself and based on her feed it’s definitely satire, although perfectly designed to escape containment and run into Poe’s Law:

A linked in post from Yolanda Cabrera: I remember asking my mom why we were so poor when we were growing up.

"Your papa was convinced it was too 'cringey' to engage with people on LinkedIn and ignored it completely as an essential sales and market tool"

Lessons are to be learned.

There is an ai cartoon image of a Hispanic mom making dinner for her daughters in a modest kitchen while saying “A comer mis amores!”

A LinkedIn post from Yolanda Cabrera:

I threw out this candidate's application, twice.

He applied a third time, and I decided to bring him in for an interview out of sheer curiosity.

We hired him right away.

The reason?

I realized he was the brother of a global pop phenomenon.

A year in, he's proven to be terrible—he’s genuinely hurting our financials with his mistakes. But, I get a VIP booth at his sister's concerts every time.

Truthfully, profit is just a metric. Social leverage and being connected are the real currencies in this business

A LinkedIn post from Yolanda Cabrera:

Had to cut an interview short today. Everything was great until the candidate dropped the dreaded S-word: Salary.

Like, really? We're talking about a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity here, and they want to focus on money? Priorities, people...back to the applicant pool we go.

December 7, 2025 at 10:34 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

this was my avatar of choice for many years

A Richard Scarry drawing of a green bug driving a yellow car. He is named "Maniacbug" and is Goldbug's evil opposite.

November 24, 2025 at 2:07 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

Loved the Norway costume, and also recently discovered this gem from the Miss Grand International pageant, from Ecuador:

I don't know when the National Costume event merged fully into the Met Ball aesthetic but I'm absolutely here for it.

Miss Ecuador (Samantha Quenedit), competing in the Miss Grand International 2025 pageant, wearing a National Costume "inspired" by Galapagos iguanas that is ... just a big crazy iguana costume. it rules.

November 23, 2025 at 10:43 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

Only one I'm aware of that takes place both where and when I grew up:

November 23, 2025 at 10:31 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

went to check this person's timeline (to pre-emptively mute) and: not beating your allegations on this one.

screenshot of a skeet: "sometimes i think i wouldn't mind having a boyfriend or girlfriend again, I'm not great at that, you gotta really like being around a person a lot. But man, i really can't imagine having a wife or husband. Absolutely nothing sexy about a wife or husband. Might as well be dead."

November 2, 2025 at 7:24 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

Pizza Box Guy

A pizza box with the classic Gill Fox illustration of a winking chef making an OK sign

October 13, 2025 at 2:01 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

Exactly one option, so I guess this is both the most interesting AND the most consequential:

cdn.mobygames.com/c39aa40e-abd...

A screenshot of the text-only game "HIGHNOON" from the very early days of the home computing era

October 12, 2025 at 3:47 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

Amazing. Liz is having a girls weekend and found an antique store that had a lot of Transformers, so I requested this guy

September 20, 2025 at 4:56 AM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

Me, upon learning that this recording comes courtesy of the O'Keefe Media Group:

the "The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point" Onion article guy

September 4, 2025 at 10:30 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

not discussing the lack of third spaces is a valid critique, but his observations on teen drinking are fairly nuanced and reasonable? (I also think he makes a reasonable point about parasocial relationships necessarily taking time/energy away from having it available for IRL social ones)

Disparaging today’s teenagers for their failure to binge-drink would be absurd. Still, I’d guess the decline of booze in the lives of young Americans is both a cause of reduced socializing and a driver of it. Young Americans go out less, so they drink less, so they have less interest in creating excuses to drink, so they throw fewer parties, so they go out less, so they drink less. These attitudes carry over into young adulthood. The share of 18- to 34-year-olds who say "drinking in moderation" is "bad for your health" has doubled in the last 20 years to 65 percent—far more than any other age group.

It would be easier for everyone—young people, parents, and commentators—if every social trend was either terrific or terrible. But like the rise of the dual-earner household, the turn against alcohol among the same young people whose socialization has plunged is a complicated phenomenon that defies easy good-bad categorization. I cannot deny that abstinence is good for young people’s livers; but I worry that it’s part of a larger set of behaviors that’s bad for their hearts.

July 21, 2025 at 3:13 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

I knew his name, but looking up his IMDB picture isn't exactly refuting your theory:

A picture of Christopher McQuarrie where it does not seem implausible that he is, in fact, Tom Cruise in disguise

May 22, 2025 at 2:12 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

you are in the minority i think; every parent I knew whose kids watched it, HATED the show. at the very least it has a very strong anti-fanbase:

Google reviews page for Caillou (1997) showing an overal 2.6 rating and the featured review starts with "Caillou is one of the WORST KIDS SHOWS OF ALL TIME!!"

May 13, 2025 at 3:47 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

you keep linking to a study that is not public so I can't read the whole thing, but let's take this part below. Of the four trees they list as being responsible for 93% of pollen, three of them are monoecious, including Platanus, which is 34% of all street tree coverage.

The most important producers of allergenic pollen in NYC are Quercus, Platanus, Morus, and Betula; they comprise 71% of airborne pollen measured and 93% of estimated pollen production (107 quadrillion pollen grains; however, pollen production was not estimated for all taxa). Previous municipal planting decisions have resulted in the high abundance of Platanus × acerifolia; it accounts for 34% of total street tree basal area and has an estimated annual pollen production of 27.7 ± 6.4 quadrillion grains. In contrast, Morus and Betula are generally unplanted, indicating that tree planting decisions will have smaller effects on their future pollen production rates in NYC. Quercus trees produced an estimated 68.2 ± 12.3 quadrillion pollen grains and accounted for almost 25% of airborne pollen collected, but were very abundant in parks and were mostly unplanted, suggesting that planting has not and will not have a major effect on city-wide pollen production. Overall, this study demonstrates that tree planting decisions can have important and long-lasting consequences for city-wide pollen production but only for species that are both primarily planted and large producers of allergenic pollen.

May 10, 2025 at 5:00 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

oh man, you haven't LIVED until you've seen the space knights!

The cover of Marvel Comics' "ROM the Spaceknight," a way-better-than-it-had-to-be toy-licensing comic property from the late 1970s

May 5, 2025 at 6:57 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

Did you actually read this article? Maybe we are talking past each other - I think Russian hackers absolutely INFLUENCED the election, by spreading propaganda, hacking the DNC & releasing emails, etc. But can we agree that “influencing an election" is different from directly changing voting results?

April 23, 2025 at 9:02 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

Skeletor making a good point: "Joke's on you; I'm INTO THAT SHIT"

April 4, 2025 at 5:35 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

this is paraphrasing something stated in the original Goldberg article:

Screenshot from the Jeffery Goldberg Atlantic article "The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans":

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

“Under the records laws applicable to the White House and federal agencies, all government employees are prohibited from using electronic-messaging applications such as Signal for official business, unless those messages are promptly forwarded or copied to an official government account,” Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told Harris.

“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.

March 25, 2025 at 5:00 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

Age yourself with a cartoon you watched as a kid

He will drink his supersauce and throw the bad guys for a loss
and he will bring them in alive and kickin'
(bawk bawk bawk bawk)
there is one thing you should learn; when
there is no one else to turn to
ca-aall on Super Chicken (bawk bawk bawk bawk)
ca-aall on SUPER CHICKEN! (buh-KAWK!)

March 20, 2025 at 9:11 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

I mean, the Whites House literally posted this (“activities aligned to Hamas” is some pretty impressive weasel wording for “we want to claim he is directly linked to Hamas and can’t nearly prove it” by the way) and the WH press Secretary said he was arrested for “distributing flyers”

Graphic from the White House Instagram feed proclaiming the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil because he “led activities aligned to Hamas”

March 11, 2025 at 11:29 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

A screenshot of Google Translate showing that "tetas" is Spanish for "tits" (or boobs, or jugs, or bohonkaderos, or what have you)

March 10, 2025 at 4:28 AM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

That doesn’t fit the reference though:

Front page from 1975 Daily News where the headline reads “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”

February 19, 2025 at 7:47 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

Me, a person who watched a lot of Red Dwarf in my 20s: “I’m sorry, you’re going to make some espresso with YOUR WHAT NOW?”

December 10, 2024 at 11:45 PM

Randy Braun

@randbot.bsky.social

Fun day trip to NYC with friends yesterday. If you like modern art, especially of the 1980s, go to see Luna Luna, an amusement park designed by prominent artists that existed for a few months in 1987 then spent 30 years forgotten in storage: www.theshed.org/program/440-...