Drew Baumgartner

Does Obama not understand that to most Americans Saddam Hussein was a very good and reasonable leader?

Just a reminder that the UN estimated in 2021 that it would only cost $6.6 billion to end world hunger.

More Perfect Union@moreperfectunion.bsky.social

BREAKING: Anthropic reports an $80 billion net loss in the first half of 2026.

If we had UBI, I'd spend my time dragging a Casio keyboard to little league games to play walk up music and other organ goofs to pump up the crowd.

The baby has taken to making fart noises whenever I walk into the room. I have never felt more seen.

I don’t know if I’m exceptionally untrusting, but it’s baffling to me that politicians soliciting donations via text yields any fruit. Any scammer could send me an identical text, and I would not be able to tell the difference.

You’d think rampant scamming muddying these waters would be the kind of problem self-interested elected officials would see to fixing. So maybe all of these texts really are scams? I cannot stress enough that I have no clue how to tell the difference.

smrtr.ioEditor, BOOM! Studios Open to Remote (Open to Remote)Company Description: Penguin Random House is the leading adult and children's publishing house in North America, the United Kingdom and many other regions around the world. In publishing the best book...

Putting this out there in the hopes it draws a correction from someone more knowledgeable: Some very rough googling suggests that a one-hour video conference call consumes less energy than even one person driving a single mile to get to that meeting in person.

Drew Baumgartner reposted

Andy Schmidt

@andy39a.bsky.social

Hey folks, BOOM! is looking for a new editor! Please spread the word! smrtr.io/Cbm2b

Most pro-AI takes are so bland and pedestrian that you can see why anyone expressing them would think they could be replaced by a chatbot. But occasionally you’ll encounter one so terrible and unhinged, it inadvertently demonstrates the uniquely human illogic that no computer will ever replicate.

Like, it’s not art, but it is something a chatbot will simply never accomplish. The discursive equivalent of throwing up on the salad bar.

Savvy marketing people recognize that new parents like looking at babies, so adjust their packaging accordingly. But sometimes they overshoot and imply some major child labor violations.

Which really helps clarify that these were not genetically engineered super farmer babies, but regular human babies made to toil in the fields, unaware of even the most basic irrigation techniques.

That watering can will get you nowhere, baby! Not to mention that a sprinkler would sit nicely in the middle of the baby/farm work Venn diagram.

Savvy marketing people recognize that new parents like looking at babies, so adjust their packaging accordingly. But sometimes they overshoot and imply some major child labor violations.

I can imagine the poor designer getting conflicting instructions to show cute babies and also show the wholesome nature of the food by showing the fields where it was grown. I can imagine that designer saying "fuck it" and submitting this as a joke.

I can imagine them waiting with a smirk while their bosses reviewed it, only for them to come back with a single not to add a “No GMOs” sign somewhere.

Yoda [rematerializing]: And yet another Skywalker, there is. [Turns back into Force ghost]

DiscussingFilm@discussingfilm.net

Jon Watts is set to direct ‘STAR WARS: EPISODE 10’. The film is intended to be the beginning of a new trilogy in the Skywalker Saga. (Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general...)

People without the skills to produce goods or provide services learning they are somehow also bad at making money off of other people’s skills. Just failing at being leeches before the whole world.

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Ads on paid tiers is wild, but it does present the most straightforward marketing stratification imaginable. Now you can chose to run your ad in front of the richest people on the platform, or the poorest, or some third thing that is neither rich nor poor.

I would like to see the mediumest amount of ads, please.

Having a cocktail. Thinking of Josh.

I suspect the Met can give away 70,000 tickets because they know they'd go unsold otherwise. I know my "let the Met die" position is unpopular (then again, so is opera), but I'd kind of like to see the mayor put his weight behind artists creating new art rather than reifying the European canon.

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@mayor.nyc.gov

Never been to the opera before? Now’s your chance. We’re giving away 70,000 free tickets to the @metopera at the iconic Lincoln Center. Go to on.nyc.gov/opera to enter the lottery. There’s not a bad seat in the house.

22 Sept

Pfft. If I wanted to watch ads I would go outside.

IGN@ign.com

Disney+ has altered its user agreement to clarify that ads will be allowed on all subscription tiers. https://bit.ly/4hhOjBo

Almost ten years on, I still see people referencing that “I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” essay, and I fear that (in typical social media fashion) the popular takeaway is what people assume the title means.

(One need look no further than “moral” policy positions we disagree with. Focusing on the morality makes it about opinion and belief, when there are cold, hard facts that support one position or another.)

I get how tiring these conversations are (especially with every day being some chud’s first on the internet), but there are absolutely ways to explain that someone should care about other people!

The essay itself references logical and evidenced-based arguments for empathetic policies, but expresses dismay that one should need evidence to want people to not go hungry. At the time, seeing that frustration expressed was cathartic, but I hate to see it take hold as a moral refusal to engage.

Honestly, focusing on the morality of these positions has the effect of conceding that they aren’t superior logically and practically. The morality may be so obvious to you that the evidence shouldn’t be worth mentioning, but it won’t be to everyone, so is a bad argument to lead with.

The essay itself is an expression of exhaustion at arguing with people whose opinions leave no room for empathy — a very 2017 sentiment that definitely still resonates today.

But I’ve seen people reference the title of the essay as a shorthand for “there’s no way to teach empathy,” which feels like a profound rhetorical failure. I fear that people have taken to heart that empathy is something intrinsic and inexplicable.

“That meeting could have been an email” is the thought of someone who wants more email. That meeting could have been a hot fudge sundae.

I hope this email never finds you because you're at the ice cream parlor.

I'm like J. Alfred Prufrock, but you can measure my life in sample spoons.

Drew Baumgartner@dbaumgartner.bsky.social

“That meeting could have been an email” is the thought of someone who wants more email. That meeting could have been a hot fudge sundae.

T.S. Eliot

(this one is for all you Crash Test Dummies fans)

15 Sept

Has @luxxury.bsky.social coined a term for this kind of thing?

Drew Baumgartner@dbaumgartner.bsky.social

Dressed the baby in puffy pants today. H said she looks like MC Hammer, so I made her shimmy sideways and hummed some “Can’t Touch This.” H called the baby a Super Freak, which is just some top-tier reverse-interpolation.

15 Sept

A panel CAN contain a lot more information than any regular sentence, but aside from exceptional circumstances, should probably still function like one sentence, with a clear subject, verb, etc. But this is getting into broader extrapolations of this "rule," which I haven't fully considered.

Drew Baumgartner@dbaumgartner.bsky.social

Like a sentence, a single panel can tell a story, but a very simple one. And actually, that's the leg up comics has on prose: the setting, the characters, the costumes, the props, and anything else you can see can be present constantly. All the more reason to focus on the actions within the scene!

“Where’s Waldo?” is like “Finnegan’s Wake” in this way, he thinks to himself, somehow imagining this is what intellectualism is.

I haven't worked much with new writers, but I have had occasion to work with seasoned writers from other media who were relatively new to comics. I've noticed a trend across those experiences that has gotten me thinking about the unwritten rules of comics that might bear spelling out to novices. 🧵

And I think this really is the kind of "unwritten rule" that longtime comics readers have absorbed through osmosis, but probably never gets said to anybody. A comics writer knows instinctively to give specific acting beats across a dialogue sequence, but a prose writer may not.

A panel shouldn't just be a vehicle for dialogue, but is a sentence in its own right, so needs a verb better than "said." It gives the artist more to work with and the reader more to resonate with.

I concocted that analogy to put it in prose writing terms, but I think "the panel is a sentence" has broader explanatory power that I think is valuable. Panels that don't have a clear verb function very similar to a sentence fragment. Panels that lack any specificity take on a childish simplicity.

And I think we don't quite set them up for success there, because I think there's a handy analogy that they could understand: a panel is the visual equivalent of a sentence. It should have at least a noun and a verb to be structurally meaningful (barring fragments for emphasis, obviously).

And it can support much more than that -- adjectives, direct and indirect objects, heck, maybe even an adverb or two. And as with actual prose, the specificity of those elements are what gives the work style. Especially the verbs! Characters will stand around like mannequins without good verbs.

But the trend I've noticed is that these types of writers tend to be a bit too bare-bones with describing the actual events of the scene, so you end up with a lot of dialogue-heavy sequences. That tends to get misdiagnosed as writers being "writerly," but I don't think that's quite it.

These are successful writers, so they understand the value of an interesting verb. The characters in their prose don't "jog," they "hustle" or "scurry." But they somehow take for granted that the verbs in a comic are the artist's domain, so lose that specificity that makes their prose sparkle.

I should preface this by saying that all of the folks I'm generalizing here are highly accomplished (hence getting "stunt" cast on comics work), highly skilled writers. This isn't about their lack of knowledge, but about where prepping them for comics writing broke down.

Editors working with these types or writers know that they'll intrinsically understand dialoguing, but may need guidance with panel count, or extra care around not writing multiple sequential actions into a single panel, so we tend to focus more on those paneling fundamentals.