💥 Triple-A Minesweeper
Mike Lacher created a hilarious little masterpiece.
🦖 New T. Rex Details Imminent
Andrew Rossi at Cowboy State Daily has some exiting news for anyone interested in dinosaurs:
"Rex Junior" is a partial but perfectly preserved Tyrannosaurus skeleton found on the Zerbst Ranch in eastern Wyoming. A paleontologist said that the "extraordinary specimen" could rewrite 100 years of knowledge about how the T. rex looked.
[...]
Many details on Rex Junior are still secret, pending publication, but Sereno said this specimen from the newly discovered "mummy zone" will redefine what we know about T. rex, inside and out.
“All I’ll say is we don't see scales,” he said.
The discoveries aren't just skin deep, though:
The first big revelation was the articulated right arm. Every bone was there, from the long, thin scapula to the very tips of the claws, perfectly articulated as they would have been when Rex Junior was alive.
“It was the only complete T. rex hand and forearm ever found,” Sereno said. “Every single bone, in place outside of the ribcage. I was totally shocked.”
And there's more:
Despite the inclination of generations of paleontologists to make T. rex barrel-chested, the articulated shoulders and wishbone of Rex Junior revealed something different.
“This specimen shows the furcula sits right in between on the crest of the coracoids, connected to the scapulae, just like it does in a modern bird,” Sereno said. “Everything joins together at the midline.”
That articulation makes the chest of T. rex much slimmer.
The research should be published early next year. Something to look forward to!
🗺️ MapQuest Now Shows Surveillance Cameras
MapQuest on Bluesky:
Turn on the Surveillance Layer in Map Options to see known license plate readers from Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and other outdoor surveillance cameras.
I was happy when MapQuest refused to change the names of certain bodies of water, but it wasn't enough to compel me to download their app.
Today I downloaded their app.
🚗 The Citroën 2CV 2028 Concept Car is Adorable
Look how cute this thing is:
Jameson Dow at Electrek:
Citroën has unveiled a concept electric version of its classic 2CV, aiming to bring the vehicle to market in 2028 for just €15,000.
For the entire second half of the 20th century, the Citroën 2CV (“Deux Chevaux,” French for “two horses”) held a special place in Europe’s automotive landscape.
The affordable, comfortable, yet underpowered vehicle had enormous popularity, selling millions of units over its production run.
Its cute, quirky look was unique and eye-catching, with its tall, rounded, cartoon-like passenger cabin, jaunty circular headlights, and pop-up windows.
And that interior!
There are more photos in Electrek's article.
This will probably never see the light of day in the US, but I'd love to see more whimsical, fun, playful, and small cars like this over here.
🦫 Beavers Destroy Sign Warning About Beavers
Daniel Tilles at Notes From Poland:
A sign installed to warn the public about damage caused by beavers has been destroyed by the beavers themselves, according to the Polish foresters who erected it.
The incident was reported in a post on social media by the forestry district of Lubliniec in southern Poland, which shared photos of the sign, which read “Warning! Damage caused by beavers”. The wooden post it was displayed on had been destroyed in an apparent beaver attack.
The hubris of the sign was its undoing.
🌐 The People Holding Up the Internet
Sheets.works:
People post this comic whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled "all modern digital infrastructure" and it stands on one small block, "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003".
We wanted to know how close to true it is. We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we listed what is actually installed on an Android phone, an iPhone and a Windows PC.
It's great to see the people doing this work called out in this piece. It's less great to see how little they're appreciated or compensated for it.
Knowing how much of the digital world is held together by people who do many years of hard work for little to no reward—beyond the satisfaction of doing the work itself, of course—makes me hopeful that the moneyless future utopia depicted in Star Trek is, in fact, possible.
🪦 The Job Trail
Bryan Mamaril built an Oregon Trail style web game called The Job Trail:
It is 2026. You have been laid off. Somewhere there is a job.
I made it 12 weeks in before I ran out of money. Maybe a little too on the nose, a little too real.
📺 Dark Matter: Love and Be Loved
As a fan of science fiction, I've been watching Dark Matter since it premiered. It's a good show with solid execution, but nothing exceptional.
Until now.
I just watched the latest episode, Love and Be Loved (season two, episode eight), and I'm here to tell you that episode is a masterpiece. I haven't seen anything on television that good in years. The writing, acting, cinematography, tone, pacing... everything was exquisite.
Even if you're lukewarm on every prior episode, it's still worth it to watch the entire show to get the backstory, nuance, and framing that leads up to this single episode.
Highly recommended.
😄 Dropout
I want to blog more about the good stuff, so let's talk about the streaming service Dropout. (This isn't a sponsored post or anything, I'm just a big fan.)
Dropout is fairly unique in both the type of content they produce and in how the business itself is run. They treat everyone they work with quite well (they pay residuals to writers, actors, and crew members, do profit sharing, pay people to audition, and more). The positive energy this brings about—both in front of and behind the camera—is palpable and tangibly elevates the content in ways that can't be faked. If want to learn more about this side of things, check out the Dropout Wikipedia page.
Some of my favorite Dropout shows are Game Changer, Make Some Noise, and Crowd Control. More than once I've had to pause an episode because I was laughing too hard and needed to recover before continuing. Game Changer, in particular, has a special place in my heart due to the unique brand of effervescent chaos it employs.
There's also a lot of top-notch fan-made content, like DeepBlueInk's animations that use the audio from Game Changer and Make Some Noise. Two of the best ones: A Knight's Concerning Oath and Kermit the Frog Represents Himself on a Murder Charge (if you visit only two links in this entire post, please make it these two).
If you're curious about Dropout but don't want to jump straight into a subscription, check out the Dropout YouTube channel for a lot of clips and other tidbits.
👀 Attention is All You Have
Alice Girard Guittard:
Before recommendation algorithms were a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer.
You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind. A site for video game news, that one website with lots of tutorials, a blog about anime that didn’t update often enough, a wiki about a TV show from the 90s…
Of course awful things existed on the web. We had Encyclopedia Dramatica and Rotten.com, but you actually had to put the effort to go there if you wanted. Nobody was going to put pictures of dead kids and far-right propaganda as a suggestion after a pancake recipe or a cat video.
The good thing is that this intentional internet is still around. It has just been a bit buried below the corporate web, but it’s not very hard to find. After all you’re on this blog, so you probably already have a good idea about it.
I was lucky enough to grow up alongside the Internet. RFC 791—the one that defines IPv4—was published the same month I was born. When I was growing up, the only option was to be intentional when using the computer, so that's what I learned to do. I loved it.
By the time big and popular social media came around it was so different from my tried-and-true approach that it never really stuck. Sure, I've dabbled with social media over the years, but my use and engagement have always been low.
I prefer things like RSS feeds, newsletters, and Tumblr (which is, I guess, technically social media in its own unique way) over anything with an algorithmic feed. To put it another way, I prefer to select who has access to my time and attention instead of letting an algorithmic feed wash over me.
To be clear, I don't think algorithmic feeds are all bad. They can be quite useful for discovering new and interesting things, but you have to be careful about the algorithms you trust (which are few and far between these days) and use them in moderation. Given when and how I grew up—spending a lot of time on the computer—that's easy for me, but it's not easy for a lot of people with different experience, like a lot of people younger than me. I mean, hell, a lot of those folks probably don't even realize there are other options.
That's a shame. A lot of people would benefit from being more intentional when using their computers, phones, and the Internet, but it's hard to demonstrate the benefits when the algorithms are so compelling. Sometimes you get lucky and the algorithm surfaces some great stuff, but those algorithms have their own agendas, and those agendas do not have your best interests at heart.
Being a passenger can be fun, but there's a lot of amazing stuff out there you'll never find if you don't spend some time in the driver's seat.