Chaos Theory

Yup.

"but that we’ve lost a whole group of the celebrities who helped an entire generation realize that being different was somehow okay."

General Leia Organa's obituary.

This is certainly something.

Making presidential dolls

"It took me a while to decide which president to start with.I wanted one with some kind of distinctive feature that would be easy to express in yarn. I also wanted it to be a president I liked. Lincoln was an obvious choice, but I rarely go for the obvious choices, plus I was a little intimidated by his beard and hat. Taft is always a favorite, but the instructions in AmiguruME don't include techniques for making a more corpulent body, and I didn't want to figure it out on my first attempt. Chester Arthur would be fun, especially with all the possibilities for different pants, but again, I was intimidated by the facial hair. So I settled on another of my favorites: Warren G. Harding. I know, I know: I do too much Harding (that's what she said). Sorry. But he seemed like he would be pretty straightforward, plus he has distinctive eyebrows."

Fahrenthold's fun year

(Washington Post.)

"Among the clutter on the coffee table, I found my 4-year-old’s Party Popper, a bright yellow gun that fired confetti. For some reason, I held the gun up to my eye and looked down the barrel, the way Yosemite Sam always does.

It looked unloaded.

Then, for some reason, I pulled the trigger.

When I got to the ER, I had a swollen face, metal-foil confetti in my hair and a faint odor of gun smoke. Finally, the doctor could see me.

“I shot myself in the eye with a glitter gun,” I said. I showed him the Party Popper, which I had brought with me, in case he wanted to send it off to the National Institute of Morons for further study."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAH.

"A Trump spokesman later offered the explanation that the resort was actually doing the foundation a favor, by storing its art free of charge. Tax experts were not impressed by this reasoning.

“It’s hard to make an IRS auditor laugh,” one told me. “But this would do it.”

And then there's that video.

"In the meantime, I had to start writing. The story was easy to compose, since much of it was simply repeating what Trump had said. The only problem was the bad words.

The Post is a fairly fusty place when it comes to profanity. If a reporter tries to get a bad word into a story, the word is usually forwarded to top editors, who consider it with the gravity and speed that the Vatican applies to candidates for sainthood. That unwieldy system assumed that bad words would attack one at a time, like bad guys in a kung-fu movie.

But in this story, we were dealing with a whole army of bad words at once. The system was overloaded. When Trump said, “Grab ’em by the p----,” for instance, the editors weren’t sure people would be able to guess right away what “p----” was. They added a letter at the end: “p---y.”

Other words required a ruling from the bosses.

“Go find out about ‘tits’!” I heard one editor tell another, while the story was being edited — Trump had used the word in criticizing a woman’s appearance. The second editor left to find a higher-ranking editor who could make a ruling. “ ‘Tits’ is all right,” he said when he returned.

On Twitter I watched myself become a minor celebrity — all because of a story that had, essentially, fallen into my lap.

“My wife says that David @Fahrenthold is a time traveler from the future trying to carefully fix the darkest timeline. I believe her,” wrote James Church , a professor at Austin Peay State University."

How to build a mystery

Don't just have the twin do it.

Blaming 2016 Is Like Blaming God

'Fuck You, 2016' On blaming a year for the things that happen in it.

"It makes for a better joke to blame the year, but it also feels less hopeless. A year is less omnipotent; its reign lasts only 12 months. We know of course, that horror and death appear on a rolling basis, that no one year has a monopoly on tragedy. But it’s nice to hope, not that the tragedy will ever stop appearing, but that maybe this next arbitrarily delineated period will hold a little less than the one we’re in now. Often, when people blame God for suffering, Gray says, it helps them feel better because they can believe it’s part of God’s plan. “It’s not clear that 2016 has a plan for you,” he says, “but at least it ends.” At the start of each January, we get a new ruler, one who will perhaps be more benevolent. That’s assuming, of course, that each year isn’t just a new scion in a dynasty of horrible years."

Blaming 2016 is like blaming God.

"Contrast Fuck 2016 with Why, God?. Consider how 2016 took lives and gave disasters. “When there is no sign of human agency,” she writes, “superhuman agency will do.” This is compelling on two levels: First, why do people throw humanlike agency all over the place, and second, what are the consequences of doing so?

Anthropomorphization, or the attribution of a humanlike mind to nonhuman entities, looks to be happening with years (and gods) as it does with animals. It’s an impulse toward sense-making, whether or not it makes rational sense. Our only access to the world is through the experience of being human, and we can only clearly communicate with other humans, so the human mind is the most immediate referent for other agents in the world, for better or worse. We impute (human) agency when there isn’t a (human) agent."

The Internet Law That Explains Why 2016 Was So Terrible.

The definitive meme of 2016 was “fuck 2016”

Who needs cat pics?

Yup.

What's the hardest shot in bowling?

Not the 7-10 like you thought.

11 things to think about when you lose hope over the rise of white nationalism

Well, this heljps.

On hope

"This seems to be the function of the audacity of hope: Even if it risks the vulnerability of your candidate losing, it’s an attitude that generates power, whether personally, professionally, or politically. After all, much of life is contemplating, pursuing, and completing goals — what you might colloquially call dreams — and hope is the fuel that gets you there."