Wil Wheaton, writing on his site, has a long essay about our current political climate.

Remember how much fun it was to harmlessly TP your friends’ houses? How silly and goofy it was to ding-dong ditch someone? Just to do silly, childish, ultimately harmless expressions of being a kid who’s fooling around? Or how about playing hide and seek? Remember how fun that was?

Thanks to the Republican fascists who have gerrymandered and suppressed their way into minority rule in 21st-century America, any of those things will now likely get you killed by a paranoid gun nut who won’t suffer any consequences. And when it’s a white man who murders a BIPOC child, his state’s Republican governor will pardon any consequences that somehow slip past the barriers to justice they’ve built.

Pick a side. There is no middle.

[…]

You can try to tell yourself that you don’t vote for their policies, that your candidate isn’t extreme. But when you vote for ANY Republican, you’re voting for those policies, because Republicans do as they are told by their fascist supreme leader, Donald Tru&p. They fall in line with the extremists. So if you aren’t an extremist, what do you do? If you want the endless slaughter to end, what do you do?

You pick a side. You’re with America, or you’re with the MAGA movement.

There’s more. You should read the whole thing.

In the civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll, a jury took only 2.5 hours to find that Donald Trump sexually abused Carroll and later publicly defamed her. Carroll has been awarded $5 million in damages.

He’s a criminal. A con man. And a rapist.

Finally: a full-length trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Definitely one of the summer movies I’m interested in seeing this summer.

Moonic Productions puts out some amazing videos. I like a lot of his stuff (such as this one, this one, and, of course, this one), but the If Rammstein wrote ‘Every Breath You Take’ is spot on. I’m not even a very big Rammstein fan, but I dig their vibe.

Finally, the lyrics match the music.

Book Riot has the story.

The Illinois Senate has passed HB 2789, a bill whose terms dictate that state funding from public or school libraries that remove books from circulation will be withheld.

As per the bill, the $62 million of funding that goes to the state’s libraries will only be eligible for said funding if they “adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights” or “develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials within the library or library system.“

It’s good to live in a Blue State.

Here’s the first trailer for the second part of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.

The delivery of “May thy knife chip then shatter” is perfection. I am looking forward to this.

After weeks of negotiations, for the first time in 15 years, the Writers Guild of America has officially gone on strike. Dan Casey breaks down everything you need to know about why this strike happened, how long it might last, and what it means.

It does an excellent job explaining what the Writers’ Strike is all about and why you should care.

A group of real-life scientists at the RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences in Japan have identified a new quantum property to measure the weirdness of spacetime. They are officially calling it “magic.”

From the scientific paper, “Probing chaos by magic monotones,” published by the journal Physical Review D:

There is a property of a quantum state called “magic.” As shown by the Gottesman-Knill theorem, so-called stabilizer states, which are composed of only Clifford gates, can be efficiently computed on a classical computer, and thus quantum computation gives no advantage. Nonstabilizer states are called magic states, which are necessary to achieve the universal quantum computation. Magic (monotone) is the measure of the amount of nonstabilizer resource, and it measures how difficult it is for a classical computer to simulate the state. We study magic of states in the integrable and chaotic regimes of the higher-spin generalization of the Ising model through two quantities: “mana” and “robustness of magic” (RoM). We find that in the chaotic regime, mana increases monotonically in time in the early-time region, and at late times these quantities oscillate around some nonzero value that increases linearly with respect to the system size. Our result also suggests that under chaotic dynamics, any state evolves to a state whose mana almost saturates the optimal upper bound; i.e., the state becomes “maximally magical.” 

And this bit:

Our results suggest that magic of quantum states is strongly involved in the emergence of spacetime geometry.

That last sentence is the best technobabble I’ve heard in a long time. Sounds like something the Doctor in an episode of Doctor Who would say.

Katie Woo, writing for The Athletic, outlines just how bad the St Louis Cardinals were in April. Lots of quotes from players and managers, but this is the central question.

No, the Cardinals did not play good baseball in April. They didn’t even come close. How they respond after one of their worst road trips in recent memory will show if this month was one horrible abnormality, or if this is actually the type of team they’re going to be this year.

Journalist Jeff Goldsmith, who attended the Disney+ series’ Emmy FYC event, is reporting that

Tony Gilroy, the Andor creator, showrunner, and screenwriter, will be launching a website to release the production scripts for all 12 Andor episodes online, for free, for everyone.

I think these scripts are ones to really study for the intricacies of the story, character development, and the like.

Here’s official trailer #2 for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

I have high hopes. Probably misguided.