DoodleChaos brings us a video in which eight Line Riders compete in a race set to the tune of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” It’s survival of the fittest in a steeplechase, as they crash into each other, fall, lose their sleds, and sometimes regain them. A free fall doesn’t always mean elimination. But only one rider can win at the end.

You might get caught up in the drama of the riders and their, uh, “luck” in the race, but if you do, you’ll need to go back and focus on the tracks and how well they synch with the music. These lines were all hand-drawn and took several months to create.

The latest DC movie, Black Adam, now has an  Official Trailer.

I’m looking forward to this. It may not be obvious now, but I’m 100% positive this movie does not take place in the current DCEU, just like The Batman and Joker. No other explanation for a Justice Society when there’s an obvious Justice League.

However, I do expect to see it connect to the DCEU proper in the near future unlike the aforementioned The Batman and Joker.

I’m sure The Flash and all the universe hopping will help make all of this future consolidation make sense. It’s like they are moving toward creating a Crisis on Infinite Earths movie.

John Cena meets Misha, a teenager with Down syndrome who fled Ukraine after his home was destroyed. To motivate Misha on their journey to safety, his mother told him the fantasy that they were on their way to find Cena. They spent the afternoon building blocks and eating cake.

“How special is today? Pretty darn special.”

This is the content I’m here for.

Drew Pastorek, writing for The Champaign Room, noticed something significant.

It’s only been about 18 months since Bret Bielema replaced Lovie Smith as Illinois’ head football coach. I must admit I was initially not a fan of the hire. But I was optimistic after a promising debut season. And after the offseason Illinois has had so far, I have no doubts that Bielema is the right guy to stabilize the program.

…

The Illini have 8 commitments thus far for 2023 (Farrell, Harkless, Jackson, Swanson, Zachary Aamland, Kaden Feagin, Antwon Hayden and TJ McMillen) and the 33rd-ranked class nationally according to 247Sports — ahead of Iowa State, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Florida, Miami, UCLA, Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Missouri, Indiana & Purdue. In fact, Illinois is currently just behind Michigan (30), Texas A&M (31) and Alabama (32).

Yes…it’s REALLY early. But to even be flirting with a top-30 recruiting ranking was unfathomable at this time two years ago.

The Illini are recruiting like a Power Five football program, not a mid-level MAC school. It may take a little time, but I think Bielema will have Illinois Football rolling sooner rather than later.

Will Leitch is one of the most productive people I know. In his Medium column, he outlines what he does in a typical week and how he achieves the amazing results. I’m a little in awe.

I should actually be taking notes.

Via Niklas Göke:

Robert Greene once told Ryan Holiday that there are two kinds of time: Alive time and dead time.

Dead time is when you wait for life to happen to you instead of for you. It’s when nothing seems to change for the better, yet when you take an honest look at the last six months, you realize all you’ve done is complain.

Alive time is when you’re making it count. It is when you do your best every day, no matter how hopeless or unfortunate your current situation may seem. You focus on what you control and try your best to learn and get better.

The idea behind this distinction, of course, is that whether you spend your time being “alive” or “dead” is up to you…

Really amazing work.

I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure.

— David Polansky (@polanskydj) May 27, 2022

“Obi-Wan” by John Williams.

This is glorious.

Having John Williams come back to create this theme is just incredible. It is melancholy and hopeful at the same time and that takes tremendous skill. I love it so much.

Writing at The Message Box, Dan Pfeiffer thinks there is a path forward after continued deaths by guns. He thinks there must be a continued push to fix our laws because NBA coaches and potential governors are making waves post-tragedy.

He is wrong.

Nothing will ever change because people voice their concerns or take to the streets. Those in power ignore that momentary outrage because the news cycle is short and attention spans are shorter. Our current political system and media environment are broken. You cannot shame these people, and Dan certainly doesn’t need me to tell him that.

The only way anything will ever change is for people to wake up enough to vote for the politicians who will make those changes. Everything else is a waste of time.

Elizabeth Bruenig, writing for The Atlantic, makes an excellent point about gun violence.

Then there are some who say that every terrible thing—including even this untenable thing that no civilization could endure, this demonic murder lottery of schoolchildren—simply must go on, and somehow, they are winning. After all, wasn’t the Newtown massacre like the breaking of a seal, the final entry in a national catalog of stunned loss that had begun with Columbine? It wasn’t that there would be no more losses. It was only that we could no longer be stunned. Yesterday, before the families of Uvalde had buried their children, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a televised interview that he would “much rather have law-abiding citizens armed and trained so that they can respond when something like this happens, because it’s not going to be the last time.” That is to say: It’s going to go on indefinitely. It’s not an end, exactly, but life inside a permanent postscript to one’s own history. Here is America after there was no more hope.

We are already living through this. It is hard to bear. All around us things that ought to matter shrink in proportion to things that ought not to; a sense of real agency in politics or government feels limited, distant; lives that used to seem perfectly accessible to your average young person seem impossible now, while darkly fantastical lives—like those of the mass shooters whose profiles are now too many and too common to differentiate, with their weird paramilitary bravado and meme-inflected manifestos—are growing more familiar to us. I fear they’ll become more familiar still. When we say, in despair, that “these men are by-products of a society we’ve created; how could we possibly stop them?,” we could be referring to almost anyone in the great chain of diffuse responsibility for our outrageous, inexcusable gun-violence epidemic—the lobbyists who argued for these guns to be sold like sporting equipment, the politicians who are too happy to oblige them, the shooters themselves.

Moral decline of this kind produces strange and grotesque effects as it works its way, acidlike, through a society. Resignation takes the form of anger, mistrust, hypervigilance, depression, withdrawal. Nihilism arrives not as society fading quietly to dust but as fruit flush with lurid color, ripening until it bursts. It is the fruit of a culture of death.

Howabout we, as a society, stop electing the wrong people. Let’s just start there.

Ross Barkan, writing for New York Magazine, echoes President Biden’s question, “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” 

The answer is, of course, never.

Republicans do not care about mass shootings. They can’t be shamed by their inaction. They can’t be forced into making a rational case for their positions. They do not care.

The gun lobby money is too sweet for them to give a shit. If you honestly think Republicans are in it to serve their constituents, I have a bridge in San Francisco I’d love to sell you. They do not care.

The only way any of this stops is by getting guns out of people’s hands.

It’s never going to happen.

Ronald Brownstein wrote a whole story about gun control for The Atlantic explaining why there’s not really any gun control in this country.

Here’s the answer: Republicans.

Oh yes, and the stupid filibuster. But really it’s just Republicans.

You want this to stop? Quit voting for Republicans.

Randy Rainbow is a genius.

This Florida High Schooler was told he couldn’t say gay in his Graduation Speech, so he found a clever workaround.

You see, he has curly hair.

The Pirates are really bad, but this was fun.

Seth Godin with some smart insight.

The strategy of the smallest viable audience doesn’t let you off the hook-it does the opposite. You don’t get to say, “well, we’ll just wait for the next random person to find us.” Instead, you have to choose your customers-who’s it for and what’s it for. And when you’ve identified them, the opportunity/requirement is to create so much delight and connection that they choose to spread the word to like-minded peers.

Not everyone, but someone. And it turns out that ‘someone’ isn’t as easy as it sounds. When you strip away the alternative mantra of “you can pick anyone, and we’re anyone,” then you have to lean into the obligation of being the sort of provider that people would miss if you were gone. That’s not easy, but people with this sort of focus wouldn’t have it any other way.

This is like the idea of getting to 100 true fans. I wonder what that number is for me.