GroundQuake.eth

Memoirs

[GroundQuake.eth @GroundQuake]

I guess it’s a thread now. 🧵

My thesis on how people are wylin

[Christopher Kratovil @chris_kratovil]

It’s deeply odd to me that America is a far less 24/7 hour society today than it was 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. I vividly remember friends from the UK back in 1996 marveling at the fact that in the mid-sized Indiana town where I went college it was possible to buy groceries, clothing, a lawn mower, a snow blower, Lego sets, and bow hunting gear at 3 AM on any given Tuesday of the year. That was peak American Empire, and it’s long gone.

[papito @treyfive_]

A full tank of gas , haircut and car wash is a $200 day you ain’t even eat yet

[Organizermemes @OrganizerMemes]

Hey if you're in dc and you're spending lots of time outside you need to check yourself for ticks regularly there's a 500% increase in ticks this year and yesterday me and my friends found 3 on our clothes after hanging out in dupont circle

[Roadrunner @JulioMoguelYan]

If you are 35+ and in a situationship, you already died but haven't noticed.

[Kyle @KBensonJpg]

A vodka soda is $15 and ubers are $70

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

I WATCHED MY COWORKER CRY IN HIS CAR FOR 20 MINUTES, THEN WALKED BACK IN SMILING LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED. PEOPLE REALLY BE FIGHTING SILENT BATTLES EVERY DAY. PLEASE BE NICE TO PEOPLE

[♡︎ @InspireToBe0]

@Joshua__DM *"Cardi flew from the Bronx to Burtonsville just to argue in front of Isaac’s Poultry Market — peak plot twist

[JDM @Joshua__DM]

It’s objectively hilarious that Cardi B is spending a single second in Burtonsville, Maryland.

[Montgomery County Department of Police @mcpnews]

The following is a brief summary of events regarding a North Bethesda homicide.

https://t.co/92bPQ8T6mj

#MCPD #MCPNews

[The DC MD VA Live @TheDMVLive]

MOCO PROBABLE HOMICIDE SHOOTING: Bethesda North Marriott Hotel, 5700 block of Marinelli Road— ~11:35am victim shot in the back of the head outside of the hotel, last reported in cardiac arrest.

Suspect fled towards the North Bethesda metro station, where Montgomery County Police are now…

[GroundQuake.eth @GroundQuake]

@OliverJia1014 Andor is magnum opus level Star Wars and will age extremely well! Just a great allude to the world and feels more like cultural and social commentary. The dangers of “if you allow it” — restraint, & realistic, didn’t use the force as a crutch to fill plotholes.

[Oliver Jia (オリバー・ジア) @OliverJia1014]

Always bothered me how The Mandalorian Season 2 had this perfect ending where everything comes full circle, yet Disney in their arrogance had to immediately undo it right afterward.

Din Djarin saying goodbye to Grogu was a fitting send-off. He accomplished his mission and in the process also learned what it meant to be a father figure. The score for this scene was absolutely beautiful and amid us finally seeing Luke Skywalker in his prime echoing Anakin, this finale was a powerful gut-punch for long-time fans of Star Wars.

Din unmasking himself before parting with Grogu and us seeing his own pained expression was absolutely devastating. I'm not ashamed to admit that I teared up in finding the whole sequence so incredibly moving. After Luke leaves with Grogu, the elevator doors literally close the episode and the somber orchestral cover of the main theme leaves the audience to take in everything that happened.

Obviously there was going to be more Mandalorian after this, but Disney botched the order of things. First, Din and Grogu should have NOT been reunited immediately after and especially not in a mediocre spin-off show that people today completely skip over. How The Book of Boba Fett mishandled its titular character is a separate topic, but having Mando hijack two episodes while inserting Luke and Grogu was a baffling choice that I can only chalk up to something going wrong behind the scenes at Lucasfilm. Perhaps it had to do with Gina Carano's firing messing up story plans, but either way that show should've had nothing to do with The Mandalorian.

What The Mandalorian Season 3 SHOULD have been was Din going on solo missions while doing his own form of soul-searching and reflection on his Mandalorian identity while the greater political machinations around him occur. He already took off his helmet and bent rules for Grogu's sake, so there was fertile ground to explore there. We sort of got some of that, but the execution was lacking to say the least.

Now, I don't actually think Mando Season 3 was a total disaster. While it was a noticeable step down from Season 1 and 2, I didn't hate it by any means and there were some decent concepts. I also don't think the upcoming movie will be some horrible travesty either. I imagine it'll be a light-hearted space western adventure, which is perfectly fine in a vacuum. Din and Grogu were always going to get back together at some point. My issue is that it had to be EARNED over time, which isn't what happened. It's clear to me that Disney cared more about selling merchandise than actually doing what the story naturally required.

In contrast, Andor did exactly what the story required and that's why people rightfully praise that show as a masterpiece. Tony Gilroy showed restraint. The people behind The Mandalorian, unfortunately, did not.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A normal Audemars Piguet watch costs around $30,000 and has a years-long waitlist. Swatch is about to sell a $400 version of it on May 16, walk-in only. The last time Swatch did this, with Omega in 2022, it sold over a million units in its first year.

The MoonSwatch retailed for $260 and used plastic instead of steel, but kept the look of Omega's $8,000 Speedmaster. Morgan Stanley estimated it drove close to 20% of Swatch Group's entire 2022 profit. Nine months after launch, lines outside Swatch stores still formed every morning.

Audemars Piguet makes only 53,000 watches a year. The Royal Oak alone accounts for 88% of their roughly $2.9 billion in 2025 revenue, putting AP third among Swiss watch brands behind only Rolex and Cartier. Steel Royal Oaks retail from $20,000 to $40,000 and trade for $45,000 to $100,000 on the resale market. The waitlist for new buyers at AP boutiques runs twelve to twenty-four months.

Two things make this collab different. First, Audemars Piguet doesn't share a parent company with Swatch the way Omega and Blancpain do. With those earlier partners, all the profit stayed inside one corporate family. With AP, real money flows to an outside company for every unit sold. Second, Swatch needs this. Their profit per dollar of sales went from 15 cents in 2023 to under 5 cents in 2024, a 75% drop from $1.3 billion to $335 million. China was the main reason.

If the $300-$500 Royal Pop sells anywhere near MoonSwatch numbers in year one, the volume works out to around twenty times AP's entire annual production, at less than 1% of what AP usually charges. AP's high-end watches stay rare and expensive. Swatch gets the hit it needs.

[big tobacco theorist @no_one__wins]

@bryanrbeal A little too close to the "One day a bridge collapsed, and no one came to fix it." quote about the Roman Empire, probably nothing though

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

The reason millennials are so nostalgic is that they got a brief taste of a world that wasn’t entirely controlled by the stupidest people who’ve ever lived.

[BROTHER LOBO 🐺⚔️ @ellobosalvaje]

The suburbs are where energetic young men go to fade into obscurity. I have watched it happen dozens of times.

A man with real potential and momentum signs a mortgage in a development 10 minutes from every strip mall and chain restaurant, and inside of 5 years you cannot find the man who was there before.

The environment shapes you more than you shape it. Most people have this twisted backwards. They believe their character is fixed and the environment is simply the setting. It is the exact opposite. The setting is actively producing the character every day.

Live in the thick of the action or get completely away from it all. Both are environments that demand something from you. The middle zone asks nothing and that is exactly what it produces.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Nike spent ten years trying to break the 2-hour marathon. They named a project after it. They built special shoes. They paid the greatest marathoner alive to chase it. Yesterday, a Kenyan runner finally did it in 1:59:30, wearing Adidas.

Sabastian Sawe used to be a pacemaker. A pacemaker is the kind of runner you hire to set the speed for the first few miles of a race and then drop out before the finish. In January 2022, Sawe got booked to do exactly that at a half-marathon in Spain. He'd never raced more than three miles in his life. He stayed in for the full 13 and won the whole thing. Adidas signed him not long after. Four years later, he became the first human ever to run an official marathon under 2 hours.

Nike, meanwhile, started this whole project in 2016 with a public goal called "Breaking2." They paid for the shoes, the pacemakers, the science labs, and Eliud Kipchoge himself. Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 in Vienna in 2019, but the event was a closed-course exhibition with rotating pacemakers and a pace car projecting a green laser line onto the road. The sport's governing body never recognized it as a real race. It didn't count.

Then Nike's running business cratered. Digital sales fell 26% in one quarter. Their share of footwear sold at Dick's Sporting Goods went from 39% to 32% in five months. On Running grew from $330 million to $1.8 billion between 2020 and 2025. Hoka nearly quadrupled. Roger Federer left Nike for On. Nike's board fired the CEO in October 2024.

Adidas spent the same period building a better shoe. The new Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 took three years to develop. It weighs 97 grams, about 3.4 ounces, lighter than a deck of cards. A Wall Street Journal-cited study found that wearing a shoe 3.5 ounces lighter saves a runner around 57 seconds across a marathon. Sawe beat the third-place finisher by 58 seconds.

Adidas also did something Nike never did for Kipchoge. They wrote a $50,000 check to the official anti-doping body for track and field, asking it to test Sawe more aggressively than any other runner alive. He got tested 25 times in the two months before last year's Berlin Marathon, and Adidas signed up to fund this for the length of his contract. The logic: the moment Sawe ran a marathon this fast, the world was going to ask if he cheated, especially after his countrywoman Ruth Chepngetich got a 3-year doping ban in 2025. Adidas got out ahead of it.

The shoe retails at $500 and is barely available. Adidas's Adizero shoes won half of all major marathon races in 2024. Yesterday in London, four of the top five finishers wore the same Adidas shoe. Yomif Kejelcha crossed the line 11 seconds after Sawe and also broke 2 hours. The top three runners all beat the previous world record.

Nike's only response was an Instagram post. Three sentences long: "The clock has been reset. There is no finish line." That was their entire public reaction to losing a 10-year moonshot to their biggest rival.

[GroundQuake.eth @GroundQuake]

@HankThomasDC We literally had a mini music week with all the open air block parties a week ago! — keep in mind so many more venues are opening! Tigres de la noche, Echostage folks are doing a new one as well! Great time to be in dc! Just gotta look.

[GroundQuake.eth @GroundQuake]

@HankThomasDC I’ve found the opposite to be true. Aside from World Cup. — sure some skip over but we have some of the best new venues for sound. — not all gigantic — but appeared 4 times on this list for best sound systems in USA clubs

[GroundQuake.eth @GroundQuake]

@benecoleman @HankThomasDC There’s more than just NW and the wharf! Tons of venues doing Indy stuff in NE just gotta look.