jason tilton

[grace 🧜‍♀️🧚‍♀️🧙‍♀️💃 @stateofgrace04]

stranger things started off doing Brown Eighties and then switched to Neon Eighties, which was its downfall

[theselongwars @theselongwars_]

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

[Vikram Murthi @fauxbeatpoet]

Never in my life did I think I’d have to insist that Sonic Youth is an all-timer group, but after seeing *way* too many people argue that they’re a trust-fund kid, emperor-has-no-clothes “psy-op,” I think many of you need to be hit in the head with a copy of DAYDREAM NATION.

[Pejuola| HR🗣️ @Pejuola_a]

Back in 2021, I met a lady who told me about this app where blind people could video call volunteers whenever they needed help with something.

Out of curiosity, I downloaded it and signed up.

I still remember how surreal it felt the first time I got a call. Someone was simply trying to decide what to wear and needed me to tell them if the colors matched. Another person needed help checking something on their TV screen.

And there I was, in my room in Nigeria, helping complete strangers from different parts of the world through a random video call.

It wasn’t paid or anything. It was just volunteering.

But I remember being so fascinated by the idea that technology could connect people in such a deeply human way. For a few minutes, you literally became someone else’s eyes.

Till today, that remains one of the most beautiful things I’ve experienced online.

[Jeff Jones @jmjones]

The Cardinals are playing four games in San Diego, and those four games are on four different networks and/or streaming services. I am not a television audience retention professional, nor am I a media contracts lawyer, but I do know that seems like an absurd own goal:

[alistair green @mralistairgreen]

The most misguided thing ppl say is ‘social media isnt real life’. Yes it is. Ppl are on their phone 24/7. Theyre cancelling plans so they can look at their phone. Everyone in yr train carriage is scrolling their phone.Nobody knows whats real anymore and everybody is angry.

[The Fat Electrician @Fat_Electrician]

There’s no such thing as being polite at a 4-way stop. If it’s your turn, fucking go.

[jason tilton @JTserious]

@AlsikkanTV

[DAILY HORROR STUFF | Michael Sellars | Author @HorrorPaperback]

My generation learned the hard way to deal with disappointment. We'd rent videos with incredible Vallejo-esque box art: a vast post-apocalyptic hellscape populated with bizarrely-clad warriors and snarling mutants, everything on fire. Then we'd hit play and it was dogshit.

[Colby @cl_all_day]

If you’re a man in college living with other men you should be playing catch at least 3 times a week. Football, baseball, even a tennis ball. You need to be playing catch

[TenDay @CaliTenDay]

Friend started running a while back, and I asked how many miles she does a week and she told me she doesn’t know, that she just goes outside and runs and stops when she’s tired.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Inception came out in 2006 for $4 million. Christopher Nolan's $160 million version arrived four years later. The original director died five weeks after Nolan's opened.

His name was Satoshi Kon. The film was called Paprika.

Same dream-sharing technology premise. Same Japanese businessman hiring the team. Same physics-defying hallways. Same elevator descending through layers of subconscious. Same dream architect character.

Kon's entire production budget was less than what Warner Bros spent on Inception trailers. The marketing campaign alone was $100 million, 25x Paprika's full production cost.

Paprika opened in two US theaters. Total overseas gross outside Japan: $944,915. Inception grossed $839 million worldwide and won four Oscars. International box office gap: roughly 890 to 1.

Kon's crew of 50 at Madhouse worked from his hand-drawn storyboards. The dream parade, the warping corridor, the character who becomes the media they consumed too much of. 30 months from planning to completion with fewer people than a modern Pixar lighting department.

The part nobody talks about: Kon was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in May 2010. Inception opened July 16. He died August 24. He was 46. He made four completed features in his entire career. Perfect Blue. Millennium Actress. Tokyo Godfathers. Paprika. His follow-up Dreaming Machine was shut down permanently because his team said no one else could finish it.

Darren Aronofsky bought rights to Perfect Blue to recreate the bathtub scream shot in Requiem for a Dream. The bone structure of every serious dream-logic film made since 2000 traces back to four movies Kon finished in Tokyo on budgets Hollywood rounds off.

The industry found the storyboards. They just never paid the storyboard artist.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[Ian Grant @ian__grant]

it doesn’t really get any better than this

[Felix ❤️‍🔥 @pilgoth]

I hate, hate, hate being forced to watch a video to learn something when I could read at 10x the speed. Videos are for cattle.

"Hey guys, today we'll be talking about X -- X is a fascinating topic, and a lot of you have been requesting I talk about X, so..." - Shut up, Shut up!

[FndNope @FndNope]

My lord, forgive the boldness of one so lowly. When we speak of our ailment in the only terms we know, it is not to presume upon your learning, but to grasp at understanding. We are not schooled in symptoms and signs, only in the names we have been told before.

If we say “a chest infection,” it is because we lack the finer words, not because we would have you take our judgement as equal to yours. Guide us, my lord. Ask of our pains, and we shall answer as best we can, for we come seeking your wisdom, not to challenge it.

Only grant us a little patience, I beg you, for we are often afraid, and our speech is clumsy when we suffer.

[Time Capsule Tales @timecaptales]

Suzanne Vega originally recorded
"Tom's Diner" as an a cappella track because she didn't feel confident enough in her piano skills.

This later became the foundation for the famous 1990 DNA remix & served as the primary testing material for the development of the MP3 format.

[jason tilton @JTserious]

@AlsikkanTV Just checked. There’s no rule against this.

[jason tilton @JTserious]

If you see the same weirdo standing outside your house every night you wouldn’t say “hey there’s our weirdo”, you’d say “hey there’s *the* weirdo.” Has nothing to do with ownership…it’s about familiarity.

[doomer @uncledoomer]

kind of narcissistic to call our moon "the moon" no? theres lots of moons all over the solar system. why is our moon "the moon" when trillions of other moons could be "the moon"?

[Handre @Handre]

Cash for Clunkers destroyed $2.4 billion in working capital in 2009. The government paid dealers to pour sodium silicate into 690,000 perfectly functioning engines -- rendering them permanently inoperable.

These weren't junkyard cars. The program required trade-ins to be drivable and insured. You had working vehicles that poor families desperately needed, and bureaucrats systematically destroyed them to boost GM sales (while GM was under government ownership, naturally).

The environmental impact? Pure theater. Most clunkers got 18+ mpg -- hardly gas guzzlers. Meanwhile, building new cars generates 25 tons of CO2 per vehicle before they leave the factory. The program likely increased net emissions while making transportation less affordable for everyone earning under $50k.