Michelle

My goal is to become one of those smart people who writes stupid television.

Self-awareness and eternal skepticism are my weapons of choice.

[slaylee @shayleeea]

yet another case of “one day everyone would have always been against this”

[alex⸆⸉ babylon era @guiltyasinights]

everything she said

[ethical hater @DijahSB]

this is as much about palestine as it is about free speech by the way, it’s unacceptable to let those billionaire owners get away with controlling your ability to speak up against oppression

[izzy 🪏 @rcktmns]

i do think it's important to remember that the real villain here is robert kraft and his posse of billionaires. the media - which favors these people - wants to paint ed sheeran as the problem, when robert kraft is. billionaires are & forever will be the root of all problems

[Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek]

This is incredible, a huge cultural shift is taking place right now thanks to Ed Sheeran being a weak coward.

Got nothing but praise and admiration for Macklemore and all those standing with him and Palestine

[JO @withlovejohana]

All of Ed Sheeran’s openers have now withdrawn from the Looper Tour. Please realize how big this is. This is what unity looks like. Billionaires are terrified of people realizing how strong they can be when we come together for a cause. Continue speaking out. Support the new artists that are deciding to put their careers at risk to take this stance.

[jordan @JordanUhl]

The “hate speech” in question:

[Hadi @HadiNasrallah]

Probably the sharpest truth told to call out the cowards who traded their principles for a paycheck. We are all with you @macklemore

[Secular Talk ([email protected]) @KyleKulinski]

1) ticket holders should demand refunds
2) the venues should be flooded with furious calls
3) Ed Sheeran should say either he plays or none of us play

Macklemore's message was 100%. Genocide is a grotesque crime and the problem is ZIONISM not Judaism. FUCK EVERY PRICK LYING ABOUT HIM & CANCELING HIM.

[lacey ᥫ᭡ @stateoflace13]

this feels too important to get lost

[Ashleyy @dontsippy]

A lot of people will come for Ed Sheeran, but the venues threatened not to host his tour if Macklemore performed. He was essentially left with two choices: cancel the tour or drop Macklemore. We live in a country where even the smallest expression of solidarity with Palestinians and their suffering is not tolerated by those in power. This is just another example of how far that pressure extends.

[Doug Hanks @doug_hanks]

Yesterday, the owners of the Miami Herald implemented deep job cuts in our newsroom. Horrible news for the reporters and editors who lost their jobs,
a frustrating decision for readers, and a major setback for local journalism in Miami.

[Daniel Chang Contreras @DanielEChangC]

Venezolanos en Venezuela: moviendo cielo y tierra para transportar suministros y socorrer

Venezolanos fuera: recaudan dinero y suministros en todo el mundo

Socorristas extranjeros: ponen su vida en riesgo para salvar vidas.

El chavismo: arman un proceso burocrático e ineficiente para sacar permisos y salvoconductos.

[Caracas Chronicles @CaracasChron]

🫓 Best way to help Venezuelans from abroad right now is with 💵

We recommend donating to the @VaccUSA Foundation:

❤️ Funds go to @caritasdevzla

✅ The VACC Foundation is a 501(c)(3). If you pay taxes in the US, your donation is tax deductible.

👉https://t.co/3BmPxMUCEr

[Thor Halvorssen @ThorHalvorssen]

Delcy Rodríguez, the "acting" president of Venezuela has declared a state of emergency.

What you are watching from Venezuela is more than a natural disaster story. It is a governance autopsy.

Hundreds are confirmed dead and the real toll is rising because no one is coming to rescue those still trapped in the rubble.

Let's break it down: Twin 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes. Buildings collapsed in Caracas and neighboring cities.

And where are the ambulances?

Where are the fire trucks?

Where is the state?

There are no emergency services. Because there is no state. There is only a criminal enterprise that wears a costume. The state built a machinery to repress. Silence. Torture. Kill. Not to rescue.

To every American businessperson who has traveled to Caracas in the last few months, met with Delcy Rodríguez, signed deals, convinced themselves that "things are changing" and that engagement is pragmatic. This is for you…

For those who believe the American government fiction that "everything is going great" with Delcy…. you are watching your thesis collapse in real time, under rubble, with no one coming to help.

The fiction that Venezuela is "open for business" exists for one reason: Delcy and her brother Jorge need your money, your legitimacy, and your silence. They have no intention of reforming. They respond that they just "don't know" when elections will take place. They have no intention of being held accountable for the billions looted, the political prisoners disappeared, the diaspora of more than eight million people. They need you as props. They need you to keep telling Washington that things are "great!" And that Delcy is exactly what Venezuela needs right now to "stabilize" and "reform."

What this earthquake reveals, as every crisis in Venezuela reveals, is that Maduro and his cronies hollowed out every institution. PDVSA. The hospitals. The fire departments. Civil defense. Emergency services. All of it stripped to the bone and the proceeds wired offshore.

The death toll will be much higher precisely because of what the people now in power did over the last 25 years.

Let's be clear: The people dying tonight and in the next few days under collapsed buildings in Caracas are not dying because of an earthquake. They are dying because of 25 years of systematic looting by the same people now issuing press releases about a "state of emergency." Because they're wholly unprepared. Because they looted everything. Did away with talent. And on top of all of this have zero empathy or motivation to help anyone but themselves. They didn’t care about millions of people fleeing into a jungle and walking hundreds of miles to freedom. Why would they care about survivors of this natural disaster?

The media locally isn't reporting or showing the images of the devastation. They're terrified of upsetting the dictatorship.

And tonight:

Not a firefighter in sight. Not an ambulance in sight. Just cameras, and Delcy, and the performance of governance where none exists.

Those businesspeople were warned. The Venezuelans who fled told you. The human rights organizations told you. The evidence was always there.

Now you have photographs.

[Caracas Chronicles @CaracasChron]

🫓 La Guaira, Venezuela. From the air.

The magnitude of the devastation along the coast is staggering.

[Alyssa 🌻 @alyssaleann]

Would people get really mad at me if I say I think New Girl is THE millennial sitcom? I'm re-watching it now, and I genuinely think it is

It's a time capsule of Obama-era optimism, millennials' wobbly post-recession launch, and the rise of smart phones. It's a show that fundamentally believes people are good and things will get better and cringe is fine and love is real. (I miss 2014)

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

2000s TV feels better than anything streaming makes because 22-episode seasons were subsidized by a business model that no longer exists.

Network TV ran on syndication economics. A show had to hit 88 to 100 episodes before it could be "stripped": sold to cable stations that aired it 5 days a week for 20 weeks without a single repeat. Four seasons of 22 episodes each landed at 88 exactly. Seinfeld, Friends, The Office, Grey's Anatomy, Law & Order, CSI. Every one was engineered to cross that threshold because the real money lived on the other side of it.

A show that made syndication cleared the initial network license fee multiple times over in back-end revenue. Friends ran 236 episodes and still generates an estimated $1 billion per year for Warner Bros, two decades after the finale. Jerry Seinfeld is nearly a billionaire because of 180 episodes of half-hour television shot between 1989 and 1998.

The 22-episode format forced "filler" episodes. The bottle episode. The beach episode. The holiday episode. The one where nothing happens and the characters just sit in an apartment. These are the episodes that built parasocial attachment. Dinner Party from The Office. The Constant from Lost. Pine Barrens from The Sopranos. Nothing happens in any of them. They're why people still talk about the show 20 years later.

Streaming killed this in two moves. Netflix, Max, and Apple pay per-episode production budgets with no syndication upside because they ARE the endpoint. And the binge model means viewers finish a season in three days whether it's 8 episodes or 22, so there's no incentive to keep a cast employed for nine months to make the long version. Cheaper to ship 8, market it as a "prestige limited series," and move the showrunner to the next project.

The result: every streaming season has to advance plot every episode because there's no room for anything else. No breather. No character development. No filler that turns into the best episode of the series. The math won't allow it.

The end state is already on the board. As of 2024, zero American series originally made for streaming has reached 100 episodes. In 50 years of television, the milestone that defined what a "show" even was got erased in one decade.

The 100-episode threshold is gone. So is the kind of show it produced.

[Sophia ❣️ @KeruboSk]

Millennials are the elite generation because they cranked out 12-page essays the night before they were due. No ChatGPT. No Claude. Just lo-fi beats playing in the background, Black coffee at midnight, footnotes that were somehow correct, and pure delusion. Grade was an A minus. Period.

[daz @MetamateDaz]

Something that breaks my heart as a Millennial is how fucking optimistic and fun our teenage years and 20s were. Like we envisioned a TOTALLY different world from the one that we've got and insanely divorced from what Gen-Z are experiencing. It's hard to put in words how fantastic we thought life was gonna be and how it seemed like we were making tangible social progress. We've had all of that ripped away from us.