Mason W

Don’t go the distance for other people. Do it for yourself.

[Jeff Passan @JeffPassan]

@GoonersDream @MarinoMLB stop gooning and learn ball

[amen | on vacation @amen_handle]

the fact that they gave Persona 4 FUCKING MAPPA and made them animate a fuckton of shit but gave Persona 3 WIT studios and made them barely animate everything makes me wonder if someone at atlus just hates Persona 3 LMAO

[Kameron “KY” Yung , DDS @DaveFreese6]

A guy at the pro shop today said that his “swamp ass is so bad he was hydroplaning on the toilet seat”. Never heard that one before. May be adding it to the bag.

[Lythero 🎮 @Lythero]

the funny thing is no matter how mundane the concept is, if Kamiya's making it, the game is gonna play amazingly.

[HIDEO_KOJIMA @HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN]

I saw “Supergirl” in IMAX. It wasn’t a “superhero movie” about saving the Earth through self-sacrifice as “justice” confronts “evil.” It was a coming-of-age story about saving oneself, Kara, as she struggles with her own trauma. Structurally, it feels less like “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015), where everyone is driven purely by survival instinct beyond notions of good and evil, and more like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), where heroes, villains, and scoundrels all converge.

[Mike Hoffmann @MikeHoffmann]

Luke Falk shared a Mike Leach story that stopped me cold:

Two kids. One rich. One poor.

Every training camp, Coach Leach told his team about these 2 kids.

The rich kid has two choices.

Get soft. Get entitled. Expect everything handed to him because he was handed more.

Or take the resources, the coaching, the opportunities, and compound them into something greater.

The poor kid has two choices too.

Say nobody gave him anything. Blame the world. Make his circumstances the reason he never became what he could have been.

Or outwork everyone in the room.

Luke said the locker room had both. Kids from wealth. Kids from nothing. Kids with every advantage. Kids who scraped for every inch.

Same choice for all of them.

Ownership or victimhood.
Fuel or excuse.

The rich kid can waste the head start or build on it.

The poor kid can drown in the deficit or weaponize it.

Greatness doesn't come from where you start.

It comes from which kid you choose to feed.

Credit to @coachlukefalk for continuing to share golden nuggets about Coach’s legacy

[TMZ @TMZ]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Cut Penis off Raccoon https://t.co/hfSjc6TGs9

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Paul Thomas Anderson pitched Leonardo DiCaprio on Boogie Nights in 1997 by showing up at his mother’s house with a LaserDisc of Raging Bull and a VHS tape of pornography. “I want to do the Raging Bull of pornography.” DiCaprio was in. Then Titanic happened, the productions overlapped, and he chose Cameron’s ship. Mark Wahlberg got the part.

PTA and DiCaprio wouldn’t make a movie together for 28 years. But DiCaprio kept calling him whenever a script needed fixing on someone else’s film.

According to two industry sources reported by World of Reel, PTA did a massive rewrite of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon after DiCaprio raised concerns the script read like “too much of a great white hope story.” Credited screenwriter Eric Roth later admitted “mixed feelings” about the finished film and confirmed a major rewrite. PTA got zero credit.

Then Joaquin Phoenix threatened to walk off Ridley Scott’s Napoleon 10 days before cameras rolled unless PTA rewrote the script. Scott confirmed it to the New York Times: “Tommy was doing Licorice Pizza, advising me how to do Napoleon. Three of us in this room screaming with laughter.” Zero credit again.

Now it’s happened a third time. According to The InSneider, PTA rewrote Patrick Marber’s script for What Happens at Night, Scorsese’s gothic horror film currently shooting in Prague with DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. Once again, at DiCaprio’s request.

This is how script doctoring has always worked in Hollywood. Robert Towne rewrote the famous garden scene in The Godfather without credit. Carrie Fisher punched up Hook, Sister Act, and Lethal Weapon 3. Under Writers Guild rules, you need to contribute more than 33% of an adapted screenplay to earn your name on screen. Most script doctors stay just under that line.

What makes PTA’s situation different is who’s calling. Scorsese and Ridley Scott both handed him their scripts, and the common thread every time is one actor who quietly picks up the phone.

PTA confirmed it all in a September 2025 Dazed interview: “Both of those things were a thing with Joaquin, a thing with Leo, and obviously with Marty and Ridley. It’s always a privilege to say, ‘Let me tell you my thoughts on the script.’”

DiCaprio eventually called missing Boogie Nights one of his biggest career regrets. They finally made One Battle After Another together in 2025. Won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay. Took 28 years and a LaserDisc of Raging Bull. But the whole time, DiCaprio had been pulling PTA into his biggest projects through the back door, shaping films whose credits will never carry his name.

Scorsese and DiCaprio’s 6 previous films together earned 41 Oscar nominations. What Happens at Night is their 7th. PTA’s fingerprints are on at least two of them.

[david ehrlich @davidehrlich]

congrats to PTA but this is clearly a make-up win for Boogie Nights and Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood and The Master and Inherent Vice and Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza and probably also some of those Haim videos too why not

[Nicholas J. Stelzner @stelzner_n1150]

Nothing like waking up to take a piss only to find out we went to war with Iran.

[Mason W @masn_ward]

@consequence Mou poo

[⚙Gibo⚙ @stardream61016]

Subspace Emissary Cutscenes

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Red Robin is a case study in how to kill a restaurant chain from the inside out.

In 2015, the stock hit $92.90 per share. Revenue peaked in 2017 at $1.4 billion across 573 locations. Families loved the place. Bottomless fries. Birthday parties. “Gourmet” burgers when that word still meant something in casual dining. The brand had real equity.

Then management panicked about rising minimum wages and made the single worst decision in the company’s history: they fired all the bussers.

January 2018. CEO Steve Carley cut bussers across every location, eliminated expeditors, and replaced kitchen managers with generic “back-of-house” roles. The logic was pure spreadsheet thinking. Labor costs were rising, so remove labor. The savings looked great in quarterly earnings. The second and third order effects were catastrophic.

Tables stopped getting cleared. Wait times ballooned. Walkaways increased 85% year over year. 75% of the dine-in traffic loss came during peak hours, the exact window when the restaurant makes money. Ticket times out of the kitchen jumped a full minute on average. Customers who waited 20 minutes for a table and another 20 for a burger stopped coming back. Red Robin’s own CEO at the time, Denny Marie Post, admitted the damage was self-inflicted.

And here’s the compounding problem. While Red Robin was gutting its own service model, it simultaneously launched a “Tavern Double” value menu at $6.99 to drive traffic. Orders of the cheap burgers jumped from 9% to 15% of all orders, which cratered the average check. So Red Robin was now serving worse food, slower, in a dirtier restaurant, at a lower price point. That combination is how you enter a death spiral.

Meanwhile, 16% of locations were in malls. Mall traffic was already declining. Those locations saw 5.5% sales drops versus 3% at standalone stores, dragging the whole system down. Management acknowledged the problem quarter after quarter and did nothing about it for years.

Five CEOs in 10 years. Think about that. The one leader who provided stability, Michael Snyder, was with the chain from 1979 to 2005. After that, it was a revolving door. Every new CEO launched a new turnaround plan. Every plan was abandoned by the next CEO. The North Star plan. The First Choice plan. New menu rollouts. Loyalty program reboots. None of it addressed the core issue: they’d trained an entire generation of customers to think of Red Robin as the place where the service is terrible.

The contrast with Chili’s makes the failure even clearer. Kevin Hochman took over Chili’s in 2022 and did the opposite of what Red Robin did. He simplified the menu, invested in operations, launched a $10.99 “3 for Me” deal that went viral on TikTok, and let the food speak for itself. Chili’s just posted 31% same-store sales growth. Red Robin’s comparable revenue was down 1.2% for all of 2024.

Both chains were in roughly the same position three years ago. One chain invested in the customer experience. The other spent a decade cutting it. Red Robin’s $65M market cap and Chili’s $3.3B market cap tell you which approach works.

The stock went from $92 to $3.61. That’s what happens when you optimize for the quarterly earnings call instead of the customer walking through the door.

[PortersBurgh @PortersBurgh]

Hiring Mike McCarty before ever having an in person interview with Scheelhaase or Shula seems like malpractice.

[UrinatingTree @UrinatingTree]

Curt Cignetti just completed the best Dynasty Mode playthrough of all-time at Indiana.

Well done, sir!

[Pop Crave @PopCrave]

Lexa Gates walks on wheel in NYC for 10 hours straight to coincide with her new album ‘I Am.’

[jacob @jtimsuggs]

Throwback to when MTV used files from the Revenge of the Sith game to make Anakin Skywalker sing ‘Take Me Out’ by Franz Ferdinand to a crowd of Clone Troopers.

And yes, it actually aired on live TV back in 2005. Growing up with the Star Wars Prequels remains unmatched.

[Steve Helwick @s_helwick]

I’m in tears at this sign