Cautiously realistic.

IN
Joined December 2006
Video games might be one of the craziest combinations of art and engineering humans have created.
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I don’t understand this. What is the practical purpose of the coolest thing ever?
Real life, baby
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Still one of the funniest philosophy anecdotes of all time
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Spooky Halloween candle hack
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MadMup retweeted
It is still hard to believe that my poem was even considered to be part of our city's 2026 Sidewalk Poetry program, much less to see it permanently stamped into concrete. Yet, here it is.
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On this morning 250 years ago, the British hanged a 21-year-old American schoolteacher as a spy, and in trying to make him disappear quietly, they accidentally made him immortal. His name was Nathan Hale, and it is worth sitting with just the last few hours of his life. He had been caught the night before, behind British lines on Long Island, carrying notes on enemy positions hidden in his shoes. There was no real trial. A man out of uniform with military intelligence on him was a spy by the rules of war, and the sentence for spying was death by hanging, no ceremony, no honor. General Howe ordered it done in the morning. What we know of that morning comes mostly from the enemy, from British officers who were there, and it is the small human cruelties that stay with you. Hale asked for a clergyman to attend him in his final hours. The request was refused. He asked for a Bible. That too was denied. He was a devout young man about to die, and they would not give him even that comfort. A British officer named Montresor, watching, was troubled enough by the young man's composure to later make sure his story was told. In his last moments Hale was allowed to write a couple of letters, one to his mother, one to a fellow officer. He wrote them, and then the British provost marshal, a notoriously brutal man named Cunningham, took those letters and destroyed them in front of him. The reason given was chilling in its pettiness: so that the rebels should not know they had a man in their ranks who could die with such firmness. They did not just want to kill him. They wanted to erase him. Then they marched him to the gallows, and there, according to the accounts that survived, this young schoolteacher who had failed at the one dangerous mission he ever attempted, stood calmly and spoke about duty and country with a steadiness that unnerved the men sent to kill him. The famous words attributed to him, that he only regretted having but one life to lose for his country, may be polished or borrowed from a play he loved. But everyone who was there agreed on the essential truth beneath the wording: he met his death without flinching, and he made even his executioners remember him. And that is the irony that redeems the whole sad morning. Cunningham burned the letters so no one would know how bravely Hale died. It did not work. The story got out anyway, carried by the very enemies who watched it, and a young man the British tried to erase became one of the most enduring symbols of the Revolution, honored two and a half centuries later, on this exact day, as the first American to die spying for his country. They denied him a Bible and a chaplain and burned his last words, and still they could not make him small.
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"Make it look like he had a happy little accident" -Bob Ross, Mob Boss
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It takes a genetic disaster to know one, I guess.
“Prince takes on the scientists”
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Qué saurus saurus, as the paleontologists like to say
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It is because of this beautiful young lady we learned who perpetuated this evil on our country. I hope her two young children have grown up to know what a hero their Mama was💔 "We're flying low. We're flying very, very low." Those were the last words ground control heard from 35-year-old Amy Sweeney. She spent her final moments making sure the world knew the truth. Twenty-five years ago this morning, Madeline Amy Sweeney was not supposed to be at work. She was a part-time flight attendant who kept a light schedule so she could be home with her kids. Her daughter Anna was five and had just started kindergarten. Her son was younger still. But when a colleague fell ill, Amy did what she always did. She stepped up and took the shift. That simple act of generosity placed her aboard American Airlines Flight 11, departing Boston for Los Angeles. At 7:15 a.m., before the plane left the gate, Amy called her husband Mike from the cabin. He later said that was unusual for her. She was feeling low about missing the chance to see Anna off to school that morning. Mike told her not to worry. There would be plenty of mornings ahead to walk their kids to the bus. Flight 11 took off at 7:59 a.m. with 81 passengers on board. About 15 minutes later, five terrorists hijacked the aircraft. As panic and violence consumed the cabin, Amy Sweeney chose extraordinary courage over terror. She picked up an onboard phone, dialed American Airlines Flight Services at Boston Logan Airport, and reached manager Michael Woodward. He was a friend, and he knew her voice. The first thing she told him was to listen very carefully, because her plane had been hijacked. Calmly, methodically, and under unimaginable pressure, Amy gave ground control the very first intelligence report of the day. She reported that the flight was hijacked. She confirmed two flight attendants had been stabbed and a passenger was critically injured. The passenger was a man in business class whose throat had been cut. She reported a bomb threat in the cockpit. One of the hijackers had shown her a device with red and yellow wires. She relayed the exact seat numbers of the hijackers, providing critical evidence for federal investigators. She named seats 8D, 8G, and 10B. Woodward's team pulled those seats up in the reservation system while she was still on the line. The name in seat 8D was Mohamed Atta. Within hours, the FBI knew who had led the attack, and Amy Sweeney was the reason. Woodward later said she spoke very calmly and very quickly, the way a professional does when there is no time to waste. She told him one hijacker spoke excellent English and another spoke almost none. She told him the hijackers had gotten into the cockpit and she did not know how. She told him that passengers in coach still believed there was a medical emergency up front. Amy had been flying with American for more than a decade, and every bit of that training showed. Alongside fellow flight attendant Betty Ong, who stayed on her own line for 23 minutes, Amy became the eyes and ears of a nation in its darkest hour. Betty's call helped lead the FAA to ground every plane in America for the first time in our history. Amy's call helped the FBI put names and faces to the men who did this. The two of them, working the same cabin with no weapons and no help coming, gave our country the truth before the rest of us knew anything was wrong. She stayed on the phone as the aircraft sped toward New York City. She told Woodward that something was wrong and that the plane was in a rapid descent. Near the end of the call, Woodward asked her to look outside and determine where they were. Looking through the window at the approaching city skyline, her final reported words were: "I see water. I see buildings. We're flying low. We're flying very, very low." At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
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Best impression ever.
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The lead songwriter for the K-Pop Demon Hunters movie: "Yeah so we purposefully made this song impossible for any one person to sing live, to drive home that these characters are superhuman." Kelly Clarkson:
Kelly Clarkson proving that she is the ONLY mainstream singer who can sing Golden on the original key live 😭
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MadMup retweeted
reminder that echo chambers don't feel like echo chambers from the inside. they feel like finally finding people who get it
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MadMup retweeted
She thinks my tractor's Shrek C
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MadMup retweeted
Dolly made us want to become better people. That's why she was an icon.
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“Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.” ― P.J. O'Rourke
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