Thanks y'all. We made the supposedly uncrackable bestseller list for middle grade novels. It is typically dominated by huge names as you can see. So, this is a real triumph. The next-shortest tenure on the list is 7 weeks and most have been on the last for close to a year.

That is to say, it's possible social media merely sucks for other reasons, but isn't poisoning children's minds en masse.

Perhaps you can spot the stats error? Pretty much *every* kid at the time read comics. So it will almost always be the case that troubled kids were comics readers. However, there's no causal connection. I am admittedly biased against what I'm about to say but... perhaps social media is likewise.

If you don't know the story there was a then-famous book called The Seduction of the Innocent. Long story short, the author showed that commonly when a kid was engaged in bad and/or criminal activity, they turned out to either be a comic reader or even have been enacting comic book scenes.

I'm fairly concerned about young people using social media, but my understanding is that the best evidence finds it explains very little of subsequent issues with anxiety/depression/body image, etc. The thing that immediately popped into my head was it could be like comics in the 1950s.

Is this graph adjusted for bias-confirmation?

Oh shit, did this start when Carrot Top got buff? Was that when the dam broke?

I really weird change in the last 10-15 years is comedians trying to be hot? Did the Internet do this? I mean there were always a few who looked like they could more or less dress themselves, but this thing where they go to the gym and have a haircut is weird.

Habitat loss is the biggest threat to the world’s wildlife. Nearly all habitat loss is driven by the expansion of agriculture: we chop down forests and convert wild grasslands into farmland to grow crops and raise livestock.

I think some of us nerds are much more willing than the general population to separate what we see as the factual case from how we feel about it, and in fact some people see doing so as per se hypocritical/bad/antisocial. That realization has helped me understand a lot of interactions.

I cannot tell you how I miss the old I Am A Guy With A Website era.

Any tech geeks out there available to help Jon? This is like... important webcomics history!

In my head they are called chicken fingers, and terms like "strips" and "tenders" are marketing inventions.

Turns out many people weren't fingered like we were! I wonder what the origin of the phrase is. I associate it more with the Southern US (where it's properly pronounced *fangers*)

Basically chicken fried steak made in strips. Was totally normal where I grew up in central TX, usually served with white gravy, toast, and fries.

(central TX and this stuff was normal in my experience)

Where you grew up was it normal to refer to any elongated food as "fingers?" E.g. chicken fingers, steak fingers, toast fingers, fish fingers?