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4 Magazines Delivered to Your Door

Things We Hate and Love Online This Week

Once again, we drive the Dodge Ram of brain damage across the vast, unknowable interior of our online world.

By Adam Christopher Smith

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Welcome to RATED AND SLATED, the column that is terminally online so you don’t have to be.

The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park runs at 188 degrees and can boil you alive, but it’s also a pretty color, so it’s impossible to say if getting your photograph taken next to it is a bad idea or not.I’ve seen a video on Twitter of tourists doing just that. Or perhaps this poster put it better: “The uncontrollable, nihilistic, compulsive need to take a shitty cell phone video that no one will ever remember… the great spiritual illness of our time.”

Some tourists walked out onto Grand Primsatic at Yellowstone National Park. Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/Css9HOPJUV— XANDER GEOGRAPHIC 🏕️ (@actionxander) July 20, 2026

Some tourists walked out onto Grand Primsatic at Yellowstone National Park. Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/Css9HOPJUV

Well, speaking of spiritual illness, I’ve been busy getting as close as possible to the internet’s broiling geothermal torrent of human expression so that you can sit back and enjoy it from a safe distance.  Here are a few holiday snaps for you to enjoy. And if you need me, I’ll be trying to reattach all this melted flesh back onto my bones. 

SELLING THE BROWN BUNNY VAN ON EBAY

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American actor and filmmaker Vincent Gallo is a man of grudges, that much is clear just from this eBay listing. What I want to know is if there’s anything to stop a group of “angry unhappy women” from clubbing together to buy the van from The Brown Bunny just to blow it up? What if the estate of Roger Ebert stumped up the cash to turn it into a traveling museum dedicated to the late critic, who Gallo once slapped with a cancer hex. And given that this 2003 drama is famous for an unsimulated oral sex scene, what if Bonnie Blue is in the market for a new Bang Bus? Vincent, if you’re reading this, get in touch. We just care about preserving the history of independent cinema!

VIRTUALLY UNWRAPPING 200-YEAR-OLD SCROLLS BURNED IN THE ERUPTION OF MOUNT VESUVIUS

NEW: Scientists use AI to fully virtually unwrap a 2,000-year-old scroll burned in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, revealing 20 columns of text. pic.twitter.com/T5Q5CifrPn— Polymarket (@Polymarket) July 19, 2026

NEW: Scientists use AI to fully virtually unwrap a 2,000-year-old scroll burned in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, revealing 20 columns of text. pic.twitter.com/T5Q5CifrPn

Sometimes I feel bad for AI. After being relentlessly blamed for the impending destruction of all of civilization, it finally does something cool like reading ancient scrolls that were buried under volcanic debris when Mount Vesuvius........

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