I'm buying a replica dinosaur skull. I landed on a website which makes replicas for museums and picked one of their lowest-priced options.
While comparing prices I found out that it's such a weird market. After two years of articles about real fossils as a trend - the New York Post wrote "Billionaires are bidding on dinosaur bones as the ultimate status symbol" in Feb. 2025 - you can find 3D-printed and resin sculptures, scaled-down and full-size theropod skulls, for any price on Etsy and other sites. Here's an ad for a Spinosaurus skull:

I was finally able to watch and download subtitles for the first episode of Zero Day Attack (2025), a miniseries about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. A year before release they posted a 17-minute 'trailer', but then the series was only watchable in Taiwan and disappeared from the discourse.
In the episode, Taipei's mayor is running to be the first woman president. After a terrorist attack she resorts to partially closing polls in Taipei, her primary support base. With a narrowed victory, it is necessary to compromise for a coalition government. Then her son is kidnapped?

In Contact (1997), Jodie Foster says a natural, in-context "We're cooked!" (6:40) well before it became a popular meme, reportedly after sports losses in 2018–2019.
A reddit thread includes other 90s mentions and a centuries-old idiom (goose is cooked). So maybe the emergent phenomenon is becoming meme-worthy enough to stand on its own (like the numbers 6 and 7 existed forever).

I'm always in awe of stories of famous people who also have great memories. For example: https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/paul-mccartneys-freakish-memory and the many stories that people have about Bill Clinton recognizing them in brief meetings years apart. He's the first example on a Wikipedia article List of people claimed to possess an eidetic memory. The citation is the Washington Post, maybe an early mention of his memory skills from 1994:

Clinton has a nearly photographic memory - he recently stunned a friend visiting the White House by saying, "Let's call your parents!" and then reciting a number he hadn't dialed in more than a decade

From an Oprah interview ten years later, on writing about his life before becoming president:

Clinton: [the editor] said, "How did you have enough room in your head to remember what happened to everyone's children and grandchildren?" I said, "Man, I'm from Arkansas, and that's what we do."

Oprah: You obviously have a photographic memory. You remembered every neighbor, every encounter.

Clinton: I grew up with all these country people who were really smart but had no education. That was typical in the South at the end of the Second World War. That's what has always made me care about education. My grandmother was smart. Her sister was smarter. And my uncle Buddy? No telling what his IQ was. I bet it was 170, 180. It was spooky what he could remember.

A little to unpack here. Is it a manufactured folksy answer, is he offering evidence that it's genetic, or is it a literacy thing? I remember being amazed by trekking houses in Nepal who would collect everyone's food order the night before and not write anything.

The 'infinite money glitch' (check fraud) which was supposedly blowing up on TikTok in August 2024 has almost disappeared from memory. When I googled it this week, I instead saw this 2025 story about NYC youth employment cards, which is comparatively well-documented and explained.
News stories following up on the TikTok trend use as proof that Chase was suing to recover money from customers. But late 2024 / early 2025 articles describe that as $661k from just four people, and about half of that money went to a masked man depositing a fake check. That's not the TikTok teens mob we were promised!

Bloomberg reported that the strike on an Iranian school is now being blamed on a Palantir AI / data fusion system. Earlier this year many people mentally merged the story with news about Anthropic working with the Pentagon. A good example of this is an "exclusive" oddly published by This Week in Worcester on March 6. Interestingly that story (quote: "the AI program included the school’s position based on older, archived intelligence") is consistent with the latest from Bloomberg ("outdated imagery and an overreliance on AI") but interweaves information about Anthropic to the point I think that everyone assumed the story was about Anthropic.

The Guardian reported FBI warned ICE agents could be targeted by fake 'tradwife' dating profiles. This is one of my most hated types of news stories. Someone within the FBI or ICE heard rumors about online dating scams, and cooked up a memo, but people are confusing an official warning with it being real. If you read the actual article, they acknowledge that this originated in the New York Post and right-wing social media reactions to (likely unserious) TikToks about doxxing agents through dating apps. But the Post article from January 17 (between the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti) does not mention "tradwives"? It promotes several other rumors: that agents are getting reported on Grindr, that ICE uses dating apps to target women, or that a Facebook group of over 1,000 coordinates dates and background checks.

Overall this plot makes zero sense, right? It presupposes that ICE agents are uniquely obsessed with finding a tradwife, to the point that someone going online as a single, aspiring tradwife can expect to collect ICE agents, who then can be identified by their profiles or do they doxx themselves? And that's before we get into this supposed dating sting network. Is it doxxing or are they doing some kind of journalism?

I'm reminded of a 'socialist' account amplified this month by Patton Oswalt, claiming that "nationwide" the resistance are dressing up as ICE to infiltrate and start fights by accusing agents of being imposters. It doesn't even make sense, dude.

Meanwhile there was a bunch of reporting last month on the attempts of ICE to find some crime while infiltrating and surveiling community groups in Minneapolis: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/25/ice-signal-chat-minnesota

Not sure how to conclude, so here's Minnesota seed art Guernica https://bsky.app/profile/johnmoe.bsky.social/post/3muaforw4k22s

Georeactor Blog

Mass Media and Memory updates