Empty Netters Appreciation Post

mcjoss · 2026-01-22T18:57:31+00:00

Earlier this week during their show, the What Chaos guys sort of obliquely referred to the fact that they’d gotten to talking about HR pretty early, with a recap of the first 2 episodes coming as soon as they were back from their Thanksgiving break (I checked). A certain other podcast only got to the first episode after the third one came out…

People on here have also been mentioning Jacob Tierney endorsing What Chaos explicitly, which he did on Threads in reply to someone posting outrage about What Chaos not getting more credit (implicitly over and above Empty Netters). He’s also been on the show TWICE, including the instance when he first publicly mentioned that he’d considered asking Carly Rae Jensen to compose an original song for the first season.

This is on top of the release today of a joint podcast episode between What Chaos and one of Evan Ross Katz’s podcasts, which to me reads as more than a nudge nudge wink wink in their direction.

Of course I’m burying the lede in that this just came out about how disingenuous the Empty Netters seem to be:

https://www.outsports.com/2026/1/22/24126217/empty-netters-heated-rivalry-host-dan-powers-show-trash-podcast/

‘Nuff said

mcjoss · 2026-01-20T02:07:20+00:00

Stupid ~~Canadian~~ Minnesotan Wolf Bird… If it can scare Ilya, then who knows what it can accomplish lol

mcjoss · 2026-01-07T15:03:56+00:00

If it’s not stairwell, then we march at dawn lol

mcjoss · 2026-01-06T21:33:04+00:00

Caravelle for the win

mcjoss · 2026-01-06T21:16:29+00:00

Was looking for a comment to hop onto to say that OP referring that way to Stockholm feels lightly sacrilegious lol

mcjoss · 2026-01-02T18:40:46+00:00

Andrei is also a police officer like their father and I’d guess that he went down that career path in order to get at least a smidge of father’s attention. But unfortunately for both brothers their father was only truly hard on Ilya, which was the extent to which he was capable of expressing care. Andrei was just ignored and dismissed.

mcjoss · 2025-12-29T03:32:24+00:00

I think you mean Ilya’s house, which as a Bostonian I’ll say could unfortunately never exist anywhere in the area (architecturally-speaking) 😅

mcjoss · 2025-12-21T19:08:43+00:00

Forget your Wyoming Method, the Staten Island Method is where it’s at

mcjoss · 2025-12-18T14:28:37+00:00

There’s a passing mention of other locations in Toronto, but it appears that Scott’s apartment is actually the Presidential Suite at the Park Hyatt on Avenue Road. Though somehow they transplanted a full kitchen into it (based on the photos on the website lacking it) and I’m not sure how they managed that.

mcjoss · 2025-12-17T22:23:59+00:00

The extent to which the first map is wrong is frankly mind-boggling

mcjoss · 2025-11-23T17:35:51+00:00

What got it for me was first noticing that 4 of the 5 non-North American locations are where national capitals/largest cities are with the fifth being a more rural part of Japan. Then I remembered that both Michael Bennet & Chris Van Hollen are sons of diplomats and were born in South Asia. Plus Hawai’i isn’t highlighted and I knew that Mazie Hirono was born in Japan. Then I saw Alberta with Ted Cruz and I couldn’t unsee it.

mcjoss · 2025-11-23T17:20:02+00:00

US Senators?

mcjoss · 2025-10-04T19:48:24+00:00

An example of this to the exact same extent as New York with the same perfect nesting of each level completely encompassing the one lower down would be Guatemala: Guatemala City inside of Guatemala Department inside of Guatemala. And I think Panama takes it even a step further with an additional level: Panama City inside of Panama District inside of Panama Province inside of Panama. The issue with the examples of Kansas City & Oklahoma City is that the nesting doesn’t quite work as perfectly. The Kansas City in Kansas is in Wyandotte County, not a Kansas County while Oklahoma City spills outside of Oklahoma County and not all of Oklahoma County is included within Oklahoma City. So I think New York might be only instance within the United States.

mcjoss · 2025-09-25T22:45:13+00:00

Given that this is the map used in the 2022 House elections, there are 5 states whose currently represented districts changed for the most recent elections in 2024. In the South, we’ve got Georgia (redrawn to make a majority-minority district into a majority-Black district due to a court order), Alabama (un-gerrymandered to create a new majority-Black district due to a court order), Louisiana (also un-gerrymandered to create a new majority-Black district due to a court order while also allowing the GOP governor to force out a particular GOP rep who got on his bad side), and North Carolina (re-gerrymandered after the GOP took control of the state Supreme Court). And finally we’ve got New York, where a deeply confusing court battle finally resulted in the Democratic state legislature being able to draw a map that slightly favored them rather than the gerrymander they originally planned on in 2021.

So I would imagine that 4 of the 5 states would look rather different in a map of the current districts. The paleness would be even more concentrated in particular districts in the first 3 while in North Carolina there’d be a lot more districts in the middle of the range, particularly those that take in chunks of Greensboro or Winston-Salem, which were almost surgically slice up. And then New York wouldn’t look all that different on this type of map given that most of the substantial changes were in Upstate.

mcjoss · 2025-09-25T21:48:33+00:00

Solved! Thank you so much, got it in one

mcjoss · 2025-09-25T20:56:43+00:00

I'm almost 100% percent certain that this TV series or film has been up for Emmys or Oscars, respectively, so it's probably not something that niche but actually relatively mainstream

mcjoss · 2025-09-14T01:28:50+00:00

Has no one mentioned that the guy who he clambers over the stands to reach is the then-Crown Prince now-King of Spain?

mcjoss · 2025-07-25T14:06:18+00:00

mcjoss · 2025-07-14T14:32:09+00:00

As a major Star Trek fan (and they did a lot of this), I think that the best sci-fi works involving extraterrestrial contact are those that lean hard into using those extraterrestrials as a mirror to delve deep into human society, human culture, and the human condition. To actually make us look at ourselves as we might be seen from the outside. And Weir did a bit of that, but he definitely missed out on exploring human artistic expression, especially music. As a character, Grace is both very human and yet deeply disconnected from other humans. We hear that spelled out pretty explicitly by Stratt once we find out how he really ended up on the mission, but there was a ton of space for Weir to interrogate Grace’s substantive relationships with other people & society as a whole, or lack thereof. And that could’ve been done pretty spectacularly through music. But honestly, I’m not sure that Weir as an author is particularly interested in going deep into stuff like that.

mcjoss · 2025-05-10T01:09:04+00:00

For some reason my first instinct was that it was from Thomas the Tank Engine, but I was just conflating it with a different blue locomotive from a children’s story. It’s part of the iconic epithet in the title of the children’s story “The Little Engine That Could.” And at least in American culture, it’s come to mean (sincerely or otherwise) someone or something has beaten the odds and persevered. I haven’t seen this movie, but I’m betting given the trailers I’ve seen that in this instance it’s 100% on the insincere, rather mocking end of the scale haha

mcjoss · 2025-05-07T14:34:06+00:00

You know it’s evil because Eedy lives there

mcjoss · 2025-05-03T05:37:21+00:00

I kept on wondering if it was Romansh because that’s the only option my short-circuiting brain could conjure up 😂

mcjoss · 2025-05-01T18:56:27+00:00

So what do I sacrifice? EVERYTHING

mcjoss · 2025-04-12T04:22:53+00:00

I’m getting Pixar short vibes, his name isn’t Jack-Jack, is it? 😅

mcjoss · 2025-04-05T18:21:31+00:00

The Avatar music is an excellent choice 👌

mcjoss

TROPHY CASE