Adam Bumas
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bumas.bsky.social
Adam Bumas
@bumas.bsky.social
1.3K followers 400 following 160 posts
Pronounced "BYOO-muss". He/They. adambumas.01 on Signal.

Head of Research and Assistant Editor, @garbageday.email. Researcher, @panicworld.com. Other research and journalism elsewhere.

The perfect level of online.
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bumas.bsky.social
movies have given us so much technical information about water
The Weight of Water The Shape of Water Avatar: The Way of Water The Chronology of Water
October 9, 2025 at 2:59 PM
bumas.bsky.social
Every month, we write about the most popular content around the internet. For the first time, I'm proud to say that we're on our own list! @panicworld.com was Patreon's fastest-growing podcast last month.
Despite this, there’s one source of news about the shooting that’s gotten a lot of attention in September: Us, apparently. According to Graphtreon, Panic World was the fastest-growing Patreon in September for the “podcast” category, with over 1,300 new subscribers this month. Our own reckoning puts as as number 12 across the whole website — first place, of course, goes to a porn game with over 3,300 new Patrons — but we’ve never even come close to making our own lists before, so we think we’ve earned the brag.
October 3, 2025 at 5:18 PM
bumas.bsky.social
Your delivery’s here.
September 19, 2025 at 10:27 PM
bumas.bsky.social
Today's @garbageday.email reminds you that facts don't care about your feelings.

www.garbageday.email/p/nate-silve...
Also, Adam wanted me to mention here that about 5-10% of the most popular posts on Bluesky — 1,000 likes or more — are actually just cartoon erotica. Which no one seems to mention when they talk about the influence of the platform.
September 8, 2025 at 7:02 PM
bumas.bsky.social
My latest for @garbageday.email: Trump's takeover of Washington is all thanks to dumb Truth Social posts and Big Balls - that's the whole point. Welcome to the age of LOLgislation.

www.garbageday.email/p/the-uncann...
This is the latest in a long series of what I’ll call LOLgislation. There was no specific bill or political movement to take federal control of Washington, but Trump posted about it and all of a sudden it was happening. The agenda has been dictated entirely via public comments on social media, pretty much the easiest possible thing to dismiss as not being serious. But when you’re the President, everything you say has to be taken seriously, even — no, especially — if you’re using social media as frivolously as it’s designed for.
August 13, 2025 at 6:14 PM
bumas.bsky.social
The best thing about Elio is the "playpen Mass Effect" vibe all the alien stuff has. Similar sensibilities but cuddlier and cuter. Even the bad guys look like Reapers with cartoon meanie faces!
The villain of Elio, who looks a lot like a cartoonier version of the Reapers from Mass Effect A bunch of aliens from Elio.
June 22, 2025 at 5:05 PM
bumas.bsky.social
@pxmolina.bsky.social found his art had been put into an AI image model, changed just enough to avoid copyright strikes, and put on YouTube. His fate may be all of ours soon. My latest for @garbageday.email!

www.garbageday.email/p/just-the-r...
But the companies that make these AI models don’t want an even hand, they want a fist. The Copyright Office report cites official comments from companies like Meta and Andreessen Horowitz, saying any regulation of AI training will stifle innovation and growth, as some of the many arguments it’s taking into account. And it goes beyond the scope of the report to mention how these companies have been, as you might put it, impressively shameless in attempting to influence the Trump administration. Andreessen Horowitz founder and America’s most expensive egg, Marc Andreessen, personally helped start Elon Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE). And, more recently, Meta’s champion friend haver Mark Zuckerberg moved to Washington days after Musk started to lose favor with the White House.
May 14, 2025 at 7:28 PM
bumas.bsky.social
Today is @garbageday.email's birthday! It's a time to look back and reflect, which is surprisingly hard online.

www.garbageday.email/p/garbage-fo...
One of the most infamous blessings and curses of the internet is the idea that it lasts forever, that nothing you say there will ever go away. But that's just an idea, one that absolutely isn't true in practice. A Pew study from last year found almost 40% of webpages from 2013 are now offline. My own most formative internet community — a semi-official forum for people waiting for Half-Life 3 — was unceremoniously shut down nearly a decade ago. The internet doesn’t live up to its own standards of timelessness, especially because it’s entirely created by, for, and about us fickle mortals. Without active efforts to preserve, disseminate, and curate, the internet has the same fate as everything not designed to change with time: It becomes garbage.
April 30, 2025 at 5:32 PM
bumas.bsky.social
Went to the Museum of the Moving Image’s new Mission: Impossible exhibit. I’m the bullseye of the target audience for this.
April 28, 2025 at 4:08 PM
bumas.bsky.social
The theater was handing out pamphleture, screening was packed - this is a genuine cultural Deal, though I’m not sure it’s a Big Deal.
April 25, 2025 at 1:20 AM
bumas.bsky.social
So for everyone who wishes The Minecraft Movie was about an even more niche (but arguably even more important) piece of online ephemera, here's The Hatsune Miku Movie.

I'm seeing this in an hour, follow along in this thread!
The poster for "Colorful Stage: The Movie: A Miku Who Can't Sing"
April 24, 2025 at 9:22 PM
bumas.bsky.social
Last week, the #4 dance track on iTunes (in the US, at least) was a dance track full of homophobic slurs. It wasn't some far-right stunt, just a very queer Tumblr shitpost that got out of hand. My latest for @garbageday.email!
Part of the song’s popularity is due to the fact that bigfoots-biggest-fan does have a degree in music production. So it is actually a banger. “Never used the degree because it didn’t seem like a sensible job,” they said. But another important piece here is that the sheer ironic offensiveness of the song — especially with lyrics coming from HR training — is a statement on its own. It flies directly in the face of the censored corporate social networks that spent years shoving soulless rainbow capitalism down our throats only to immediately bend the knee to the Trump administration last month. The song is queer in the most fundamental sense of the word — defying convention, reveling in transgression. And on the internet in 2025, true transgression means making something algorithms can’t promote.
February 24, 2025 at 7:49 PM
bumas.bsky.social
Phantom Menace on at the gym. Going for Jar Jar Gains.
February 2, 2025 at 3:19 PM
bumas.bsky.social
Just realized what a huge missed opportunity we had for another Barbenheimer.
The poster for Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man The poster for the Dav Pilkey adaptation, Dog Man
January 30, 2025 at 2:49 AM
bumas.bsky.social
Two tumblr posts from user arachnid-party. One says “do you think if blades of grass had consciousness they’d have a foot fetish”. The second says “sorry about this post. turns out i had been inhaling toxic fumes for the past 4-5 days”.
January 15, 2025 at 1:50 PM
bumas.bsky.social
😭😭😭 It’s gone 😭😭😭
Matthew McConaughey’s infamous promotional Tweet for The Dark Tower, asking “.@idriselba you want the Tower?” Elba’s account is deleted, so there’s no reply, but McConaughey’s next Tweet in the sequence remains.
January 12, 2025 at 6:48 AM
bumas.bsky.social
Whatever holiday you're celebrating, make it a happy one.
A "jollified" screenshot from Dune 2. The black-and-white image of Giedi Prime has a Christmas tree border, and Baron Vladimir Harkonnen has a Santa hat. The subtitle reads "marks the Holy Birthday of our beloved na-Baron Feyd-Rautha", but "Feyd-Rautha" has been badly replaced with "Jesus".
December 24, 2024 at 3:19 PM
bumas.bsky.social
@chatmalik.bsky.social's "all posts with >500 likes" feed is rapidly becoming my favorite way to experience the website.
Two posts announcing the House Ethics Committee has voted to release their report on Matt Gaetz. After each post is a very sexual post with images that have been hidden for containing adult content.
December 18, 2024 at 4:17 PM
bumas.bsky.social
Always a joy to see the season’s harvest of Toynbee Tiles coming in.
An abstract green, orange and white design. It’s a Toynbee Tile embedded in a road at Union Square in NYC. It’s labelled “HOH24”, HOH meaning House Of Hades.
December 4, 2024 at 5:50 AM
bumas.bsky.social
Santa's Slay features Robert Culp as a Doc Brown-esque grandpa who turns out to be a literal angel from heaven, as explicated in stop-motion.

What else can you ask for from the medium of cinema?
Robert Culp in Santa's Slay A stop-motion scene from Santa's Slay featuring the evil Santa and Robert Culp's character.
December 2, 2024 at 3:27 AM
bumas.bsky.social
Had the rare honor of seeing Frank Oz talk about The Empire Strikes Back at MOMI!

One of a million amazing details about his time as Yoda: He insisted on cables, not radio control, for Yoda’s face for TLJ, after dealing with too much lag on ROTJ.
Frank Oz sits down in front of a screen at the Museum of the Moving Image, as an interviewer carries away his crutches.
December 1, 2024 at 1:17 AM
bumas.bsky.social
Da plate! Labels in alt.
A full thanksgiving plate with turkey at the center. Clockwise from top: Spaghetti squash bake, kale and pepper salad, cranberry relish, oyster cornbread stuffing, potato leek gratin, roasted brussels sprouts.
November 29, 2024 at 2:23 PM
bumas.bsky.social
Don't be so quick to judge Wicked fans; like it or not, we've all become theater kids. My latest for Garbage Day!

www.garbageday.email/p/everyone-s...
One of the bizarre side effects of our streaming- and platform-driven digital media environment is that, even though your favorite TV shows and movies have never been so accessible, audiences are also more likely to not actually experience them in full. Also, by being gobbled up by large franchises, many of them are now just as long-running as Broadway productions, in a sense. The result is a world of mass entertainment reduced to something you do or consume through short clips on your phone. Algorithmic social platforms like Facebook and X have been suppressing outgoing links for years, prioritizing the conversation about a thing over actually going and seeing the thing. And more recently, TikTok has taken it to another level. The app’s autoplaying, algorithmic presentation is designed to make people feel like watching and making content are one and the same. You could sit and watch all eight episodes of Disney’s Star Wars spin-off, The Acolyte, but chances are you didn’t. Though, you may have seen the cool headbutt scene. TV shows, movies, gambling, dating apps — you are likely consuming all of that via vertical videos first, if not completely.
November 25, 2024 at 8:46 PM
bumas.bsky.social
Watched High Sierra tonight. Maybe Bogart’s most perfectly cast role, which is saying something: A seasoned mob enforcer transitioning into a rugged, moral, attractive leader. Love a noir set in gorgeous sunlit mountains.
Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino in an image from High Sierra.
November 22, 2024 at 4:43 AM
bumas.bsky.social
A mashup of movie title treatments: "I'm Still" from I'm Still Here, "Here" from Here, and "Tic" from Heretic.
November 20, 2024 at 1:00 AM