Jonathon Owen

@arrantpedantry.com

2641 Followers 146 Following

Editor • Writer • Linguist • Ironic meta-pedant • Villain • Cat person Blog: https://www.arrantpedantry.com Merch: https://arrantpedantry.myspreadshop.com

A movie poster for The Odyssey, showing Matt Damon in armor with one of those head crest thingies
Automatic alt text of the Willy Wonka "The suspense is terrible" gif, reading, "Dr. Seuss: The Suspense Is Terrible"
A wooden toilet chair. It looks like a regular wooden chair with arms and a back, but it has what looks like a toilet lid in the middle.
Screenshot of a Facebook post by IGN that reads "Gus the T. rex is up for auction this month after years of excavation and reconstruction of 183 fossilized bones, with an opening bid set at $19 million." The picture shows a T. rex skeleton with the text "One of the most complete T. rex skeletons named 'Gus' is up for auction starting at $19M."
A zoomed-in picture of an angry-looking hawk on a vinyl fence, screeching and spreading its wings
An angry-looking hawk (either Cooper's or sharp-shinned) sitting on a white vinyl fence, screeching and spreading its wings
A Despair.com poster showing a thunderstorm, with the caption Pessimism Every dark cloud has a silver lining, but lightning kills hundreds of people each year who are trying to find it.
A cake with "Ghost Dealers" written on it. It has the caption "I asked for go Steelers."
Screenshot of an article reading: The 36-year-old woman spent most of her 30-minute court statement speaking directly to her young sons, giving them advice about marriage, life and the importance of supporting one another. “Be like your dad,” she said tearfully.
A piece of chocolate cake sitting on a plate
A single-volume compact Oxford English Dictionary in a slipcase, with a magnifying glass that's about two inches thick
A very fluffy gray cat sitting on a gray office chair
A very windblown red fox stands in the snow with the words "IT HECKIN WIDNY" around it in Impact font
A paragraph with the heading "Railway’s road to ruin": "The PocketOS boss puts greater blame on Railway’s architecture than on the deranged AI agent for the database’s irretrievable destruction. Briefly, the cloud provider's API allows for destructive action without confirmation, it stores backups on the same volume as the source data, and 'wiping a volume deletes all backups.' Crane also points out that CLI tokens have blanket permissions across environments."
A headline reading "Shoe company Allbirds pivots to AI compute in sign of a totally normal and healthy economy" with the subhead "Say hello to 'NewBird AI.'"
A "Get in, loser" meme with the text "We're going to shed our corporeal forms and become beings of pure energy"
The Alliance of Magicians from Arrested Development. Gob is holding a sign that reads, "We Demand To Be Taken Seriously"
A Calvin and Hobbes strip. In panel 1, Calvin sits at a table with Hobbes, writing a paper. He says, "I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them." In panel 2 he says, "I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity." In panel 3 he holds his paper up and says, "With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report?" In panel 4, Hobbes takes the paper and reads, "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Transrelational Gender Modes." Calvin says, "Academia, here I come!"
Holding my copy of Kory Stamper's new book True Color
Alfre Woodward as Lily in Star Trek: First Contact telling Jean-Luc Picard "Actually, I never read it."
A Gizmodo headline reading "Sunken Soviet Submarine Is Quietly Leaking Radiation Decades Later, Study Finds"
A bar graph from the NOW Corpus showing the changing rate of use of "quietly" between 2010 and 2026. It starts at 16.49 words per million, drops to 10.36 by 2019, and then shoots up to 36.45 by 2026.
Dr. Nick from The Simpsons gestures to an exploded cylinder of ether and says "Inflammable means flammable? What a country!" while firefighters try to put out a fire
Screenshot of a VistaPrint ad from Facebook. It shows a blue tumbler that reads CARING MAKES ALL THE DIFFERE NCE But the "NCE" at the bottom is cut off, so you can only see the tops of the letters.
A cat rubs against a human's legs and says "Pet me."
Fry from Futurama stands in the kitchen in tighty whities, pouring what looks like dog food into a bowl from a large bag labeled Bachelor Chow. Then he adds water from the sink, and the kibble swells up and starts to look gooey.
A very fluffy gray cat with a derpy expression and a very nice blep
A dark red 1993 Buick Regal. It has a hood ornament, as all fancy cars once did.
Scrabble tiles reading ICE OUT (with a blank tile in the middle)
Screenshot of a Scrabble rack showing the letters TFZQNXG
Screenshot from a marked-up PDF in which the proofreader indicated that I should insert "could" after "might" in the sentence "What you find might contradict assumptions that are important to you (or your stakeholders)."
The cover of a report by McKinsey & Company titled "Product Excellence: Driving Success Through True Product Excellence"
A figure labeled "Evolution of Graphics Rendering" On the left is a wireframe model of three gears with the label "fixed-function pipeline (c. 1990s)." Then there's an arrow (which for some reason splits in two?) pointing to the right side, which shows three nicely rendered gears with the label "real-time path tracing (c. 2020s)." But the three gears on the right are all meshed so that none of them can actually turn.
A screenshot from the Scrabble app showing the tiles BLUESKY in my rack
A snippet on Facebook from an article about regrowing teeth. The image shows a lower jawbone with an empty socket on the left, and on the right side there's a new tooth that's about five times the size of the surrounding teeth. There's also redundant labels on both sides that don't seem to be pointing at the right things.
A doctor telling a shirtless Sterling Archer "Well, actually, men can develop breast cancer" while Malory Archer reads a magazine in a nearby chair
A gray and brown colorpoint tabby cat sitting in an empty cardboard box letting in its side
A post about a cake recipe on Facebook. It's supposed to read eggnog poke cake, but the tail of one of the g's is covering the top of the "o" in "poke", so it looks like "puke"
A screen recording of me using the Find and Replace feature in Word. As I click through the results, the Find and Replace dialogue box keeps shifting, so I have to keep moving the mouse to stay over the Find Next button.
A Scrabble rack showing the letters YEEEAH
Screenshot from a Gizmodo article reading, "It’s not uncommon for a streamer on the precipice of premiering one of its banner shows to release a helpful little recap video to catch folks up to speed. What shouldn’t be a sentence written, let alone read, is that Prime Video appears to have rake-stepped once more with AI, making new slop in the form of a Fallout ahead of its second season. Surprise! It comes complete with inaccuracies and hallucinations about the show."
A panel from Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin's mom walks into his room and asks, "Well, how's your healthcare plan coming along?" Calvin replies, "I've almost started!"
A novelty keychain shaped like a Utah centennial license plate, with the name Jonathon on it
Milhouse from The Simpsons saying "They've got chocolate milk now?"
A strip from the edge of a sheet of continuous-feed paper, along with a paper spring made from such strips
A closeup of Yzma from The Emperor's New Groove bludgeoning one piece of broccoli with another, in an attempt to tell Kronk to hit Cuzco on the head
A passage from the Wikipedia article on Canaan, which begins "The English term "Canaan" (pronounced /ˈkeɪnən/ since c. 1500, due to the Great Vowel Shift) . . ."
Screenshot of a headline reading "How exhaling at the wrong time saps your strength"
Screenshot of my NYT Connections results, showing a perfect game done in reverse order of difficulty
The Sisters from Kubo and the Two Strings. They are dressed identically in black, with wide straw hats, and they slowly lift their heads in unison to reveal white Noh masks underneath.
Benoit Blanc from Knives Out saying "It makes no damn sense. Compels me though."
Screenshot from a page with the heading Concepts. The text below it reads: Apache Hudi (pronounced “Hudi”) provides the following streaming primitives over hadoop compatible storages • Update/Delete Records (how do I change records in a table?) • Change Streams (how do I fetch records that changed?)
Michael Scott from The Office sitting in front of a whiteboard that reads "'You miss 100% of the shots you don't take —Wayne Gretzky' —Michael Scott"