Great game, I remember really digging the Clayface fight. The little clay enemies went down easy, but there were enough that it felt… mushy(?) getting through them to get at Clayface himself.

Okay, but imagine if, when the cellular phone explosion kills him, his ashes are scattered across the ocean. But then that water gets used to make lotion for babies, setting the wheels of promotion into motion. At least the sun would still shine in the summer time.

Ah man, but tests of athletics are so fun to narrate! First roll: “Seeing your clear physical advantage, the shaman leaps toward you as soon as the competition begins, managing to work his way into an advantageous initial position.” Second roll: “Pressing the advantage, the shaman is able to weave between the arms of your stronger grab, heaving you up and down to the ground. At this point, there’s only one chance for you to recover.” Third roll: “It all happened so fast. Despite superior strength and every magical boon at your disposal, the shaman’s quick reaction and formidable skill at using his own body has managed to pin you just long enough to eke out a win. ‘A little overconfident, weren’t you?’ he says, offering a hand to help you up (or glaring down at you if he doesn’t like you).”

$50 fro 6pm-2am is cheaper per hour than a movie ticket or dinner at a restaurant, and hitting that many bars is easy when they’re all on the same 2-3 block stretch!

You just have to live in the right city with sufficiently high rates of alcoholism! In Fargo, ND you could get a tall 200 lb+ man proper sloshed over an evening downtown across 5-8 bars for $50 or less as recently as 2019. Not as cheap as drinking at home, but enough that most folks without kids working full-time could do it every other weekend.

I’m sorry, but did you read the post? Do you think that the highest quality explosive ordnance they could make would involve zero explosives being loaded in them, with zero of them exploding? The post leaves it completely unambiguous.

Hi, I drove a LLV for a couple years! It’s actually so, when they stop at a mailbox, they don’t have to leave or lean across the vehicle to reach out to a mailbox on the right side of the road. It is also easier to hop out for packages, as you said, but if I recall the volume of packages was much lower when the vehicles were designed, so they were more focused on delivering letters from one mailbox to the left.

Another fun fact, LLVs are one of the only street legal vehicles in the US with a shorter front wheel axle than the back! This makes turning much tighter so the driver can pull a full U-turn on any standard road without needing a Y-turn, since visibility is pretty awful behind the vehicle when backing up. This also makes them pretty fun to drive.

I hear to find the best BBQ in Texas you need to find a restaurant attached to a rinky-dink gas station.

Yes, but given the context clue of “I’m seeing a lot of comments telling you how to feel, to “be okay with it,” which I think is lame,” which do you think I meant?

Maybe it depends on how you define the two terms, but I disagree, or at least what you’re saying wasn’t my intent. I think understanding emotions is the primary way to deal with them, but I added the bit about channeling it because sometimes understanding isn’t enough and something more needs to be done. In my mind controlling an emotion means exerting willpower to push down or replace an emotion that arises, while channeling entails a greater degree of acceptance of the emotion and then purposefully putting it toward something productive.

In the context of this scenario, demanding acceptance when the present emotion is probably some mix of disgust, confusion, and fear summed up as “I don’t like it” is a form of emotional control that isn’t healthy. After understanding what emotions are in the mix and (hopefully) why those emotions are present, there are productive and healthy ways to deal with them without trying to force them to change. Confusion has the most obvious way to “channel” it by researching polyamory to be less confused. You may say that that’s not really channeling, and I agree that it can be a vague term, but without that confusion (or by rejecting it) I doubt there would be curiosity to learn, which would hamper a healthy response. I feel pretty deep in the weeds at this point, but I hope that clarifies what I’m trying to say a little.

Basically, to use definitions from Merriam-Webster, to control is to “to exercise restraining or directing influence over” emotions, while to channel is to “to convey or direct [emotions] into or through a channel” toward something productive. The first isn’t a healthy coping mechanism in the long run, the second is if done right.

I’m seeing a lot of comments telling you how to feel, to “be okay with it,” which I think is lame. Feelings aren’t something to be controlled, only understood and maybe channeled toward something. When a couple of my good friends began a polyamorous relationship, it really weirded me out, but eventually I came to accept that it worked for them, even though it would not work for me.

My advice is to first understand why you don’t like it. Give it some personal thought, then do some reading on what polyamory is and how it can or cannot work to compare and contrast with the thoughts you had going into the situation. In the process, you will not only gain better ways of understanding and expressing your own feelings and concerns, you’ll also have learned useful advice and guidelines to share with your daughter.

Then sit down with your daughter and share your more refined understanding of your feelings and how they lead to your approval/disapproval of her polyamory and share the guidelines you found to keep such a relationship healthy should she decide to pursue it. I think the middlingly fortunate reality is that she is reaching an age where she will do what she wants, whether it is behind or in front of your back. At least she’ll know that you tried to understand.

Looks like midwest emo is going to be getting even bigger!

Dandadan is very pretty, but Redline uses no effects or CGI. It was one of the last animated movies to be completely hand drawn using traditional animation. The reason it looks like “cheap effects” is because over 100,000 hand-drawn frames were made for it over a seven year production period to push the animation to the absolute limit. Please reconsider.

Speaking as a US citizen, I would like to move closer to the corporatist (not corporatocratic) models of countries like Sweden, Norway, and Germany. Capitalism and the economic strength that investment can bring tempered by strong unions at the national level to ensure that workers get good working and living conditions, with the government serving as a meeting grounds to hash out details. From my understanding Swedish law even mandates that worker unions have a place in government.

To me it seems ideal because it’s feasible. Corporations are already entrenched in the US government, the only missing pieces are unions large enough to be involved at the same level. I think we were on track to have that 50-60 years ago when unions like the UMWA represented over 400,000 workers by themselves, but unions have slowly been eroded over the decades. I think it would be easier to rebuild American unions and demand that corporations be kept in check than it would be to overhaul the current economic/political system into something entirely new.

With Blomkamp working on it, I’m interested. I wonder if he will try to recreate the satire of the Verhoeven movie, follow the book more closely, or try to compare/reconcile the two. I hope it’s the last one, or at least not just a retread of the Verhoeven movie since that still holds up on its own.

Edit: I wish I’d read the article before posting (:/) because it sounds like they’re going for a more faithful rendition of the book! As someone whose ideals were influenced by the book’s themes of political responsibility, I am cautiously optimistic.

It’s a little less scary if you imagine Death slooowly moving the bead(?) across the abacus over the course of an entire year before starting the next one on your birthday.

One of the most important things I heard in middle school was from a friend of a friend: “It’s normal to be weird and it’s weird to be normal. Have you ever met someone who was truly ‘normal?’”

The T doesn’t stand for anything. The word is pronounced similarly to maggot, so MAGAT draws a connection between MAGA and maggots. It would just look weird to leave the T lowercase in MAGAt.

I’m glad that you enjoyed it, but listening to the audiobook was one of the most aggravating reading experiences I’ve had. There were cool bits, but every chapter or two my eyes would glaze over for a minute as Wil Wheaton read off a list of things from the 80’s for a paragraph or two, interrupting whatever flow the book had going on at the time to cram ‘memberberries down my throat. I prefer the movie because I can look at the ‘memberberry references without them interrupting the other cool bits.

I enjoyed it for the most part, but the scene that’s always stuck with me is when Antonio Banderas’s character learns to speak the Viking language. Hearing the way he said “I listened” made me want to listen more to see what I could learn.