I loved swordfish steak the one time I had it, so I’d bet that Scylla, Charybdis, or the Kraken would be quite good.

Oh, also The Kraken is quite tasty.

It’s a little more expensive, but not dramatically so

Buying boxes of full-sized candy isn’t even that much more expensive than the fun-sized, and the psychological impact is immediate and dramatic. Every year I hear kids go “Woah, big candy bars!”

One time in high school, I heard somebody yell “Steve, you [bundle of sticks], stop talking to your girlfriend and let’s go!” and Steve was in fact at the time talking to his girlfriend.

The sheer concentration of cognitive dissonance has stuck with me to this day.

This is the whole “if humans were going to have wings we’d have to redesign the whole organism from the ground up” fiasco all over again.

I’ve used it to tone down the language I wanted to use in an angry email. I wrote the draft that I wanted to send, and then copied it in and said “What’s a more diplomatic way to write this?” It gave a very milquetoast revision, so I said “Keep it diplomatic, but a little bit more assertive,” and it gave me another, better draft. Then I rewrote the parts that were obviously in robot voice so they were more plausibly like something I would write, and I felt pretty good about that response.

The technology has its uses, but good God, if you don’t actually know what you’re talking about when you use it, it’s going to feed you dogshit and tell you it’s caviar, and you aren’t going to know the difference.

Blacula is legitimately fantastic. It’s full-on a story about the lingering violence springing from European colonialism and the slave trade.

Just one example: The main character is an African prince, and his name is Mamuwalde, but when Dracula turns him, he says “I curse you with my name! You shall be called BLACULA!” For the rest of the film, no one calls him Blacula, because his name is Mamuwalde! Except there was one subtitle that slipped and read something like “BLACULA: I lost her because of you!”, and I immediately thought, “Hey you subtitling asshole, his goddamn name is Mamuwalde!”

By the end of the movie I was rooting for him in the fight with the LAPD.

80 percent-scale mock White House

I’m confused about this part. Does that mean it’s in basic outline correctly-sized but only has 80% as many rooms…

…or that the layout is exactly the same as the original, but everything is 20% smaller? Because then you’ve got issues with all the agents feeling like they’re seven feet tall.

“If I fall asleep, wake up 100 years later and somebody asks me, what is going on in Russia, my immediate answer will be: drinking and stealing”

–Alexander Rozenbaum

John Stark, one of the rescuers of the Donner Party.

In Summit Valley the remaining rescuers discussed what to do and took a vote to save only two of the children in Starved Camp. That might have been all they could manage. The others would have to stay behind.

John Stark, above, could not abide that. That meant that nine people, mostly children, would die on the mountain, exposed to the elements down in a very deep hole in the snow. John Stark decided he would save all nine, “Already shouldering a backpack with provisions, blankets, and an axe, he picked up one or two of the smaller children, carried them a little ways, then went back for the others. Then he repeated the whole process again and again and again. To galvanize morale, he laughed and told the youngsters they were so light from months of mouse-sized rations that he could carry them all simultaneously, if only his back were broad enough.” Once they were out of the snow he would eat and rest he said, but not before. He saved all nine. That is extraordinary and that is heroism. It was also heroism he never got contemporary credit for.

This is my hole, Charlie Brown! It was made for me, you blockhead!

There’s a tough lesson I learned about trying to get my friends into board games: It’s easier to turn gamers into your friends than it is to turn your friends into gamers. I’ve learned that some of my friends are never going to share my interests as much as I’d like, but that just means I needed to find people who were already in whatever hobby and start hanging out with them and some of them will eventually be your real friends.

Making and keeping friends as an adult is way more difficult than it seems it should be, but it’s a painful reality.

Kamala is the best version of a normal politician fighting against Trump. It remains to be seen if that’s enough, because he’s just so goddamn weird that it’s difficult to even compare Tool A to Problem B.

I think she’s incorporated virtually all of the strengths of any of her comparable peers, and almost none of their weaknesses. I think that, given the nature of the opponent and his total lack of seriousness, she said everything I would reasonably hope she would have said during this debate.

I also think that I don’t properly understand the collective psyche of the American electorate. I don’t understand how the election could be this close, when it is a choice between a serious, competent, passionate, talented professional, and a man who is literally a collection of all of the worst possible traits a person could have. That it could come down to such a narrow choice is a mystery for the ages.

Wouldn’t the men who were “best” at masturbation have the fewest children?

Picsart. I’d like something that can do a bit of photo editing, adjust brightness/contrast/curves, work with layers, and conveniently slap together collages, but that doesn’t interrupt me in between every other operation with an ad or a request to sign up for a subscription to the app.

I didn’t even consider how many people with cardiac issues must be looking at that screen.

“Shrunken SUV” or “Took a normal 2- or 4-door and injected it with experimental growth hormones.”

I swear I see one once a week that would make sense and carry the same number of people and stuff at half the overall vehicle volume.

Qi users need not apply.

Your grandmother seems awesome.

And strong, assuming she lifted that book herself. It’s heavy as fuck.

Edit: My mistake. It looks like that edition is less than three pounds. I was thinking of this edition:

…which weighs almost twenty pounds.

Edit 2:

I’m sorry, I should have been more considerate of readers who don’t know imperial units. That would be 23 vs. 182 golf balls, for paperback vs. hardback editions.

Aw, yours are better!