Never listened to OA, but Strict Scrutiny is one I listen to for Supreme Court news and analysis.

This is the way.

New Colorado law will ban sales of dental floss, clothes, & other household products…

Me: Yo, what the fuck is going on in Colorado?

containing toxic “forever chemicals”

Me: Oh, that makes sense.

I was trying to watch the original Nosferatu but the version I was watching had dogshit Casio keyboard accompaniment. I muted it and had Spotify put on a playlist based on “Danse Macabre.” Much better. That said, a proper silent movie with live accompaniment is fucking fantastic. I saw Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall that way and loved it.

It’s true, that wasn’t an entirely fair comparison, but I was thinking about disastrous adaptations, and that one sprang to mind.

Say, for example, Kubrick and The Shining or Ridley Scott and Blade Runner or Jackson and The Lord of the Rings, as opposed to Shyamalan and The Last Airbender or Jackson and The Hobbit.

Honestly, if Jesse Eisenberg had just been doing a version of his Zuckerberg from The Social Network, it would have been fine. His whole twitchy routine was weird as fuck.

Virtually anything with a Newberry Medal is highly likely to have a traumatizing beloved character death somewhere in it. Maniac Magee and Bridge to Terabithia were good examples from my childhood.

If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

I was curious about this. Since political parties run their own primaries, then they can decide to use whatever voting system they want. I suspect that RCV primaries would produce a candidate that is more competitive in the general election (though I don’t know enough about electoral math or demographics to be sure). I’m certain that RCV has a tendency to discourage scorched earth campaign tactics, so party candidates would be less prone to trying to destroy one another.

Judge Joseph P. Whyte wrote in an order Wednesday that the purpose of an expungement is to give people who have rehabilitated themselves a second chance

Sounds like people should test that theory by having a protest in front of their house and see what they do.

Also:

City prosecutors and police opposed the expungements.

Oh my God, these people are so horrible they found a way to unite cops and BLM protesters.

Also MAGA 2024: “Lock up Hunter Biden!”

You can improve the effect by putting a couple of forks or metal chopsticks deep into the food before starting the microwave. This will help conduct the heat further down into the food during the cooking process.

Also, put a liberal sprinkling of pure silicon on top of your human food for human beings before placing it within your human consumption orifice.

With as many problems as the Hobbit movie trilogy had, I can say one thing for sure: Martin Freeman was a perfect Bilbo. Him being constantly irritated that he wasn’t able to sit comfortably and have a meal, all the way from the Shire to the Battle of Five Armies, was flawless. Freeman was a very good John Watson in the BBC Sherlock, but if The Hobbit movies had been better then his Bilbo would have been up there with RDJ as Tony Stark and Patrick Stewart as Professor X as greatest casting decisions of all time.

Laser thermometer. It makes cooking things at really specific temperatures a lot easier.

Some long-handle sundae spoons. They’re incredibly useful for getting to the bottom of a deep jar or yogurt tub.

Collapsible screw-together travel chopsticks. They take up virtually no space, come with their own holder so they stay clean, and you’ve always got some nice chopsticks to eat with.

Blue painter’s tape. You can label anything (especially stuff that’s going into the freezer), and it’ll peel off again without leaving any residue.

Beaded reusable cable ties. It’s always nice to be able to tie up a power cord.

A nice headlamp. It’s really nice to be able to put on a headlamp and have your hands free when you’re doing stuff outside at night. Fair warning: you may fall down a nice flashlight rabbit hole.

We got the under cabinet Un-skru kind, and it works like a dream.

I got a Zojirushi at the thrift store and I love it, but then I realized that the pot has a nonstick coating inside, and there doesn’t seem to be a replacement that doesn’t have nonstick. No more rice cooker for me. :(

Slightly less than one boob and one testicle. Just like the average person has slightly less than two legs.

I’ve been playing Shattered Pixel Dungeon virtually every day for years, through I don’t know how many updates. I’m far from convinced that every run is winnable, but there are some patterns that I’ve observed.

Mage and Huntress seem to be my best classes. The Mage’s staff means that you are guaranteed to have something that’s worth upgrading. The Huntress’ bow and her special abilities like growing grass by walking can make for some truly interesting gameplay changes, whereas I feel like most of the other classes’ abilities are more about moderate improvements to quality of life.

A Ring of Haste is probably my favorite ring to find, since being able to kite monsters is a great path to victory. Tenacity, Elements, and Strength are boring. Wealth can be good if it comes upgraded, but I wouldn’t put scrolls into it. Evasion always seems to turn on me sooner or later. Energy and Arcana can improve quality of life but are otherwise pretty mid.

A Wand of Regrowth is almost always a path to victory, especially if it comes upgraded, doubly so if you become a Warden, and triply so if you can combine it with the Sandals of Regrowth.

A Wand of Blast Wave is incredibly useful when used to knock enemies off ledges or into traps, saving yourself the trouble of killing them.

Other wands are a super mixed bag, depending on what you can manage to do with them, but I’ll say that some of my most fun and successful runs are putting a Wand of Corruption into my Mage’s Staff and becoming a Corruption Battlemage. You whack an enemy, Amok him on his friends, then corrupt them, then rinse and repeat until you win.

I’ve already mentioned the Sandals, which I’d say are incredibly useful if you’ve got a Wand of Regrowth or a Blooming enchanted weapon, but are otherwise hard to keep getting enough fresh grass to make worthwhile. I think the Ethereal Chains and Hourglass are my favorite and most useful artifacts. Horn of Plenty is okay but not great, unless you can combine it with being filled by the Battlemage’s energy generating ability. Other artifacts are mid, but I’ll make a special mention of the Unstable Spellbook which seems to screw me as often as it helps and yet I can’t deny that I have a great time with the mayhem it adds to my run. The Alchemist’s Toolkit is terrible; I hope a future patch significantly alters or replaces it, because honestly why bother using it at all?

I think my favorite runs are Corruption Battlemage or a Sniper with a nicely upgraded Boomerang; I always get a lot of fun out of using the boomerangs.

There’s no end to the conversation but that’s all I’ve got for now. It’s far and away the most played game on my phone… possibly my most played game ever, measured by eternal hours. The publisher is an absolute treasure and he deserves all the praise and success in the world.