1: Closing Time, by Semisonic, but that’s because I put it on when I’m trying to hustle people out of the store at the end of a day

2: Batman Theme, by Neal Hefti

3: Evil Plot to Blow Up Batman, by Neal Hefti, but those are because my daughter kept insisting she wanted to listen to the 1960s Batman soundtrack on the way to school.

Numbers 4-6 are from the Frozen Soundtrack for the same reason, then back to 1960s Batman for 7-9.

10: The Batman Theme, by the Ventures. Kid loves Batman.

Then there’s more Batman, more Frozen, and a song from The Little Mermaid.The first song that I consistently choose to listen to for myself and that hasn’t been artificially inflated is #15.

Victim of Love, by Erasure.

I taught myself a few knots! Took a few tries, but now I can tie a monkey’s fist without screwing it up too badly. Gives me something to do with my hands for a while, and I can give them away as gifts.

“I’m cutting back on all the online spaces that we used to share.”

“Okay, that’s your right, but it is going to be a hell of a lot harder for us to stay in touch, so if you’re okay with putting up barriers to contact, then go right ahead.”

“WhY iS iT sO hArD tO sTaY iN tOuCh WiTh OlD fRiEnDs As aN aDuLt?!?”

I was at my first gun show with an older friend who knew guns better than I did who I was following around to keep me from making any stupid decisions.

There’s a table with a sign for “Constitutional Carry,” where they don’t think you should need a special license to concealed carry a handgun.

My friend walks up to these two guys at the table, and says “Hey, just so you know, I hope you guys fail.”

The younger of the two kind of bristles, but the older one, a dude with a long white beard, says “Oh, why?”

My friend says “Because I worked in a gun shop for fifteen years, and I helped fill out more concealed carry applications than I can count and…” at this point she gestures around at the huge room behind us, “I wouldn’t trust 95% of the people in this room with any gun at all.”

And the old dude behind the table smiles and nods his head and says “Yeah, that’s a fair point.”

So anyway, that’s the day I bought a Ruger GP-100 in 357 Magnum.

I fully agree with everything you just said. My point was that if you bring so little to the table that you feel you’re in danger of being successfully replaced by a toy, then you need to do some self-improvement.

If you can’t bring more to a relationship than an appliance can, then you’ve got to work on yourself.

From Bag Balm:

Originally, it was used for only cows’ udders, but farmers’ wives noticed the softness of their husbands’ hands, and started using the product themselves.

The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals.

-J.B.S. Haldane

It’s an entirely different kind of flying.

And can we not consider that each of us can so arrange his own particular life so as to make it meaningful to himself and to those he influences? And in that case does not all of life and all the Universe come to have meaning to him?

Surely it is those who find their own lives essentially meaningless who most strive to impose meaning on the Universe as a way of making up for the personal lack.

–Isaac Asimov, Knock Plastic!, 1989

But… I’m still using it!

I appreciated that after several Street Fighter games in which Sagat was significantly more difficult than actual final boss M. Bison, they finally made M. Bison truly challenging in Street Fighter Alpha 3.

Word Crimes, by Weird Al Yankovic

It’s consistently interesting to me the way that AI image generators seem to grasp the basic concept of regular repeating patterns, but inevitably get bored and start going all wibbly wobbly. The keyboard and the striped shirt are great examples; it can tell that there should be regular, parallel groups of lines, but it quickly devolves into a dementia patient trying to draw a chess board.

I read The Sum of All Fears in high school and it had a weak president being advised by a bunch of stupid advisors working from faulty data and bad assumptions in a way that was leading us step by step to a nuclear World War 3, so that gave me nightmares for a while.

I don’t think anyone will like what happens if even the illusion of a functional system of laws is well and truly swept away. When enough people believe that a system is working, even if it isn’t working but they believe that it is, then life can more or less continue in a vaguely tolerable fashion. When that belief is taken away, things tend to get weird.

Edit: For the record, I think that most lower class and an ever-increasing number of middle class people already live in that reality. I think it’s the people with the most to lose who will find out just how bad it can get if the imaginary glue holding society together evaporates away in a puff of searing populist anger.

Not that I really expect Disney to ever do the right thing as such, but I can dream about Disney lawyers going all…

…in court for ICE fucking around with their “WOW” customer service ethos and therefore their bottom line.

How to draw a pig

Or even just getting hit in the head by a well-meaning person who reasonably thinks they’re trying to prevent a maniac from killing someone in the building.