Ah! A fellow holder of the belief that time travel stories are better when they are internally consistent! I hate e.g. Looper for having time travel that makes no goddamn sense. It takes me out of the story when the characters are literally watching the timeline change before them as it magically radiates out from one point. And then our protagonists somehow remember the original timeline… Bah.

…So I must ask - have you seen Primer? If not, maybe you’d like it!

It’s hard to compare apples and mangos, but if we’re gonna consider favorite tropical fruits, I friggin love fresh mangosteen. It’s like a little fruity Bob-bom. Smooth and silky texture, creamy sweet flesh and just fantastic. They don’t seem to travel well, unfortunately.

Or fresh pineapple.

I had fresh pineapple off a farmer’s cart in the tropics two decades back. Afterward, I couldn’t eat pineapple in the US for almost three years. It was so much better than the canned or grocery-store stuff there was just no comparison.

Rogue: deviant from the norm.

Rouge: a shade of red.

If your pee is rouge when you stand, you need to see your doctor.

Most beasts under 80 lbs. Over 80 lbs, it’s gonna be on a case by case basis. 90 lb sloth, no problem. 81 lb wolf, …problem.

The biggest animal I feel confident in is an 800 lb human. Huge, but that fucker’s gonna be exhausted ten seconds into the fight.

Disagree. Privacy should be the default.

Collecting information should be legal only in so far as it supports the customer’s use of a product/service. E.g. It’s nice if my doctor can keep a medical history on file, or my mechanic can do the same for my car.

Selling/disclosing information to third parties should be illegal.

Boop Boop!

I make my own! From real roots!

The preponderance of evidence is that humans are generally, good, kind and helpful (most of the time). Our evolutionary superpower is fucking cooperation!

I genuinely believe that - in spite of the if-it-bleeds-it-leads news cycle - humanity is rising to the challenges of our time.

Our time is hard, but there are so many people working to improve the world. They don’t get into the news cycle, but they’re out there.

Mr Rogers related a story about his mother, who told him that when he saw disasters on TV, to remember to “look for the Helpers.” They’re always there. No matter how bad things get, the Helpers seem to come out of the woodwork whenever aid is needed. Look for them.

There is a monster in the mountains near my home. It’s known to have killed many people across history.

There are instances where these things are known to have hunted humans. They’re incredibly strong, weigh as much as a car and can take your head off in a single swipe.

Few people who encounter an angry one survive.

They call this beast… A grizzly bear.

I actually wrote a prototype for an IPFS-based FB replacement. It… kinda worked. I could get posts to share some of the time, but I reached a point where I realized I’d need to rip out a bunch of my backend and start over to fix it and I just didn’t have it in me at that time.

Since then, however, a new IPFS framework has come out that’ll replace a lot of the crappy code I’d written for interfacing with IPFS. I’m thinking of blowing off the dust and trying again.

Attending PAX with my family. My kids have managed to have fun and not get too punchy despite having been walking around the convention floor for six hours.

And we’ve found three games we’re insta-buying so far!

Oh man! I need to rewatch Big Fish and O Brother! I haven’t thought about them in forever, but I love both of those!

Snatch! All-time #1! …except for when Blade Runner is #1.

Other faves that I haven’t seen mentioned yet:

Heists

• Baby Driver

Comedy

• The Cornetto Trilogy
• Oscar (Sylvester Stallone in a comedy of errors)
• Evolution

Sci-Fi / Fantasy

• BR:2049
• The Thirteenth Floor

Action

• The Transporter
• District B-13

Horror(ish)

• Cabin in the Woods
• Tucker and Dale vs Evil
• El Orfanato (The Orphanage)

I highly recommend them. There’s a lot of them, but unlike many other long-running series, you can pretty much read the Discworld books in any order. It helps to read them in rough publishing order, but it isn’t required

My then girlfriend was spending a summer in Portland. Just before she left, she handed me a box of about twenty hardback novels all by the same author, one Sir Terry Pratchett.

A couple days after she’d flown out, I grabbed a random book from the pile and began reading. By the time she returned, I’d read the entire box.

So I married her. 😁

I was not born rich, but my parents are extremely hard workers who managed to move our family from lower to upper middle class.

My Dad graduated HS with a D average. And he only did that well because the California school system at the time flatly refused to fail any students. Ever.

At the time I was born he worked at a Levolor factory, making blinds. Later, he became an upholsterer at La-Z-Boy. For the time, he was making crazy good money - $14/hr! (And this is in 1980s dollars, equivalent to around $50/hr today!)

But… He didn’t much like it. Six years sfter swearing off school forever, Dad decided to go back to college. And not just to get his GE’s. Nope, Dad decided to become a friggen lawyer. (I guess he decided if he was going back to school, he was going to do All The School.)

For the next several years, he studied during the morning, slept all day, then worked graves overnight. I saw him for literal minutes a day, when he got home from school and when he left again for work.

I was four when he started and eleven when he graduated. Through that time, the sweet money he’d made before seemed like crazy wealth. More than once, our family ran out of food. And more than once, our neighbors (who themselves were only just making do on welfare) would “secretly” leave enough groceries on the doorstep for us to eat for another week.

Of course, there was no money for childcare. My mom took care of us, while doing what she could to earn money. She taught piano and guitar lessons, arranged an underground daycare for our neighbors, and whatever other odd jobs she could do from home.

I grew up in that struggle. We never went completely hungry, though I did skip a few lunches to make sure my younger sibs didn’t need to.

And eventually, Dad graduated and became an attorney. And suddenly… We had money.

We bought real milk, instead of powdered milk.

We could eat at McDonald’s - an amazing luxury.

We lived in a house with actual walls instead of painted cinderblock.

We started going to the dentist and doctor more often.

We didn’t buy a new car. My Dad had an 81 Toyota Tercel that he ultimately put 300K miles on before hitting a deer finally totaled it in Feb 2000.

A couple times, we even went to Disneyland.

…

So that’s what changed when my family suddenly became “rich”.

As others have said, it depends on your job and what’s going on that day, but in my career, I have left work early just to take my kids to the zoo.

I told my boss I was leaving. He asked me why. I said, “It’s a gorgeous summer day, life is short and I’m gonna take my kids to the zoo.”

He kinda eyeballed me for a second and then laughed and said “Ok. Have fun!”

And we did.