“Drenched from head to toe in the blood of your opponent, you stand over their crumpled body.”

“Sweet! I loot the corpse. What do you I find?”

“A small note: ‘Note to self: get cure for horrible blood plague.’”

“…fuck.”

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

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.

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.

Hell, I’m a married dude with a child, and I wear a rainbow flag. Ain’t nobody that straight.

I have real love for TNG S1E16, “Too Short a Season.”

The Enterprise is dealing with a hostage crisis on a planet where the local government wants this old admiral who had negotiated a truce there decades before to come back. He shows up and it turns out he’s taking experimental de-aging drugs to grow younger. It turns out that when he had negotiated the original truce before, he had violated the prime directive and given weapons to some rebels, but he told himself that he made it even by giving the same weapons to the other side, which led to decades of bloodshed.

The writing is just okay, and the old guy / young guy makeup is pretty bad, but the scene where the admiral dies while looking into his wife’s eyes gets me. I also like to imagine that the ep might have originally been written with Kirk in mind as the old guy, because the whole “Well I made it fair by giving weapons to both sides” seems like the kind of cowboy insane shit that Kirk would pull and then never consider the consequences. The episode feels a little bit like it’s revisiting some of the times when Kirk would do his thing and then warp off into the sunset while definitely leaving some loose threads behind.

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.

Quark: I think I figured out why Humans don’t like Ferengi.

Sisko: Not now, Quark.

Quark: The way I see it, Humans used to be a lot like Ferengi: greedy, acquisitive, interested only in profit. We’re a constant reminder of a part of your past you’d like to forget.

Sisko: Quark, we don’t have time for this.

Quark: You’re overlooking something. Humans used to be a lot worse than the Ferengi: slavery, concentration camps, interstellar wars. We have nothing in our past that approaches that kind of barbarism. You see? We’re nothing like you… we’re better.

DS9, The Jem’Hadar (1994)

Millipede using its hundreds of legs to rapidly type code into a stone keyboard: Ehh! It’s a living!

Everyone should read Motel of the Mysteries.

Bears

which has been pirated.

You wouldn’t download a locomotive…

Coca-Cola was invented in 1886, and Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card company.