This book is also a pretty strong "huh I guess I'm into bondage" awakening trigger for young readers (based on a sample size of one but I bet there are others).

feels like a good time for this screenshot of a tweet

this is a different point from op's but the block I grew up on on the Upper West Side had an empty lot full of garbage on it through the late '90s and I think a lot of people don't realize how recently it was that even nicer parts of NYC weren't fully saturated with buildings

contrary to common belief, communion wafers are treated as unleavened for purposes of pesach that's because as a doctrinal matter we do not believe he is risen

I am already subscribed to the If Books Could Kill patreon but an episode where Peter reads Naruto and explains it to Michael in excruciating detail would get me to double subscribe.

The other part of this is "it's good, actually, for the kids to all hang out together and feel like part of the same community and we don't want to necessitate richer parents keeping their kids isolated from community (i.e., segregating only kids with poorer parents in the 'free tier')"

BREAKING: following up on 2020's "Keith doesn't know what a PB&J is," tonight's game gave us "Keith doesn't know what a fluffernutter is."

this isn't the point but I'm really sick of this slander on litmus tests, which aren't actually binary (just analog)

my hot take is that the rot goes back to First Contact, which is in large part about how Picard's dedication to duty (trying to stop the Borg from rewriting history) is a pathological obsession à la Ahab and he should just chill out about the whole thing

I'm sorry to the Mets fanbase; "Richard Lovelady" was just a fake name I invented to infiltrate the straight community and I never meant for it to go this far

TIME FOR MOVIE THOUGHTS I spent almost all of ALPHA worried that it was going to lose me with a thoroughly telegraphed twist, but when it arrived it was touching and powerful rather than cheap. It's a movie about characters disguised as a movie about ideas, which I wish I'd realized sooner.

I want to be having the serious disagreements I have with a lot of the YIMBY left about the efficacy of specific proposed government interventions at creating housing, and instead I'm stuck with people who think an apartment building is scary

Fuck Robin Hood like we've all wanted to since before we even understood the concept Marry Fox McCloud to advance my political career Kill Fantastic Mr. Fox for his many crimes

not necessarily a sign of its times so much as its author, but I like that WATCHMEN intends to treat Dr. Manhattan as the sole supernatural element and the squid thing causing a psychic blast that hurts psychic sensitives is just a fact of ordinary science

It is very hard to imagine that I am engaging in revolution by doing something that my great aunt and great uncle did openly and successfully for decades before I was born

baseball allegiances 1. Mets 2. [holding this spot for the Diamondbacks if they let me use the pool] 3. Cyclones 4. Dairy Daddies 5. [everyone else including the Diamondbacks until I get pool access] ℵ0. Dodgers ℵ1. Yankees ℵ2. Braves

Mets strategy at this point in the season seems to be "have your pitching collapse slightly less than the other guys"

IT'S A DOLLY PARTON JOKE

For service and devotion.

Getting the last pierogi eggroll on opening day feels like some kind of omen

I remember specifically some discourse around Scorsese shitting on marvel movies, where it became clear that a large number of people responding in defense of the mouse had the impression that Goodfellas and Taxi Driver were dense, impenetrable texts along the lines of Sátántangó or Jeanne Dielman

still wondering what issue that they're actually closely aligned on two specific first cousins once removed are going to spend the entire seder meal bitterly arguing with each other about

the preferred term is "oui-aboo"

had some plans for this weekend and instead I managed to cap it off by rolling straight from emergency dentist for the tooth I broke yesterday to several hours (so far!) of vomiting from what seems to be food poisoning

Hi, teabagging expert* here! yes *my credentials are that I have had this done to me in the context of making pornography, in which it was treated as a sex act and filmed for the purposes of sexually arousing the purchasing viewer

A ghost scrub's a ghost guy Who thinks he's fly And he's also known As a ghostbuster

this is french for "the gume"

tomorrow will be the 20th anniversary of the VHS release of A History Of Violence, the last major studio VHS release I like putting weird anniversaries on my calendar, there's not a deeper point to this post

also if you're talking about a fallacy related to alfalfa the least you could do is call it the "alfalfacy" or the "alfalfallacy"

And Then There Were One (I really wavered between this and "-1" but I decided that incrementing the number normally was funnier than going in the direction the actual story goes)

I don't know much about how this ends but I've just been struck by the near-certainty that at least one phase of it is going to include maps renaming the Persian Gulf to the "Gulf of Iran" (yes I know)

I, for one, don't think the historical Zoroaster said ANY of the things in that famous book of his speeches.

Hot damn, another one within a month (shaved 10 seconds off my Wednesday pb)

Not the main point but a billionaire has a fundamentally different relationship to money than a gambler has to casinos and I don't trust the social analysis of anyone who treats them as similar.

I generally agree with the underlying sentiment ("lol ur gay" as a response to right-wing people being evil sets my teeth on edge and makes me feel less safe around the people doing it). And I agree fully with this as applied to, say, images of Trump and Putin making out. BUT. 1/3

This is tangential, but accepting "smoking" and "eating meat" as things that I do sometimes and feel bad about (for different reasons) is how I've managed to mostly quit smoking and eat a mostly pescatarian diet; trying to quit entirely made me counterproductively resentful of the whole project(s).

separately what is this hyphen-use bullshit

I make mid-six figures and I don't really understand this perspective? I can't imagine constructing my personal life that way, some of my best friends make a fifth of what I do and it would be a weird reason to stop being friends with them.

oh look, an excuse to yet again post about how my elementary school building its Leathers playground was featured on Sesame Street www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9o1...

My opinion on women's sports: give NYC another WNBA team so we can engage the way we engage with all other sports (bitter hatred of the Wrong team from our hometown).

It's fascinating that the vision of a nostalgic(?) playground has no kids on it at all. Like, whose "POV" is this?

I'm gonna take this in a different direction. Pre-covid I went to a lot of movies so I saw the same trailers a lot, enough to build up feelings about the movies. The two that I still get angry thinking about today are MADAGASCAR 3 and GRUDGE MATCH. Never seen either movie, but I hate them both.

A lot of games that don't really work are trying to account for too many different types of play—it's actually really hard to make something work for both a one-shot and a long-running campaign, and trying to stretch a system to do both sometimes means it does the one you really want badly.

I think what saved me from feeling like I needed to write pseudophilosophical articles about having multiple partners is the fact that my great uncle, my great aunt, and my great aunt's lover were just all part of regular life in my extended family growing up. Just "yup, that's one of the options."

obviously not the most important thing but has there ever been a more obviously bullshit title than "Special Envoy For The Shield Of The Americas"

it's so weird the way the specific "we were cut in half and looking to recombine with our soul mate" story sticks despite BOTH of the two main works in which it's told (the Symposium and Hedwig) rejecting it before you get to the end

I would watch the shit out of Sean Baker's WAR OF THE BUTTONS But if we're allowed to raise the dead to adapt classics from after their time, Fritz Lang's BOOK OF THE NEW SUN would be incredible

youtube giving me this suggestion when I listen to Paul Robeson should be actionable under title ii or something

This is even funnier when—as I saw when I was clerking—it happens with the internal cross-references in the execution version of a contract, leading to a binding agreement that's basically impossible to interpret without (potentially competing) testimony on what the parties meant to put there.