Variety is the spice of life.

This is the way.

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 set up a location near a native elephant population where if an elephant brought you like a banana or something and you gave that elephant a handjob… I one hundred percent believe that the elephants would figure out the arrangement and you’d have a successful elephant brothel running in short order.

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.

“My grandpa worked at the gives-orphans-cancer factory until he died of cancer, my daddy worked at the gives-orphans-cancer factory until he died of cancer, I’ve been working at the gives-orphans-cancer factory for the last twenty five years and by God I’m proud of my recent cancer diagnosis, and I will fight with every fiber of my being to make sure that my son grows up to work at the gives-orphans-cancer factory!”

Dr. Venture: Why are you naked?

Brock Samson: To prey on their fear, move like an animal, to feel the kill.

Scientist: It’s for the good of the planet! [releases plastic-eating bacteria into the wild]

[Later, in the smoldering ruins of a post-plastocalyptic future…]

Former Scientist Now Pottery Shard Crusher: Okay, maybe that was a mistake.

Gotta get them achievements.

That tens of thousands number is always brought up, but it’s an average that is affected by the actions of Spiders Georg, an outlier who should not be counted.

And down to get its friction on!

The seed is strong.

In all honesty, it seems like they’ve been trying to make 3D happen every ten to fifteen years since the 1950s. And they tried making VR a thing in the 80s and 90s, too until it went to sleep for a little while.

Think about the ways that information tech has revolutionized our ability to do things. It’s allowed us to do math, produce and distribute news and entertainment, communicate with each other, make our voices heard, organize movements, and create and access pornography at rates and in ways that humanity could only have dreamed of only a few decades ago.

Now consider that AI is first and foremost a technology predicated on reappropriating and stealing credit for another person’s legitimate creative work.

Now imagine how much of humanity’s history has had that kind of exploitation at the forefront of its worst moments, and consider what might lie ahead with those kind of impulses being given the rocket fuel of advanced information technology.

Wait, were you showing your friend how to download Metallica porn on Kazaa?

Think of crooked local sheriffs and police departments vs. state police, which are generally held to a higher training standard and are therefore less onerous.

There are people who, disturbed by “big government” today and its tendency to curb the advantages they might gain if their competitiveness were allowed free flow, demand “less govern- ment.” Alas, there is no such thing as less government, merely changes in government. If the libertarians had their way, the distant bureaucracy would vanish and the local bully would be in charge. Personally, I prefer the distant bureaucracy, which may not find me, over the local bully, who certainly will. And all historical precedent shows a change to localism to be for the worse.

—Isaac Asimov, Nice Guys Finish First, collected in The Sun Shines Bright, 1981

Why is dark humor like food?

Because not everyone gets it.

We got a service. We’ve two cats, a dog, and a toddler, and no family closeby to help with child care. We did the math and decided we needed the help. It’s fantastic.