I’d be curious to see that chart for a Toyota Yaris. I drove one for a few years and it was almost unnerving how little hood it had.

There’s a tough lesson I learned about trying to get my friends into board games: It’s easier to turn gamers into your friends than it is to turn your friends into gamers. I’ve learned that some of my friends are never going to share my interests as much as I’d like, but that just means I needed to find people who were already in whatever hobby and start hanging out with them and some of them will eventually be your real friends.

Making and keeping friends as an adult is way more difficult than it seems it should be, but it’s a painful reality.

But if the viewer speaks French then they would understand the French audio dialogue, so if a (deaf) viewer speaks French, then they ought to have the opportunity to read the French subtitled dialogue.

Adjacent pet peeve: When there’s captioning, and a character in a movie speaks a foreign language, and the captions read “[Speaking in French]”, or even worse, “[Speaking in foreign language]”.

Just caption “Jette-le à l’arrière du camion et emmène-le hors de la ville.”! If I do or don’t speak French, and if I can hear or if I’m deaf, then the caption would serve the same purpose either way!

The Disney movie Moana made me furious with this, in the flashback during “We Know the Way,” when the islanders are singing (I assume) Polynesian, but the lyrics are just “[Singing in foreign language]”. The fuck, Disney?! You’re usually good at translation!

PLEASE ADOPT VERIFICATION CAT TO CONTINUE

“To prove that you are human, donate $$$ to Doctors Without Borders.”

“To prove that you are human, register to vote.”

“To prove that you are human, adopt a pet from the local animal shelter.”

Did you catch all-despising baby skull last night?

Why is everyone wearing so much blush?

Not a widely beloved performance, but on this episode of Prairie Home Companion, he plays Jim from Huckleberry Finn, catching up with ol’ Huck. One of my all-time favorite bits.

Relevant part starts at 9:45

It’s not just sad, it’s one of the fundamental problems of our time. There are all of these obvious good things that government could and should be doing, but because they seem scary and revolutionary, the Democratic party is afraid (perhaps rightly so) that if that try to do them, they will lose to the Republicans. Then, people get upset that the government isn’t doing enough and seems stagnant, and that’s why candidates who seem disruptive get more attention.

On the good side of that equation, you get Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, who became much more successful than one would think on paper, because they branded themselves as Change candidates. The dark side of that is Trump, who appeals to people who think he seems not like a normal politician, and probably to a fair number of accelerationists, too. Obviously if you think about it for thirty seconds you can see that Trump is a fucking con man first, middle, and last, but the outsider branding might be his most potent tool.

Democrats have got to acknowledge that anger at the system feeling fucked, and they have got to make real changes to noticeably improve people’s lives. If all they do is try to maintain institutions and return to the pre-Trump status quo, then the fascists who want to set fire to everything are going to have that advantage over them.

In any sane society, closing a private prison would be cause for celebration.

I’m curious: what would that mean, within Brazil’s borders? Would they be able to prevent Starlink from being used? Broadcast a Starlink jamming signal over the whole country? Or turn it into a diplomatic issue, with the US State Department getting involved?

Russia would never threaten China with nukes, because 1) China ALSO has nukes, and 2) China has been the only thing keeping Russia afloat recently.

But it would have to be a scorched earth kind of invasion. The kind that pisses off basically everyone, because it leaves every single Russian, military, or citizen, dead. They’d have to come in, take everything, and kill everything. Take the land.

First of all, if you’re being invaded by an army planning to genocide your entire population, then you have no reason not to use every weapon in your arsenal. If the options are A: China kills 100% of your populace or B: Launch nukes and even 1% of your populace survives whatever follows, then B is the most rational choice.

Secondly, there’s no reason to assume that states will make rational decisions to begin with. I’d say the current state of affairs in Ukraine is a very good example of that in action. So even if China wasn’t planning to genocide all of Russia, even if it was some kind of “benevolent” invasion where they were going to tiptoe around the flower beds, gently pry Putin out of the Kremlin, and basically leave everything the same except that now Russians pay for groceries with renminbi instead of rubles… there’s still every reason to imagine that Putin and his top brass would still launch nukes on the mere principle of the thing.

So no, let’s not glibly plan for a fast forward on nuclear Armageddon, thank you very much.

Not to mention the security that comes from being able to not pay if you get scammed for whatever reason. I paid for a course at a community college with a credit card, but then my schedule changed so I tried to cancel the class before it even started. The college gave me a whole runaround, and whether it was willful or just simple incompetence, I wasn’t able to get a refund. So I called my credit card company and explained the situation to them, and they resolved the whole thing for me. Sometimes even mentioning that you’ll refer such a problem to the fraud department at your credit card company is enough to get someone to back down and give you a refund.

Credit cards have issues, especially if you have problems with using them responsibly, but that’s one particular way in which they can save you a lot of headache.

I didn’t even consider how many people with cardiac issues must be looking at that screen.

“Shrunken SUV” or “Took a normal 2- or 4-door and injected it with experimental growth hormones.”

I swear I see one once a week that would make sense and carry the same number of people and stuff at half the overall vehicle volume.

Qi users need not apply.

“Trump Secures Coveted Worm-Eaten Brain Demographic”

“Experts Say Worm Eating Brain May Induce One to Endorse Trump”

“Man with Worm-Eaten Brain and Man with Adult Diaper to Form Unstoppable Super-Ticket”

First devouring all of Fantasia, now this.