He’s not even a BIG big designer, like a Dior or a Givenchy. He’s an upstart from a reality TV show who’s managed to spin that into real success. And you know how he’s done it? Every fucking line of his, from his Payless shoes to his Puma collection to his Lane Bryant collection, has paid attention to being accessible…

I was sincerely hoping you were making a typo with her name (for some reason the spelling didn’t leap out at me in the article but did in your comment), but no. Somebody’s parents really thought it’d be cute to saddle their little girl with the one-two punch of “most boring girl’s name” plus “obnoxious/laughable…

His Payless shoe line always had every style go up to a size 12, so he’s always been putting out work that was accessible for at least a few standard variations away from “normal.”

That’s one thing I always liked about Project Runway - Every season had a “normal” or full-figured challenge. Watching that really let you know who on the show had real chops and who was a whiny bitch who got too used to easy success.

Everything, and everyone, in a family is made dangerous by a gun. I can’t imagine really trusting someone, even my own parents, if I knew every time they were angry my life depended on their continuing ability to stay sane and make good choices. Everyone is capable of losing that ability, because everyone has a…

Lol. This might be the most amusing use of the phrase “museum quality” by someone with no idea what that means that I’ve ever heard.

Now might be the time to start talking to him about the importance of backup plans as well, both workarounds that may take longer but get you to the original goal in the end, and having completely different second-choice goals. When you get closer to time, he should probably look into UT feeder schools with easier…

Reading the article is a helpful way to gain clarity. She says she “always” did this, and while that may not literally be true, it is easy enough to read that as “most of the time.”

You can’t help kids get better SAT scores by sitting the exam for them. Jia has just admitted that she wrote (or re-wrote, same thing) the admissions essays for her clients. She says she always did this, and while that may be hyperbole, it still indicates that it happened often. Once, frankly, is bad enough. I think…

I would be interested to know how many people in her class were actually people of color - as Jia notes, most public schools (and not only in Texas) are still effectively segregated.

These are a bit dark. For my money, the best subway PSAs in the world are in Prague, where they have cute cartoons that will teach you basic metro-riding ettiquette, like do not block people getting off the train (look at their sad trapped faces!) and let old people sit down.

Can I just say that watching the political party that was somehow so staunchly anti-government for so many years finally get their comeuppance and knock themselves into obsolescence is just about the most satisfying thing ever? I’m so glad that it happened in my lifetime.

The real racism is how you keep insisting on pointing out her racism, you racist!

I also feel it helped Arya’s Braavos storyline feel a lot less like a waste of time. She clearly needed the things she learned from the Faceless Men to carry out that kill. I had kind of been assuming she’d finish off her kill-list the same way she’s managed it thus far - either by running into the people she hates at…

You can’t fast if you don’t have anything to break the fast. They’re starving, not fasting.

By the same token, we don’t know that Ghost the direwolf isn’t secretly a flying fish, it’s just the narrative believed by everyone who looks at him whose opinion we’ve been told anything about that leads us to believe she’s a direwolf. So I dunno, maybe everything we’ve been told is a lie (unreliable narrators are…

Your personal experience of scarcity was pretty damn irrelevant, too, but I figured if you were going to take a flying leap into “let’s talk about me!” I could at least take the time to show you how foolish that was.

Does that Frey party take place in Riverrun? I’m pretty sure it takes place at the Twins, because it’s the same set as the Red Wedding - they’re celebrating taking Riverrun, but I’m not convinced they’re there. The Twins is a little further east than Riverrun, which may help explain how she got there.

To be fair, she heard a prophecy saying that she’d have three children and they’d all die before her - while it’s clear (especially in the books, where it’s mentioned early and often) that it bothers her, it’s not clear how much she believes it. Until two of her kids are dead. After that, I figure she probably got…

And I’ve lived in Sudan, where water scarcity is also a fact of life - except the water isn’t delivered by truck, it’s piped directly from the Nile through a pipe system that dates to the British colonial period. If your neighborhood has a pipe breakage, or the river level falls too far, there’s no truck coming for…