The Canadian Mint is, I think, the worst for making crazy "collectable" coins:

"Nobody's gonna wanna read about a strong man in tights Joe. It'll never fly!"

My gym has tablets in the treadmills, so I've been keeping up with the TV Club Clone High rewatch that way. It's been great!

And Taylor Swift will be fabulously rich, famous and popular no matter what. It's almost as if we don't matter.

Why is the perhaps manufactured talent of a singer up for more scrutiny than, say, an actor who had to be fed his lines before every take?

Males absolutely get this level of vitriol. I remember when Justin Timberlake hadn't yet established his solo credibility and performed at the Live8 concert in Toronto he was booed an insane amount, for literally NO REASON except that he was associated with a boy band.

"This kind of "detective work", one anyone can do with a copy of iZotope, is really unfair and ridiculous."

It wasn't as much of a "performance" as him just performing his song.

It's the illusion that they do which annoys me. I can't help but think of the J-Pop group Perfume; they straight up say that they only sing on a few of their slower songs when they do live performances so that they can mostly just focus on dancing and showmanship.

In short: Beyonce sounds good because she's been at it longer and has some natural advantages.

I wouldn't call this a win for "the haters."

The definition of "country music" is "if we market this as country music, will we sell more records?"

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to convert you to my way of thinking about this. I'm just explaining to you what that way of thinking is. I don't think that you're "wrong" for having a different perspective.

Huh, I'd say they were better than every episode this season save the finale. Series standouts by my reckoning.

I'm not denying that it goes somewhere else in Britain, I simply feel that when it does it tends to quite strongly contrast that elsewhere to London. The 'power' of Britishness is simply another attribute of the city, which is why the show's trips to the industrial-era North don't tend to look at it with any sort of…

Sure, but neither does Britain. Thus the context within which he is situated is important, and his British context is highly London-centric.

Oh don't get me wrong, there's still douchebags here, I just don't see it as a paradigm.

I view the world through a pretty localized lens where possible, so that doesn't match-up with my London-centric view of the show (where the level of power is accurate to the city's dominant role in the world), but I understand how it can be perceived that way.

There's a famous quote by an author — famous scifi I think — who watched a seminar about his work, and then told the professor his interpretation was interesting but inaccurate. The professor (overly dismissively, but reasonably accurately) asked the author how he could be sure that he knew what his book was actually…

I'm curious what you mean a fantasy of British power post-empire?