That's what I was going to comment on - the combination of backdrop and stools that they chose creates a really weird effect.

I'll never understand why that isn't a bigger part of the mission in school. So many of the books that I was assigned to read in grade school were just objectively awful, and no effort was made to assign things we'd enjoy or had an interest in. I get that it's more work to give kids some choice about what they read,…

I tried to get my younger cousins to watch them 10 years ago, and it wasn't terribly well recieved. All the fantastical beasts are traditional animation overlaid over the live action, which wasn't something they'd seen before, being young enough that CGI effects were ubiquitous. The older one was coming up with…

How do you feel about the BBC Narnia miniseries with the really hokey effects?

We have fun coming up with nicknames for our rental cars, like "coked up squirrel", but I don't think we've ever actually liked a rental car. For a while it was a lot of Malibus, I think.

It sounds like there's some interesting psychological games at play. Making people wait, having it be disorienting and creepy, then makes them really relieved when the friendly guy shows up to ask easy questions. The awkward setup has to be a part of the design, right?

There's an extra element of tragedy to the failed heist that gets Shadow arrested because of how pointless it was. Laura thinks that there's some one action/achievement that will "fix" her depression, when I really don't think it works like that.

The opening scene of the last episode, where you're certain that you're going to see the woman fall off that stool, and then she doesn't, felt a lot like Dead Like Me, when they'd be telegraphing some gruesome Rube Goldbergian death. It made the subversion of expectations that much more effective.

Oh, thank god you're joking - I'm so relieved!

Thanks! I felt like the plotline was done in a respectful way overall, but I didn't feel like I was a position to weigh in on it because, well, it's not about me. I appreciate hearing what the NDN community generally thinks about it.

I'll never understand why teachers pick such awful books to assign so much of the time. Isn't it possible to find books that have interesting themes to explore but that are also not a bore to read? You'd think one of their goals as educators would be to foster a love of reading.

The month between the appendectomy and the tumor removal was really rough, because until they got in there and could check out the margins we had no clue if it was still stage 1 or not (and if the answer was "not", we pretty much would have been screwed), but thank goodness they caught it in time. It was also a…

It's shocking to realize how something that big could go almost unnoticed. My husband recently had a tennis ball-sized tumor removed, and we only found it because of the imaging that was done prior to his appendicitis. There hadn't been any symptoms we'd notice, nothing - if it hadn't been for that sacrifice play by…

I've never been able to get into the novels of Windling's that I've tried, but those fairy tale short story anthologies of hers are generally excellent.

Just read the third Court of Thorns and Roses book by Sarah J Maas, A Court of Wings and Ruin. I liked the 2nd book the most out of this series so far, but really enjoyed this one, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that, while this one ends very satisfyingly, there are more books planned in the series. This…

If you pick up any of the short story collections, make sure to read the intro - there's usually a bonus short story included in there that isn't labeled in the table of contents.

The Tiffany Aching books and Nation (standalone YA, not Discworld) are some of my favorite Prachett - I felt like he did a better job of constructing a coherent plot for those than he did for some of his adult books.

It might be because I've got a soft spot for WWII historical fiction, but I thought Between Shades of Gray was really good. I especially liked that it focused on a largely forgotten (in pop culture) part of an otherwise very well-trodden war: what the Soviets were doing to their own people.

You can always just call to thank them and tell them that it's an important issue to you - this is one of the main ways that they get feedback from constituents, good or bad.

I don't know what to do on a large scale, but as individuals, you can suggest safer alternatives if someone seems like they're leaning too hard on a prescription. I know that some people have had success weaning themselves off of opioids by switching to kratom instead. There's a lot of weird scaremongering out there…