In the books Martin is always mentioning how the floors are covered with fresh or dried "rushes," which apparently was a common practice in medieval Europe. Rushes served a similar purpose to scattering hay on a muddy path, but smelled better and weren't as crumbly and prone to cause itching.

Serious name/comment synergy here.

You are history's greatest monster.

Drugs is a pretty general category. Shaggy wasn't cooking crystal in the back of the Mystery Van, he was eating weed brownies with his dog.

I was just correcting the quote. Got to keep that Frisky Dingo meme pure and strong, like the Hapsburg bloodline or Donald Trump's base.

How does that make sense? Weed makes you notoriously prone to snacking. Tobacco keeps people thin, marijuana does not.

I'm not sure why this comment is an orphan, but it was supposed to be a response to someone pointing out that an article making the same idiotic point about comic books was recently highlighted to similar disdain.

Soda can? My penis fills an entire tall-boy, peewee.

Yeah, I was going to point that out, and then I thought that it might be counterproductive to bring gymnastics into a discussion of unrealistic and harmful body images.

True story, in spite of being a fat kid who read a lot of comics, the only unrealistic body image I ever thought was attainable and attempted to achieve myself was Todd McFarlane-style hair. Think Spiderman in the early '90s.

Has it decreased or just leveled off?

This is actually pretty insightful—I was going to write in response to another comment that a lot of this is the result of it being hard to draw anatomically correct human shapes, and it's more than doubly hard to animate anatomically correct movement. Why are legs and arms usually skinny? Because it lets you draw…

These are all ridiculous. Daria didn't have a "thigh gap." Her skinniness was not intended to be attractive—it was just how her animators drew her. To the extent her thinness is even a feature, it's in the nature of "skinny girl who hasn't filled out and is thus at a social disadvantage to more conventionally…

I avoid the sample chapters and spoilers related thereto and then write snotty things about GRRM on the internet, as is the way of our people.

No, as has been pointed out elsewhere in the comments, all of the released chapters were allegedly meant to have been included in Dance, but weren't finished in time. He's releasing material that was already late for the 2011 book, in other words, not new material for the 20XX book that he's supposedly working on.

…

The Mines in Spelunky. You hear that the game is hard, but you don't expect to walk two units away from the door, get plunked by an arrow trap, hurled into a snake that bounces you down a hole onto a spike trap on your first fucking game. Also, on a similar note, the Jungle in Spelunky. What the fuck, monkies over…

Bushido Blade and Bushido Blade II were my jam in high school. Best sword fighting in any video game, ever, by an enormous margin.

While we're being categorical: escort missions. Any escort mission. If I have to keep something alive, that thing had better be controlled by me.

Thanks to Bojack Horseman, I now think of Paul F. Tompkins as an actual dog. That dog is also a fairly successful actor, but he's just a dog to me now.