I actually kind of liked what she did with Malfoy. These being fantasy novels Harry faces off against a lot of Pure Evil, and so it’s tempting to throw Malfoy in with that lot (Harry does it himself in the earlier books), but Malfoy’s not Evil, he’s just kind of a shitty person. It’s an important part of growing up to…

Just a PSA here: Big splashy public proposals are for relationships where you know 100% she’ll say yes, because she’s been “hinting” for years and you’ve been dragging your feet. If there’s even a sliver of doubt in your mind about how she’ll react, DON’T DO IT. Plan something private and intimate.

Yeah I think they course-corrected after the first few seasons, which makes the initial hate for the show seem strange to people who are more familiar with later seasons. The starting premise was pretty bad. 

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Seinfeld finale, so perhaps it’s just badly executed. But the hate for it has always seemed kind of strange. It’s a perfectly good premise for a finale - an excuse to bring back old side characters, and there’s some nice dark humor in the main cast finally facing some consequences for…

The part that’s so bizarre to me is... the idea that white women might get a “pass” for racism is the kind of thing that only makes sense from the perspective of modern identity politics. This whole worldview that you can group people into “privileged = bad” and “marginalized = good” and that being marginalized means…

The genius of McDonalds is that every time, in every location, it tastes exactly the same. Not only that, but it tastes exactly the same as it did 20+ years ago when you were a little kid.

Honestly, it’s always been surprising to me that trailers aren’t MORE misleading. Usually you can tell how good a movie will be by its trailer - there are exceptions, but they’re relatively rare. You’d think you could make any movie look good for a minute or two, but clearly not.

Trevor Noah is charming and seems like a good guy, but I really dislike this kind of political humor that treats even reasonable, well-argued disagreements as fodder for mockery.

That whole subplot felt like a TV show “monster-of-the-week” to me. You could probably transplant it wholesale into the first season of Agents of SHIELD without anything feeling out of place. 

I feel like the name “Neutral Milk Hotel” gives you a pretty good idea of what you’re getting in to, so on that level at least it’s a success. 

I see the news of his death on reddit, and in reading the comments I see a few people mention that they felt bad for his daughter. I think “oh I didn’t know he had a daughter”, google it, and up pops the article “Who is Anthony Bourdain’s daughter, Ariane?”. Click!

Why was the hard-boiled egg there in the first place? That’s not a normal thing to have on a salad....

The thing they’re going to have to overcome, for younger folks unfamiliar with previous versions, is that the title “A Star is Born” sounds waaayy too much like reality show cheese nowadays. It’s going to be hard to convince folks that this is a proper drama and not some inspirational schlock. 

Yeah, I was expecting a hot take, but this was just incoherent. 

Le Guin was really a remarkable person, opinionated and perceptive, and one of the greats in SF/Fantasy. Anyone looking for a quick snapshot of her writing, I recommend the intro to The Left Hand of Darkness, which you can read online: http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html

The trick to softening butter in the microwave is figuring out how to run it at half-power. It gives you a lot more margin for error before it starts to melt. The usual technique is:

Thank you for doing a better job avoiding spoilers in the title than io9 did.

The trick to Grape Nuts is knowing how to sweeten them up. I like to eat them with chocolate chips - the flavors complement each other really well.

Much like black people can call each other the n-word and no one cares, I’m not surprised that an Asian person wrote a book with this title, or that lots of Asians and Asian-Americans read it and liked it. As a white person, though, I can’t imagine myself recommending this movie to a friend, even with qualifications.…

It’s amazing to me that in this day and age famous artists can still be “ambiguously gay” but here we are.