He also threatened profiler Robert Ressler with bare-handed decapitation during an interview in the 1970s. Ressler told Kemper he’d be in trouble if he hurt him, and Kemper replied, “What, they’ll take away my tv privileges?” Ressler got real nervous and started repeatedly pressing the button to summon the guard so he…

Thanks for the recommendation!

It happens, but the cases are rarely notorious enough that word of it gets out. I only remember Karla Holmolka and Karla Faye Tucker.

First D&D campaign, I was the only girl, age 15 or 16. I was playing with a couple of friends and a couple of their friends. In spite of allowing me at the game, the DM didn’t want me there, so he apparently added to the Wandering Monster table “horde of rapist barbarians”, with a strangely high-percentage chance that…

I thought they crushed Mediterranean sea snails (murex something?), and the ancient Romans called it Tyrian purple...

In real life there used to be “Ted Bundy is a One Night Stand” t-shirts, which is the inspiration for them here. I’ve never seen a picture of one, though, which is odd considering how often this gets mentioned in True crime books.

I don’t believe in their God, but I still have to subsidize their beliefs thanks to their tax breaks. Can we collectively stop supporting the religious? Christianity would still be legal, I just wouldn’t have to pay for it.

The multi-stall bathroom issues at my tech-industry building near Seattle are: people for whom standing on the toilet seat and squatting is the norm but covering the seat with that paper cover first is not a thing they do (leaving sprayed pee and footprints); people very loudly and wetly brushing their teeth (making…

It isn’t just you. I think it’s because in school, cursive was graded on style more than printing was, so we learned to take the time to make the letters more carefully. You might still keep that in mind when you’re writing, even if you’re not conscious of it.

I just bought a cahier d’écriture for children so that I could improve my penmanship, because it has been easier to learn a new way of writing than it is to just fix the way I write now. To make it more entertaining, I am using a fountain pen with J. Herbin’s Poussiere de lune on séyès paper, as if I lived in the…

It’s not just Apple minions who do this kind of thing. I used to work at a tabletop game company and we were deluged with tourists (not just children, either) that had apparently never seen an office building before. A friend of mine works at a video game company and they get people coming in hordes from other…

It’s not an excuse and I wasn’t addressing the criticism itself because I am not invested in that argument. I didn’t write the article nor am I defending the tone. The actual point was that someone using “Murder Can Be Fun” in their name might well take a somewhat flippant approach to writing about murder. It would be…

The essay is reprinted from the irreverent ‘zine “Murder Can Be Fun”. As you might gather from the title of the ‘zine (and author’s ID), the coverage of crime is going to err on the side of melodrama and a possible exploitative tone.

I was replying to ‘you-can-pick-a-screen-name-later’ talking about making their own dippin’ dots with liquid nitrogen at home, and so I said / meant the commercial process by which Dippin Dots are made is much the same as what they did at home. I understand the Spherificator / molecular gastronomy part, although I am…

I didn’t mean with the Spherificator, I meant with Dippin’ Dots and liquid nitrogen.

A great book about the phenomenon that was Peyton Place just came out, if you’re interested. “Unbuttoning America: A Biography of ‘Peyton Place’” by Ardis Cameron.

It’s the same, but on a much larger scale: 18 things you didn’t know about Dippin’ Dots

I am mostly reposting what I said in the Bibliomancy thread because it belongs here more than there. I made slight edits because this was a reply to something someone said, so it started differently.

Vote: GarageBand ‘11
Why: I use this because I can make seamless music podcasts and save them as high-quality chaptered AAC files. This lets people see the tracklist with the album art for each song, and they can also skip to a favorite song (it’s MP3s for everyone else). I generally make themed playlists, so I also…

I am dedicated to having a personal library of tangible books, but I buy ebooks (via iPad apps) mostly for ‘junk’ reading (consuming books with the speed and lack of discretion that one might consume junk food). For instance, I’ve disallowed myself new physical books about WWII or forensic sciences because I have so…