I dunno about dog shit, but a squirrel would be fluffier than this cheap toilet paper they have at my job.

Whoa… that's your example of a PKD plot that made no sense? I thought it was pretty clear that the guy had lost his mind, and just couldn't perceive anything that deviated from the dream he'd been in for the last 10 years.

I haven't read that one, but his non-SF Confessions of a Crap Artist is very good. The Broken Bubble and The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike are less good, but have some great moments and are worth it just for the very creepy 1950s Marin County atmosphere and the deadpan satire of work-related bullshit. There's…

And it'd be worth it just to see D.J. Qualls sweating his way through a bad consignment deal.

They did at least gesture toward setting up the "Frank and Ed try to make it in the handmade jewelry business" subplot, which is one of my favorite parts of the book despite how little it has to do with the plot, just because Dick writes inept small businessmen so well.

Well, the US has (or had) the Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office a.k.a. DISCO, which I refuse to believe wasn't named in clairvoyant anticipation of this lawsuit.

Good grief, I just wasted 20 minutes arguing with some random person on the Internet (not here) who thinks LOOKING is a sell-out show that isn't really gay at all but is obviously just made for a target audience of "middle American" suburban women (?!) to help them "feel progressive." What the hell can anyone say to…

My wisdom teeth were relatively easy, but a few years ago I cracked one of my premolars biting into a piece of fucking Toblerone. The dentist said "You need a crown." I went in for the crown. They ground down the tooth for a while and then they said "It's too cracked. You need a root canal." I went in for the root…

I had a friend in NYC who was living in a place like that in *1992*. We weren't dating though, so I didn't face any of those challenges.

I just hope that we won't have to have 500 comments every week about whether Chuck's condition can be real. That's kind of irrelevant to the show, because if the writers want it to be real then it is real as far as this story is concerned, whereas if they want Chuck to be delusional then he can be delusional…

I'm really impressed with everything they've done with this character. I'll watch Michael McKean do anything, but Chuck is written so perfectly as a foil for Jimmy: he defeats all of Jimmy's powers of bullshit simply by being someone who's constructed his own reality and doesn't care about anyone else's. Even if you…

They even managed to get a downhill-facing shot of Dolores Park in such a way that you couldn't really tell that the lower half of the park is currently super ugly due to a big renovation project. I live a block from there, so I got a kick out of that bit (including Patrick's rant about people standing in line for 45…

Yeah, that was my take on it too, although I think for Patrick there's also a connotation of "this person is weird, in a way that I don't quite understand but that I know is kind of old-school somehow, so I'll compare him to another charming eccentric archetype." Patrick just isn't very familiar with all that many…

I fell for him irrevocably as soon as he started telling Agustin all the reasons the kids at the shelter will drive a person crazy. That's exactly how a certain kind of incredibly dedicated and effective counselor (or nurse, social worker, etc.) talks when off the clock— not conflicted or judgmental about it at all,…

Warner Brothers announced plans for a Pern movie last fall, for what it's worth.

If it's fast film and a narrow aperture, you can have an adequate depth of field to capture all of those things without focusing, no?

Unless they somehow come up with a plot reason for Sandra to encounter some spy shenanigans, due to Stan fucking something up, or just because she slightly knows the Jenningses.

Often, sure, but once a certain amount of that has already happened, the "cachet of all that trendy stuff" becomes more abstract and doesn't depend on having any actual artists or whatever still around. It certainly doesn't outweigh the perceived disadvantage of keeping a neighborhood name that connotes danger or…

Also, I don't think developers are all that interested in "keeping a neighborhood hip." There are plenty of un-hip people with lots of money.

(Shrug) I don't know how they come up with these things. I'm only surprised that they didn't find a way to put "Heights" in the name.