When they say "doesn't make a difference", what they mean is that if you bought extra-coarse salt, pre-ground it to your desired size, and then used it a month later, it would give exactly the same result as taking that salt and grinding it to that same size seconds before you ate it. That there's no difference…

Doesn't bear out etymologically, unfortunately: "vanilla" meaning "conventional" or "boring" dates back at least to the 1970s, but "white bread" with the same meaning isn't attested before 1980 or so.

He actually just recently did his last article for SA; like, within the last month, I think.

Uh…I have some bad news for you when it comes to recent revelations about Shmorky.

The fact that you work at a building with a 0th floor is mysterious enough.

There's potential ambiguity introduced by the Oxford comma any time you have a three item list in which the second item can be interpreted as being instead an appositive phrase referring to the first item, and the third item definitely can't be. (Technically, any time the penultimate item could be interpreted that way…

I'm pretty sure he was replying in support of you and just phrasing it differently, not disagreeing with you.

The fact that you use it proves that it's correct in your register. The only time a fluent speaker ever naturally says something not actually grammatical is when they make a production error.

Even the "wrong" usage can be correct in an informal setting, though.

Yeah, but there's still a structure which can be described. Otherwise there'd be no way to actually parse what you say into a meaning. There's some underlying order by which you translate concepts into sounds and symbols, and someone else translates those sounds and symbols back into concepts.

That depends. Do you mean rules as in "requirements for how to use language", in the grammarian sense, or rules as in "descriptions of how people actually use language", in the linguistic sense?

My take: there are some sentences that can be validly interpreted in multiple ways with it, there are some that can be validly interpreted in multiple ways without it, there's no such thing as a punctuation system that's guaranteed to always work, so use whatever you want so long as you attempt to have people…

If you hit the three-dot button underneath the thumbnail and to the side of the title, it should give you an option to remove a given video from your recommended; once you choose that, it'll give you a couple links, one of them should be something like "Why?" If you click that link, you can tell Youtube to stop…

Not to make you feel more dumb, but I'm pretty sure Blaine even called it out as an ironic name for a zombie at one point.

I'd say more that what counts is whatever you as an individual want to count, because it's all made up anyway and there's no such thing as a more real piece of fiction, regardless of the background behind its creation.

I know it's out of character for AV Club, but I think this article may not have been intended with utter sincerity.

I don't know, I've heard some horror stories about Sears right now. It's definitely hard to beat, though.

The release announcement Kickstarter email was sent out yesterday, I got it fine; are you sure it didn't get caught in your spam or something?

It was awesome, and I miss it too, but unfortunately it was also part of why TSR ended up going under. The large number of settings ended up making them compete against themselves, dividing their audience rather than growing it. They were printing 3 or 4 times as many settings without really increasing their customer…

Yeah, this was just the 2016 In Memoriam; Paxton would be included in the next Oscars ceremony.