I think there’s a definite learning curve to getting the thing to behave smoothly in traffic. I found sport mode to be the smoother option, counterintuitively. But I wonder if there wasn’t a patch for the DSG, because mine will absolutely never go into first gear unless the car has come to a complete stop for at least…

Yep. After 25 years of slogging traffic in short ratio manuals, having an “automatic” is a godsend. I leave it in manual most of the time and it’s still fun and rewarding. A good compromise.

I can’t speak t o the R, but I’ve driven a mkVIII GTI. I have a 2017 mkVII that I love DEARLY, and man... I straight up hated the new car. I consider the way I interact with the car as the single most important aspect of the vehicle. The handling and overall performance, sure - important. But not most important. The…

This whole story just illustrates how decentralized automation with no manual oversight or management is Wargames-level bad thinking in almost every scenario.

That’s almost certainly the case, and illustrates how decentralized automation with no manual oversights is Wargames-level bad thinking in almost every scenario.

How is Laena’s death such mystery? The baby was breech, and the physician had no way deliver it. It takes all of 30 seconds to know that historically breech births were the leading cause of death in pregnant women, and something like 5% of all births were breech. It was practically unsurvivable for both the mother and…

I’ve never seen someone driving a donk drive dangerously. They’re not my thing, but aside from the tooth rattling bass (which I thought was awesome in 1990, before I got old and developed tinnitus that would have driven Harrison Bergeron insane), they’re pretty harmless.

My best theory is the mithril story is actually the work of Sauron, deceiving the elves. That would actually make sense. He’s manipulating each of the races to believe their survival is somehow tied to the acceptance of the rings. I’ve always wondered how exactly he conned them each into taking them, aside from the…

I had a similar thought - how else does Sauron trick them into taking and using the rings if not for some sense of preservation of the race? - and really hope this is the case, or something similarly sneaky.

The narrative of this whole series is so murky. Yes, I understand Sauron is back and up to something, and the people of Middle Earth had better do something to stop him, but every single episode ends with that same conclusion. We’re more than halfway through the season and I don’t understand the enemy. I don’t…

Nope. Hot Springs, Arkansas. But I also spent a lot of time in Dallas every Summer and was pretty well versed in the Galleria, Prestonwood and Valley View Malls.

Did you have $10 Timex watch that you got for Christmas the last year you believed in Santa, and set the alarm so you’d meet back up at the food court on time?

I’m old enough to remember my parents giving me $5 and a Coke, and leaving me at Aladdin’s Castle while they did their thing at Dillard’s, or whatever. If I ran out of tokens I’d hit KB Toys. Last ditch was the record store or Sears, in case they had a video game demo station set up. They knew where to find me. Of…

A bus full of all the world’s leaders is sort of the beginning of every drugstore Tom Clancy knockoff paperback.

That late 80s/early 90s period was a real clown show, eh?

Unless we have a lot of plastic in the load, our Bosch does an amazingly efficient job of drying dishes. I suspect the effectiveness of the towel method depends a lot on how your dishwasher dries - airflow, like the Bosch, or heating coils.

What’s so colossally stupid about this is that Top Gun: Maverick just made like twelvety gazillion dollars.

Society sucks.

Remember when you could buy a game, even a terrible one like Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, and keep playing it forever?

There’s a part of my brain that believes this is all part of a plan to be able to say, “Look, we really tried selling EVs but the consumers didn’t want them, so can we please get back to selling gas-powered cars?”