The thing is that her material wouldn't really translate to a book. They're not writerly sorts of jokes; they live and die on a stage. If you check out some of her comedy outside of Live, you'll hear more of what she's about. If you haven't heard the Taylor Dayne story, look it up on YouTube and you'll see a long…

Plenty of people don't get her. Her style isn't really about wide appeal; she tends to work heavily with timing in ways that play with expectations. If that doesn't work for you, then it probably seems like a comedy routine where people are laughing at the parts without jokes. I love her stuff, but it definitely…

I've enjoyed all of this artist's Comic Pages for their art. They're well-composed, well-drafted, and each is distinct from the others. The stories are just so inconsequential, if that makes sense. They go by without making much of an impression. Humour-wise, there aren't many gags; plot-wise, there usually isn't…

Quite so. It's quite possible that any of our ironclad laws could still turn out to be wrong with further research. If two subatomic particles in two different places turn out to be linked in their actions, then cause and effect becomes a much trickier concept.

I also think that this may be one of those US-only things. There are several big malls in my town that are doing fine, and I think that it may be partially because it's somewhat harder (in my experience) to get free shipping in Canada than in the US, where it seems to be almost the norm at this point. If you have to…

With that, I think I'm sold on trying to pick this up. Thank you.

It's not really surprising. The thing that I liked most about it was, I suppose, that it had such a strong authorial voice. It really felt like its own thing entirely, something that couldn't really be substituted. Those qualities don't guarantee that it'll work at all for any given person. If you hate that…

You know, I never thought that I'd want to read a Howard the Duck comic that wasn't written by Steve Gerber, but this article just changed my mind. I didn't know Howard had a creative team that actually understood him now. Damn.

This is a bit of a late response, but I'd suggest that part of the issue is, in fact, that understanding can be impeded if people aren't communicating according to the same set of rules. Pretty much any set of rules will do, as the multiplicity of the world's languages would attest, but sharing a language always…

You'd have to use it immediately if you didn't want to stir like mad every time, too, but it'd be worth the experience at least once (though I like the taste of olive oil).

After his terms, he'll serve out his 10,000 year-long post-presidential term interred in a golden throne, using his potent psychic abilities to help the US Navy navigate. Seems a bit harsh, maybe, but someone has to have their finger on the button when Ted Cruz returns from his mad experiments at the heart of the…

You have me wondering what a coconut oil-based mayonnaise would be like. Some purist out there is probably loading a gun as we speak at such a suggestion.

I always find it odd to think just how much of one's local reality is imperceptible. It feels weird to be stuck in the dark and not be able to see much anything, but it feels normal to have a full range of vision and see only a fraction of what's out there. I'll bet that one peek at the full range would make anyone…

Was one of the Hindi Fleetwood Mac covers "Dreams"? I'll bet that one would fit really well with the rhythms of the language.

Infinity is the secret ingredient in the incomprehensibility souffle, for certain. The thing that got me was the realization that over infinite time, literally every single possible thing happens an infinite number of times. Just talking about it becomes so abstract that it'd be better off to find a way to do it in…

So imagine that our universe came from something else, has a definite origin and eventual ending, and is part of a larger context. Where did the larger context come from? If our universe was part of a multiverse, then it would simply be the multiverse that was subjected to the same paradox. At some point, created…

Slammed in the Butt by my Book as a Building

Well, there's the question of whether morality predates the notion of morality itself. Are the things creatures do right or wrong if the creatures themselves no conception of it? Normally, people would answer in the negative, saying that you cannot act morally or immorally without knowing what morals are. It's the…

I don't think Ligotti usually applies himself much to ethics, actually. His writing tends more towards a descriptive mode than a prescriptive mode. The anti-natalism is all pretty much from one book and his interviews, I think.

What if "coming from" somewhere is a false concept? In a sense, everything that exists comes from the same place, i.e. the universe. We just think of things as being from elsewhere because our concept of "here" is smaller than then extent of the universe. If you think of "everywhere that exists" as "here", though,…