It wasn't my scene, but I think it's better than its reputation (and I agree that pop-punk is a better name for it, especially regarding Fall Out Boy and Jimmy Eat World). I have a bandmate who got into the Fueled By Ramen bands a bit after their popular era, so I've learned to appreciate them for what they were:…

I have to check out these Burke novels now. Crime stories are all about the primal, elemental parts of humanity pushing sprouts through the cracks in civilization (how's that for an overwrought metaphor). For example, I read this a few years ago and it's stuck with me ever since. It's the purest revenge story I've…

Plenty of melodic punk was pretty great. I guess it depends on what you call pop-punk, but the Fat Wreck Chords-ish sector was involved in lots of great times.

My brother likes to say that hip-hop never died, it just moved to the UK. They always come up with some awesome genre melds.

I'd agree with the overall sentiment, but I would say that hip-hop has definitely had some incredible periods in the past that are worth remembering. That huge explosion in the '80s and then the one in the mid '90s seemed like incredibly exciting times too.

Rock guys can get ridiculous about instrument fetishism. I have a bunch of instruments, but the dirty secret is that the useful qualities of an instrument plateau after a certain point. A guitar/bass that's $500 new could be used for an entire career if you kept it in repair. The $3500 electric guitars are fucking…

The funny thing about folk is that it's been "dead" for longer than many people have been alive and it somehow just keeps going. It's really sturdy because it's easy to pass on. I genuinely don't think it will die out for good within our lifetimes or even long afterwards.

I think you could argue that children have legal rights that are effectively very difficult to enforce. Abusing a child is definitely illegal, but it happens incredibly commonly and it's often difficult to prosecute.

That's interesting. It sort of depends on what you think of as the point of a menu. If the point is to group foods in a predictable taxonomy, then you can make a strong argument for chili as a soup by family resemblance (soup is like stew and may encompass it; chili is either a stew or very close to one). If the…

How have I never heard of this guy? They have to collaborate in some way. The Wikipedia article has a quote about how his religion is revenge and that is exactly the sort of thing that I need to hear from a crime novelist.

There's definitely something to be said about children's rights and how they're not really respected in reality. I don't think that single parents are the doom that everyone makes them out to be, especially given how many couples contain a member who has no business being in authority over children ever. The…

Thank you for letting me know that this existed and is good. Good Vonnegut adaptations are so rare that I didn't know if any unambiguous examples existed (maybe Slaughterhouse Five is alright? I've only seen bits and pieces).

I'd say that chili is a category that falls into the family of stews. It has enough variation to be its own category, but it's definitely still a stew.

Those No Limit Soldiers better watch their backs!

I actually wasn't super into it the one time I saw it, but it won me over anyway. I wasn't terribly interested in the plot, which tends to be a bad sign for my enjoyment of a movie, but everything was so well-mounted that I could just have fun with how well everything was put together. I loved the voice acting,…

Expectations have been set accordingly. I won't look for something that breaks the mould, just something that fills it with silver.

The subtext of The Incredibles is confused, more than it is anything else. It doesn't perfectly map to any system of philosophy because it probably wasn't intended as an allegory in the first place. Thus, I think you can see shades of Rand or Nietzsche in it, but it's not intended as a parable and thus doesn't read…

I think that Inside Out supports a trilogy in a sort of 7-Up style. I think it'd be cool to see it grow with the kids who watched the first one. If they did another one in about three years, it could cover prime teenage anxiety territory!

If personal experience is any indicator, the way one feels after a loss like this is that life is now going to consist mostly of this loss. From the perspective of a few years on, I can say that you never really know what your 100% can actually be. The death never changes, but it's funny how much a life can adapt.

When my brother died (very suddenly), I pretty much treated that part like ripping off a band-aid. I walked out of the apartment and called up pretty much every friend of mine who had known him in order to just get it out of the damned way. It acted as a distraction from the corpse that was 20 feet away, so I…