Oh man, I tried to rewatch Last Unicorn recently and it is sooooo sloooow, I just couldn’t stick with it (Secret of NIMH holds up a bit better). About 5 years ago I watched Conan and Beastmaster for the first time - Beastmaster was a ton of stupid fun, but I couldn’t handle the misogyny in Conan. I know the “times…

I remember a specific day (I was in middle school, brothers were home from college) where my mother announced that having to decide what to cook for dinner was exhausting and after 20 years she just couldn’t do it anymore; from that point forward she’d happily cook us whatever we wanted, but if we didn’t ask for…

...or a “my five year old is going through a phase” thing.

My mom: “Hey Baba, what was your mom’s name?”
Her Grandma: “I don’t know.”
My mom: “How can you not know!?”
Her Grandma: “...I always called her Mama!!!!”

It looks an awful lot like Czech bublanina (in my family it’s a breakfast food rather than a dessert).

Also, what happens if I change my mind and want to take something out of my cart? Half the time I’m shopping for a specific recipe, can’t find a key ingredient, and decide to start over for another recipe.  It’s a lot easier to just put things back on the shelves without having to worry about clearing things from a…

Generally agree, but I do appreciate the 2003 live action version for giving us Jason Isaacs as Hook/Mr. Darling. (In fact, I thought the 2003 version was perfectly fine overall. It didn’t do anything startlingly new, but it was a quite visually pretty remake of the standard story).

So it’s the unknown 1990s editor that has Nostradamus-like powers - Now we need to figure out what other hidden messages (s)he put into books over the years!

Yeah, more and more I’m feeling like Democratic success in the presidential election is going to turn on finding the right Pres/VP pairing. No single candidate seems to be able to unite enough people, but there are quite a few combinations that could adequately balance people’s wants and fears in terms of progressive…

I actually end up buying store-brand TP because its the only brand made from 100% recycled paper that my grocery store sells.* But totally agree on menstrual products, and also Band-Aids are definitely the best band-aids. Brand matters much less for food - its usually just as good, and sometimes even better quality…

Yeah. If I recall correctly (I’m not re-watching the trailer to double check) they have that cheesy line about being the first people to set foot in this part of the wilds, then the very next shot is a First Nation woman walking toward their camp. These kinds of stories can still be done well, but they require a…

The sad thing is, we’d probably just have to use the extra tax to pay off the various industries that will throw a fit if the US tries to cut down on sugar/ corn syrup intake. 

Eh, Yale’s student body is 11% legacies and 51% scholarship students (Harvard is 14%/55%), so while I understand the initial impulse to think Ivy League students are dumb legacies, it’s not true for the vast majority. There are some legit smart people at top universities.

I like that idea. I think the key is that the recreation has to essentially be a final message with very limited interaction, rather than an attempt to bring the person back to ‘life’, so that there is urge to imagine a future with the person. Like finding your loved one’s past letters in a drawer.  

...which suggests a reasonable middle ground: VR recreations of actual home movies. While the hurt/heal debate is still relevant (after all, people can get too wrapped up in reliving old memories in any form), at least you’re not attempting to bring the lost child to ‘life’.

The version that makes me sad is dumping soy sauce over things. If you’re at Panda King, sure. If you taste your dish and decide it needs a bit of a kick, sure. But some people will be at a nice vietnamese restaurant and still dump soy sauce on their dish without even tasting it first, because that’s what ‘asian food’…

...Is it terrible that now I’m wondering if a non-white guy who wants to rob a bank could put on blackface and trick the cops into being on the lookout for a white racist?

I think there’s definitely something to the idea that we underestimate vertical distances, but I also think we tend to underestimate just how variable states are with respect to size. Obviously everyone knows TX/CA are much bigger, but what about idaho vs. west virginia vs. indiana vs. maine? There are a lot more…

Speaking of that general area, the thing that gets me is how far east Ohio and Indiana are. They’re not the ‘east coast,’ but geographically they’re way more eastern than central. From DC, Columbus OH is 100 miles closer than Charleston SC.

Why is anything disrespectful? We can go back into history to find the root of the tradition, but ultimately it’s disrespectful because society says so. If societal rules say that its rude to wear a hat inside and you do it anyway, that means you intended to be rude (or you’re societally clueless). I assume you…