I’m personally a huge fan of kids acting like complete assholes in restaurants, because it takes the heat off me and my kids. My kids are generally pretty well behaved, but those times when there’s some truly awful piece of shit kid elsewhere in the restaurant, absorbing everyone’s dirty, judgmental looks so I don’t…

Was just thinking the other day about the use of actual branded cars in some Studio Ghibli movies, e.g., the Audi A4 in Spirited Away, the W123 Mercedes in Secret World of Arrietty. I can’t remember seeing anything like that in western-produced animated films - probably due to clearance culture. I wonder if that’s…

Good to know. I had a massive coolant leak/overheat incident one time in my XJ, and the engine seems no worse for the wear after I patched everything up and refilled. Now I know why.

Nice. Now to work on inceptioning my kids into wanting to see this more than whatever fifth-sequel CGI piece of shit is being relentlessly marketed at them this week.

I’m at the point where I almost want him to do something stupid and tacky to mitigate how bad I miss him. Like getting arrested for drunk driving a stolen postal truck through the front window of a Wendy’s or some shit.

What celebrity, if it came to light they were a sex monster, would cause you to completely snap and lose faith in humanity?

It means to return to the first chord of the chord progression, which is rooted in the first note of the scale, hence the roman numeral for 1, and its a major chord, so it’s capitalized.

If they can ever reliably detect phone use, I’d like to see that factored into insurance rates the same way other driving behaviors are. Taken a step further, maybe at some point maybe habitually distracted drivers would be priced-out of insurability, and thus driving altogether.

Just heard about John Teti and the AVC show on his Twitter, which sucks. (Will there be any kind of announcement on the site proper?) Block & Tackle was one of my all-time favorite features on this site.

Right? On the other hand, it’s not a very good episode of Black Mirror where a piece of near-future technology randomly maims someone and I’m still like “Fuck it. Let’s make that pizza robot happen.”

My read was that using the guinea pig just made it laughably easy and quick to catch her. Like, not only was killing all those people ultimately pointless as far as covering her tracks went, it didn’t even buy her more than the length of a school play.

Not trying to be a Kinja apologist, but since I started reading some of the AVC sister sites, I’ve been struck by how good their comment ecosystems are. Maybe not golden age AVC good, but it kind of makes me wonder whether everyone really needed to abandon this place the way they did. 

You are wrong—those comments were never popular.

And it works so well because that’s *exactly* how kids really play with toys. 99% of TV shows and movies take place in a weird parallel universe where ubiquitous brands and pop culture are nowhere to be found; seeing a character type a search in Bing or reference a fake, in-world Facebook analog always undercuts the…

Even product placement in general doesn’t have to suck. The Lego Movie had one of the loosest, most-anarchic approaches to IP I’ve seen this side of Mad Men. Not only with the Lego brand, but all the dozens of sub-licensed brands from Harry Potter to LotR to DC. Hell, the Krazy Glue and Q-Tip trademarks even made an…

Think I’m gonna hold out for another 20 years and wait for some other author to write a novel that’s just a reference-heavy homage to Ernest Cline’s books, and then just watch the film adaptation of that, directed by Steven Spielberg (or his non-union futuristic robot equivalent).

Word. I just skimmed this for the release date and that’s all I’m reading. I can’t think of a show that better rewards you for going in 100% cold.

I enjoyed it and thought it was mostly successful. But the audiobook production (how I “read” it), with the sprawling voice cast, underscored what a stretch it is to call this a novel. I had to run into a bookstore just to see how this thing was formatted, because it otherwise just felt like a really weird radio play.…

I have a beater 2000 Cherokee and just use push pins. Plus, my kids get a kick out of the way the headliner billows and undulates uncontrollably when the windows* are down.