The original Shrek, at the time it was made, before the sequelization and merchandising, was genius.

I said to Nilus below that I’ve switched to a group that plays board games instead.

I sort of did: I joined a group that plays board games instead.

Hmm, I wonder if I should cast Zone of Truth....

I’ve had a long enough run of playing in utterly undynamic groups—bone-dry DMs, min-maxing combat monster PCs—that I’ve sort of lost my taste for it. My baseline experience of playing D&D for a while now has been “I wish I was doing something else.”

“Living well is the best revenge” is something that people say when they’re desperate to avoid having someone take revenge.

‘Wuhan’ hits a certain sweet spot of ‘easily pronounceable’ and ‘definitely sounds like it’s somewhere in China, even if you aren’t at all familiar with geography.’

I’ve said before that I flew to Japan in spring of 2009 right around the height of Bird Flu. They wouldn’t let us get off the plane until some guys in Level A suits had come in with thermometer guns and checked everyone. I wonder if someone had the idea for the opening scenes of The Strain by experiencing that.

Nemo might have started out A Line but they switched it to B Line when they discovered how merchandise-able it was.*

I don’t want this. I don’t want any more Star Wars. I don’t even want the Star Wars from before. I’m Burned Out. This feels like an abusive husband trying to get in the front door after being kicked out, discovering the chain lock is in place and trying to shout promises through the gap that, no, he’s changed, he’ll…

Yes. I’ve started to wonder if Pixar is bifurcating their product line into A and B Lines. A Line makes the high-quality, unlikely-to-be-sequelized, appeal-to-the-whole-family ‘high concept’ films (WALL-E, Up, Inside Out, Soul, the shorts) whereas B Line makes the more kid-focused, dumber, lower-quality Cars, Monsters…

Yes. I think I saw the trailer for this 3 times (I have kids, so I see a lot of kids’ movies) before realizing it was a Pixar product.

I don’t think he’s particularly famous now. He’s my least-favorite ninja turtle. 

I really did not care for the Voyager-era Federally Mandated Arousal vis-a-vis Seven of Nine: “You WILL find her irresistibly sexy, damn you, YOU WILL! It is APE LAAAAAAW!!”

This is terrible. I don’t want more Star Wars, I want less. I want it all to go away. I want to never hear about it again. I want to cleanse my life and the entire world of it. I want it never to have even been.

I really think I’m tired of Dungeons and Dragons and/or tabletop roleplaying in general. Couple of things/factors:

I mean, I’d be vaguely, sorta, halfway in favor of voter ID ififIF:

As an aspect of this, we’re never going to be fully free of this shit (the ‘fines, dues and fees’) part of it so long as America is chopped up into thousands of individual, not-adequately-funded local police departments, all of them sorta kinda protecting public safety but mostly operating as auxiliary tax collectors,…

I seem to know a lot of people who’ve gone on cruises and loved it or are planning to in the near future. None of them seemed phased by norovirus or the occasional ship running aground or those people who periodically fall overboard and drown. Stuff like that—and now, like this—makes me completely nope out of the idea…

I imagine a lot. Medical care is very expensive.