Bluetooth speaker? No! Homemade PVC pipe passive amp? Yes!

I definitely identified a range of classic movies from “Holy shit, I love this” to “I can appreciate this as Important Cinema but it’s not for me.”

In the first group I’ve got movies like Casablanca, The Philadelphia Story, and The Lion In Winter.

I recently watched La Dolce Vita, and that is very much in the second category. I can see how so many movie tropes came out of it but… it’s just a little bit too much for me.

It’s worth going back and checking out old movies because some of them are legitimately fun to watch, but it’s also okay to just acknowledge a movie’s contributions and move on.

Surely the internet will not be weird about this. Surely no degeneracy will commence.

Count Junkula

Probably The Asylum.

Admittedly, The Asylum has a quite a few rooms within it, but I’d say that the antechamber of The Asylum that abuts the outer wall to Outside comprises the majority of the surface of the Earth and its atmosphere, so that’s a pretty big room.

Did you see what he did to Dr. Dugong?!

Looks like one of those mechanical cancer SCPs.

The story is in The Devil’s Storybook, by Natalie Babbitt.

At one point when I was in my mid to late-twenties, my workplace’s neighbor had their sprinkler system fail and flood their business. It was so bad that a bunch of water seeped under the adjoining wall and we had about a half an inch of water across a third of our fairly large store. There were maybe a dozen or so of us working there at the time, and we all got called in to rapidly move merchandise out into a big truck so that it wouldn’t get spoiled by the damp air before the remediation guys could do their thing.

So there’s all of these people, most of them younger than me, but not by a lot, running back and forth with crates of merchandise, and I looked around and immediately saw how chaotic and inefficient it was.

So I said, “Okay, you stand by the truck. You stand by the front door, you stand just inside. You stand a little further in than that. The first person just picks up a crate, and we bucket brigade it all out to the truck.”

It was an obvious solution, and it made the work go by so much faster and easier, but apparently I was the only one who thought to do it. I realized that in that moment, in a moderately large group, I was the most responsible adult in the room.

And I’m pretty sure that was when my childhood ended.

Wallet. Phone. Keys…

That boy needs therapy.

Wait until Surf Dracula gets up on that surfboard.

Suppose that Australia wants to become republic.

Scenario A: King Charles tries to oppose this. His opposition is overridden by, you know, democracy. Now he looks like even more of a schmuck for standing in the way of something that was going to happen anyway.

Scenario B: He doesn’t oppose it. Australia votes to become a republic, and seems like a cool guy for not standing in the way of the inevitable.

Seems like a pretty straightforward choice between options.

How about…

that they are endowed by their Creator with possess certain unalienable Rights

I know how to enunciate, speak with a voice supported by my diaphragm, and increase the intensity of my speaking voice without actually yelling. It’s incredibly useful. Virtually no one ever misunderstands me on the phone. I can have a conversation in a loud crowded place. I’m actually fairly conflict-averse, but when I need to “switch on,” I can usually short-circuit people’s inclination to argue by using a more focused voice.

Everyone should take a decent Acting 101 class where they teach you these skills.

Just a couple of judicious edits…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men persons are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.

Here’s Life Expectancy vs. Healthcare Expenditure, and there you can see Americans on average living about as long as people in Turkey or Poland while spending dramatically more than people in Germany or Switzerland.

I needed a white karate gi for a Street Fighter Halloween costume, so I went to the local school and bought one, and while I was at it I bought a black one too, in case I ever wanted to be a ninja. Then I started wearing the black karate pants as pajamas.

That was over twenty years ago. Those same black karate pants are still my favorite pajamas. In-fucking-credible.

The fashion world is in a war on pockets, so they can sell more handbags. The fewer and smaller pockets we have, the more accessories we need to buy. First they came for women’s pockets. Now they’re trying to make cargo shorts unacceptable for the same reason.

• Reservoir Dogs / Pulp Fiction / Kill Bill

• Stand By Me

• Dirty Dancing

• The Lost Boys