Except you do level up if you continue to practice and learn new skills.

I would listen to music but in 90% of times that music is controlled by my phone

I highly recommend trying to listen to albums in their entirety, if for no other reason than it makes it easier to turn it on and then not touch anything for the rest of the album. Personally, vinyl works really well for me.

chronic exposure to time dramatically increases your chances of getting terminally old.

It seems pretty clear that they have a significant amount of intrusive thoughts about sexual assault and think that abusing people from a position of power isn’t bad enough to merit removing Neil Gaiman from “nerd canon.”

Honestly, it’s stomach-turning enough to make me think they’re just trolling.

the cake is a lie.

Son in Law is one of my partner’s favorite movies, and even being introduced to it in the late 2000’s, I can see the appeal. Peak Pauly Shore. Plus, there really aren’t that many Thanksgiving movies, so it’s right up there with Planes, Trains, and Automobiles for the Mount Rushmore of Thanksgiving movies.

“Linked to,” though; don’t mix up correlation with causation yet. The article also talks about how the cognitive unloading caused by AI use is also negatively correlated with age, and while I don’t want to let AI off the hook (or the corporations pushing it), critical thinking skills in general aren’t the strongest within the 17yo-25yo age bracket.

Then again, I’m more than a little high, so maybe I’m totally missing something here.

Balatro? In my 196 memes? How do I sign up for more?

You’re correct that the police like having the dogs as a pretext to search on flimsy/non-existent evidence, but it’s not that the dogs are half-trained; they are very well trained to give false positives based on the officers’ body language and attitude.

And if you want John K Samson doing indie rock with alt-country influence, the Weakerthans are fantastic. I highly recommend listening to Reconstruction Site straight through.

Windhand. Sort of a psychedelic doom metal with groovy elements and a haunting, ethereal female vocalist

I thought Prey would be great for pre-teens, but my wife hasn’t seen it and was super skeptical (and she didn’t want to watch it, which was probably more of the issue), so… shrug. Next time she’s having a night out, we’ll probably do it.

Tangentially related (since this is our go to when the wife is out of town), all 3 of my kids have loved kaiju movies since the oldest was in diapers, so if you haven’t watched Pacific Rim and the modern “kaiju-verse” (or whatever it’s called), I highly recommend it, ideally from a pillow fort on the couch so you can play act being kaiju and knocking over your own city if it gets slow.

Really? I always heard/read that it was as a response to Alien getting an R rating.

And actually, Alien is not a bad answer to this question. It was my 9yo and 7yo’s first R rated movie and they absolutely loved it. Plus, it sets them up for more good sci-fi down the road. My kids just watched Interstellar at 11 and 9 and really enjoyed themselves

Turn down for what?

So sayeth Little Jon the Wise, Prophet of the Crunk.

A light in the darkness; his sage words bring hope in harsh times and bring booties to shake like amphorae filled with salt.

ahh, jeez. If I’d known you were into vinyl, I’d have thought twice about these recommendations ;)

Glad to spread the good news. I think I found them in a listicle about “the best non-metal satanic groups” along with Amigo the Devil, Twin Temple, and Dorthia Cottrell, among others.

I found a lot of good music from that list, and it wound up sending me down a three-year rabbit hole when it mentioned psych doom and stoner rock, which I had never really explored (and now stoner/doom is one of my favorite genres).

So, clearly I have pretty positive memories of that particular article; I’ll see if I can find it again, because if you like Bridge City Sinners, there’s a lot more to explore

Edit: found the link and it’s just as good as I remembered from when I first found it 3-4 years. I still listen to a lot of these bands

Edit 2: It seems like the Sinners aren’t actually in this list directly, but I have a vivid memory of discovering them through this article, so I must have dug into the “People also listen to” sections in Spotify

That’s fair. Psychobilly tends to have more punk/progressive tendencies, but like most music scenes, there’s a wide variety of people who self-identify into that group, not all of whom share the same values/politics. With Rockabilly in particular, you get considerable overlap between the nostalgia for the fashion and music of early rock’n’roll and the nostalgia for the politics and society of the same era.

Libby Lux, lead singer of the Bridge City Sinners, fits the bill pretty well, but as you say, no mohawk. I feel like once you get into the folk-punk/psychobilly scene, the default is more often rockabilly greaser/pinup than punk but there’s exceptions to everything.

Edit: Also, their particular flavor of satanic folk-punk is particularly good, if you’re into that sort of thing. I think they do a pretty good job of writing catchy songs with a mashup of B-movie pulp (a la The Cramps or the Misfits), occult themes and imagery, and modern relevant topics like mental health issues and substance abuse. 9/10, highly recommend, especially their first 2 albums, the first of which has my all-time favorite version of “St. James Infirmary Blues”

Friend, that’s a possum

I think you’re on the money with yeet, and I think “af” (as in “Dark Souls is hard af”) still has a fair bit of usage considering how old it is and how cringe it was for a while.

Cringe, too, for that matter, although I still think “cringey” is better

Edit: I predict “low key” will stick around, too.