Elmore Leonard. Dude was a massive influence on popular culture. He was instrumental in teaching Tarantino how to be Tarantino. He wrote the books that SO MANY great movies and television shows were based on.

Hunter Thompson. His gonzo style is often imitated but rarely duplicated. And it’s such a goddamn simple concept, but no one else managed to do it with his flair.

Disney released an animated movie a couple years ago called Strange World. It was a wildly mediocre movie with a plot that had a very obvious pro-environment, message that was subtle as a brick.

But what really ruffled the conservative feathers was son character who had a gay crush. For as preachy ad the rest of the movie was, the gay crush subplot was amazingly well done. They treated it like any other hetero love interest subplot. It wasn’t preachy or hamfisted or campy… it was just a family being happy for the kid.

As the defacto Excel guy in my office… I’m sorry. Also, I’m kind of proud of what I managed to accomplish.

That reminds me of The Venture Bros. There’s a villain called White Noise who is basically anthropomorphic television static in a humanoid shape.

He was a white supremacist television repair man before his “accident”.

The writing on that show was so goddamn sharp.

Just one word: plastics.

If that doesn’t work, turn on the tv and try to repeat the words you hear immediately after you hear them, but absolutely silently. The goal is to echo the television ij your head.

That is your internal monologue.

Now imagine you’re trying to sleep and the asshole part of your brain starts talking about the reality dumb-ass shit you did 25 years ago…

Now imagine that you just got a song stuck in your head. You know the song really well… and you can’t stop repeating the hook in your mind.

It’s your brain silently reading the captions of the narration of the images of your train of thought.

Needs more zat.

I read this in the voice of Dr Killinger.

That’s the ultimate rub in all this religion malarkey. There is no afterlife where they will be judged for their earthly transgressions. The best we can hope is that they have a slow, inevitable death… the kind where there’s a few moments of lucid self reflection when they know it’s over. Then they die feeling that fear.

Case in point: a number of years ago I knew a kid who was smart enough to flash Tomato on his router, enable SSH and even install a bunch of Entware packages. But he wasn’t intelligent enough to change the SSH port from 22 or leave the remote access disabled.

Fast forward a month or two and his ISP tells him that they traced some pretty serious botnet shenanigans to his IP.

Just because someone is smart enough to use a device doesn’t necessarily mean they’re intelligent enough to use it safely.

Horizon Zero Dawn. It actually got my wife to put her Switch away and watch. That’s saying something.

Put on Bluey.

I didn’t even know a horse could do that!

This looks like a Sleazy Back Alley encounter in Kingdom of Loathing.

I used to love my job. I ran movie theaters. Not only was I good at it, I felt a great deal of personal satisfaction. I had fun going in to work. Then I got something I love more: a wife and kids. Movie theaters didn’t pay the bills, and it required too many nights, weekends and holidays. If I wanted to make more money and spend more time with my family, I needed to find a respectable 9-5. It took me another 5 years of bouncing around jobs to find one that, while I don’t love it it’s not a job that makes me want to drive off a cliff.

My kids are getting old enough that, if theaters started offering respectable living wages for adults with families, I’d go back to the industry in a heartbeat.

“How strangely appropriate, that we be meats’ dream.”

Goddammit I love that.

I once dated a woman ten years older than myself. She had two kids.

Several years later I started dating a woman ten years younger than me. I was telling her stories about how awkward my ex’s oldest kid was. Turns out she went to school with my previous girlfriends kids. She remembered the kid exactly as I described.

Not like, same class or anything, but my new girlfriend was a senior when my ex’s oldest kid was a freshman.

It’s weird to think about things in that context. At first I thought I was cool because I was able to bridge generations. Then I realized that “generations” are a construct, ultimately irrelevant to the actual passage of time. The arrow of time is inevitable. Entropy will increase, space will grow. And as long as humanity persists, we’ll likely end up in the same physical and metaphysical place just hoping we did the right thing so maybe people might remember us for a generation or two after we die.

We spend so much time, effort and emotion on things that are ultimately meaningless in the face of the creeping heat death of the universe.

What a great example you are setting! See everyone? You can be an octogenarian while still gatekeeping things like an obnoxious 19 year old!

KWGT and KLWP. Worth every penny to skin your home screen to your exact desires. It’s basically like adding several layers of extra functionality to your launcher with custom coding and some surprisingly great GUI tools. I’ve seen people do some insane shit. Throw in Tasker and you got a stew going!