Slowly decaying, shriveling, succumbing to the inevitable ravages of entropy that will ultimately reduce me to an undifferentiated pile of organic mess, no matter what means I or anyone else tries to employ to slow the descent.

There’s also the thread of dumping on a person for liking something because it is popular. “Boo! Basic opinion! You should like the weird niche stuff that I like because I fit into that extremely narrow niche!”

And I applaud the weird shit that isn’t for everyone, I think that’s where some of the stuff I love the most comes from, but sometimes there’s a very good reason that something is already widely beloved.

Just do it in the bathtub, that should be fine, right?!

“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”

In that way, he’s being honest; he “feels badly,” because the mechanism by which he feels feelings is fucked up, so he is bad at feeling emotions.

W dodged those shoes like someone who’d had shoes thrown at them before.

Relevant xkcd

The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles big anime titties on the other.

—J. B. S. Haldane

Honestly, there are some people who shit-talk their exes so much that I worry a little bit.

I have a pretty significant ex, and it certainly took some introspection and painful internal work, but I eventually was able to hang out with them again and still really value their friendship; I even invited them to my wedding, and attended theirs in kind.

As I saw it, this person was my best friend for the majority of six years together, and I didn’t want to totally discard that part of myself that had that friendship, even if the romantic relationship didn’t ultimately work out.

Fun story!

I worked at a used book store for a while, and we were emphatically a no-judgement zone. The only things we wouldn’t buy were things that wouldn’t sell (or that were actively dangerous; the boss didn’t want us to buy The Anarchist Cookbook, not because it gave instructions on how to make bombs, but because it gave bad instructions on how to make bombs), and we made a practice of never ever talking down to a customer based on their reading habits.

A fairly common exchange for us was that someone would show up, deeply embarrased, with their dead father or grandfather’s collection of old Playboy magazines. We loved old Playboy magazines. They sell well, they hold value well. We wanted as many of them as we could. Sometimes someone would bring in old hardcore magazines from the seventies on up, and those were harder to sell, so we didn’t love those as much, but again, it’s not a conversation about the pictorial equivalent of gynecological exams, it’s a conversation about what does or doesn’t sell.

One time, a guy brought in his dead grandfather’s old smut collection, and it was pretty cool. Stuff from the 1950s with Bettie Page where it was ostensibly photography instruction magazines but the models were 95% nude women, with the occasional still life and ads for lenses or flash bulbs to lend an air of legitimacy. Literally French photography magazines from the 40s or before the war. Very impressive old smut.

Included with the collection, all of which we wanted, was a little pile of film reels in metal cans from at least the 1960s, and who knows how much older they might have been. They had hand-written labels on them like “Long Lake” and “Picnic.”

Now, we didn’t and couldn’t buy old film reels. But I told the guy bringing these in, “I’ll give you three guesses as to what’s on these reels, and the first two don’t count. I can’t buy them, but please don’t throw them away. There are some pornography museums out there, and you should contact them, because a lot of people in your position find this stuff, freak out, and throw it away, and then it’s gone forever, and that’s a loss to human culture, even if it’s smutty human culture.”

So I hope he contacted the pornography museum and that someone’s old pornography got preserved, because even the Library of Alexandria probably had a smut section.

Sturgeon’s Law is always in effect.

Proper drinking technique demonstrated (on left):

“I don’t do politics.”

Well baby, politics is going to do you, regardless.

–Nina Turner

FWIW, I’ve been to a few large-scale Nerf events and they were a healthy mix of dude-bro gun enthusiasts (on account of the hobby being eminently gun-adjacent) and queer folk flying their flags, and they were all having a great time together.

I’m sad that David Bowie died without ever getting cast as The Dark Knight Returns-era Joker.

“Christian Bale or Ben Affleck as Batman?”

“Michael Keaton!”