Much like the word “woke,” MAGA conservatives have stripped DEI of its original meaning. As conservatives use it now it’s basically just a socially acceptable stand-in for the N-word (or the F-word, depending on context). Like just a couple of days ago I was at a burrito place and the guy a couple spots ahead of me in line said, “This DEI cashier better not fuck up my order again.” It was very clear what he meant was, “This N-word better not piss me off.”

Any time you hear conservatives say “woke” or “DEI,” you can almost always mentally swap it with the N-word or the F-word and what they’re saying will make a lot more sense.

He’s on several episodes playing that character.

Nana Visitor also has a guest appearance on that show.

Not really. I have some old friends that are still pretty active on it, but I only check in every few months to see what they’re up to. I usually have to go directly to their profile because my main timeline hardly has anything I actually follow in it anymore. I fell off using it regularly back when they broke the chronology of the timeline, but now it’s just so much worse. There’s almost nothing in my feed that I actually want to see anymore, it’s all ads and bullshit posts injected by some algorithm.

Just keeping people away from the windows could potentially prevent hundreds of thousands of injuries from burns and flying glass in the survivable area of the blast radius. It’d be really hard to overstate what a massive difference that could make when it comes to allocating medical resources in the aftermath.

This needs a line going up the Appalachians for the “You-uns” belt.

I don’t know if they officially count as grindhouse, but when I was a kid I loved a ton of the B-grade action movies that the Cannon Film Group put out in the 1980s. American Ninja, Delta Force, Cobra, Bloodsport, the Death Wish movies, Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, etc. And, of course, the greatest ninja movie ever made:

Ninja III: The Domination.

Just gonna leave this here.

I keep getting served some supremely mediocre eastern European hip-hop in Release Radar and other Spotify-generated playlists because of some guy who performs as Devo. Same with guys performing as Slayer, Poe, etc.

A lot of the time they’re listed on the track along with two or three other people, so I go to the pages of those associated acts and tap the “don’t play this artist” option in the three dots menu, and that usually cuts down on how much I see them in my feeds. At least until they do a new collab.

And while we’re on the subject, if Spotify could also stop lumping several artists of the same name together on the same profile, that’d be great. There’s an old surf-rock band called the Astronauts that I listen to sometimes, and at one point there were albums from at least four different bands included on their discography page. There’s still at least two.

Given Tesla’s usual build quality I feel like it’s pretty much inevitable that there are going to be an enormous amount of skull and limb injuries from those gullwing doors.

Maybe you need something like a motorized tie rack.

Patriot cells.

Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy. Both the books and the radio shows.

Did the mushroom learn to control a robot, or did the scientists figure out how to connect a robot to a mushroom in such a way as to make the regular processes happening inside the mushroom trigger a set of robot legs? Because the article makes it seem like the mushroom is intelligent and has agency, and was thus far only lacking the proper robot body in order to express that; but the video makes it look like the legs were all pumping in unison, and the resulting movement was more or less coincidental.

Are they genuinely trying to stifle education, or is it all just racist bullshit?

That’s the fun part: stifling education is the racist bullshit.

They’ve been anti-education since desegregation. Back in the ‘60s the Religious Right, particularly Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and the people in that orbit, tried really hard to go through the courts and use their freedom of religion under the First Amendment to keep black people out of their church-based schools. Obviously they lost, but they have never forgotten how the mean ol’ federal government defiled their perfect little angels by forcing them sit next to some filthy negro while they learn their multiplication tables or whatever. Ever since then they’ve made it their mission to destroy public education.

By the 1980s that Evangelical movement had become fully ingrained into the Republican party, and that drive to destroy public education came with it. It’s what’s behind the push for charter schools. It’s what’s behind the push for private school vouchers. It’s what’s behind Evangelicals astroturfing school board meetings, and sometimes taking over the school board itself. It’s a big part of why public schools (inner city public schools in particular) have been chronically underfunded for longer than I’ve been alive. It was racism the whole time.

But yeah, whenever I hear a conservative use the word “woke,” I’ve found you can pretty much always mentally transpose “woke” with “ni–er stuff” (or “fa–ot stuff,” depending on the context) and whatever they’re trying to say suddenly makes a lot more sense.

I feel like they should be doing that regardless.

Yeah, the saltpeter (potassium nitrate) is really the key ingredient here. It’s the rapid oxidizer compound that gives your anti-Gorn cannon its boom boom. Without that, mixing all the other stuff together is just going to be smelly and disappointing.

Usually breading meat starts with dipping the meat into an egg wash before you dip it in the bread crumbs, so the yellow probably comes from egg yolk.

Rom-coms are aspirational fantasies. They’re modern-day fairy tales of getting swept off your feet by a handsome prince and living happily ever after, never wanting for anything ever again. Material comfort is always a factor in these stories. If it’s not overt, as in Pride and Prejudice where the main character betters their station by ending up with the mega-rich guy who seemed like a dick but turned out to have a heart of gold, then it has to be implied by the setting and the lifestyles of the characters. If the material wealth of the love interest isn’t going to be a factor in the story then it has to be demonstrated that those financial needs are met in some other way.

You’re probably never going to see a rom-com where the main character gets their one true love, but being with them condemns them to a life of struggle and poverty. No matter how you try to spin it so it’s ok because at least they have each other, that would never be a truly satisfying ending in this type of movie. Material needs to be taken care of too. Even in movies like Overboard where the whole point of the movie is Goldie Hawn learning to be a human being by struggling through a working class lifestyle, they still have to end up rich at the end for the story to feel fully resolved.

It’s polite to pretend that money doesn’t matter, and a lot of rom-coms try to down-play it, but it does. It does matter. And it always shows up in one way or another.

I don’t know that I’d consider myself an audiophile, but I am a musician. I run a pair of powered studio monitors out of the back of a Focusrite Scarlett usb audio interface for recording, and it’s way better than any computer speakers I’ve ever owned in terms of sound quality and fidelity. Of course, I’m also not trying to have a dance club setup that’s going to rattle the windows on my nextdoor neighbor’s house with super-ultra-mega bass, but it’s an avenue to consider.