I loved swordfish steak the one time I had it, so I’d bet that Scylla, Charybdis, or the Kraken would be quite good.

Oh, also The Kraken is quite tasty.

It’s a little more expensive, but not dramatically so

Buying boxes of full-sized candy isn’t even that much more expensive than the fun-sized, and the psychological impact is immediate and dramatic. Every year I hear kids go “Woah, big candy bars!”

One time in high school, I heard somebody yell “Steve, you [bundle of sticks], stop talking to your girlfriend and let’s go!” and Steve was in fact at the time talking to his girlfriend.

The sheer concentration of cognitive dissonance has stuck with me to this day.

This is the whole “if humans were going to have wings we’d have to redesign the whole organism from the ground up” fiasco all over again.

Deep fried pecan pie on a stick!

Blacula is legitimately fantastic. It’s full-on a story about the lingering violence springing from European colonialism and the slave trade.

Just one example: The main character is an African prince, and his name is Mamuwalde, but when Dracula turns him, he says “I curse you with my name! You shall be called BLACULA!” For the rest of the film, no one calls him Blacula, because his name is Mamuwalde! Except there was one subtitle that slipped and read something like “BLACULA: I lost her because of you!”, and I immediately thought, “Hey you subtitling asshole, his goddamn name is Mamuwalde!”

By the end of the movie I was rooting for him in the fight with the LAPD.

I’m seeing a lot of games with awesome cover art but pretty standard gameplay for its era. You gotta pick something with truly dogshit gameplay to counter the cover. I present the NES game Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:

I was the kid who liked to stand in the horror section of the video rental store, look at the covers, and read the descriptions of scary movies I was way too meek to ever actually watch. This comes along, and I think it looks pretty cool! My mom paid good money to rent this and so help me I spent a good chunk of my evening trying to figure out how to do… literally anything. I wandered back and forth as Dr. Jekyll for a while before I bumped into too many pedestrians and turned into Mr. Hyde. Then I wandered back and forth as Mr. Hyde until I believe a bird killed me. Never made it past the first level.

That is a truly horrendous game with badass-looking cover art.

Can’t speak for the second game, but Wizards & Warriors 3 was fucking awesome.

John Stark, one of the rescuers of the Donner Party.

In Summit Valley the remaining rescuers discussed what to do and took a vote to save only two of the children in Starved Camp. That might have been all they could manage. The others would have to stay behind.

John Stark, above, could not abide that. That meant that nine people, mostly children, would die on the mountain, exposed to the elements down in a very deep hole in the snow. John Stark decided he would save all nine, “Already shouldering a backpack with provisions, blankets, and an axe, he picked up one or two of the smaller children, carried them a little ways, then went back for the others. Then he repeated the whole process again and again and again. To galvanize morale, he laughed and told the youngsters they were so light from months of mouse-sized rations that he could carry them all simultaneously, if only his back were broad enough.” Once they were out of the snow he would eat and rest he said, but not before. He saved all nine. That is extraordinary and that is heroism. It was also heroism he never got contemporary credit for.

There was a Limited Run Games release , and although they seem to be sold out online, I saw some physical copies in their retail store just the other day.

There’s a tough lesson I learned about trying to get my friends into board games: It’s easier to turn gamers into your friends than it is to turn your friends into gamers. I’ve learned that some of my friends are never going to share my interests as much as I’d like, but that just means I needed to find people who were already in whatever hobby and start hanging out with them and some of them will eventually be your real friends.

Making and keeping friends as an adult is way more difficult than it seems it should be, but it’s a painful reality.

Kamala is the best version of a normal politician fighting against Trump. It remains to be seen if that’s enough, because he’s just so goddamn weird that it’s difficult to even compare Tool A to Problem B.

I think she’s incorporated virtually all of the strengths of any of her comparable peers, and almost none of their weaknesses. I think that, given the nature of the opponent and his total lack of seriousness, she said everything I would reasonably hope she would have said during this debate.

I also think that I don’t properly understand the collective psyche of the American electorate. I don’t understand how the election could be this close, when it is a choice between a serious, competent, passionate, talented professional, and a man who is literally a collection of all of the worst possible traits a person could have. That it could come down to such a narrow choice is a mystery for the ages.

Picsart. I’d like something that can do a bit of photo editing, adjust brightness/contrast/curves, work with layers, and conveniently slap together collages, but that doesn’t interrupt me in between every other operation with an ad or a request to sign up for a subscription to the app.

I didn’t even consider how many people with cardiac issues must be looking at that screen.

“Shrunken SUV” or “Took a normal 2- or 4-door and injected it with experimental growth hormones.”

I swear I see one once a week that would make sense and carry the same number of people and stuff at half the overall vehicle volume.

Qi users need not apply.

If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

Harmonica holder

I’ve got an Anbernic 353p and I LOVE it for handheld, but trying to use it as a console has proven tricky. I just want a device that I can plug into my TV and play games on with a minimum of tinkering. I shouldn’t need to remap controllers every time I turn the thing on. I don’t care to follow along with a three+ hour long tutorial to get all the settingsjust right. Plug into TV. Turn on. Play game.

This is where original hardware, or even those SNES Mini or Playstation Classic devices have appeal, because they aren’t tinkering hobby devices, they’re game systems first, last, and only. Everything above and beyond that should be very optional.