Matt the Bruins

On 6/30/2022 at 4:39 PM, TrickstaPriest said:

 

I mean, it bothers me because literally everyone is fooling themselves at thinking they are making "the correct financial decision for their retirement" by supporting these policies.  Retiring is hard when your grocery bill is higher than rent.........

Oh, the lack of air conditioning during a heat wave will probably get them before starvation becomes an issue.

It didn't surprise me, anything that perfectly aligned with my taste isn't long for this world. How Galavant got a second season, I'll never know.

Would a sample of neutronium that small be stable, or would the immense pressure make it explode to a less dense state almost immediately? That could make for quite the spectacle!

Being an antisocial hermit has helped me immensely in both avoiding the disease and in not being distressed by the protective measures needed to do so. I suspect my luck will finally run out on this October's trip to a family wedding in Las Vegas, but I'll be timing my next booster to peak at that time as the best thing I can do short of opting out. My GP just told me that vaccines adjusted to be more effective against the newer omicron variants may be available in the fall.

Add an animatronic feature that makes it turn its head in reaction to motion, and you're golden!

I saw Superman IV: The Quest for Peace in the theater with a friend and we gave it the Statler & Waldorf treatment (this was before Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a thing). I think the audience enjoyed our heckling more than the movie.

On 6/3/2022 at 11:34 AM, unclevlad said:

I'd also wonder if you're effectively shutting down your sense of taste from the overload.  

It does seem to me that trying a second time shortly thereafter would unfairly benefit from his taste buds still being shocked from the first attempt. Of course I've never actually tried swallowing a lit piece of charcoal, so I don't know how that process works, exactly.

On 6/11/2022 at 12:05 PM, DShomshak said:

Disturbingly, the Russian ambassador who recently resigned over the Ukraine invasion claims that many Russian strategic policy people think, or claim to think, that Russia could achieve a quick and easy victor over the US by using nuclear weapons. Just drop a nuke on some small town in the US, and the cowardly Americans will drop to their knees and beg for mercy. The ambassador thinks they're insane.

Like unclevlad, I think the ambassador is downplaying the divorce from reality. The US responded to a couple of very prominent buildings being knocked down by all but flattening the country hosting the terrorist training camps of said attack's mastermind (and incidentally invading another completely unrelated country we didn't like while we were riled up). The amount of [crap] we would lose at a hostile nuke detonating on American soil would be like nothing seen in human history.

Well yeah, they put up the golden arches sign to warn everyone!

He was looking for a scenario in which the heroes win.

I'm hoping it only takes him a couple of weeks to get back in fighting trim just to make Star Lord more insecure.

You might be interested in a similar VPP power I developed for my Young Scratch character:

Through Me The Way Is To The City Dolent: Extra-Dimensional Movement (single location in the Netherworld), Area Of Effect (personal Surface—Damage Shield; +¼), Constant (+½), Usable As Attack (does not work on targets of good character or who have holy objects upon their person; +1¼) (60 Active Points); Gestures (both hands; -½), Incantations (-¼), No Range (-½). Total cost: 27 points.

I set up the exceptions conditions on the UAA so that it wouldn't work on anyone who wasn't going to end up there eventually anyway.

Phantoms by Dean Koontz. It's a really interesting premise (as seen in the film adaptation), but Koontz' writing style is so reminiscent of leveled readers I encounter in early childhood publishing that I was breaking out in laughter every time a chapter ended with an exclamatory one-sentence paragraph. If you want to introduce your kids in elementary school to horror, it will be much more readable to them than most books that aren't in the children's library.

Happy has annoyed me basically forever, so I can't say I'm terribly sorry.

On 4/17/2022 at 11:45 PM, csyphrett said:

Columbo has to deal with Oskar Weiner killing his mother in law as the invisible man, and George Hamilton accidentally killing the husband of a woman he is dating and then hypnotizing her to jump off her fifth floor balcony.

CES 

Was this a crossover with Love at First Bite?

The books rejected were in the K-5 age bracket. In early childhood education, you use stories and activities (even better if they're hands-on with manipulatives) to teach Math, not page after page of problems.

Or reciting counting tables as a class to the schoolmarm.

On 4/13/2022 at 12:07 AM, Ternaugh said:

Still not as bad as the murder rate in Cabot Cove.

Cabot Cove made Sunnydale, CA look like a peaceful little town by comparison.

I've watched the first two episodes of Moon Knight and I'm not particularly impressed. Between Oscar Isaac being the lead and Benson & Moorhead directing everything after the premiere the show should have had me completely enthralled, but it's not happening so far.

I'm kind of rolling the dice with risk statistics. I have a family event to attend in Las Vegas this October, so unless a variant surge gets really bad in my neck of the woods I'm going to postpone getting the second booster until early September to maximize my protection while I'll be surrounded by the most people from all over.

I've just started with the series Merlí: Sapere Aude  about the lives and loves of Spanish philosophy students attending university, and am really enjoying it 3 episodes in. I wish I'd seen the parent series Merlí, but it was removed from Netflix before I had the chance.

If Putin had bought from Acme I imagine Moscow would be burning right now.

Ultraviolet, a late 90s BBC series starring Idris Elba and Jack Davenport that's part police procedural, part political thriller, part vampire horror in which the word "vampire" is never actually spoken. It holds up remarkably well more than two decades later.

Maybe there are enough women, people of color, and LGBT subscribers that including programming geared toward them is a net gain over the loss of angry white men who cancel when they see anyone not exactly like them?

It was a fun movie. I wouldn't say it deserved awards for anything, but my money and time weren't wasted seeing it.