I got a tour of a military base with a guy who was wearing smart glasses and I couldn’t fucking believe that someone didn’t grab them off his face and break them in half. I was being VERY careful to ask if I was permitted to take pictures in some places (in at least one of which where the answer was No), and this dude was cruising around like Boris Badunov trying to gather secrets.

Can’t sell shit if no one can buy shit.

That’s the one that I’m actually interested to maybe try someday.

I don’t think anyone will like what happens if even the illusion of a functional system of laws is well and truly swept away. When enough people believe that a system is working, even if it isn’t working but they believe that it is, then life can more or less continue in a vaguely tolerable fashion. When that belief is taken away, things tend to get weird.

Edit: For the record, I think that most lower class and an ever-increasing number of middle class people already live in that reality. I think it’s the people with the most to lose who will find out just how bad it can get if the imaginary glue holding society together evaporates away in a puff of searing populist anger.

Case in point:

Not that I really expect Disney to ever do the right thing as such, but I can dream about Disney lawyers going all…

…in court for ICE fucking around with their “WOW” customer service ethos and therefore their bottom line.

If you’re doing bendy sex positions and your partner farts and you can’t both have a laugh about it and continue with the bendy sex then your relationship needs an upgrade.

Tetsuo: Twin ceramic rotor drives on each wheel… And these are… Computer controlled anti-lock brakes… 200 horsepower at 12,000 rpm…

Kaneda: That bike’s been customized just for me. It’s too wild. You couldn’t handle it!

The cookie in question:

Erotic Lincoln-Samurai Fax Fiction

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

–John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Creepio, have you seen… anybody?

It’s the strangest thing, they’re all dead. You killed them!

I love that a show about a hat-wearing pig looking at plants is long enough to have an intermission.

Star Wars doesn’t need lightsabers or the Force any more than Marvel needs Iron Man or Captain America. They’re both good, and they’re a couple of the most iconic parts of the franchise, but both Star Wars and Marvel are big universes, and they can both tell stories totally separate from those popular touchstones.

Jedi Party, by Auralnauts, is my preferred way of watching the Prequels.

I’m pretty sure the only possible in-universe explanation for what we see on screen is that phasers somehow sense what the user is trying to aim at and adjust accordingly.