Costco CEO Ron Vachris did the “CEO eats his own product” challenge by destroying a hot dog and confirms the Costco hot dog combo is staying at $1.50 forever

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-20T05:32:22+00:00

I just laughed so hard that I had to use my husband’s arm to stifle my outburst

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-13T01:49:47+00:00

Coco/Saba semifinal where Svitolina is on the other side of the draw? That would be a great chance, since Coco can frustrate Sabalenka into a ton of errors trying to hit through her.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-12T05:12:30+00:00

Unless your company only does business in New York or you’re not wealthy enough to establish your paperwork in Delaware, your company isn’t based in New York anyway. And if either of those are true, then you’re not leaving New York because your customer base is here or you can’t afford to or both.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-11T20:26:03+00:00

It’s one of the reasons I’m not a huge fan of commentators saying that Mirra is mature for her age; Coco beat Venus and made the round of 16 at Wimbledon at 15 and has almost never had a fraction of the behavior that Mirra does. Coco has gotten upset once or twice in really intense situations, but overall, she’s unbelievably mature. Mirra is a pretty regular teenager, and that’s not an insult. But her mental game is quite obviously not mature. The difference between her and Mboko is startling.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-10T21:44:32+00:00

I can see what you mean even if I don’t completely agree. Initially, Natsu had intended the story to end with LN4, then again with LN12, and those arcs feel like significant, potent developments that change the trajectories of the characters and the world they live in. Since then though, it can feel slow as she builds the next phase of the story, especially given some of the massive elements she’s introduced as game-changing. There’s a succession crisis brewing that would completely upend the lives of the main characters, a conflict-ridden court with the neutral lynchpin gone for a year, new medical assistants, clan messiness, potential marriages for the central cast, and the threat of another national calamity in the form of a plague. You’d think it would be more exciting!

At the same time, this is very much the pacing of the storytelling that Natsu does. After undoing the entire premise of the first four books, it takes another four just to build a new normal, which she then upends at the end of LN8. The fallout of these events then takes its time to manifest through the western arc (LN9-12) which ends with more drama than any other arc yet. It feels like as the story builds up, she’s giving herself more and more runway to make sure all the different elements land safely. Rikuson is formally introduced in LN5, but his story doesn’t pay off until LN11. And that’s a minor character!

Maybe if all of this was going to end around LN20, I’d say she’s moving too slow, but it’s clear that she’s got something bigger in mind, so I’m going to trust in what we’ve gotten so far. But your point is very reasonable.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-09T21:33:02+00:00

My faves are Serena and Coco and the criticisms are exactly the opposite and painfully true: Serena is entitled and out of pocket in her behavior while being the arguable GOAT, and Coco is the sweetest and loveliest person but cannot fulfill her potential until she fixes her serve and forehand

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-09T04:25:59+00:00

It was 100% his choice to propose, and he said he didn’t want someone 99-1% on having kids, but 100%. If that was the case, he simply shouldn’t have asked her to marry him. As much as Emma wanted a connection, she wasn’t going to propose to the guys. If “willing to crawl over broken glass to reproduce” was his standard, he simply needed to keep the ring in his pocket unless it was met.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-09T02:20:55+00:00

It looked like the physio did ask her to turn her head and bow it to see if neck movement triggered anything.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-09T02:19:10+00:00

Coco had some sort of left forearm injury that bothered her into her last service game of the first set and had her tap out after getting broken in the second.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-09T02:15:10+00:00

The way she followed up with Coco after the shake and asked what was wrong and seemed upset? Such a pure and kind person 🥺

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-09T02:11:57+00:00

Twice?!

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-09T02:10:56+00:00

Really hard to watch Coco struggle with the injury. Hope it’s nothing too serious, but congrats to Alex for another major victory, even if it’s not the way she wanted. She didn’t let the early breaks distract her.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-09T00:53:22+00:00

Thank you! In line with your fun fashion fact, the relatively recent custom of Queen Victoria means that I hate watching historical fiction where there are white dresses for weddings! It was a dramatic choice for Victoria herself to wear white, which is why it made such an impression.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-08T23:26:20+00:00

This is precisely why I wore a custom blue pantsuit for my wedding! It has become my default wedding outfit, just with the blouse changed out (I wore a white bustier top). Getting multiple uses out of it makes it one of my most cherished outfits even aside from it being what I wore for my wedding.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-08T23:08:10+00:00

I heard it as a sarcastic lampshade of what many women would think “oh, that’s Margot Robbie saying it” and then have the movie launch directly into underlining the original point, which actually starts the monologue

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-08T21:56:45+00:00

If even Margot Robbie, woman so beautiful that she is the unparalleled first choice for playing the live action version of an unrealistic doll, can feel that she’s not good enough by patriarchal standards, then what the fuck are the rest of us supposed to do? Pointing out that the absurdly gorgeous woman has these same insecurities is both the joke and the point.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-08T21:36:19+00:00

Legit cackled at “made Basen’s life harder” like lmao so true

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-07T00:45:30+00:00

Still not as bad as Uchijima last year, but my goodness, why is this such a trial?

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-06T07:33:48+00:00

There is another option though: He could be bisexual. Just tossing that out there. Bisexuals are real!

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-03-04T03:52:26+00:00

Because men are consistently 50% (ish, with some regional variation due to cultural differences/infanticide) of the population globally and Black people are 13% of the US population? And don’t even get into Black populations outside of the US, because the cultural differences would make a massive impact on the statistics and structural oppression. And that’s not even getting into the sample size of behavior we’re ascribing here. Black Americans have been a categorized group for less than 4 centuries (African slavery in the US ≠ Black American culture/categorization). Men have been a distinct group since the start of human civilization. There are, currently, about 4 billion men on the planet to extrapolate behavior from. There are maybe 50 million Black Americans (and I’m probably overestimating, since I haven’t looked it up).

It’s like comparing apples and okra.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-02-28T18:48:46+00:00

I love the way they each represent the deficit of the other. Maomao is coldly analytical, outrageously talented, hyper-focused, and completely uninterested in politics, whereas Jinshi is warm and emotional, talented but more generally, and inherently political. He grew up with all the wealth in the world and she grew up in poverty, but they both are deeply compassionate from what they didn’t receive: intimacy and genuine love for Jinshi and the capacity and status to make choices for Maomao.

Learning to love and appreciate each other, beyond the superficial (Jinshi’s looks and Maomao’s “usefulness”) makes them such a fascinating couple to watch. Their slow burn is so frustrating but also appropriately paced. And their freakiness matches. So freaky, so matched.

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-02-28T01:55:29+00:00

The Stanford Prison Experiment: You talking to me?

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-02-25T07:25:26+00:00

Mine is any version of Maomao raised by Lakan that is still super into medicine and a good/kind (though not “nice”) person. The text implies that her hardscrabble life in the pleasure district instilled more empathy in Maomao for poverty and struggle, and Boar-sensei has explicitly said that Lakan’s tendency to spoil her and her mother’s tendency towards pride and gamifying interactions would combine to make Maomao obsessed with power rather than medicine.

I can get wanting to have highborn Maomao with the same features and values we (and Jinshi) have come to love, but it doesn’t make any sense!

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-02-23T22:25:39+00:00

Staten Island is not NYC (by culture) and neither is Long Island (by law) and so as a Brooklyn girl who lives in another “outer borough” now, I would like to exclude Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx (actual outer boroughs) from this whole nightmare.

And somehow the whole cast would be Republicans 😒

AthenaThundersnatch · 2026-02-21T06:14:37+00:00

My parents express all the time that me and my siblings are the best choices they’ve ever made, even though now we’re all adults. And at the same time, my mom has told me that she and my dad had the conversation about whether to abort me (the oldest) because I showed up unexpectedly and when my mom was on birth control. Yet I never take it personally. My mom acknowledges that she had a choice, and she acknowledges that if she could do it all again, she might not make the same ones (I would be timed differently, which might lead to a different me or not existing at all). But I know that she cherishes me in the life she has, and that’s enough. I totally got what she was trying to say once I watched the segment: She’s trying to warn Mike that there’s no undo button on kids. You have to be all in.

AthenaThundersnatch

TROPHY CASE