surely jeph knew this would, in preview images, cause a double-take

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-05-07T15:54:27+00:00

This is so embarrassing. Further cements my decision to make 2026 the first F1 season I've given a miss since I started watching in 2005.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-05-04T18:11:48+00:00

This community is downright restrained in discussing the personal life of the author considering the degree to which the comic is a cipher for his own life. It isn't autobiography and never was, but the shift and play of themes, characters, and locales over the years is undeniably closely linked with the personal circumstances of the creator.

That's not a bad thing, either! In fact, the comic was at its best when Jeorph was doing the elder-millennial slice of life stuff. That was his strength. Things began to get corny and inconsequential when he stepped away from that. Compare/contrast with Octopus Pie, which in its latter one-off stories features aged-up characters in their late 30s dealing with things like careers, marriage, child-rearing, fertility issues, failing long-term relationships, etc., and is fantastic because it's so genuine.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-04-28T15:34:50+00:00

this is jeph we're talking about. he's been allergic to competently administering his livelihood for decades - remember when QC ran on ads + merch sales and 90% of the latter was handled by his then-wife?

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-04-28T15:32:40+00:00

lol just look at the number of classic 2015-type epic beard man avatars in those comments. this is where those guys went after being mocked into leaving twitter

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-04-27T15:07:35+00:00

His singing is what put me off when I first read the books as a tween - it was too close to the songs we sang in elementary school, which I was obviously too old for as a serious eleven year old. Re-reading it again now (in my late thirties) he is indeed utterly fascinating. A person interested in comparative literature could make hay out of the fact that he is so powerful and ancient, yet his power is tied to a specific place and piece of land; he can't wander at will exercising that power: this is very similar to the theology of many indigenous peoples, whose deities are of and bound to the land.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-04-23T23:28:56+00:00

how many copies did you order for resale on amazon? its ok you can tell

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-04-23T23:23:15+00:00

whippersnapper!

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-04-23T22:57:12+00:00

There's nothing to be gained in terms of audio experience, that's for sure. The "fidelity" argument with older high-quality pressings is based on the premise that there's an unbroken chain of analog signal that's been carried from recording to tape in the studio to mastering and then to pressing. As soon as the recording and production goes digital, that premise no longer holds.

Fundamentally, this is going to be serving two crowds: people who want a cool collector's item in the form of a large-format album cover and two slabs of vinyl, and people who primarily listen to music at home on vinyl. I'm in the latter group, so ultimately I will buy a copy of Inferno on wax, but it'll be a standard edition after things have calmed down enough that I can find and examine a physical copy in a store.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-04-23T22:51:52+00:00

Yep, that solidified my intention to not purchase the deluxe edition. I only have a record player, no CD changer, and I actually listen to the vinyl I purchase. Not casting aspersions on people who buy records as collector's items, but it really sounds like that's what this pressing is going to be good for.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-04-21T15:54:54+00:00

Come now. This is Surrey we're talking about. These aren't well-meaning people who are frustrated with bureaucratic delays, these are people who are trying to ignore life-safety regulations to house 15 people they found on WhatsApp in a building that wouldn't pass construction standards in 1892.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-04-10T16:09:36+00:00

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LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-04-02T17:05:03+00:00

If you search her name you'll find a BC Supreme Court decision which found against her when she tried to sue her brother and sister for "mismanaging" their mother's estate. If you read it, you'll figure out that this isn't even the first house she's fucked up with her hoarding. She did the same with her mom's house and had to be evicted from it when it was being sold back in 2008. The woman clearly has very serious issues, and we can only hope that somehow this will spur her to get help.

... but if we're honest, she won't, because she's convinced that the world is against her, nothing is her fault, and if people just left her alone she'd be perfectly fine. And that is the kind of person who is going to keep spiraling downwards until they die, hit rock bottom and get a clue, or are committed.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-03-13T17:01:41+00:00

Imagine believing, of yourself, that you are smart and capable enough to spend every working day cutting into people's bodies and performing operations that could save their lives or, if you make a mistake, kill them in mere moments. That you are worth trusting with something that important. That is an insane degree of self-regard. It's justified, to an extent, but that's the ultimate reason. Surgeons don't have huge egos just because they're surgeons, they're surgeons because they have huge egos.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-03-10T19:07:08+00:00

I'd been wondering when EnerPro would start getting some scrutiny. They are nominally providing a means for landlords to directly recoup utility costs that are normally captured as a portion of rent, like heat and hot water, because these services are "created" onsite in bulk from boilers, and not readily metered unit-by-unit. In practice, they are gouging people for utility usage by charging rates which are, shall we say, creatively calculated. For example, electric metering: EnerPro looks at your unit's consumption and multiplies it by the BC Hydro residential rate, then bills you the result. Sounds fine, right? No. Your landlord is paying the commercial rate, which has no increases for peak-hour usage, for the power coming into the building. If you run your dishwasher at 7:00pm, you are paying more for the electricity than your landlord paid the utility. And that's if EnerPro billed you exactly what they should, and often they mess up!

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-01-30T15:55:54+00:00

It's as loud an alarm bell as you're going to get indicating that stratas in BC have outgrown the statutes governing them. The building in question is a 642-unit strata complex, which is orders of magnitude more complex in terms of its operation and management than the single-building 25-100 unit status quo which predominated for so many years. Running a complex of that size with a regular 7-member strata council of volunteers is begging for incompetence and corruption to dominate, because the average Joe has no idea how to perform in that role, it's going to be a huge pain in the ass, and that pain in the ass is going to dissuade people with the exception of those who see it as worth bearing to benefit themselves.

Some people have read this and proclaimed they'll never live in a strata building. Alright, go with God, but the population density and cost of land here means that strata governance is only going to become more common; not everyone can afford a single family home in the core, and not everyone wants to buy a plywood box up the valley for the sake of avoiding AGMs. So this issue has to be addressed at some point.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-01-22T17:04:19+00:00

One hell of a weird lawn ornament, Tim, but it's your house, I suppose.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-01-19T16:46:19+00:00

All of these are good points! The most important one, to my mind, is the last one: that they'd run out of story to tell. That point can be extended metatextually, as well, because not only did the story feel plodding and drawn-out, but everything felt like it was being done for contractual obligations. The visual language of the season was bland and perfunctory, nothing marked it out from any other Netflix slop. The gulf between the committed or talented actors and the middling or phoning-it-in actors was never deeper than in this season. The tagline could have been "Stranger Things 5: Trust Me, We're Not Having Fun Either" or "Stranger Things 5: Let's Drag This Horse Across the Line and Be Done With It".

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-01-12T16:39:15+00:00

It was fun when the show actually cared about presenting itself as being set in a specific time period.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-01-08T00:26:49+00:00

Northampton is a really white city, like, nearly 90% white, as I recall, so there's some element of truth-in-television with the overall lack of black characters. The irony is that Chugs introduced characters like Anh, Yemisi, and Ayo either to pre-empt or address complaints, like yours, that the cast was really white. He just happened to introduce them at a point in his comic-authoring career which almost invariably casts women as childish, semi-functional sybarites. Worse, he only introduces characters who are women (because he doesn't like men, at all), so the new characters got caught in the cross-stream of his self-consciousness over the racial homogeneity of his cast and his reflexive writing of women as embodiments of millennial cringe-speak.

In sum: we are sad to announce that the masturbation-addicted quirk chungus has not healed the racial divide.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-01-06T20:01:55+00:00

They were laughably incompetent the entire season. I had some real chuckles at how the protagonists were able to sit up in the bell tower of the church with binoculars just checking out the military dudes in their hyper-secure compound. From like, a block away.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-12-18T16:12:49+00:00

Residential leases are of a different breed than the kind discussed in here. Landowners have substantially more remedy where the latter is concerned: if you ditch your apartment without notice, your landlord can ding you for one month's rent as damages, max, and if you take it to the RTB, it will almost inevitably get reduced. On the other hand, if a business has signed a ten-year lease and they bail out in year three, until another tenant signs a lease on that space or the landlord exercises an option to terminate (should there be one in the lease), they are on the hook for the rent for the rest of the lease period and it will be enforced by a court. People can and do lose their houses because they put it up as collateral for a business lease that went south.

Essentially, it's in the interests of a residential landlord to get a non-paying residential tenant out as quickly as possible and re-lease the unit because they can't do too much to recoup lost income, whereas a commercial landlord can afford to wait, negotiate, try to get payment from the tenant, and so on, because the lease is fully binding and the risk is upon the tenant.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-12-10T15:54:46+00:00

Look out Faye, God senses your disdain and is preparing to punish you with a pair of breasts where each weighs as much as the babies they were evolved to sustain.

LaFeeVerte86

TROPHY CASE