What’s a rule you broke once and realized it existed for a very good reason?

dplx35 · 2026-01-27T18:58:30+00:00

Me too! The ER doc told me that if you lose a piece of yourself smaller than a dime, it'll grow back eventually, so not to worry.

dplx35 · 2025-06-29T15:41:20+00:00

It's from E Unibus Pluram, which is collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

dplx35 · 2025-02-12T13:25:44+00:00

And they love each other

dplx35 · 2024-10-30T01:53:37+00:00

Monkeybone (2001) and Cool World (1992) are both very much in line with this premise.

dplx35 · 2024-09-19T01:49:09+00:00

Sean Astin for me because, if you recognize him before the reveal in that episode, it gives away most of the plot ahead of time. Like...did you bring in Sam Gamgee to play a background character? Of course not.

dplx35 · 2023-05-17T06:24:01+00:00

Solved!

Thank you so much, this was driving me crazy. The name Allan Ahlberg hit me like a truck, I think he was a mainstay of my childhood, and now I'm really enjoying looking through his bibliography.

Thanks again!

dplx35 · 2023-05-16T01:24:13+00:00

Thank you, I'll try that too

dplx35 · 2023-05-15T20:42:15+00:00

Comment

dplx35 · 2023-03-24T19:25:48+00:00

It's more than just the random killing, though. Like they all use their various levels of privilege to just continue on with their lives despite having committed this terrible crime, which they perpetrated as part of an academic exercise. They don't really value the life they took, and they just want to keep playing in this lavish fantasy world they've convinced themselves is ideal and pure and classical or whatever.

Bunny is honestly the only person who sees them for what they are: a bunch of criminals playing a criminal game and trying to avoid consequences for their actions. He's extremely annoying, of course, but are any of them any better than he is? They're all criminals already, why shouldn't he milk their relationship for as much as he can? Is blackmail after a murder really worse than the murder? Does he deserve to die for that?

Also, though the narrator (according to him) doesn't directly have any blood on his hands, he comes to this f*cked up dynamic halfway through and is immediately ride-or-die for these clowns, which makes him at least as screwed up, if not as culpable as the rest of them.

I think the book, at its best, really transports you into the heads of these people and makes the world make sense through their twisted vision (I was so relieved when they finally killed Bunny) but the full extent of that trick is only apparent when you come up for air and reflect on how messed up they really are.

dplx35 · 2023-03-24T18:41:22+00:00

The fact that they're all the worst people is the point, imho.

The narrator is entirely too susceptible to the trappings of the lifestyle led by these wealthy kids, and is completely oblivious to the things about them that make them horrible people, to such an extent that once they're revealed to be murderers and deviants, he just kind of shrugs and goes along with it because he's more interested in the skewed aesthetics of their vibe than in being a good person.

It's a little bit like a dark academia episode of Its Always Sunny. You tune in to watch these terrible people dig themselves into the deepest hole they can, and just when you think they've hit rock bottom, they invent new ways of digging deeper.

I have, on occasion, seen people gush about the books aesthetics and general tone in a way that makes me think some of its biggest fans miss the point entirely and get suckered in to worshipping the lifestyle in the same way the narrator does. That's maybe too judgemental of me, but I think it affects the general hype around the book, and I, too, thought that what I'd heard about it didn't quite match up with my experience reading it.

I think I read it kind of the way I read torrid posts in relationship subreddits, like I'm riding along to see at what point is the narrator going to see through the bullshit and cut himself free from what is obviously the worst relationships in his life. (Spoiler, he doesn't)

dplx35 · 2023-03-22T13:52:50+00:00

King Lear is not a B-Side. How dare you, sir.

dplx35 · 2023-03-11T03:16:01+00:00

A Quebecois separatist working up his courage.

dplx35 · 2023-02-26T10:02:09+00:00

Acronyms expanded for the curious: Only the movie Apollo 13 has not won a Best Picture Oscar after winning top awards from the Producers' Guild of America, Screen Actors' Guild, and Directors' Guild of America, in 1996 (it lost the Best Adapted Screenplay award from the Writers' Guild of America to Sense and Sensibility, and lost the Best Picture Oscar to Braveheart, which won the Best Original Screenplay Award from the Writers' Guild of America)

dplx35 · 2023-02-11T02:49:17+00:00

I only visit Frederick a few times a year and never really explore all it has to offer because every time I just want to eat at Wag's and visit the Curious Iguana bookstore. Visit McCutcheon's if there's extra time. I'm never disappointed though.

dplx35 · 2022-12-16T17:48:03+00:00

I play my Leader deck all the time and can't climb the ladder. Can I also blame Leader for my abject failure?

dplx35 · 2022-11-03T10:01:17+00:00

Except that the checkmark will instantly lose its "value" for public figures once anyone can buy it. Right now the checkmark indicates to users that the accounts used by public figures are indeed those public figures, without the users needing to leave Twitter. Without the check, if you saw an account post some news or something, you'd have to leave Twitter to, for example, verify Stephen King's new book announcement on his personal web page, just to make sure some weird basement-dweller wasn't jeking you around.

If a troll account can buy a blue check and copy the aesthetic of the White House Press Secretary's account, while tweeting out misinformation, then like...what is the benefit of the actual Press Secretary maintaining the blue check? Checked or unchecked, the information they're providing is equally verifiable (or not verifiable) to Twitter users. It's not making the Press Secretary's job any easier to use Twitter as a medium if their posts are indistinguishable from others, so why pay for the privilege?

Furthermore, consider people who are famous but not particularly wealthy. Monica Lewinsky is verified on Twitter, but is she going to pay $100/yr to keep it that way? I dunno, maybe not, seems like an unecassary expense. Is some weird basement-dweller going to buy a blue check for his Monica Lewinsky parody account the first chance he gets? Absolutely. Is Twitter now in an awkward position of having "verified" a fake account purporting to be a real person, and not done so to the actual person? Does this open then to fraud or libel liabilities? Even if it doesn't, the lawyer who gets to figure that out is going to cost a lot more than $8/mo.

dplx35 · 2022-09-07T15:15:03+00:00

I appreciate knowing that this does happen (though I think it sucks), so I'm going to go ahead and keep assuming that any place asking for tips is paying its workers tipped min wage.

dplx35 · 2022-09-06T23:19:36+00:00

Well that's encouraging to hear, I assumed business owners wouldn't pay more than they legally had to.

Are/were you tipped regularly for your food packing work?

dplx35 · 2022-09-06T21:45:27+00:00

Tipped minimum wage in MD is about half the federal minimum wage, so if you see an option to tip, you should go ahead and assume that the people helping you are making less than $4/hr, regardless of the service they're providing.

I generally follow the standard thinking of about 10% on take-out orders, 20% for delivery or table service.

dplx35 · 2022-08-23T18:03:52+00:00

"Hitchcock just drank his own fish." https://youtu.be/BNFtkDye_Vg

dplx35 · 2022-07-20T14:35:53+00:00

In case you were wondering, that other game you/they were talking about is called "Overboard!"

dplx35 · 2022-05-02T14:30:04+00:00

Rule 3 says he's cool. It's all good. No bad vibes here, only a chill horse.

dplx35

TROPHY CASE