Bluetooth speaker? No! Homemade PVC pipe passive amp? Yes!

Probably The Asylum.

Admittedly, The Asylum has a quite a few rooms within it, but I’d say that the antechamber of The Asylum that abuts the outer wall to Outside comprises the majority of the surface of the Earth and its atmosphere, so that’s a pretty big room.

Did you see what he did to Dr. Dugong?!

Looks like one of those mechanical cancer SCPs.

At one point when I was in my mid to late-twenties, my workplace’s neighbor had their sprinkler system fail and flood their business. It was so bad that a bunch of water seeped under the adjoining wall and we had about a half an inch of water across a third of our fairly large store. There were maybe a dozen or so of us working there at the time, and we all got called in to rapidly move merchandise out into a big truck so that it wouldn’t get spoiled by the damp air before the remediation guys could do their thing.

So there’s all of these people, most of them younger than me, but not by a lot, running back and forth with crates of merchandise, and I looked around and immediately saw how chaotic and inefficient it was.

So I said, “Okay, you stand by the truck. You stand by the front door, you stand just inside. You stand a little further in than that. The first person just picks up a crate, and we bucket brigade it all out to the truck.”

It was an obvious solution, and it made the work go by so much faster and easier, but apparently I was the only one who thought to do it. I realized that in that moment, in a moderately large group, I was the most responsible adult in the room.

And I’m pretty sure that was when my childhood ended.

How about…

that they are endowed by their Creator with possess certain unalienable Rights

I know how to enunciate, speak with a voice supported by my diaphragm, and increase the intensity of my speaking voice without actually yelling. It’s incredibly useful. Virtually no one ever misunderstands me on the phone. I can have a conversation in a loud crowded place. I’m actually fairly conflict-averse, but when I need to “switch on,” I can usually short-circuit people’s inclination to argue by using a more focused voice.

Everyone should take a decent Acting 101 class where they teach you these skills.

Just a couple of judicious edits…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men persons are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.

I needed a white karate gi for a Street Fighter Halloween costume, so I went to the local school and bought one, and while I was at it I bought a black one too, in case I ever wanted to be a ninja. Then I started wearing the black karate pants as pajamas.

That was over twenty years ago. Those same black karate pants are still my favorite pajamas. In-fucking-credible.

The fashion world is in a war on pockets, so they can sell more handbags. The fewer and smaller pockets we have, the more accessories we need to buy. First they came for women’s pockets. Now they’re trying to make cargo shorts unacceptable for the same reason.

• Reservoir Dogs / Pulp Fiction / Kill Bill

• Stand By Me

• Dirty Dancing

• The Lost Boys

Star Trek: TNG

Batman: The Animated Series

Space Ghost Coast to Coast

Sexual positions are locked behind tiered paywalls. The most basic ones are free, but as they get more interesting, you have to pay increasing royalty fees.

Chemtrail conspiracy theorists in absolute shambles.

Donald Trump is Pantone 16-1449: Gold Flame.

You must never go there.

That’s basically a plot point in Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, where visitors have to pay for the amount of air they intend to breathe while visiting the moon.

Also, Idea: invent a copyrightable method of filtering or otherwise treating air. Release your “specially modified” air into the atmosphere. Start charging for every time someone inhales one of your AyreMolecuulz™.

Picsart. I’d like something that can do a bit of photo editing, adjust brightness/contrast/curves, work with layers, and conveniently slap together collages, but that doesn’t interrupt me in between every other operation with an ad or a request to sign up for a subscription to the app.

For sure, the technology and fashion is all VERY late-90s. But the way that The Matrix informed SO many action and scifi movies to follow, and spawned so many cultural touchstones made it break containment.

And then you’ve got subjects that it brings up, like mixed technophobia and technophilia, gender identity, anti-authoritarianism, and so on that are still at the forefront of our cultural awareness. The Matrix has stayed relevant and meaningful in ways that very few works have managed to.

Hackers

Romeo + Juliet