Ho-ly shit… I had forgotten this particular bit.

But yeah, me too. Undead Mummy Ernie…

I wanted to disagree with you, but checking the data almost all of the best action flicks I could have sworn were fairly recent actually came out in the early-mid noughts. Seems like after The Matrix blew up the genre, nobody ever figured out how to put it back together.

Even if I wanted to quibble and argue for the best my personal favorite action flicks within a precise “2 decade” window… it’s a depressingly short list:

• 2004

  • Hellboy (technically a comic movie, but I’m keeping it because Doug Jones and Ron Perlman just rocked)
  • Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Vol 1 missed the cutoff)

• 2006

  • Crank

• 2007

  • Hot Fuzz

• 2009

  • The Bourne Ultimatum
  • District 9

• 2017

  • Baby Driver

… Almost every single other action flick I thought of came out between 1998 and 2004. (Also, 2000 was a weirdly good year for action fans in retrospect)

Sigh. I’m gonna go bemoan the world getting lame and shake my cane at the kids out on my lawn.

Edit: JOHN WICK! How TF did I forget those? But yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s it now.

USA: Real barbeque. I don’t mean braised meat slathered in a sticky sauce, either. I mean tough cuts of meat, cooked slow and low over woodsmoke until it is fall-off-the-bone tender. No sauce required.

Much easier to find this in the southern US, with Texas, Missouri, and the Carolinas all being particularly famous BBQ regions. In the northern states, your best bet is gonna be to find someone local with a smoker - not just a grill.

Bro - no mention of Texas BBQ? Beef brisket with Texas-style BBQ beans (savory, not sweet for those who haven’t had them) is amazing.

Yup. And that’s a great example of not relying on Deus Ex Machina - we watch Ender go through all his brutal training, learning to be the best and becomes a truly terrifying weapon of war. By the time Ender is, well, ending things, we’ve seen his growth and understand why he can do the things he does.

In the early days of Superman comics, dude couldn’t, e.g. fly. He could just jump really high. He didn’t have laser vision. Over time, the writers kept adding new powers until the only story they could tell was about Supes vs his own conscience. Nothing else (okay, besides Mr Mxyzptlk) can actually stand in his way.

History of Superman power creep

All things Deus Ex Machina. I get it, endings are hard. Climaxes are hard to write. But the payoff feels cheap as hell when your protagonist just “digs a little deeper” and suddenly finds just enough power to save the day. When it comes out of nowhere, it feels unearned by the hero and is not only unsatisfying, it’s also a good way to give you hero power creep until there’s nothing on earth that can believably challenge them. See: Superman.

While I agree with you on the whole, there are some real world places with names that go hard.

Like Dead Man’s Pass, Oregon. Or Devil’s Gate, Utah.

…Maybe it’s just a Western US thing.

As far as we’re concerned, yes. It literally would travel at the speed of light. But since the light from the momentarily-ago-normal universe would be traveling just ahead of it… Everything would look normal until it collapsed

That’s a question no one has yet been able to answer definitively though both neuroscientists and philosophers are trying.

I’m of the opinion that “I” am a pattern, encoded in the physical interactions of my brain and body. I’m not certain if I have free will or just like to think I do. But I do believe that whatever makes me “me” is fully contained within the dimensions of my physical being.

I love this concept. A purely memetic threat. An idea that could destroy you merely by knowing it…

(If a specific set of improbabilities are true)

You cannot step into the same river twice - Heraclitus, ~550 BC

We are all a series of continuous evolution, alteration and change. “I” am not the same person who began this sentence. The idea that “I” cease to exist overnight and begin anew in the morning is meaningless. There is no one version of me. I live - and to live is to change!

Harsh - but the first of these to make me actually lol

Have you checked the internet archive? No guarantees, but if anyone in the world has a backup of an old text- based site… it’s them.

Amazing.

I’m just starting to learn how language development works and like… of any language to try implementing, Haskell definitely seems like one of the most complex.

Like - one dev could reasonably implement a Forth or Lisp, but you need a long time window to finish a Haskell…

Fascinating.

I’m a minor programming language nerd. While I’d never recommend writing an in house language - I can see the appeal for me personally.

What were the languages like? OOP? FP? …Logic?

Why’d they build 2 languages?

This seems so wild to me - sorry if I’m prying.

(This is not an idiom, just something I realized as a parent.) Sometimes, being an adult means “reaching into the shit.”

Shit has to be dealt with. My kids - as babies - could not deal with their own shit. It was my job and responsibility as their parent to clean up that shit. And sometimes something would get dropped in the shit. And you gotta reach in.

Nobody likes dealing with shit. Everyone tries to take as little shit as they can. But some days, no matter how I feel - it’s on me to reach into the shit.

Today - Smashing Pumpkins

Once upon a time, I was fairly strong but I couldn’t touch my toes. That full deep stretch was just a little beyond me. It always had been, as long as I could remember in my adult life. Throughout years of martial arts and parkour that moderately normal level of flexibility eluded me.

Then I quit my job at Amazon. I was so burned out I ended up taking 6 months off. During that time I mostly hung out around the house. Played with my kid. … played a ton of Minecraft.

The point is, I wasn’t doing any new exercise. I was just doing things other than hunching in a chair all day. And just before I started a new job I discovered that I could touch my toes again!

I asked my new job for a standing desk - and I’ve kept that practice up at every job since. I alternate between standing and sitting on a tall office chair. I estimate that I stand a little more than half the day all in, but being able to transition has made a huge difference for me.

I’m in my forties now and I can grab my feets no problem. I don’t do any dedicated stretching - I’m just not hunching all day.

Yep. And it was great. My wife and I married young - only in our early twenties. Because of reasons both us had grown up a little too fast and as young adults we mourned the fact that we’d never really gotten to enjoy our childhoods.

So we decided to hunt down all the crap we wanted as kids. We hit antique shops and thrift stores, eBay and garage sales. We found a ton of the things we’d always wanted.

Popples and Rainbow Bright dolls.
Kenner Star Wars action figures.
Video game consoles.
Transformers.

We bought the crap our inner children still wanted and gave ourselves permission to enjoy it - and then let it go.

Ultimately, we didn’t keep much of it - though we’ve still got a box of a few favorite dolls, games and action figures somewhere. A few toys even got passed down to our own kids.

I don’t regret a moment of it. Giving ourselves a belated childhood was fun - and it helped us move on and say goodbye to that part of our lives.