That’s… just the default for most of cultural history. Odysseus gets back from war, slaughters like thirty dudes in the dining room, and his wife is just thrilled that hubby is back. The other way is the subversion of classical treatments of violence in fiction.

“I’m cutting back on all the online spaces that we used to share.”

“Okay, that’s your right, but it is going to be a hell of a lot harder for us to stay in touch, so if you’re okay with putting up barriers to contact, then go right ahead.”

“WhY iS iT sO hArD tO sTaY iN tOuCh WiTh OlD fRiEnDs As aN aDuLt?!?”

Pollster: Have you ever thought about shooting someone?

Me: Well even if I never had before, now that you’ve asked the question and put the idea in my head, I have, so thanks for that!

Pollster: Follow-up question: Have you ever thought of a pink elephant?

I was at my first gun show with an older friend who knew guns better than I did who I was following around to keep me from making any stupid decisions.

There’s a table with a sign for “Constitutional Carry,” where they don’t think you should need a special license to concealed carry a handgun.

My friend walks up to these two guys at the table, and says “Hey, just so you know, I hope you guys fail.”

The younger of the two kind of bristles, but the older one, a dude with a long white beard, says “Oh, why?”

My friend says “Because I worked in a gun shop for fifteen years, and I helped fill out more concealed carry applications than I can count and…” at this point she gestures around at the huge room behind us, “I wouldn’t trust 95% of the people in this room with any gun at all.”

And the old dude behind the table smiles and nods his head and says “Yeah, that’s a fair point.”

So anyway, that’s the day I bought a Ruger GP-100 in 357 Magnum.

I fully agree with everything you just said. My point was that if you bring so little to the table that you feel you’re in danger of being successfully replaced by a toy, then you need to do some self-improvement.

If you can’t bring more to a relationship than an appliance can, then you’ve got to work on yourself.

From Bag Balm:

Originally, it was used for only cows’ udders, but farmers’ wives noticed the softness of their husbands’ hands, and started using the product themselves.

Doesn’t look good.

The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals.

-J.B.S. Haldane

I was working on a Shakespeare play one time and I started keeping notes on lines that sounded like episode titles. These are all from the same play:

The Feverous Earth

The Parallel Fellow

The Volume of Time

The Borrower of the Night

A Fruitless Crown

That Which We Destroy

The Tender Eye

The Timely Inn

The Season of All Natures

The Power of Man

His Earth-Bound Root

To Appease an Angry God

In the Tyrant’s Grasp

Blunt Not the Heart

The Seeds of Time

The Golden Round

Honor Unaccompanied

The Serpent and the Flower

Full disclosure: I was thinking of these as Doctor Who titles, but I think the principle is sound.

That was the name of my half-orc barbarian!

Actually his name was Gary Crunch, but everyone called him Grunch except for his parents.

“Things that are normal when you’re poor but ‘impressive’ when you’re rich.”

• Walking everywhere

• Eating simple grains

• Hunting / fishing for food

• Spending time with your family

But… I’m still using it!

Similar experience, though I think my mom was just white-knuckling her way through being a single mom with two kids, so she didn’t have a lot left over to pursue her passions and share that with us. That, and her father was a monster, so my grandmother was doing her own white-knuckle process a generation prior. I’m trying to make myself more emotionally available to my kid, because I’d like to reduce the generational trauma, but it’s going to make for an interesting conversation someday.

Unexplained Ferrous Objects

It’s consistently interesting to me the way that AI image generators seem to grasp the basic concept of regular repeating patterns, but inevitably get bored and start going all wibbly wobbly. The keyboard and the striped shirt are great examples; it can tell that there should be regular, parallel groups of lines, but it quickly devolves into a dementia patient trying to draw a chess board.

😳😬

I DID tell the guide what he was wearing because I didn’t want us to end up in a military detention cell but the guide was like “Eh, it’s fine,” so I guess it was, but boy it didn’t feel like it should have been!