You’re supposed to put your mouth on the parts that don’t have hair.

In some cases he has used AI to remove watermarks. It changed other details of the comic. Pretty gross.

Someone needs to send this to that guy in the Comic Strips community who keeps cropping out artists’ signatures because he thinks they’re “ads”.

He hates ads so much.

I couldn’t get through Tolkien. I tried reading the Hobbit but gave up when it started talking about blue beards and gold belts. It felt too arbitrary to hold my interest.

But the LotR movies are needlessly slow. It’s Peter Jackson’s directing style, which only works in that very specific context where a large portion of the audience is ready to fill in the blank spaces, and the rest of the audience forgives it because they expect it to be a rambling epic.

Every shot is one second too long. You could cut an hour from the runtime just by cutting out the lingering reaction shots. Every time Sam or Frodo says something, it’s followed by two seconds of them staring longingly into each other’s eyes. There are so many things to love about those movies, but they’re basically unwatchable to me.

As for Rowling, I think her success is mostly due to accessibility. They’re easy reads in a way that fantasy books almost never are. The reader doesn’t have to put in any work to get to the world building.

She follows a classical plot structure. She establishes motifs early and only subverts them when subverting them becomes the obvious choice. There are many blue beard/gold belt moments, but they’re propped up by easy-to-understand structures like the house system.

But yeah, then there’s no depth to it after that. I always thought it was overrated.

I’m reminded of a story from Oliver Sacks, where one of his patients had some kind of vestibular issue that made him unable to tell that he was always tilted about 20°. He couldn’t correct it alone, because that felt level to him.

The patient had been a carpenter, so his solution was to mount a spirit level to his glasses. He watched it out of the corner of his eye and constantly corrected his posture. Eventually it became second nature to him.

It’s not a race!

Meh. It’s a bit slow.

Thumbnail looks like a sandwich.

Honestly, Google Search has been better the last couple years after spending the previous twenty years getting consistently worse.

Most of what I use Google for is trivial. Like how old is a certain actor, or why was this author canceled, or what does this item do in a video game?

It’s great for those things. Especially the video game stuff. I don’t want to watch a 10 minute video just to get a discrete answer, and now I don’t have to.

I can even ask it for spoiler-free hints on a particular puzzle, and most of the time it gives me something useful.

I had such high hopes for dbzer0, but it’s just another .ml.

When I cook for my wife’s family, I get endless, sincere praise. They tell me it’s the greatest soup they’ve ever had. They ask for recipes. The next day they sheepishly ask if they can eat the rest of the leftovers.

When I cook for my side of the family: nothing. Crickets. Which is even more odd to me since my mom never met a seasoning. Period. She does not season her cooking. One time she was tipping over a jar of Italian seasoning just to let it look at the meatballs, and she accidentally spilled some in, and everyone told her it was the best meatballs she ever made.

But I provide a flavorful, well-prepared soup, and at best I get: “Well it turns out I didn’t mind black beans this one time, but I still hate them.”

I’ve had two different people tell me that my chicken soup is the greatest soup they’ve ever eaten. If you’re not getting excited about soup, go and find better soup.

You’re pretending I’m pretending that. Don’t be that guy.

Tomorrow? Like Monday? Nothing happens if kids refuse to say the pledge of allegiance in America on Monday. They just don’t say it.

It’s just a matter of politeness. It’s rude to call someone something they don’t want to be called.

He was “The Mad Titan”, not “The Reasonable Titan”.

What happens in North Korea if they refuse to do something like the pledge?

As someone from Houston, Dallas is the worst. Not just at driving; I didn’t even read your comment. Dallas is the worst.

I can’t not read them. My eyes read the subtitles against my will, and I miss whatever else is going on on the screen. Sometimes I spoil emotional moments because I read them first and miss the actor’s delivery.

Other times subtitles are necessary, like if we’re watching while the kids are asleep, and we need to keep the volume lower in case there’s an action scene. Plus how else would I know if the music is “upbeat” or “somber” or whatever?

You know what, sure. I’m on board.