I think originality is overrated. Hear me out.

Example 1: Star Wars should plagiarize more. Original Star Wars is Hidden Fortress in space, plus a bit of WW2 dogfighting and some car culture flavor. Late period Star Wars has been taking original Star Wars, blending it up, and pouring it back out again. Not enough plagiarism. Top Gun, but make it Star Wars and call it Rogue Squadron. Three Musketeers, but make it Star Wars and call it Three Jedi. Take your pick of old detective noir stories, set it on Coruscant, and call it the The Dantooine Falcon. Stop ripping off Star Wars in Star Wars, and go back to ripping off other properties, and it’s a license to print money.

Example 2: Stop trying to make movie franchises progress forward in time; continuity and originality are overrated. James Bond has been making virtually the same movie for over sixty years, and people still love it! Bond goes to exotic locale meets and beds some number of beautiful women, engages in a bit of extreme sports, foils the plan of some flamboyant villain. The actors are regularly changed without comment. The movie is always set “right now.” Bond has (almost) always been 007 for “a while.” Continuity virtually never spans more than a couple of movies until it gets reset to zero again. And it’s still going strong as a franchise! Pirates of the Caribbean could have used this pattern and just kept making crazy pirate adventure movies forever, but they got wrapped around the axle trying to keep a continuous plot going forward. Should have gone the James Bond route.

Stop trying to make original movies that advance an overarching plot across a franchise. Make movies that have already been made and that don’t take the franchise anywhere. You can’t go wrong.

I saw a car with these two bumper stickers:

That was a very confusing day for me.

There’s no way in fucking Hell that Trump would willingly stand in the way of a bullet.

There’s no way in fucking Hell that Trump could keep quiet about it if he was actually an active participant in a conspiracy. He’d have tweeted about it by the end of the week.

There’s no way in fucking Hell that the people around Trump could orchestrate an attempted assassination without it blowing up in their faces somehow.

The ear was probably hit by a tiny fleck of glass from a shattered teleprompter, and then with Trump no doubt on blood thinners it would bleed like all get out.

Just keep assuming ever greater stupidity and incompetence all around and you’ll usually arrive at the correct answer as to what happened.

I don’t care how you say it, I just want to know if it works, because I have been burned by these products before, Trebek!

You’re correct. I’m sorry, I had my numbers screwed up in my head.

These are the numbers from Wikipedia. It still fucks me up that Trump increased his vote margins, even to the point of winning the popular vote. It’s probably going to haunt me to my grave and be a thing that I deeply wish wasn’t true, but there it is.

What I ought to have said was that comparing 2024 to 2016, it’s not that Democratic support fell off precipitously, but rather that a lot of people showed up in 2020 to vote for Biden, and then a lot of them stayed home in 2024.

Trump gained some, and that fucking sucks, but apathy and disengagement is a big factor in what got him back in the White House.

Accurate.

Trump got about the same number of votes in 2024 as he did when he lost back in 2020, whereas Harris got fewer votes than Biden did, so strictly speaking we are getting exactly what all too many of us didn’t vote for.

13 year old: “I’ll just take the death penalty, thanks."

You Made It Weird, with Pete Holmes. Really fucking funny comedian Pete has had lots of interesting guests. Usually starts with relatively normal stuff, but usually by the end of any given episode he gets into “Do you believe in God?”, “What do you think happens when we die?”, and “You ever do ayahuasca?” territory. Pete is SMART and has been going on his own spiritual and philosophical journey for a while, and it feels like every guest is another step on that journey. Look up the episode list and find someone you like and listen to their conversation.

It’s fucking rich Thiel trying to coopt Robert A. Heinlein. The man believed in people being free to do as they wish, but he was no fucking kleptocrat. I’m not convinced that his philosophy would comport particularly well with modern libertarians, who amount to sock puppets for the GOP.

He believed fiercely in being politically knowledgeable and involved:

The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”

They thought of the government as “They.” The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.

He believed in rationally-considered governance:

If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

And while he sure seemed to hate Communism, something I don’t find all that surprising for a man of his generation, he arguably hated corruption and capitalist decay even more:

Of what use, then, are the American Communists?

They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.

Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.

Unfortunately we are more prone to ignore the sick spot thus disclosed and content ourselves with calling out more cops.

All of those quotes are from Take Back Your Government, a nonfiction book about how and why to get involved in politics, and one that I wish more people would read and take seriously. All of his fiction… you have got to take with at least a grain of salt. He loved to put political philosophy rants into his writing, but he also loved exploring weirdo scenarios that he may or may not have totally believed in, himself. Just because someone took a given interpretation from one of Heinlein’s fictions does not mean that he would be chill with a bunch of vampires bleeding the planet dry.

They’re working on that.

You can always track further back to earlier causes, but I think that we took a real hard turn for the worse in this country when Ford pardoned Nixon and an angry mob didn’t rend Richard the Treacherous limb from limb. If the powers that be can just dispense Get Out Of Jail Free cards to their buddies and the people are unwilling or unable to fight back and force there to be consequences, then nobody in a position of power ever really needs to worry about abusing their office.

I suspect that a party that ran a ranked choice primary to select a candidate for a FPTP election would have an advantage over an opposing party that didn’t. I haven’t got the math or statistics to back it up, but everything I’ve read about ranked choice discouraging scorched earth politics sounds like it would be healthy in a primary.

Surveys indicate that 100% of people respond to surveys.

Pig is a masterclass in not telling the audience more than they absolutely need to know. I’ve gotten so sick of movies where the dialog repeats itself for the benefit of people who weren’t paying attention thirty seconds ago, or else it constantly spells out stuff that rightly ought to be conveyed by the actions of the characters. Pig is the antithesis of that. Characters hardly say anything that they don’t need to say, and everything else is left to the viewer to figure out. I fucking love it.

Electric kettle.

Bone conduction headphones.

Rechargeable head lamp.

Nice EDC knife.

Driving gloves.

A really good insulated cup.

French press.

Digital kitchen scale.

Slow cooker.

Yeah, I actually think Lovecraft was doing what was probably the healthiest thing available to him at the time with all his fucked up phobias by turning them into inspiration for spooky stories. He was creative and articulate enough that he could have been writing political screeds and trying to get others on board with driving out all the immigrants, but instead he wrote about crab monsters from space. Far from the worst possible outcome considering a lot of the other possibilities from the time.

Whether or not you should consume HP Lovecraft media despite the fact he was a racist is entirely up to you because he is long dead. He doesn’t make any money. He isn’t even racist any more. Because he’s dead.

I always say “If you’re going to be a shitshow of a human being but a talented artist, the least you can do is also be dead.”

See also: Phil Spector, Pablo Picasso.