Would you rather push a boulder up a hill... or up a sheer cliff face while stormtroopers at the top are shooting at you and rounding up everyone who could help and putting them in camps?

By Odin's beard, I wish that animated series set in 3008 could have worked out.

Wallet. Phone. Keys...

Also, the 2000 Presidential election results in Florida:

Blacula is legitimately fantastic. It's full-on a story about the lingering violence springing from European colonialism and the slave trade.

Just one example: The main character is an African prince, and his name is Mamuwalde, but when Dracula turns him, he says "I curse you with my name! You shall be called BLACULA!" For the rest of the film, no one calls him Blacula, because his name is Mamuwalde! Except there was one subtitle that slipped and read something like "BLACULA: I lost her because of you!", and I immediately thought, "Hey you subtitling asshole, his goddamn name is Mamuwalde!"

By the end of the movie I was rooting for him in the fight with the LAPD.

She told me that she couldn't be bothered to think about Donald Trump.

Funny thing about that...

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."

—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

Not blaming you or your friend for Trump, but reading the book that quote came from made me a lot more engaged in politics on a day-to-day basis.

That boy needs therapy.

Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too, right then, so they'd leave me alone.

—Ender Wiggin, Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card

P.S. This attitude led Ender to >!accidentally genocide an entire sentient alien species.!<

What's odd is that Anon is so close to achieving enlightenment. I got to a point in my life where I felt like I had no idea how to attract a romantic partner. I'd dated a few times, but each time it had kind of fell into my lap, and I never got the hang of talking to women I found attractive in a way that made it clear I was interested.

So I just gave up. I accepted that I had no idea how to get a date, and I just went about my life, pursuing things that I found interesting.

And, lo and behold, I wound up meeting the woman I would marry, albeit through the mechanism of someone straight up telling me that she was interested in me.

If you're focused on "getting" a girlfriend, you're thinking of a partner as a valuable object to be acquired, and you're not enjoying your own life, and improving yourself within that life. If you don't think of romance as a pursuit, but rather as something good that can happen within the context of living your life well, then you are much better off.

Also, you've really got to get it into your head and heart that women are people and not prey animals, which I'm going to be honest, it seems might be a detail that is escaping Anon.

I say we go old-school.

Portrait of Robert de Montesquiou (1897). Musée d'Orsay, Paris

So say we all.

Why don't men know how to be manly anymore??!

In matters of taste, the customer is always right.

Nobody but the audience gets to decide what the audience wants. Not writers, not actors, not directors, not graphic designers. If you can give the audience something they didn't know that they wanted until they got it, so much the better for you. But if the audience just plain wants something else, then there's no amount of cajoling or negotiation that will make them feel otherwise.

That said, I have no idea what the collective response is to either of these posters, and this does feel a bit like a tempest in a teapot.

Colorado River toad: ₍𝄐 ̫͡ 𝄐₎

Humanity: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Oh, I've got fucking Cold urticaria. My body takes it personally if I go swimming in cold water, or don't wear a heavy sweatshirt on a chilly day, or God forbid if my sheets are just a little bit cold and I'm not wearing wrist-to-ankle pajamas. It fucking sucks, and it didn't even develop until I was in my thirties, so it's not as if this something that I learned to live with so early that it's second nature to me now. FUCK my fucking cold-activated histamines.

Treat your taste kindly with KENT, the cigarette with the NEW Micronite filter!

^^Micronite ^^is ^^asbestos.

I shit you not, I once watched a lady talking to the information desk at an art museum about a membership with a toddler. The kid started getting antsy, and didn't listen after she told them to stop trying to run away. She had the kid lay down on their stomach, and she very gently put her foot on the kid's back, so she was in effect halfway standing on them. The kid didn't even seem upset, just "This is what happens when I don't listen." Awe inspiring.

Yeah, not getting what they want might mess up a kid's afternoon. Being taught that throwing tantrums can get them what they want might mess a kid up for their entire life.

Nothing should! Parenting is hard fucking work, and if you're not one hundred percent up for it, then don't do it!

Even in some fantasy ideal world where pregnancy and childbirth are easy, preschool is free, and the future isn't somewhere between bleak and horrifying... being a parent is still an incredibly taxing ordeal, mentally, physically, and emotionally. There are plenty of kids in the world. Nobody should get born to parents that feel even the slightest bit of reluctance at their existence.