It would be needlessly expensive, but…

I’d say I have a fairly medium-grade routine.

I hand grind whole beans. Not even super-special premium beans, most likely just the huge bag of Kirkland whole beans. Maybe not even ground same-day, quite possibly ground and then put into a ball jar ahead of time. They are hand-ground, though, with a grinder that is adjusted to a high level of coarseness.

The grounds are measured into a French press. I use a digital kitchen scale so that it’s always the same amount. I use a kettle to get the water to 200F. Pour over the grounds until they’re soaked. Slosh them around a bit for thirty seconds. Pour in the rest of the water up to the fill line on the French press. Set a timer for four minutes. Press down the plunger and pour into a mug, plus a glass bottle for the excess. That’s it. Yes, it’s particular, but I am pretty sure it’s not an ultra-premium process. I’ve had better coffee in a decent hotel. The main thing is exactly measuring what I’m doing, so I get consistent results.

I had my mom and sister over and they complimented my coffee. I didn’t make a big deal about it and thanked them.

The next morning, my sister is up before me. I come out to the dining room and she’s pouring coffee from the press. Suddenly she goes “Oooh! This coffee is strong! Too strong! I’ll have to water it down!”

I ask, “Well how much grounds did you use?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I just eyeballed it.”

“How long did you let it brew?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s been a while. It’s still in the press.”

Well, yes, that would possibly result in an unpredictable result. This is why I have a hard time vacationing with my family.

What a terrible day to have eyes.

The description I’ve heard is “front of the class minds with back of the class attitudes.” It worked for Obama, it worked for Clinton, and if we don’t recognize that it’s a winning combination we’re going to continue to get fucked in the general elections.

…and then I’ll ram my ovipositor down your throat and lay eggs in your chest! But I’m not an alien!

Good Christ, can you imagine a holodeck version of The Lord of the Rings? Even allowing for the occasional time skip forward, it could take months if not years to work through the whole trilogy. It would be glorious.

Unknowingly?

I read a lot of the Hugo Award short story collections and it’s a great way to get into sci-fi. They’re usually pretty good if not excellent. If you like the author’s style, you can go out and look up more of their work. If you don’t, not a problem, it’s just a short story anyway.

Gotta use the spray.

Civilian review boards. Abolishing qualified immunity. Abolishing the practice of cops getting fired for some fuckery but then getting new cop jobs in a different district. Abolishing civil forfeiture. Disarming cops except for highly specialized and carefully managed units. Training in de-escalation and enforcement of its use. Employment of mental health crisis agents when armed cops aren’t warranted. Abolishing no-knock raids.

These are just the policies I could think of off the top of my head that would go a long way to improving the police problem. I imagine there are tons more. We could try to implement any or all of them and see immediate improvements. But instead people go straight to “abolish the police / ACAB,” and suddenly there’s no such thing as a discussion anymore, just pro- and anti- groups screaming at each other.

I mean, let’s be honest. I’ve had almost this exact fantasy about some real shitheads that I’ve dealt with. The trick is to allow the dark thoughts to come and go and not let them come out and really start causing problems.

Also they shouldn’t have called the category of “things that aren’t planets despite being in some ways planet-like” “dwarf planet,” they should have called them “planetoids.” Star Trek had been referring to small planet-like objects as planetoids for decades, so the work in the popular consciousness had already been done. Dwarf planet not being a planet makes it sound like they’re saying dwarf people don’t count as people, and I don’t care for that at all.

Steve Bannon looks like if a pile of laundry from a cheap Vegas motel soaked in piss, liquor, and gas station meth wished that it would become a real boy.

Smith: Things have changed. The market’s tough. I’m sure you can understand why our beloved parent company, Warner Brothers, has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.

Neo: What?

Smith: They informed me they’re gonna to do it with or without us.

Neo: I thought they couldn’t do that?

Smith: Oh, they can, and they made it clear they would kill our contract if we didn’t cooperate.

Everything you need to know about the movie. I strongly suspect that Lana Wachowski deliberately made the movie as dogshit as she could plausibly get away with so as to properly kill the franchise once and for all, or at least until she’s dead and someone else can try to pick up the pieces and reboot the whole thing in a few decades.

A. The Princess Bride. More likely a spinoff with Inigo becoming the dead pirate Roberts

Counterpoint:

This video makes some great points about how movies don’t feel real anymore. Digital color grading is part of it, but the very short version is that movies don’t give us the sensory information or speak to us in the visual language that we need to feel like the movie is real. Watching the video gave me a whole vocabulary for how to critique failings in modern movies.

Yeah, assuming that a yard is meant to approximate the stride of an adult human, who’s the Goliath-sized motherfucker with the 5’ 3" stride who took a thousand steps and called that a mile?

Edit: Okay, I checked.

The furlong (meaning furrow length) was the distance a team of oxen could plough without resting. This was standardised to be exactly 40 rods or 10 chains.

An English mile is defined as 8 furlongs, 8 presumably being chosen because it divides by 2 and 4. What a cockamamie system of measurement.

Edit Again: Okay, I checked again.

The modern English word mile derives from Middle English myle and Old English mīl, which was cognate with all other Germanic terms for miles. These derived from the nominal ellipsis form of mīlle passus ‘mile’ or mīlia passuum ‘miles’, the Roman mile of one thousand paces.

A pace is a unit of length consisting either of one normal walking step, or of a double step, returning to the same foot.

This is all still very silly.

🥁✨