Recent content by prabe

Somewhere I have "Sticks" anthologized. Find that and read it. (I can poke around and find out where I have it, if you need.)

I'll stop using Alex in the format when someone else has hosted as many episodes of the show as he did. Or when I'm dead, which will probably happen first.

I know that A) our HOA's reach is constrained by county and state law (for instance, they had no power to prevent us from adding solar panels to our house, that's a state law here) and B) many of the things people around here (by which I mean the neighborhood I live in, not this website) might...

So, as counterpoint, the HOA where I live isn't so bad, though there are some holdovers in the bylaws from the 1960s that are definitely classist and probably racist. That's not an argument that you should have ditched your principle, I get the sense the HOA here is something like an outlier...

Heh. If I were pointing at stuff that blurs the car/truck line, I'd probably point at CUVs, myself. (Though those have a different raison d'etre than the El Camino did.)

Some people are lumpers, some people are splitters, some people see those approaches as both being useful and both being wrong. :LOL:

Most of those divides--and the earlier ones you were responding to--have a lot of middle ground, IME, that thinking of them as "divides" tends to exclude.

I think it's easy--especially if one doesn't watch much of it--to see it as just that. The jokes are (at least almost) always at the expense of the idiots, which does argue against it being a celebration of stupidity, but noticing that requires more attention than one might want to give.

I don't normally do anything different, reading wise, for "spooky season," but I have me some Stephen Graham Jones I could read, and that might serve as a motivation/excuse. Trilogies always feel like a commitment, even when I can just read them through.

If you want an examination of how Spotify is evil: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly. If you want a slightly-credulous take on orientalism and mysticism in the first half of the 20th century: Holy Men of the Electronic Age by Raphael Cormack. I know you said "no true crime" but Murderland by Caroline...

The srrawmanning might have been a matter of ignorance, but I see the Bad Faith Brigade has arrived. Never mind.

While I stand by my position that everyone at a given table should take the game they're playing roughly equally seriously, I don't disagree with your point, here.

I haven't seen that sort of increase from the local roaster where I get my coffee beans. Yet. I expect it'll hurt when they start having to cover new shipments and the tariffs thereon.

And these are failures to navigate that strait I mentioned.