Luftmensch

I think cosplay can leave a lot of room for interpretation, depending on the character, the convention, the situation in general. If you look up Joker cosplays, you'll find a lot of contradicting interpretations, and perhaps even costumes with no overlapping features (for example, one person could do an unpainted scar-faced Heath Ledger Joker versus an over-the-top Killing Joke Joker). Even when there haven't been multiple canon interpretations, some characters simply lend themselves to different cosplay approaches (look up Wall-E cosplay if you want some good examples). A seemingly contradictory accessory, in a thoughtful, well-done costume, can be perfectly appropriate. Speaking of cosplay, apparently this fella was spotted sweeping up garbage at a convention.

A fork is actually perfect for scooping jam or jelly. It seems unintuitive, but jam is thick enough that a regular fork will still scoop it up just fine, and then you can use the fork to comb the jam into an even spread, where a spoon just smooshes it around without breaking up the chunks. Knives are still ideal for butter or peanut butter.

I, for one, stand behind any measure to ban America's Funniest Home Videos.

Well actually, that's more or less what we already do. It's illegal to drive a vehicle on public roads that doesn't meet these honestly pretty strict safety standards. We tolerate certain statistical risks including high top speeds and low driving ages because there's a huge cultural demand for them. Which might have something to do with the fact that the US has more traffic related deaths per capita, per vehicle, and per mile than all of Scandinavia, France, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and even Italy. Culture's hard to change, but the law, fortunately, keeps the damage down.

In more civilized nations (by which I always mean Britain), the police aren't armed with handguns (maybe even guns at all? I'm not sure). You may recall that the UK wasn't able to compete in the Olympics pistol games because no-one was allowed even to practice and train on the mainland until special exceptions were made. You may recall that following the civil war, the federal government made deals with the states that made it illegal to deploy army forces into a state without permission from the governor, even for aid. If you're interested in maintaining proper checks to power, perhaps you could petition for a clause demanding a disarmament of police forces as a condition to gun control? Or strictly limit military weapons onto bases or secure outposts, including reservists? Or you could argue for more gradual controls: Stronger limits on the import and manufacturing of guns, tighter control over ammunition, requirements to take a ballistic "fingerprint" of every manufactured gun, have cartridges coated with special pollens that can be traced, imprint signatures on bullets to make them more tracable, require logs of everyone who buys ammunition as well as strict inventories with manufacturers and wholesalers, voluntary gun buyback programs, public awareness campaigns,&c. I'm especially keen on the pollen solution: Pollen happens to be very good at surviving being shot through a gun, and there's one extra bonus: It contains DNA. DNA can be manufactured, sequenced, and logged in a database. If you required the whole gun industry to use genetic engineering before they were allowed to make ammunition, we'd have a lot more genetic engineering jobs, which is win-win. I don't know that anime, what's she from? I might go and watch it. I just saw the picture and thought it was relevant.

I distinctly recall the announcer shouting HOLY SHIT So I don't think it's out of place. I wouldn't be surprised if it came from Idle Thumbs, but I read somewhere that Valve adopted the Shitty Wizard as the scapegoat for all their code problems. Edit: found this: Allegedly the shitty wizard was also a used for creep in early builds.Anyway, I've been afraid to play on a multiplayer server because I don't really know the game, so I've been doing practice games with bots to get started. I was playing mainly as durable strength lords because they're not very complicated to play, but I was totally getting my ass kicked on easy and medium level bots, so I assumed I just sucked. Then I decided to branch out, and play as Sniper. I avoided playing carry because I kept hearing it was such a high-responsibility position, and only for experienced players, but I wasn't winning with Tiny so what the hell. I leveled up to 25 in no time, scored 14 kills, and single-handedly wiped out my lane and the radiant ancient, with no help except from my creep. Moral of the story, bots just can't carry I guess.

Cause guns are so kawaii.

An AR-15 is designed for self-defense in the same way Confederate cannons were designed for civil war reenactments. Difference is, people actually use Confederate cannons for reenactments, instead of stockpiling them in an arsenal, talking loudly about their right to reenact Civil War battles if they wanted to, and then launching a cannonball through a school. Theoretically you could use an assault weapon to defend yourself, but I reckon it's awful hard to not kill someone when you shoot them with a 5.56mm fragmenting bullet. Personally, "he started it!" is too weak of an excuse for me to knowingly kill someone when I have nonlethal alternatives, and I'd be glad to keep weapons out of the hands of bloodthirsty hicks who still think "Stand Your Ground" was an enlightened policy. Maybe it's easier if you choose to believe in an afterlife or vengeance, but I for one am glad to leave bronze-age ideology where it belongs.

Stark can't twerk.

The first rule of astronomy is: You do not talk about astrology.

I have been baffled how, here where I live in the south, we have an obscene amount of infrastructure for dealing with snowstorms relative to how much snow we get. In a typical year we get up to 4" of snowfall (a couple light dustings and sometimes a full inch or two stick once or twice), and the most I can ever remember falling was three or four inches at once. Despite that, our city somehow manages to pull out snow plows, maintenance vehicles with snow tires, and sometimes even salt the roads. Not sure how they reckon it's worth the money, but looking at a map of house values, mine and the surrounding ZIP codes have an average home value between $290k and $508k, so that might explain how they can pay for it.

Yeah, that's my beef with a lot of activists. My sister goes to an all-girls school, and she's underweight. Not unhealthy by any means, but she has a very straight figure; not a twig, but relatively light and skinny. Anyway, her school has special class mascots: Even years are the Pink Panthers, odd years are the Red Devils. My sister is a Red Devil, which means this is her mascot: Then recently, the school decided they wanted to change things, since that mascot's never been very popular (because it's butt-ugly), and they introduced this replacement: About half the class got in an uproar about the change, ostensibly because they thought the cartoon lady represented an oversexualization of women. My sister was actually really upset by the debate, because the rhetoric among the students turned to attacking the mascot's figure: "She's too skinny!" or "Real women have curves!" or "Nobody really looks like that!" Inadvertently, a well-intentioned campaign aimed at being more open and accepting regardless of appearance turned into a shaming campaign targeted against women who are skinny. So yeah. I'm not cool with that. I don't think it's the fault of feminism or activism, more like, I think that activists are just as prone to the same thoughtlessness and prejudice as anyone else, which is unfortunate. Edit: Note, it's also way uncool how the authors of the Feministing post have to make it a racialist thing. Blaming shit you don't like on "White Privilege" is just as much shaming as calling someone uppity. The folks at Guardian make a flawed point about Beyonce undermining feminism. You want to criticize that, that's fine. Saying "lul no ur white stfu" isn't.

Interesting bit of research you did there on the Hitler bit. It was a fascinating discussion, I'd recommend giving it a read. The point isn't to sympathize and agree with Hitler, only to be able to look back and acknowledge that he was in fact a very charismatic person whom people stood behind because he promised, and gave, his people what they thought they want. Good and Evil can only exist when you strip off a person's humanity. The holocaust was pretty terrible though. Would not recommend. Lots of homosexuals and gypsies and minorities and priests and Seventh Day Adventists and political dissidents and lots of Jews got killed. Problem is when you strip Hitler down to the number of people he ordered dead, it's a lot harder to be able to spot Hitlers in the future. Hard to go into a shopping mall and say Oh there's one! The fellow fencing in all those children and shooting them! Yeah, he must be a bad fellow. Better avoid that one! But yeah, you'll have to elaborate on that first comment. It's lost on me. Edit: Dammit how did I end up on the top of the page twice in a row?

Why have traffic laws? After all, traffic collisions make up a tremendous number of deaths in the United States but people who drive safely don't kill people on the road, it's the people who ignore the rules. Cars cost anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars, nobody just spends that money just to crash it into someone. We are a driving nation. You aren't all wrong, of course, but I think you're missing some of the points. Assault weapons are specifically a talking point because they're responsible for the largest mass shootings, and it's a perfectly fair target: They have no practical purpose in civilian life, they do kill people (even if relatively few), and it's a convenient gateway to overall more strict gun legislation. People in general don't want to own guns and don't want guns on the street, but it's a very sensitive topic because some chap decided it was a civil right a few centuries ago (which is like calling a screw a simple machine in my opinion: It's not necessarily the most enlightened idea, but it's been there so long noone's willing to throw it out).

I had a chat with a friend who just got back from studying in France, who marveled at how secure they were. Not in the sense you're talking about of being emotionally safe and positive environments; simply that they were built like fortresses. I have no idea about France as a whole or the world at large, but simply from a security standpoint, it's very easy to walk into a school campus. Heck, sometimes I walk right through a middle school campus when I walk into town, because it's just the fastest way. If you have a safe neighborhood, this is fine, but if you life in a dangerous area, it makes sense to have a campus where you can feel completely secure.

Jake looks flabbergasted at how cute that is.

Somehow I never got The Ship. Huh. Let me in on that fruitcake when it comes about. Speaking of, I bought 8 copies of Thirty Flights of Loving to give to friends because I'm a tool.

People talk a lot about that clause, but the Supreme Court has already ruled on that matter. The militia clause is popular to point out, but unfortunately US law's current official position is that assault weapons are protected under the second amendment for private ownership. On the bright side, this makes an academically interesting situation where the government is forced to work with one hand behind its back and come up with creative solutions. I won't say that the US is especially good at solving its problems, but I think that artificial boundaries make for some interesting results.

Well, the US is in the unfortunate position that it's legally obligated to allow its citizens to have weapons, so we're forced to think of workarounds and alternative solutions. I'll also note that in a typical good-sized restaurant kitchen, a single person with a knife could easily kill 1/4 of the kitchen staff before he's taken out himself. It's just an analogy for a society at large. Since knives are a necessity in a kitchen, and guns are, unfortunately, a legal necessity in the US, it might be useful to compare the social dynamic. Hah, I've been avoiding mentioning Bowling for Columbine. It seemed too easy. While we're picking easy stuff, here's Eddie Izard:

That's part of why I quit my last job. I was doing t-shirt graphics, which is kind of cool and fun, but I was doing it with incredibly short deadlines (usually only having time for one draft), having too many responsibilities (doing graphics, answering the phone, helping customers, printing, cleaning, inventory, and more often than not making up for work someone else didn't do) without enough time to dedicate to any one of them. It was really fun at first when I was just playing and learning and was expected to be creative, but after a few months I was expected to churn out routine formula designs. I would have made templates if I had time, but I didn't have Illustrator at home and at work I was always jumping from one job to another so I didn't have time for serious problem solving. I don't think I experienced serious burnout, but after about a year and a half it wasn't worth not getting paid shit to deal with it all. Truth be told my old bosses owe me a lot of money. I accepted the chump deal at first because they were family friends, I didn't need the money so much as the experience and something to do, and unlike anyone else, they offered me a job, but they're way the hell behind on paying me.

On the one hand, I agree: The general public has no use for assault weapons. Self defense and hunting firearms are reasonable demands, since those are instruments that have an obvious place in civilian life. Where I can see assault weapons making sense is if you have a well-trained and regulated militia that owns its own weapons. If citizens could only legally own assault firearms by swearing an oath and participating in regular mandatory drills and testing, I for one would feel more comfortable, not less, knowing I live near a gun owner. On the other hand, think of it this way: If you were to run a kitchen, how would you stop your chefs from stabbing each other? It seems like a silly question, but you have a whole room full of open flames, blunt instruments, and hella sharp knives. How do you make sure noone gets hurt if one of the chefs goes mental? Do you lock all the knives away and make sure only the sous chef has the key? Do you make sure there's an armed guard watching everyone? Do you set up gates and fences between the parts of the kitchen so noone can reach each other if they became armed? All of these seem like crazy solutions and they totally are. Nothing is physically preventing anyone from stabbing each other, but you don't need anything because you have an environment where everyone knows they can trust each other. While I don't think every schmoe needs to have an AK in their arsenal (or have an arsenal at all), I think it's possible to have an environment where weapons are abundant and you still can feel safe. You have to trust the police to protect you, and society not to kill you. That's not something that you can necessarily directly legislate, but it is something you can influence with media and by shifting the public discourse to be less isolationist and paranoid and more towards looking out for each other and trusting people. This is oversimplifying things, but when people feel like they can trust each other and the police to look out for them if someone did do something bad, we'd have a much easier time dealing with people having guns. And for that matter, we'd have a much easier time dealing with not having guns.

Related to that, I listen to Scriptnotes on a regular basis (hosted by Jordan Mechner's longtime collaborator John August), and some weeks ago he had a show with advice about when it's worth incorporating yourself. Six Figure Advice transcript

It depends a lot on your experience. I know some responsible gun enthusiasts who like to collect guns and shoot cans at the firing range for fun. That's all fine and good. Then there's my old boss, who would literally cock and aim his shotgun at people regularly as a joke. Even though his wife was almost killed ten years ago when someone else did the exact same thing with her. Even disregarding that, he is a paranoid looney, and if it weren't for the folks I know who are just plain enthusiasts, my impression of gun owners would be entirely defined by that old nutjob. I've seen fiction deal with that sort of idea a few times. Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court kind of deals with that. He tries to bring enlightened technology and policy to the medieval people, but the culture just can't take it. That's part of why the Prime Directive exists. Maybe a bottom-up cultural evolution would be good in the long-term, but I'm still optimistic for a top-down approach. Once people weren't allowed to segregate, things weren't all fixed, but they sure got better.