Spoilers for 007 flick No Time To Die from 2021:

!spoiler spoiler we find out the next 007 is exactly a seductive woman. The above concept could be written with the actress chosen for that film as the new 007 and it wouldn’t feel like a character change at all.!<

Definitely a recommend if you’re a Bond fan and missed it during the pandemic.

As a person with aphantasia, I’ve enjoyed it since I was a child. But my parents read to me every night before bed for a long time, and so my hunch is that I latched onto it because of that positive association.

Fun fact worth noting: humans and octopodes split back when our shared bodyplan was effectively a worm who just got legs. Octopuses have been shown to be able to learn and memorize letters, patterns, their different keepers (e.g., spitting at one particular keeper they didn’t like), etc., and all the intelligence they’ve been demonstrated to learn evolved separately from humans.

So we’ve actually got two examples of “worm with newly-evolved legs” becoming pretty damn smart on Earth, not just one - which makes my bet more on the “if the biosphere got to worms with legs, there’s a lot of smart stuff there”

One Two Three Four

I declare a thumb Woman

It’s a descriptive rule, not a prescriptive rule, and likely one snuck into the powerpoint to try and get the class thinking and laughing. Like calling the descriptions of gravity the “laws of gravity”, it describes something about the world we’ve seen, but there’s no Physics Police enforcing all matter follow the “Laws” - it’s just the term we use for a description of how things work.

A lot of advanced English classes are much more on the descriptivist side of things - observing patterns in ways we use language - than the prescriptivist approach we get in grade school where we’re just learning rote things like spellings.

Back in the alarm days of college I used Pink Floyd - Time because the couple seconds of ticking before everything went off would send me into conniptions to prevent the calamity.

Then I found sleepyti.me and now I only use 'em when I can’t/haven’t gone to bed at the right time or really can’t risk missing a plane. Would recommend.

Bojack Horseman has some good rep, but before that, yeah, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head. An explicit “Ace day” seems silly unless pitched as a self-care day, I guess?

This is what I would refer to the extra big bags of cereal as when living with a friend and it was his turn to do grocery shopping.

“1x bachelor chow cinnamon crunch, 1x fruity pebbles.”

Great book, I still occasionally use its “glass teletypes” when referring to screens

That’s a weird-un. I moved to Fedora specifically because I wanted a no-nonsense distro, and for the last 7 years it’s delivered on various desk- and laptops, knock-on-wood.

Invertebrates? No. All out

I invite you to meet the awesome jumping spider, whose eyes are very especially needed set up to be forward-facing for depth perception for their jumps, and who hunt other spiders, as well as the wolf spider, who are also a hunting (as opposed to web) spider.

In fact, you can use the chart of spider eye layouts to pretty much identify whether you’re looking at a spider who builds webs and waits or a spider who hunts:

Anyone with two big forward-facing eyes is probably looking around for their next meal; the rest are building a web, trapdoor, or taking some other approach.

If unaware, you may enjoy this contest (of which I’ve chosen the 2021, but there are many and they are great)

adding the 2012 because it’s just the best

Pomme d’terror

Oh dang, it was my media PC until 2017, when the switch took over its role, IIRC. Definitely got my money’s worth out of it even if there were no games lmao

Do I still get to grease squeaky hinges? If so, maybe a deal.

There’s a 1994 interview with Bill Gates in which he talks about how someday in the future we will have what he calls wallet PCs, and which will allow us to pay for things, be cameras, things we can use to hold our tickets to go into shows, etc. One of the best Playboy interviews.

Honestly I think we’re in the radium water phase of the tech: it’s been found to do things we couldn’t before, but nobody’s got a clear idea of what exactly what it can do, so you’ve got everyone throwing it into everything hoping for a big cash-out. Like, y’know, Radithor when people were just figuring out radioactivity was a thing.

prescriptivists are lingual nazis

Not very hopeful if you have diseases easily managed in a global society, like epilepsy, but for which you are effectively dead if global medicine production stops.

I’ll be real: that butter distribution is hitting all the right spots in my brain and I have been craving a butter-drenched waffle for a few hours now. Luckily, it’s after when I normally eat, and hopefully by tomorrow I will have forgotten.