Dawn of War and its expansions are awesome, if you don’t mind playing a game from two decades ago.

Vampire Robot. Love me some B-roll.

It was right around the release of Star Wars Episode I, and the new pastor thought if he brought modern pop culture references into his sermon, maybe The Youths would sit up and pay attention.

The sermon was a whole thing about “being a Jedi Knight for God” and it was insufferable. I’m not sure time has ever gone by slower. I was twelve and absolutely not won over, I wanted to crawl out of the pew and die.

#ea8917, I like a nice orange.

Andy, but they decided against it at the last minute. However, my dad’s brother and his pregnant wife really liked the name, and a few months later my cousin Andy was born.

JustWatch does a decent job of telling you if a specific movie is on any of the streaming services. For example, I just searched for the movie Tombstone and apparently it’s on Apple TV+, Hulu, and AMC’s service.

It’s not always accurate, so take everything it says with a grain of salt, but it’s better than nothing.

Perv here. Gimme a plain cheese all day every day!

Cathy Berberian - Stripsody

An opera singer and avant-garde music composer who made a song out of comic book sound effects.

Less strange, she also did an operatic cover of The Beatles’ Ticket to Ride. I’m pretty sure my ironic love of this has crossed over into completely unironic genuine love.

No joke, I think about “do all your shopping… at Wal-Mart!” more than I should.

Funnily enough I loved the Wet Paint song and looked forward to it BECAUSE they throw paint at the screen and I thought that was really neat. Just goes to show you how these little skits affect kids in wildly different ways

I-beam

If you don’t watch the video: it’s footage of an I-beam being created at a factory. As an adult, this is not scary. As a young child, this is terrifying. There is no narration, none of your Sesame Street friends are here with you. This is a large glowing letter I that the camera never breaks away from. It’s mashed and chunks appear to break off of it. The music is a ominous sounding piano with occasional trumpet bursts and anvil clanks. At the very end the camera freezes on the I-beam and we get two final crashing piano and anvil notes. The whole thing lasts less than a minute, and then we’re on to the next segment. There’s no context for what you just saw, no lead-in, and no one makes mention of it after.

It scared the hell out of me. If I saw this early in the morning, I’d be in an anxious state for the rest of the day.

Some digital artists use Switch JoyCons for shortcuts in Clip Studio and other painting programs.

According to my parents, it was I Got My Mind Set On You by George Harrison. I was a toddler and apparently loved that song.

But the first one I distinctly remember was the B-52’s Love Shack.

Dick Van Dyke comes from an era where it would be real easy to do a lot of bad shit without anyone ever knowing, and I hope he never did.

My high school didn’t have them, but the vocational school where I took extra classes did, as did our family’s PC. I thought they were great. This was about 2001-2004ish, flash drives weren’t a thing yet, and burning a CD to hold a single word doc or powerpoint or something like that seemed really wasteful.

Sometimes I would put a couple mp3s on a zip drive and bring them to school to listen to while I was working on a project.

The one toy I wanted more than anything as a kid was the Jurassic Park Compound.

I see them on Ebay going for $100-200, but that’s just for the building itself. It’d be pretty pointless to have a big fence with no dinosaurs in it, so I’d have to buy some dinos too. And I need action figures to sit in the watchtower and watch over the dinosaurs, you gotta have that.

And then the realities of adulthood set in: I wouldn’t enjoy this toy as much as I would have when I was a kid. Kid me would probably spend hours with this thing crafting big elaborate stories about wrangling dinosaurs and stuff like that. Nearly-40 me would set up the toys, make sure everyone’s in cool poses, and then it would probably sit on a shelf. I’m not really sure it’s worth it.

So while I’m sad I never got the toy as a kid, I think going back and buying it nowadays would be kind of an expensive hollow victory.

You might want to check out Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers. The book is about the people of the Exodus Fleet, a group of multi-generation ships that left Earth years ago. Even though the fleet eventually found other planets for them to live on, many are content to continue living out in space. It’s a neat little slice of life book about this community doing their part to keep these ships going.

We’ll take all kinds of dragons!

Small dragons, big dragons, even radioactive dragons.

When it comes to buying furniture: Get secondhand furniture handed down by relatives, or found at thrift stores, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, garage sales, whatever. It’s more eco-friendly to buy stuff that already exists, it’ll probably cost less than brand-new furniture, and the older stuff is sturdier than anything you’re going to get at Ikea.

With the money you save buying secondhand tables and drawers and such, buy a GOOD brand new mattress. You can cheap out on a lot of furniture, but never cheap out on a mattress. Decades from now, your back will thank you.

Seconding joggers. They’re basically just sweatpants with good marketing. I’ve got two pairs that haven’t pilled up on me yet.