You can’t bring the time travel souvenir back with you in the time machine. You’ve got to store it in a safe cave or storage unit or something so that it’ll be at least plausibly aged by the time it reaches the future, even if surprisingly well-preserved.

I went through a handful of devices, and none of them ticked off all the boxes for me.

Now I use a Unihertz Jelly Star. It’s tiny, it has Bluetooth, Wifi, expandable memory, headphone jack, and in a pinch it’s also a phone with a camera and flashlight and so forth. The battery charges very fast, and it’s got a halfway decent external speaker. More dedicated audiophiles than me would have to weigh in on if it’s pumping out audio signal in all the right bass and treble frequencies at appropriate levels, but it does everything I wanted from a digital audio player.

Kira: Captain Boday? You want me to bring Captain Boday to your quarters for dinner?

Dax: It’s just a suggestion.

Kira: Well, it’s a bad suggestion! Number one, you used to go out with Captain Boday, number two, Worf hates him, and number three, and we’ve discussed this many times, Captain Boday has a transparent skull.

Dax: And you don’t like to see a man’s brains?

The show is awesome, but it’s about 30% Twilight Zone, 20% Ghost in the Shell, and 50% incomprehensibly kinky fetish so esoteric that the censors didn’t know that it ought to have been censored for TV release.

But that’s not a convincing proof.

I want to see it all fluffed up for winter.

…beans…

Despite being set in France, Lumiere is one of only two characters in the movie with a French accent, the other being Babette, the sexy feather duster. In the animated movie, Lumiere is played by Jerry Orbach, who is not French, but who played world-weary recovering alcoholic homicide detective Lenny Brisco on Law and Order.

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 Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, “You may rest a little now,” ​Alice looked round her in great surprise. “Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!”

“Of course it is,” said the Queen: “what would you have it?”

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else——if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

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.

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.

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.