I think originality is overrated. Hear me out.

Example 1: Star Wars should plagiarize more. Original Star Wars is Hidden Fortress in space, plus a bit of WW2 dogfighting and some car culture flavor. Late period Star Wars has been taking original Star Wars, blending it up, and pouring it back out again. Not enough plagiarism. Top Gun, but make it Star Wars and call it Rogue Squadron. Three Musketeers, but make it Star Wars and call it Three Jedi. Take your pick of old detective noir stories, set it on Coruscant, and call it the The Dantooine Falcon. Stop ripping off Star Wars in Star Wars, and go back to ripping off other properties, and it’s a license to print money.

Example 2: Stop trying to make movie franchises progress forward in time; continuity and originality are overrated. James Bond has been making virtually the same movie for over sixty years, and people still love it! Bond goes to exotic locale meets and beds some number of beautiful women, engages in a bit of extreme sports, foils the plan of some flamboyant villain. The actors are regularly changed without comment. The movie is always set “right now.” Bond has (almost) always been 007 for “a while.” Continuity virtually never spans more than a couple of movies until it gets reset to zero again. And it’s still going strong as a franchise! Pirates of the Caribbean could have used this pattern and just kept making crazy pirate adventure movies forever, but they got wrapped around the axle trying to keep a continuous plot going forward. Should have gone the James Bond route.

Stop trying to make original movies that advance an overarching plot across a franchise. Make movies that have already been made and that don’t take the franchise anywhere. You can’t go wrong.

Money may not buy happiness, but it can buy a jetski, and have you ever seen someone look sad on a jetski?

DO NOT CREATE THE TORMENT NEXUS

Homophobes: “We can’t legalize gay marriage! The birth rate would collapse! If men could marry men, then what reasonable man would ever choose to marry a disgusting, weak, woman over a strong, virile, muscular, sweaty, musky, oily, maaaannnnnn…”

The rest of us: Dude. Bro. Dude.

A “New York minute” is defined as the time between when the light turns green and when a New York driver will honk their horn at you.

1. Tater tots are basically an entire potential meal of their own. Not a French fry, but I may actually prefer them as a possible main dish.

2. The best French fries. They are the perfect side.

3. If you want to fancy it up a bit. Suitable for formal occasions.

4. Taking the one-dimensional line of the French fry and extrapolating it out to two dimensions. Still a good ketchup conveyance, but starting to get into the issue I’m going to bring up with…

5, 6, 7. Not a good enough ratio of crispy outer fried surface to gooey potato inner. I prefer crisp, but when I bite one of these, I have a good chance of just getting a mouthful of scalding hot potato napalm, or what’s worse, cold potato cement. Not ideal.

'8. Yeccch.

I don’t care how you say it, I just want to know if it works, because I have been burned by these products before, Trebek!

13 year old: “I’ll just take the death penalty, thanks."

You Made It Weird, with Pete Holmes. Really fucking funny comedian Pete has had lots of interesting guests. Usually starts with relatively normal stuff, but usually by the end of any given episode he gets into “Do you believe in God?”, “What do you think happens when we die?”, and “You ever do ayahuasca?” territory. Pete is SMART and has been going on his own spiritual and philosophical journey for a while, and it feels like every guest is another step on that journey. Look up the episode list and find someone you like and listen to their conversation.

Catra would never try to use the power of friendship to pay off gambling debt.

She’d either cheat at gambling so as to win big, or she’d run up a bunch of debt and then leave Scorpia holding the bag, with the possible long-term consequence of having to burn down the casino.

Red Cross

Counterpoint

I was watching Labyrinth on a loop as a young boy, and I thought David Bowie was awesome, but I turned out… more or less straight. Mostly. Pretty much. I mean, of course Bowie is gorgeous, I’m not an idiot.

a goofy mascot that keeps doing weird things.

Sounds like exactly what a king should be.

My uncle was a small-herd fairy farmer my entire life. Never had more than a couple dozen cows at a time, always knew all of them by name. He kept on getting squeezed out by larger and larger operations. He eventually went grass-fed organic to try and stay competitive. Then he told me that the large operations have organic mini-farms that they operate. The cows there are kept organic… but only so long as they remain in perfect health. The instant one gets sick, she gets moved over to the bigger factory operation and is pumped full of all the antibiotics that all the rest are kept on.

So, while my uncle is keeping a small herd and who has both financial and moral reasons for wanting to maintain his cows that way, a large factory farm can maintain a nominal organic operation, undercutting small fries like my uncle, but actually only keeping their cows organic for exactly as long as it’s convenient, and not a moment longer.

My uncle is retired now, but it hurt me to hear him tell that story. We ought to care about small family farms, but we keep letting capitalist “efficiency” turn every aspect of life on Earth into a market-optimized hellscape.

This book

was a lifesaver for me fresh out of college and not knowing what the hell to do in the kitchen.

I haven’t used AeroPress, but I appreciate that the French press is equally useful for making both hot and cold brew coffee. Mine is all-metal and you could just about beat someone to death with it.

“Mr. Franklin, of what use is this hot air balloon contraption?”

“You can take ladies up in it with a bottle of wine and a blanket and you know, they can’t refuse, because of the implication. Think about it. She’s floating up in the middle of the sky with some dude she barely knows. You know, she looks around, and what does she see? Nothing but open air. 'Ahhhh! There’s nowhere for me to run. What am I gonna do, say ‘no?’”