People are actually meant to be functionally immortal, but ghosts always catch up to us and make us die within about a century at most.

When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.

–Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer

Billboards are illegal in the state of Vermont.

I’m familiar with all of the technology involved, but I’m not sure about the applications you’re describing.

With a Have-A-Heart, the specific goal is live capture and release. There is no killing involved. The animal might be properly freaked out at the experience of being trapped, but that is specifically so as to permit an animal’s live relocation.

With a bolt gun, it’s meant to be used in a slaughterhouse scenario, which is a whole moral discussion of its own, but at bare minimum one wants the animals to be kept as calm as possible until the bolt gun is applied, because stressed out meat tastes worse than calm and placid up until the moment of death.

With hunting, the goal is to kill the target as cleanly as possible, preferably with a single bullet. That’s the Scenario A I’m describing above.

If one were hunting an animal with the intent of killing it, then a trap, followed by a knife or bolt gun, would maximize the terror felt by the animal to be killed. Sure, one may be putting less lead out in the environment, but at the cost of putting the animal through… almost the most appalling experience of death possible, with the admitted exception of a poorly-aimed bullet or arrow, followed by a wounded flight through the woods and slowly bleeding out.

So… if one’s absolute maximum goal is to reduce environmental lead, yes, that is one way to do it, but the moral implications of that method seem pretty rough.

Scenario A: You’re minding your own business, when a bullet passes through your heart/lungs and you’re dead in seconds.

Scenario B: You get caught in a trap and wait for hours for an ape with a knife or a bolt gun to come along and finish the job.

Honestly, if I were an animal, I’d prefer Scenario A.

Holy shit, I had no idea Raymond Cocteau was this before he was Raymond Cocteau. That’s total genius casting.

Comrade, I rented that movie from a locally-owned VHS rental shop that used physical membership cards.

Sure it’s a dystopia, but it’s a dystopia where they solved too many problems. John Spartan gets into a high speed car crash and his car instantly fills up with safety foam and he’s completely unharmed. The police force is ethnically and gender diverse. Guns are museum pieces. The cops don’t know HOW to assault somebody.

Sure they’ve killed a large amount of choice, and the guy in charge of it all seems to be determined to secure even more power for himself because of course he’s a sociopath with Mr. Rogers’ speech patterns, but all told I’d much rather live in the Demolition Man future than Judge Dredd or Death Race 2000.

If the three sea shells discourse isn’t a stand-in for 90s Americans’ anxiety about bidets then I don’t know what is.

“Gambling and crypto” reminds me of when I was in DARE and they would refer to “drugs, alcohol, and tobacco,” and I thought “aren’t those all drugs?”

Depending on the photo, without size context clues, I would probably have a hard time telling them apart.

Aw, fuck.

Presumably at some point a human being was involved in the decision making process to try and use this image to convey… some kind of message to other human beings, and at least one human being in that process couldn’t be bothered to give the AI slop more than the most cursory glance.

Unless of course one could design a fully-automated system of generating pseudo-scientific clickbait factoid garbage accompanied by AI-generated illustrations, entirely dedicated to producing as much vaguely plausible-seeming garbage as possible, 24 hours a day, just spewing out the opposite of useful knowledge at an unfathomable rate.

But what kind of monster would deploy that weapon on humanity?

Commentary tracks are the underappreciated treasures of physical media. Lord of the Rings gets a lot of deserved praise, but The Matrix has a philosophers commentary track which is awesome, and the 1989 Batman has Tim Burton geeking out over his own movie in a delightful fashion. Also, Jonathan Frakes does a hilarious commentary on Star Trek: First Contact where he sounds simultaneously like a popular high school jock and a gigantic Star Trek dweeb, and I adore him for it.

I worked at a used media store 10+ years ago, and I remember worrying about what would happen when everything was conveniently available on good ol’ reliable Netflix, which at the time seemed like the logical thing that everyone would eventually sign up for, and then what would I do?

Fast forward to today, and streaming has certainly changed the market. Huge TV show box sets are almost impossible to sell, though it’s not a totally dead market. DVDs and Blu-rays sell about as well as they ever did, if not better. Maybe everything is on a service somewhere, but most households aren’t going to sign up for every service, so as a result of all the streaming services fighting like dogs for library rights, there’s almost always someone looking to get a cheap, used, physical copy of a movie they can’t get elsewhere.

If anything, I feel more secure about the future of physical media today than I did ten years ago.

I just got into tying knots! It’s a useful skill. You can pick it up in a couple of minutes and then improve continuously. There are a lot of books on the subject. It’s cheap. You can use cord you might already have lying around the house, or you can get paracord at the hardware store, or you can go somewhere fancy like Paracord Galaxy if you want some extra special colors or patterns. It’s soothing and leaves you with something tangible at the end.

Here’s a monkey’s fist knot I just finished! I’ve been giving them to friends to use as keychains.

I heard an interview with the costumer who designed Elvis Presley’s rhinestone-studded jumpsuits. They kept on not paying him, but he was having so much fun that he didn’t really want to stop, so instead of quitting he just kept making each jumpsuit more elaborate and more expensive. “Yes, this new suit requires $15,000 worth of genuine Alsatian rhinestones.” Not exactly win-win, but I’m glad he was having fun and spending a ton of Elvis’ money.

At first I thought it was FHQWHGADS.

Yes, but also: