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.

A. The Princess Bride. More likely a spinoff with Inigo becoming the dead pirate Roberts

Counterpoint:

This video makes some great points about how movies don’t feel real anymore. Digital color grading is part of it, but the very short version is that movies don’t give us the sensory information or speak to us in the visual language that we need to feel like the movie is real. Watching the video gave me a whole vocabulary for how to critique failings in modern movies.

Yeah, assuming that a yard is meant to approximate the stride of an adult human, who’s the Goliath-sized motherfucker with the 5’ 3" stride who took a thousand steps and called that a mile?

Edit: Okay, I checked.

The furlong (meaning furrow length) was the distance a team of oxen could plough without resting. This was standardised to be exactly 40 rods or 10 chains.

An English mile is defined as 8 furlongs, 8 presumably being chosen because it divides by 2 and 4. What a cockamamie system of measurement.

Edit Again: Okay, I checked again.

The modern English word mile derives from Middle English myle and Old English mīl, which was cognate with all other Germanic terms for miles. These derived from the nominal ellipsis form of mīlle passus ‘mile’ or mīlia passuum ‘miles’, the Roman mile of one thousand paces.

A pace is a unit of length consisting either of one normal walking step, or of a double step, returning to the same foot.

This is all still very silly.

🥁✨

Every day brings us closer to All-Despising Baby Skull.

I understand that this looks like a pretty good setup for a Final Destination movie.

Phil Spector produced some of the best music of the twentieth century, including one of a handful of bearable Christmas albums in existence. Also he’s a fucking murderer. So… bit of a mixed bag, there.

I kind of think that Lovecraft was doing about the least-worst thing he could with his absolutely massive trove of neuroses and phobias, which definitely included racism and xenophobia.

He was convinced that the universe was chaotic and horrifying and that the only thing we could hold on to for stability was racial purity, and that’s pretty fucked up, but he turned those feelings into spooky stories about interdimensional space monsters, which is certainly a lot better than writing political tracts or trying to convince everyone that the Armenians are actually to blame for all of our problems.

Therapy would have been even better, but writing spooky stories was better than some of the very real alternatives that other people were exploring in the 19-teens and twenties.