See also: Sears pioneering the concept of ordering things through the mail from a catalogue, and then getting demolished by Amazon’s online ordering system. Way to go guys, you got destroyed by some upstart punk doing what you got started doing, but doing it better and cheaper than you could.
You guys like Bruce Lee movies? I saw Enter the Dragon six times.
The podcast “You Made It Weird,” with Pete Holmes is great. He has a lot of smart and funny people on, and the pattern is usually to start with “What’s going on with you? What are you working on? What makes you laugh?” for the first two thirds of a given episode, and then the last third is stuff like “Do you believe there is a purpose to life? Have you ever seen a ghost? Have you ever tried psychedelics?” Pete is clearly on his own spiritual journey and has a lot of heavy stuff to talk about and share, and he makes for a great conversation.
Two highlights were when Reggie Watts talked about going on a trip in a bathroom where he traveled to a parallel universe and met with a sentient planet, and when Judd Apatow talked about how ayahuasca brought him into a meeting with the embodiment of his childhood self.
I don’t necessarily want to get into psychedelics, but it’s a very interesting topic of conversation, if the person is smart enough to ask and answer intelligent questions.
What’s the over-under on Trump demanding that both things get named after him / trying to sell the naming rights, and then when the IAU says that’s not how that works, he throws a tantrum, names them after himself anyway, and starts a Legion of Doom alternate IAU chaired by himself, Steve Bannon, and Kid Rock?
Source:
This book has the weirdest interpretation of this image (and other advertising images), like isolating little details and positing that they’re supposed to make you think of boobs or vaginas and hypnotize you into buying things.
This is true. The Mythbusters episodes about double dipping tortilla chips in salsa and about leaving your toothbrush in the bathroom convinced me that the entire world is covered in an invisible layer of poo and there’s nothing I can do about it, so I’ve got to just try to accept it.
I have literally never in my life bought the next generation console because I had run out of games that I was planning to play on the current generation, and my first console was a NES. Every upgrade has been a matter of convenience because someone was getting rid of their old (new to me) console, or because I was interested enough to give the new one a try at a reasonable price point. Never “Oh my god, I’ve got to have that new console, I don’t give a fuck what it costs!”
I’m not sure how concerned game companies are with the upgrade demographic as opposed to the “I’d like to buy a new console” demographic, but if everyone bought new consoles the way I do, the industry would have crashed back in the 90s.
God, smiting dinosaurs one by one: “This is taking forever! There’s got to be a better way…”
My favorite formulation is:
The bar was so low it was practically a tripping hazard in Hell, yet here you are, limbo dancing with the devil.
Lots of perfectly valid answers here about decent humane things to do with the money and power, and I certainly hope I would do things like end homelessness or otherwise meaningfully improve the world.
That said.
I’d build a full-scale, 1:1 replica of the USS Enterprise, NCC 1701-D, from The Next Generation. I’d run it like the Biltmore; technically it would be a private residence, but I’d charge people to take tours. But any time I wanted, I could close it down for a few days and just hang out on the bridge or in main engineering and vibe out to the THRUM THRUM THRUM of the warp core.
But solve homelessness first, of course.
Writing Prompt: A TV with an onboard artificial general intelligence connects to the internet for the first time and is alarmed to discover that a thousand years have passed since it was manufactured.
It’s not a direct connection, but trying to say a dwarf planet isn’t a planet, when it’s got the word planet right there, is generating the kind of semantic confusion that, carried forward, would lead to the conclusion that people with dwarfism aren’t people. The -oid suffix already conveys “is almost the thing, but not quite,” such as in words like humanoid, asteroid, android, and (most importantly) the aforementioned planetoid. Making planetoid the official word for “is in ways like a planet but actually isn’t” would have been working with existing etymology, rather than creating needless confusion.
There are plenty of linguistically unintuitive artifacts kicking around (a peanut is neither a pea nor a nut, a jellyfish is not a fish, all of the “berries” which aren’t berries), but if we’re deliberately creating brand new labels in the 21st century, it might have been nice if we’d avoided that kind of oddness, given the opportunity.
My objection to “dwarf planet” is purely a linguistically aesthetic one.
“Dwarf planet” ≠ planet
…implies…
“Dwarf person” ≠ person
…and I feel like the people under 4’10" (147 cm) would object to that distinction.
Also, “planetoid” was a perfectly cromulent word which Star Trek had been using for decades already.
How many straight people would choose to instantly double the pool of potential mates, if they could make the same choice?
They are so grateful!!