Fizzzzle

Tim Roth was great, I'm looking forward to seeing more of him. I liked that we got more snippets of Jen being an actual character this episode.

One of the reasons the age for recruitment will never increase to 21 in a million years is specifically because basically no one would ever join the military again (or very few people). By the time you're 21, you most likely have some kind of life and giving it all up to join the service seems like not as great of an idea. That being said, the military is a great option for a lot of people. There are even a lot of doctors and dentists who will join the military because the military will wipe out their medical school debt in exchange for [x] years of service, and they start as officers automatically in addition to getting housing provided (actual houses, mostly) and not getting paid like shit.

Dude, I fucking love this guy. He gets super nerdy about transit and sounds EXACTLY like the person who would annoy people that you're trying to bug about urbanism. He's literally a Mike Judge character.

Sounds like a great day. I bought some chips and salsa and was totally pumped to eat it, but then I ate a bratwurst and now I'm not hungry anymore.

This essentially wipes out most of my debt minus $2k or so. We chillin'

Good news is the books will already be finished for this one! (famous last words, but seriously, GRRM has already published the basic plotline for the show, you can see who "wins" in the end if you want, I believe most of it is covered in A World of Ice and Fire)

I'm also a book reader (though I've never read Fire & Blood, which might help), and I was pleasantly surprised. ... it's just picking us all up before the fall.

Agreed. It makes sense for the narrative. I haven't read Fire & Blood, but I am pretty familiar with the Dance of the Dragons plotline, and I'm glad they didn't introduce a ton of characters that aren't really going to matter until a long way down the road.

I quite enjoyed that.

That's kind of how I feel about Rings of Power too

This is their version of biden eating ice cream

That's the thing - I know she's Bruce's cousin. As @SuperSpreader says, they mention it all the time. But that doesn't tell us anything, they just shove us into a road trip. "Bruce Banner's cousin" is not a character trait. Is she flawed? I don't know. Does she have dreams? Beyond wanting to be a lawyer, I don't know. Is she witty? Probably a bit, the writers aren't dumb. There is literally no character building. The first episode relies entirely on playing off of Bruce's character, the rest of the episode is "Hulks chilling in Mexico" for 30 minutes. Nothing happens that gives you an insight into what is driving the story that couldn't be summarized in a 1-minute scene. Judging only on the first episode, it's sort of the opposite world version of Falcon vs. Winter Soldier.

I'm down with that. Shout out to Keyser sozes mom.

I'm honestly a sucker for Buffalo wild wings. I can't hide it. What about you? Do you get down with Applebee's? Chili's? Outback

Maybe it's because I have basically never read a comic in my life, but I can't get over the fact that I don't know who the hell this person is. Why is she a lawyer? What is her relationship to Bruce? What is... anything? Ms. Marvel did SO much character building in the first episode. She Hulk did not

Eh.... say what you want about the CGI, but like... nothing about that episode was good. It was like fanfiction. I'm not hopeful that this series will amount to anything, but we'll see. The first episode really didn't establish anything about anybody, it was literally just scene chewing for 30 minutes. Like, they took 30 minutes to tell me that Jen is a Hulk and she got powers from getting in a car crash with Bruce. I don't know anything about her personality. I don't know anything about anything. 75% of the episode was throwback lines and Hulk visual gags.

You know what else? It's easy to say "men are discouraged from showing emotions." That's not true, at least for me. I'm fine with crying in front of people. I realized that what happens is every time I feel sad or angry or in pain, my default response is to say to myself "there's no time for that right now, we'll deal with it later." Later never comes. I just bottle everything up, not because I'm afraid of the emotions necessarily, but because my brain just says "now is not the time." And then when something as monumentous (is that a word?) As someone close to me dying happens and the flood gates break, it ends up just being like every bit of pain, sadness, and rage that I've been putting off all comes crashing in at once. A lot of it has nothing to do with anything else, it's just like... like I said, the dam breaks.

Someone fairly close to me that I've known for a long time just passed away yesterday. He had parkinson's. I went to work, and it had been obvious that I had been crying by that point. I'm sure my eyes were red and puffy. After a few different occasions where I just had to go and cry a bit, my boss was like "dude, just go home." I don't think he meant to judge by it and I didn't take it that way, but I was just a bit of a mess. I thought I had my emotions in control, but do you know what made me lose control? It was my uber driver saying "how 's it going?" It sounds so stupid, but I've noticed a pattern in how I grieve people that I've lost. I bottle up everything and pretend everything is fine, and the first thing that makes the dam break is the first time a stranger asks me "how's it going?" That's what breaks me. Because this stranger doesn't actually care how things are going, they're just being polite, and my response is "good!" when every fiber of my being wants to scream "THINGS ARE NOT GOOD, I'M FUCKING FALLING TO PIECES," and that effort of lying about how I'm actually feeling causes me to confront my true feelings for the first time and I jsut fall apart. It's like I'm able to pass off as "fine" as long as I don't have to lie about it. As soon as I have to lie to some stranger and tell them "yeah, everything's good," I just lose it. Like the extra energy it takes to lie to people strips away the wall that I had built around myself to get through the day. I don't have the mental energy to both bottle everything up and lie to someone at the same time.

I mean, one thing you can credit New Orleans for, it is possibly the most walkable/bikeable city in the south. Maybe even moreso than Atlanta. Every major road has a median that allows pedestrians to not have to cross 5 lanes of traffic at once, there are tons of bike lanes, and the streetcar runs 24/7. The streetcar is slow as shit and you can't get everywhere on it, but you can get from Tulane to Marigny pretty easily, and the route never fully stops. They also have a ferry that runs between Canal St and Algiers that runs like 20 hours a day. Basically, New Orleans is kind of shit in terms of transit on a global scale, but compared to the rest of the south, it is easily the most walkable/bikeable city. Atlanta has better transit, but it's got more sprawl. New Orleans is fairly compact.

Sounds fucking dope. Wild camping/backpacking/whatever you call it is something that you can't replicate. I hope you had a great time. I'd love to do it again in the western US, but it's like half the year it's illegal to light fires, and the other half it's cold and damp and miserable. No longer can you light an actual fire in Glacier in June. It was a unicorn of a time...

"but if we get rid of the filibuster, what will happen when REPUBLICANS take back control again?!?" What fucking cuck attitude. The last major thing the Democrats got done was Obamacare, and even most Republicans wouldn't dare to repeal a lot of it, because it actually helped people.

There is a market on Royal, which is one street adjacent to Bourbon. There's also a couple open air markets that are really cool by the waterfront.

I mean, that makeup is A+, though. Goddamn.

Honestly, as stupid as it sounds, do one of the walking tours. No one wants to be "that tourist," but they're fun, you just walk around with a tour guide and drink. Bonus points if you do the ghost tours - it's all bullshit but they make it fun. There's a bar called Voodoo on Rampart that is open 24 hours a day, it's kind of a good dive bar to begin with, but there's also a walking tour company that operates out of it. And they give you 2 massive hurricanes for the tour for like 10 or 12 bucks. Watch out for roaches at night, they're fucking everywhere on the streets. You never get used to them. Especially the ones that fly. If you want to party in the French Quarter, I recommend staying off Bourbon Street. Almost everything on Bourbon is a rip off. However, if you like going to gay bars, pretty much every bar on St. Ann is a gay bar. Locals call it the "Fruit Loop." Probably my favorite area in the French Quarter tbh. Don't accept beads from the guys who walk up and down the street. They literally pick the beads up from the gutter from the previous night and try to sell them to people. Those beads are covered in piss and puke. Try to spend some time in the Garden District. That's where most of the good food is. Most restaurants in the French Quarter are overpriced garbage. Hit up New Orleans City Park. There's a bunch of stuff to do around there, too. Also the National WW2 Museum is in New Orleans for some reason. Not sure how that happened, but apparently it's supposed to be fantastic. I've never been myself. Oh and don't walk around Treme at night if you don't know where you're going. I know, I live there, you can stumble into the wrong shit at the wrong time if you're just wandering aimlessly. Best stick to the roads that you're used to.

I mean, I am stretching definitions, and you could argue that the most effective gun is one you never have to fire, but on the other hand, if the entire purpose of a gun is to shoot people, and a majority of lethal gunshots are self-inflicted, then yes, if you own a gun and ever fire it outside of a range, the odds are it will be to blow your own brains out, not in self defense. I'm also conveniently igoring that self-inflicted gunshots are probably more lethal as you're not firing at a moving target, but still.