Spice was the naughty cable channel I wasn’t allowed to watch.

Despite being illustrated with a stock photo of the Catholic Pope and mentioning his recent remarks on AI further down, the article notes that this person was granted a religious exception based on Unitarian Universalist practice, not Catholicism.

For those unfamiliar, Unitarian Universalism is an inclusive and diverse movement centered around common ethical principles which basically boil down to “you do you, just don’t be a dick.”

I usually default to subs, but there are certain dubs that are pretty iconic and I’ll sometimes choose over the Japanese. For example I always enjoy the English-language cast of Cowboy Bebop and count that as one of the times they really Got It Right translating the dialogue and casting the dub.

And, of course, there are the gag dubs like Samurai Pizza Cats or the Funimation version of Shin Chan in which the dub clearly veering away from the source material and doing its own thing is the whole point.

Ad-free podcasts are the best podcasts.

Not only that, he was a direct caricature of the producer’s former boss.

• https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/shrek-criticism-disney/
• https://www.tumblr.com/modmad/175300711680/delistylehardcore

I was a 1980s kid. Darth Vader was one of those peak villains one sees in childhood, the ultimate bad guy. He killed indiscriminately. He had space wizard magic to find you and read your mind and choke you remotely. He had the evil (red) version of the coolest weapon in the universe. He was so scary his own soldiers on the bad guy side were afraid of him. He tortured the princess. For some reason he was part robot, had a deep commanding voice, and even his breathing was scary. And to top it all off, it turned out he was the good guy’s father. Fathers are supposed to be safe, not scary!

I had many, many childhood nightmares about Darth Vader. I watched the movies an incalculable amount of times, I cheered when the good guys beat him, or at least escaped him with their skin intact.

Then I grew up, and the prequels happened. I don’t know if any retroactive backstory could have matched the feelings my childhood mind had generated so many years earlier, but I was at least curious about what they’d come up with to explain who Darth Vader had been and what made him that way… only to learn that apparently the ultimate scary badass was apparently just some dull and whiny guy who somehow was randomly lucky, smart, and magical, lived a really nice and comfortable life with lots of support and encouragement, but was just all “no I wanna be bad now because some easily-resolvable life stuff made me angry waaaah.”

So disappointing.

This would be the same continuity in which magic villain blood is found to be the cure for actual death, and they use it once and then never speak of it again.

That’s also how it works in the recent game where you replay Voyager’s journey. You just have your engineers research photon torpedo building, and then doing so uses up a portion of your normal tech resources.

Farquaad’s name was literally the filmmakers calling their family-movie villain “Fuckwad” and sneaking it past the radar.

Anyone who has worked retail will tell you that one of the funniest things a crappy customer can do is threaten to take their business elsewhere. “You mean you’ll stop bothering me with your bullshit and never come back? Oh no!!!”

Imagine feeling the need to name-drop in order to somehow improve your Walmart experience.

I personally don’t like using catchall for this, I prefer to play with aliases, but it’s certainly another way to do it depending on the result you want.

For those unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJN9mBRX3uo

Another fun thing to do when you have your own email on your own domain is create all sorts of fun little forwarders/aliases so you can give out addresses that aren’t your main one, track who passes the address you gave them along to spammers, and delete the alias addresses whenever you like.

For example, you want to buy some cheese from the site Cheesemonger.foo and you need to give them an email address when creating your account. So, you give them [email protected] which is an alias you set up to forward to your real email inbox, and you receive mail from that site as normal. If you then start getting spam email sent to cheesemonger@yourdomain you know for a fact where the spammers got the address, and you know to delete that forwarder and buy your next batch of cheese elsewhere because screw those address-selling jerks at Cheesemonger.foo.

If they’re made of wood.

Burn the witch!

So I can either set up an expensive machine that will make my electricity meter spin like a helicopter rotor while being a major safety hazard to life and, even if it works only as intended, fill the air with a constant supply of mosquito smoke (don’t breathe this!) or I could just get some of those curly sticky strips from the dollar store.

What if AI is their only chance?

One could always drop coins into a wishing well, which has about as much chance as AI of solving this particular problem.

Or, if they just wanted to get a shot of Kirk from this movie, they could screenshot any of the tens of thousands of frames of him from that very movie, which they own and for which they are making the thumbnail.

Now I’m imagining someone tuning in to Farscape for the first time on a Harvey episode, and trying to make any sense at all out of anything they were watching.

Beating your neighbors unconscious, removing their clothes, and putting them on yourself “can be part of the process” of getting dressed, but people would call you a jerk for doing that instead of getting your own clothes.