"They weren't real pearls, you know," Batman said, speaking for the first time in three hours.

"Master Bruce?" Alfred replied, immediately. No matter how long the silence, he always replied immediately.

The Bat-Computer's monitor flickered, still saying "Searching..." "My mother's necklace. Real pearls have a knot between each one. Keeps them from rubbing against each other. They're fragile, friction can wear them down. You have to restring them every few years."

The cowl was slung back, his face puffy and tired-looking.

Years ago, noted failure Kirk Cameron had an evangelical video where he said bananas proved the existence of God. Perfectly shaped to the human hand, tasty and edible, in an easy-to-open package.

The problem with this (or one of the problems) is that wild bananas look like this: Wild bananas have thick skins, they're riddled with seeds. We selectively bred bananas for years until we came up with the mutant varietal we slice into our Cheerios every morning.

"Allied Forces" in "1919" in "Dusseldorf."

Okay, dipshit: World War 1 ended in 1918.

In World War 1, the two sides were the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente.

Germany was part of the "Triple Alliance," so you're saying that Germans captured their own city after the war.

https://twitter.com/ABridgen/status/1643178412213764096

"Allied Forces" is a term specific to World War II. Like this is obvious horseshit from the first sentence.

During the Renaissance, despite what you might expect, the Old Masters didn't just eyeball the marble slab or the blank expanse of cathedral ceiling and dive in with a chisel or paintbrush.

No, first they made a detailed sketch, as close to full-size as they could manage. These sketches came on big, firm pieces of card stock that made them easier to work with, and they were, of course, beautiful, as even an old Master's preliminary sketches were prettier than most people's finished products.

Here's my assumption: sometime during TNG, when Picard was spending time on Bajor, he got infected with a weakened Pah Wraith, either because it was wounded or young or whatever. All it could do was cause him brain damage. He then passed that Pah Wraith to young Jack Crusher, who has been living with it his whole life, creating a weird power dynamic between the two that is more symbiotic than we normally see.

Outdoorsy-dude Insta accounts are hilarious cuz they're always like "my pack has a hatchet, a bigger hatchet, three knives, bear grenades, a waxed canvas army bag, and an old-timey oil lamp."

And then real outdoorsy people are like "I have a 2" knife for cutting summer sausage." "My bugout bag has an m1911 a1, 400 rounds of ammunition, three bags of water, freeze-dried three-course meals and a flare gun."

Real outdoorsy people: "I have ramen noodles and a water filter."

In Strange New Worlds, one character is seen reading a fantasy novel by Benny Russell, a 1950s author whose life Ben Sisko hallucinated in the DS9 episode "Far Beyond The Stars."

This suggests that Benny Russell was, in fact, real. Ben Sisko began having visions of a life as Benny Russell, dealing with the prejudice of trying to be a speculative fiction author in the 1950s - and Russell's experiences helped reaffirm Sisko's resolve at a moment when his faith was wavering.

I developed an insane #DS9 fan theory last night.

So, in the TNG episode "The Chase," we find out that all the humanoid aliens in the Milky Way were seeded there by a precursor race, who looked like this: Now, I'm not the first person to speculate the first part of this: due to the similarities in makeup, and the fact that they're both played by Salome Jens, a lot of people suspect those precursors eventually evolved into the Founders, who were supposedly once like "the solids."

I feel like our whole society is like one of those stories about magic where the magic has a price, where each thing you create destroys something else and chips away at your soul, but we're in the middle act where friends are getting concerned but the hero is oblivious.

https://twitter.com/SzMarsupial/status/1629970812777144323

"No, it's great, see, I speak into this tablet and a creature arrives on my doorstep with anything I want. This will not backfire in any way."

This argument is ONLY targeted towards landlords; nobody who rents has warm fuzzy feelings about trying to get someone on the phone in the middle of the night when something goes wrong. And the guy who shows up to fix it is NEVER the landlord.

https://twitter.com/ChelseaWooff/status/1630210059287384064

Middle of the night emergency? The landlord will:

- Avoid your calls.
- Act annoyed when you get through.
- Will wait until the problem gets so bad as to border on legally actionable.
- Try to use substandard replacements and some-guy-he-knows instead of a contractor.

To Save Money, Maybe You Should Start The Day By Lighting A Cigarette, Polishing Off The Last Dregs Of A Warm Beer On Your Nightstand, And Staring Grimly Out At The Ruins Left Of Your Life Now That She Is Gone To Save Money, Skip Doing Laundry, Instead Picking Up Scattered Clothing Around The Floor Of Your Trailer, Sniffing Each To See If Any Of Them Are Still Acceptable For Another Day's Wear For Your Trip To The Liquor Store For Stag And Lottery Tickets

Something that nags at me is when a sci-fi character goes to Mars and they make their spacesuit orange/red... blending seamlessly into the landscape. Wouldn't that be a bad design, from an emergency/rescue point of view? It's extra-notable in "The Martian," above, where the whole plot point that kicks off the story is that they can't see Matt Damon in a storm and assume he's dead. Maybe if his suit had been, like, neon blue they would've found him?

I feel like family income has an impact on which generational cohort you identify with. Like, I was born in the 80s but shit's expensive so a lot of the signifiers of the 80s didn't filter into my house until the 90s. I learned to drive in like 1999 and the first car I drove was my family's 1971 Ford Country Squire.

Which was terrifying, that car was like 46 feet long or some shit. Sounded like a houseboat.

I think the big problem is that art is a conversation, and a lot of stuff stops making sense or being interesting when it becomes so dominant that the stuff it's in conversation with goes away.

https://twitter.com/xoxogossipgita/status/1617630879836438528

For a long time superhero movies were SUPER self-important. DC is still kind of stuck in that mode, with each Batman movie getting darker and edgier than the one before it, but for a long time that was THE way to adapt a superhero property.

Look, I didn't want to wake up on a Monday morning and have to say that stopping a series of chocolate commercials is ceding a battle in the fight against fascism, because saying that sort of shit makes you sound unhinged, but unfortunately here we are.

https://twitter.com/mmschocolate/status/1617518785686274052

The far right is perfecting a playbook they can wield on anything, any issue. They can shut down anything they want by triggering a normal person's natural desire to avoid a fuss, the healthy person's belief that this sort of thing isn't worth fighting over.

I feel like the true hallmark of a failing nation is that I can no longer picture an event horrible enough that it would make our country pause and reflect.

Mass shootings? No. A pandemic killing a million people? No. An attempted coup? Nope. All of these are just opportunities, now. Each crisis provokes a response, an angle that can be taken to gain ground in the culture war. Nothing is unequivocally bad anymore.

In the book "The Peter Principle," it's suggested people don't generally get fired for being incompetent at a job - you have to tell the boss to fuck off, get caught stealing, break the rules in some way for that to happen. So when you're incompetent, you stop getting promoted. So in any given hierarchy, you keep getting promoted until you reach your "level of incompetence" and stop there until conditions change.

So all the work in a hierarchy is done by the workers who haven't been promoted to their level of incompetence yet.

Don't make me

https://twitter.com/JordanS1981/status/1611042710747770880

OKAY-

For starters, let's just assume that Kevin doesn't have a phone. He's 8, after all. But if you want to say that his family is rich enough that he'd have one, sure, but all you need is a throwaway line that Kevin got his phone taken away because he spent $300 on Roblox.

I feel like a lot of stuff is collapsing because the disruptors won, they disrupted all these major business and entertainment ventures, only to discover that being good at fucking shit up doesn't really translate well to running things. GRRM always said that one of his inspirations in Game of Thrones was the question, "what's Aragorn's tax policy?" because heroically vanquishing evil and taking the throne doesn't actually demonstrate any of the skills you'd need to be a good king.

I had a great idea for a TV show today but before I had a chance to tweet about it Netflix cancelled it. I was gonna turn this into a thread but Netflix has cancelled that as well.

No, this shit exists because of people who believe that being a man is the opposite of being a woman, and try to live their lives in opposition to anything they think is feminine.

"Being a man" doesn't mean "not being a woman."

"Being a man" means "not being a child."

https://twitter.com/jmasseypoet/status/1608639858649755650

I can't think of anything less adult than sitting around thinking about your own masculinity. Expending time and calories worrying whether you're acting in accordance with some expectations you're perceiving about society, history, genetics.