If I’m in transit on airplanes and in airports for 8 hours and I wear a mask for 7 of those hours, the one hour (or probably less) that I take off my mask to eat a meal doesn’t completely negate the good that wearing a mask does for the rest of the time. I’m still reducing my risk (or the risk I pose to others around me) for 88% of my travel time.

Taxi accessibility varies wildly depending on where you are.

I lived in a small city (700k-ish people) for a decade and almost never saw a taxi on the streets. One morning, I locked my keys in the house and had to call a cab to take me to work. It took 30 minutes for a taxi to arrive. I lived literally one block away from the city’s taxi depot.

A couple of years later, Uber hit the scene. With their service, I never waited more than 8 minutes for a ride anywhere in the city.

Just the one time, I think.

I am old enough to remember that. My, how times have changed.

Also, remember the time that Howard Dean tried to stir up some excitement among his campaign supporters and was knocked as “not being presidential”?

This is truly the Darkest Timeline™.

For me, everything that happens on HBO after Jon is stabbed by his brothers is just high-end fanfic. I will always believe that the showrunners fucked up the ending. And, let’s be real, GRRM isn’t going to prove me wrong.

In some countries, cellular companies still charge for sending text messages to people who have a different provider. WhatsApp is an easy way to connect with all of the people you know without paying extra fees.

And there’s a whole customer interface that lets you order directly from small businesses, which is super convenient if you live in a country that still has a lot of “mom and pop” stores instead of giant superstore chains.

It was the musical, so it was not a cheap ticket. I don’t know how they didn’t know it was not going to be supportive of their worldview.

We went to see that one with a group of friends. A couple of people in the group thought it was amazing and deep, and the rest of us thought it was empty and pretentious. We wound up having a very loud two-hour debate in the parking lot afterward.

An older lady and a kid were at South Park in the row in front of me. They didn’t make it 10 minutes.

I think that a lot of people in the Boomer and older age ranges never really understood the idea of adult animation, so they just assume that animated shows and films are made for kids.

(But my favorite Parker/Stone walk-out was the obviously Mormon couple who sat in front of us for the first 30 minutes of The Book of Mormon. The guy had the word “Mormon” embossed on his belt. They didn’t do their homework before they bought those tickets.)

Opening weekend, my then-fiancé (now husband) and I went to see this movie. I had gone way down the viral marketing rabbit hole before the film came out. I had read all of the websites and watched all of the “supporting evidence” videos. I knew it was a work of fiction, but I was super invested.

The movie ends, the final credits roll, and the woman in front of me looks at her date and says, “That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t scary at all.” Then she turns around to get her sweater off the back of her seat and we make eye contact.

I’m sitting absolutely still, staring straight ahead, tears dripping off my chin.

She didn’t say anything else, took her things, and left.

I grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical church, and I had a lot of religious trauma around witches as a kid. Like, my mom made me listen to Mike Wernke and wouldn’t let me go trick-or-treating because she believed that witches were sacrificing children to Satan. I had recurring nightmares – well into my 20s – about a witch who lived in the woods behind my house who tried to kill me in horrible ways.

So, while I absolutely understand that The Blair Witch Project is not for everyone, it remains the single most terrifying film I’ve ever seen.

From a utilitarian perspective, you’re still reducing overall suffering by an order of magnitude, so your scenario is still a greater good.

All true. But because teaching is historically “women’s work,” it is undervalued and underpaid.

Most teachers I know have at least Master’s degrees, yet we’re paid less than B.A.s start at in many fields. I took a 20k/year pay cut when I became a teacher, despite having received a Master’s degree before entering the field.

Until we value teaching as much as we value other types of work, we’re not going to attract large numbers of qualified people, whether they’re men or women.

We also would have accepted Rusty Shackleford.

Same. We can always sacrifice them for a faith boost if they keep asking questions.

Defiling corpses, fomenting communist insurrection, burning witches … That game has everything!

I agree.

Also, more embryos may be created than needed. So after a couple conceives, if those embryos are considered to be people, what can the fertility clinic reasonably do with them that won’t be considered murder?

Agreed on both counts.

Let’s not forget Echo, November and Whiskey from Dollhouse.

I also live in a country where I was not born, and it is full of kind people. I am very visibly different from most of the population, so people usually assume I’m a tourist. They always seem pleasantly surprised to learn that I live here.

I’ve been here almost three years, and I haven’t mastered the language yet, but people are usually really kind about my limited vocabulary.

That’s most of the programs car dealers buy… lowest bidder marketing company with no context and little practical experience gets told “we need X” and voila, here’s X.

I worked in marketing for a decade, and when my company started trying to court car dealerships, the quality expectation for that segment of our work was basically non-existent. We went from a high-end boutique experience with 99% accuracy and on-time delivery to mass-produced garbage marketing with literally bare-minimum quality control. 1/10, would not recommend.

For real. Every time I’m scrolling through a news article and I see a rectangle with an X in the upper-right corner, my initial reaction is, “Oops. Ad. Scroll past.” I’m quite certain I’ve missed some embedded tweets that way.