Aliens turns 40 today! Many people remember it as a sequel as good as its predecessor (for different reasons). But it's also noteworthy for the character who established the Pete Buttigieg-Sam Altman archetype.

One thing that rarely gets asked when people talk about "improving" an economy is "for whom?" or "to what end?" The answer is usually "for the already wealthy at the expense of workers." Upon whose backs are these "improvements" built? Do they gain any benefit from it? Or is it all their sacrifice?

I know I've said it before at the other place, but I'll say it again here: Everyone in the orbit of this administration looks like one of the antagonists from a Coen Brothers film.

This is the doomed, monster-prowled hotel where the opening fiction for Hunter: The Reckoning 5th edition takes place. Most of the stuff that frames that story actually took place here: the wedding crashing, the weird hallway, the unsettling door half-seen.

It’s wild how quickly we went from putting these everywhere to completely abandoning and neglecting them once we quit caring about the immediate response to the problem. Seeing these is like looking at social fossils.

I WISH YOU WOULD STEP BACK FROM THAT LEDGE BAT MAN

Today I learned that Johnny Knoxville was Keanu Reeves' body double in CoppolaDracula.

Oh, man, I saw this and thought "Tom Cruise sure looks like Chris Pratt" but then I looked it up and the Tom Cruise Tomorrow movie is Edge of Tomorrow, not the Tomorrow War.

Also, the best part of "Jack & Diane" is the second verse where the lyrics are just completely unintelligible, like John Mellencamp doing an impression of Uncle Pecos from the old Tom & Jerry cartoons.

Magnificent description of the vampire in Angela Carter's "The Lady of the House of Love." "Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness," CRIMINY.

I think it was this bridge, but at night, and there were some snakes.

We had gone down there in the fall, around Halloween, and one of the local haunted houses had done a big interpolation painting of the classic Bradstreet Linda Blair vampire on their building wall and it made me do a double take, "Hey, I know what that is."

Maybe a weird thing to notice but I'm 90% sure that the cover of Brighter's Laurel album is the same location as the interior of Nottingham Castle from Robin of Sherwood. What kind of nerd recognizes this stuff. I think it's Wells Cathedral?

Going back to the original declarations here, look at what's being said. Note the distinction between wanting to write versus wanting something to have been written.

Oh, man, look what I found in the t-shirt drawer. Probably from the early 2000s.

We had some UI problems during preproduction as well. Total Wild West situation, just stick whatever feedbacks or hotbars you needed wherever; it’s all good. One of the engineers doodled up this sticky by way of comment and I still have it, 15+ years later.

I know I usually sass about profiteering, but let me frame this in terms of game design: This is a system that rewards dishonesty in participation to such a degree that it all but REQUIRES dishonesty in order to be “competitive.” This is akin to three-card monte; it is not traditional speculation.

Thinking about this one, it informed one of the W5 concept examples. One time there was a defense contractors’ conference at the Hilton where the band played and a couple of us bullshitted our way into the conference social events by saying we were at the conference with “HardTargetSoftDev.”

Man, Tom Homan is a real chud. I wonder where he came from.

Pomegranate the Inexorable Degradation of the Wretched Bodily Prison

NOW JUST A MOMENT HERE

I stole the name of this card from a Cocteau Twins song.