Movies, and TV Shows, and Books! Oh my!

Enter Reckless Ben, an investigative journalist/youtuber who is basically the real-life equivalent of Napoleon Dynamite fused with Sun Tzu. He's taken it on himself to get this family their legos back. His methods so far include, but are not limited to:

Going to the store and politely asking the manager to return the family's legos to them

Hosting a fake youtube challenge for the employees at the store and inducting the winner into a cult he created for the sole purpose of getting the new store owner's phone number, so that he can politely ask him to return the legos, since asking the manager didn't work

Creating an official, legally recognized company called We Steal From Old People, and selling their merch from a booth set up outside the Bricks and Minifigs store

Applying for a gambler's license and using The Church of Scientology Sucks (the legally recognized religion that he created during his Scientology investigation a few years back) to hold a lottery for one of the missing lego sets, thereby making Bricks and Minifigs guilty of stealing from a lottery, which is a criminal offense that the police are legally required to investigate

Having 9 of his friends each purchase $10,000 worth of the stolen legos from the family so that all ten of them could individually file small claims cases against Bricks and Minifigs. They won all of those cases btw. Bricks and Minifigs shut down the store in Salem before they could be forced to pay

Now it's worth noting that when he started this investigation, literally all Ben wanted was to get this family their legos back. But somehow this ended up snowballing into uncovering serious corruption within the American Fork Police Department, who as it turns out have been in the Bricks and Minifigs CEO's back pocket this entire time. Ben's had his car searched, his house raided, and been arrested and jailed without being told what he was even being charged with (which is a massive civil rights violation, and is supposed to be very illegal in the US). He's had to resort to hiding out in Mexico to get the Lego Mafia off his back while he lawyers up and prepares to go back to court against Bricks and Minifigs, because yeah, they still haven't returned/paid for the legos they stole from the sick elderly man, in spite of the fact that the entire world now knows what they did and hates them for it. In fact, they are now trying to sue the old man and Ben for 1.5 million dollars, for the heinous crime of....proving that they stole $200,000 worth of legos. Ben says he's still willing to settle with them outside of court however, provided they return the stolen legos and send him a video of the scummy CEOs verbally apologizing for their actions and doing the chicken dance as a show of good faith. Meanwhile, the American Fork PD is most likely going to be hit with a lawsuit of their own thanks to Ben's public documentation of their corrupt behavior, which includes initially redacted bodycam footage that shows the cops literally conspiring with the Bricks and Minifigs CEO to come up with reasons to have Ben thrown in jail.

The villain in this story, his name is Josh Johnson and comedian Josh Johnson did a whole bit on it that was quite a journey. If you didn't catch it on your YT rabbit hole, it's worth a watch.

i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.

so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”

And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”

I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”

I think there's meant to be a normal amount of... social friction? Not necessarily outsized or harmful shaming responses, but like. A weird look that tells you that you just said something rude. An eight-year old talks too much shit on the playground, so another eight-year pulls his hair and calls him a fartface. That kind of thing. It's nature's way of constantly checking how you are relating to others, and keeping that system calibrated, because you're a pack animal at heart.

Customer service culture creates an underclass that is not allowed to provide this necessary social friction. You are unable to help the boors, bullies and oblivious loudmouths register that they've done anything wrong, because your reaction to them is tied to your fucking income. And as a direct result, they just steadily get worse and worse.

my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.

the truth is actually weirder

she’s aware dandelions look like this

she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions

she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?

gosh I enjoy this website

Ultimate basic white girl name, like the lass who sat next to you in school and had pigtails and drew little hearts over her “i”s. The Duke Leto of the Atreides, House Major of the Galactic Padishah Empire… and his girlfriend, Jessica. Hilarious.

She falls in love with the biggest wife guy in the universe, and he won’t marry her. Hilarious.

Duke Leto loves her and trusts her fully, despite knowing that she’s a witch from the long line of witches who do rapey mind control stuff for eugenecist reasons. He just reckons she’d never do that to him. And he’s RIGHT – she’s been painstakingly trained in mind control and she never uses it on him and they just have consensual sex like normal people, thanks very much. Hilarious.

She’s been raised, conditioned, and trained so she can accomplish one (1) task: have a baby girl with Leto. When it comes down to it, she reckons he’d be disappointed at the gender reveal so decides to have a boy instead, upending 10,000 years of meticulous planning and concerted effort. THEN, she ends up having a girl with him afterwards anyway. Hilarious.

She births a messiah to make her bf happy and piss off her bosses, and then births an abomination completely unintentionally. Hilarious.

Despite her Bene Gesserit training and bodily awareness and general deep understanding of things, she somehow doesn’t realise that going through the Spice Agony while pregnant will have an effect on her foetus??? Corazon mio, smoking a cigarette has an effect on your foetus. Not eating enough spinach has an effect on your foetus. Taking a massive overdose of a lethal drug was probably going to have some foreseeable side effects. Hilarious.

When Leto II and Ghanima are preborn and 9-year-old Leto II tells her that he and Ghani can remember her and their granda getting it on in extreme visceral detail and her first reaction is to that mentioning it was a little gauche of him, actually. Hilarious.

Total Solar Eclipse 2026

here is a map of the path of the eclipse (from timeanddate)