evening shroud. morning lark

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

via @lethalwizard

I have it on good authority from multiple Brits that they find Australian winters, which rarely dip below freezing, worse than winters in the UK.

Closest match: Psylliodes chrysocephala genome assembly, chromosome: 4 Common name: Cabbage Stem Flea Beetle

The base premise has a stock phrase attached, “The ball works his core.” Someone needs to say the stock phrase to a visitor.

So for the ball on head gag you put him on top of Grandpa Nutmeg’s head or on top of Grandma Nutmeg’s head. And for the big ball gag you have Grandpa Nutmeg explain it or Grandma Nutmeg explain it. This fills out a 2×2 table and gives us the four comics above.

Notice that there’s at least one year between each of these comics, and that the oldest one is from 2016. The series is nine years in the making. These are the only comics so far with this caption.

(Disclaimer: this data is biased by reruns and right-censoring.)

I predicted Iggy would show up. He did not. On careful consideration I don’t think he could have. He doesn’t fit the caption. Iggy is whimsy-neutral: he describes wacky events impartially. Grandpa and Grandma Heathcliff are whimsy-mitigators: they comment on ordinary elements to downplay the overall wackiness. Compare:

“The ball works his core” is whimsy-mitigating. It’s funny that the speaker only explains which muscles the ball exercises and ignores Heathcliff’s species and the ball’s size.

To break out of the 2×2 matrix above you need to either come up with a third joke (tricky) or apply one of the existing jokes to a different character.

You can’t do the ball-on-head version with another character. Grandpa and Grandma Nutmeg are used up, Iggy isn’t suitable (I called this), and neither is anyone outside the Nutmeg household. Cats are known to rest on heads, the ball-on-head is exaggerated cat behavior, but they do this with people they trust. So it has to be the big ball version.

The joke has to take place in a location where people exercise. The speaker has to be familiar with Heathcliff’s routine. The obvious setting other than the Nutmeg household is a gym and the obvious speaker other than the Nutmegs is a gym employee.

The “Mid City Gym” location was used in a few comics in 2003, then resurrected starting in 2023. Same interior, same uniform.

The opening title card of the movie “HOLES” is misspelled in DVD and Blu-Ray copies of the film.

Often when a movie is transferred to DVD, Blu-Ray, and 4K formats, the titles have to be redone to read more legibly. When Disney released “HOLES” in 2003, the title card itself was written in small text in the corner of the screen. If transferred to home video normally, this title would have been only five pixels tall and too faint to make out.

But in early 2004, when the time came to alter the title for home video, the digital technician responsible typed the name wrong and quality control never caught it, all the way through the film’s blu-ray release in 2018. No fans wrote in noticing the flaw, nobody in quality for the disc releases, nobody at all noticed, and so the flaw remains to this day.

And of course, not only does the fact that Darcy, who owes their family nothing, has kept and continues to keep this secret for them even after Elizabeth’s refusal deepen the gratitude she begins to feel for him after the letter of explanation, but it also liberates Elizabeth to fall in love with him. Because Elizabeth-who-wants-to-marry-for-love would never be happy marrying someone who didn’t know the family secret in advance. She had resigned herself to spinsterhood because she couldn’t be satisfied with having to hoodwink someone to have their hand, but also couldn’t put her family at risk by trusting someone who wasn’t bound to them by more than an engagement. (Maybe she was even tempted to confide in Wickham at one point, and hasn’t Darcy’s letter proven she was absolutely right not to yield to that passing thought.) But Darcy figured it out himself, and he’s kept her trust, and she could fall in love with him without guilt—if she hadn’t already turned him down.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.