So many good ones, I don't know how to choose.

• Interstellar 55555 (slightly cheating)
• Perfect Blue
• The Green Knight
• The Girl With All the Gifts
• Dune (the original)
• Densha Otoko
• Spirited Away
• Dark Knight
• Interstellar
• The Last of Us (game and show)
• Innocent Venus

Slightly unpopular opinion: All official lore is crap and should be generally ignored. (Even the stuff I kind of like) If I want to play in a world where what I can do is limited by the generic, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road, crowd-pleasing writers at some corporation I'll just play a AAA video game. The ability to be participatory in the creation and evolution of the in-game world is what makes TTRPGs different from consumer media. Why would you give that part up, but still leave yourself with all the cognitive load?

Smilie Autumn

It's not age that makes you conservative, it's comfort and success. People on the older end of life tend to have advanced more in their career. In the current era, older people in America and Europe have been part of a period of relative success. People who are doing well in the current society don't want it to change. People who are struggling, do. The reason most monied interests support conservative agendas is that they are wealthy because they are suited to the current order. If they actually were to support real change, it'd cost them money.

Don't forget the vocal minority problem. The subset of people who comment on things is much smaller than the set of people who consume them. And while the threshold of effort for making comment is low, it isn't zero, so people who hold more extreme views are going to be more prevalent in the selection because the people with moderate views aren't going to have the motivation to spend 20 minutes explaining the nuanced position they have, while the 'love' and 'hate' camps will gladly spend 10 seconds on posting their simplistic view.

Add on the way modern systems work, focusing on likes, upvotes, etc. and you get short form responses getting greater engagement purely because they don't take as long to read. It's always easier to get traction with a short, maybe amusing, rehash of a common opinion than with a long dissertation on niche, complex views.

That cycles back in at the top to create a visibility bias so the people making the next round of commentary/content see the wave of love/hate and try to ride it. The result is a feedback loop with a terrible signal to noise ratio.

I'm not one to say it doesn't matter. I know the benefit good nursing provides. I'm saying, in modern culture, especially in the circles who have political, economic, and cultural power, there is, and has been for decades, a push to think of a college education as an investment product that benefits the purchaser, with little to no consideration being given to societal benefit. They are acting as if your work is not more meaningful/beneficial to society than, say, a Marketing Director. (a position of similar wage which I would say is, at least, not as beneficial, if not actually harmful to society)

Nursing, for instance, is a profession, or even a vocation, which provides tremendous societal benefit, both in the direct 'people's lives in medical settings suck less' sense and in the indirect 'people get back to health and productivity' sense. Despite this, it's not common, as far as I've seen, for governments to offer much in the way of benefits to nurses as reward for their service. There's even a tendency to, when they ask for a raise, to take an attitude of 'You should be happy. At least you get to know you're helping people. We need all these extra profits to help compensate us for doing our jobs that don't help people.'

Mostly as an aside, I've actually thought for years that nurses and doctors who are providing direct care to patients (i.e. not people who went to Med/Nursing school and then went into medicine-adjacent business, but people putting in direct labor to help heal people) should have a significant tax cut. Their work benefits society more than the money it would represent, and a cut would make their lives easier, and help balance the years of tuition and effort it takes to get to that position.

In the current system, education isn't viewed as a system of societal improvement but as a product to improve the standing of the individual. Because the individual is seen as the only one who benefits from their education, the individual pays for it.

As others have said, there are lots of divides in various cultures. From what I have heard, many people from the Americas look down on those from further south in the Americas. (Americans look down on Mexicans, who look down on Guatemalans, etc.) I've heard there are still certain views regarding Han Chinese versus others in China, xenophobia in Japan, sectarianism between subsets of Islam, and a basic level of nativism throughout much of the world. For America, the culture started with the era of 'scientific' racism so it started with a color divide. Those old divides remain because certain classes of people keep reinforcing because it helps their narrative. In the same way you can look at what happened with American healthcare through a Marxist, free-market-absolutist, or various other views, you can look at America through various lenses, and the racial one still holds a lot of sway. As long as enough people identify with the grouping, it grants political power to those who have authority in that group. The power is used to reinforce the identity to perpetuate itself and the cycle continues. It takes fairly drastic circumstances to change that.

Popped open the article to find out, and the answer is neither. The 'milk' is crystals collected by cutting open a particular kind of roach and extracting them from its brood sack.

There's a phrase I didn't know I'd be using today.

What about a 360deg camera, where the target person is yourself, and anyone else captured is merely incidental/background?

And it's only March.

The point of having the system before you play is just letting everyone know what to expect on the G part of RPG so they can focus on the R and the P. It kills all momentum to stop and ask, 'so what system do we want to use' in the middle of the game. No system is perfect, but it cuts out a lot of work to just pick one and roll with it, homebrewing over the few holes that show up.

I will feed you your liquified body parts, staring at the bottom, and working up.

I will fill your colon with cyanoacrylate.

I will give you an enema with the liquified bodies of your family.

I will tickle your family to death in front of you.

I will do all of the above in reverse order.

Having kids is always an act of selfishness. You don't do it because you are trying to 'gift' life to the child. You do it because you think it will make you happy. Look at your reasons.

"me and my partner have wanted children since we were children" There's your reason. You have the biological imperative. You want your genetics to continue.

" if a life is not worth living it must be an absolutely horrific and torterous experience." That's life. 'Worth' is purely subjective. Objectively, life is worthless. If you have the right genetics and circumstances, you can ignore this fact, but it's always there.

"If all of us liberal and educated folks stop having kids what will the world look like?" This is just the ideological version of the biological imperative, the idea of 'my ideas must be passed down' instead of 'my genes.' But it is based on faulty assumptions. It assumes your kids wouldn't become fascists just because you aren't. It assumes the children of members of a political party will automatically join the same one when they grow up. Why would you assume this? Do you have the same views as your parents? Grandparents?

If you want to have your kids, go ahead, but don't delude yourself that it's your gift to the leftist cause or to the child. It's a way to scratch your biological itch to be a parent, just as much as masturbation and sex.

I attempted to hail a member of my clan, FOR THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE!

Confirmed. I'm seeing sources from the BBC, Guardian, Independent, and gov.uk.

Insert joke along the lines of 'I don't.'

More seriously, I've thought about this a bit. The simple answer is already seen in other responses: rural enough to escape crowds, close enough to urbanity to get good internet. The more perspicacious answer is overly complex: someplace where the weather is mild enough not to kill you if you lose your keys, and likely to stay that way despite climate change, mountainous enough to have nice views and avoid flooding, flat enough to build, sparse enough for land to be affordable, populous enough to be able to get the things I want without making a long trek, wooded enough to get the benefit of trees, bare enough to allow access, not too many racists or zealots, not too rich or poor of neighbors, neighbors not close enough to disturb me, but not so far that I couldn't run over for something if needed, somewhere politically stable, somewhere I can work without a million-mile commute, where the soil doesn't suck, where there's a pleasant amount of rain and sun...

It's not a small question.

Cigarette advertising was banned in the US. It famously increased profit because they didn't have to burn it all on advertising.

Advertising is like nuclear weapons. It's bad that it exists, harms people around it, and is only needed because the opposition has it. If it disappeared, everyone would benefit, but no one wants to be the first.

I actively avoid shorts so most of what I watch is long form.

• Technology Connections - A guy needing out about household tech
• Unlearning Economics - a trained economist turned public edutainer who kept learning after Econ 101, unlike others who shall remain nameless
• Behind the Bastards - Chummy laughter about the worst people ever
• RPG with DBJ - RPG talk with a focus on creativity and exploring the opportunities afforded by the space of 'limited only by your imagination'
• We're in Hell - A guy looking at pieces of media and the ideology infused into them by culture
• Gresham College - lectures on widely ranging topics, presented by professors but targetting the layperson
• The Morbid Zoo - A cool gal doing analysis of movies, usually horror, but sometimes others, with an eye toward ideology and culture (Hellraiser, Smile, Twilight, PotC, etc.)
• Folding Ideas - More film analysis, but with a tack toward various criticisms
• Doctor Who - the old series are all on the tubes now. Not educational, but fun.

So, if you laid on a large enough block of it, you'd have the perfect shape to make a mold for a customized foam mattress?