There are some seriously deep Easter eggs in The Last Jedi, and a bunch of other good nerd-food in this video.

Ah, too bad. In the past, I’d always gone for a cheaper player, and regretted it. When I started upgrading to 4K, I made sure to correct that mistake: I bought the Oppo. Its build quality is head-and-shoulders above the others on the market, and I’m sad to see that they’re going to stop making them. I’ll enjoy mine until some other format forces me to buy something else.

:(

Not that it helps against past abuses, but it can’t hurt to do this now.

Like many people my age, I have fond memories of walking up and down the aisles at Toys R Us stores when I was a kid. However, I recently had the chance to do the same with my nine-year-old, and the current stores are nowhere nearly as engaging. She was excited to go, and wanted a new toy, but the store wasn’t doing anything for her. Perhaps it was that the toys aren’t as good as when I was a kid–they certainly don’t seem as creative somehow. Perhaps kids are just more into video games than they back in my day; video games became a thing while I was a kid in my single digits, and were very expensive. Anyway, it’s sad to know that something like this is gone.

Ironically, the thing that took us to the store was to buy a controller for the Nintendo Switch, which Toys R Us had in stock and was nearby. We also had a gift card from my daughter’s previous birthday that had been languishing for over a year, something I can’t imagine happening to my younger self.

Depressing, but important, article.

Interesting that the creator and writer of Jessica Jones really didn’t take anything from The Defenders into account in the character’s main story. I wonder if that’s true of the other main characters–modulo Daredevil, obvs. It’s kind of a shame that it all built up to a series that had at least one of the characters almost completely unaffected one way or another.

I’m only three episodes in to Jessica Jones, and enjoying it quite a bit so far. I’d say that, based only on those early episodes, that it’s the best Marvel series in awhile. I thought The Punisher ended up better than it had any right to be, but Iron Fist and Luke Cage were disappointing. I really hope they hit the next season of Daredevil out of the park.

As someone who long ago considered myself a conservative, I find the hypocrisy and lack of principles in the current conservative movement among the most baffling developments of the past 20 years. I personally became more liberal as I aged, but was initially pushed away from political conservatism by it becoming nearly synonymous with the religious right wing; I am decidedly not religious.

In any case, I found several of this article’s points to be well-made and worth a read.

“Principled conservativism continues to exist, primarily at small journals of opinion, but it is increasingly disconnected from the stuff that thrills the masses. I remember as a high school student in the 1980s attending a lecture at UCLA by William F. Buckley Jr. I was dazzled by his erudition, wit and oratorical skill. Today, young conservatives flock to the boorish and racist performance art of Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter. The Conservative Political Action Conference couldn’t find room for critics of Trump, save for the brave and booed Mona Charen, but it did showcase French fascist scion Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.”

“As a doctor, I feel I have a duty to inform the public of what I have learned as I have observed these wounds and cared for these patients. It’s clear to me that AR-15 or other high-velocity weapons, especially when outfitted with a high-capacity magazine, have no place in a civilian’s gun cabinet.”

Great report from GQ. It’s absolutely infuriating that we’ve let the NRA hobble what should be a basic tool for investigating crimes.

Moreover, this quote:

“We have more gun retailers in America than we do supermarkets, more than 55,000 of them. We’re talking nearly four times the number of McDonald’s. Nobody knows how many guns that equals, but in 2013, U.S. gun manufacturers rolled out 10,844,792 guns, and we imported an additional 5,539,539. The numbers were equally astounding the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that.”

Wow.