I’m seeing a lot of games with awesome cover art but pretty standard gameplay for its era. You gotta pick something with truly dogshit gameplay to counter the cover. I present the NES game Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:

I was the kid who liked to stand in the horror section of the video rental store, look at the covers, and read the descriptions of scary movies I was way too meek to ever actually watch. This comes along, and I think it looks pretty cool! My mom paid good money to rent this and so help me I spent a good chunk of my evening trying to figure out how to do… literally anything. I wandered back and forth as Dr. Jekyll for a while before I bumped into too many pedestrians and turned into Mr. Hyde. Then I wandered back and forth as Mr. Hyde until I believe a bird killed me. Never made it past the first level.

That is a truly horrendous game with badass-looking cover art.

Can’t speak for the second game, but Wizards & Warriors 3 was fucking awesome.

The Pop-up Book of Phobias is also great.

Nothing that makes noise or takes batteries.

Board books. Toddlers are murder on books with paper pages. Stick with classics like Goodnight Moon or Dr. Seuss, or if you want something more recent the Little Owl series by Divya Srinivasan, or Calm-Down Time by Elizabeth Verdick are really good.

Playground/beach toys, like a bucket / shovel / rake set that parents can keep in the car. They’ll likely get lost, so go for cheap and sturdy over premium and expensive.

Sidewalk chalk, like the huge fat ones.

The water based coloring books someone else mentioned are great, too. No cleanup (beyond the occasional water spill), they can be reused, and they’re great entertainment for the car.

And yeah, like others have said, coordinate with the parents.

And if you hate the parents, get a Furby knockoff or something else that makes noise.

ONCE AND FOR ALL

So you’re saying that the Gulf Coast gives people bad credit?

/s

Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.

Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?

Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?

Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.

Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.

John Stark, one of the rescuers of the Donner Party.

In Summit Valley the remaining rescuers discussed what to do and took a vote to save only two of the children in Starved Camp. That might have been all they could manage. The others would have to stay behind.

John Stark, above, could not abide that. That meant that nine people, mostly children, would die on the mountain, exposed to the elements down in a very deep hole in the snow. John Stark decided he would save all nine, “Already shouldering a backpack with provisions, blankets, and an axe, he picked up one or two of the smaller children, carried them a little ways, then went back for the others. Then he repeated the whole process again and again and again. To galvanize morale, he laughed and told the youngsters they were so light from months of mouse-sized rations that he could carry them all simultaneously, if only his back were broad enough.” Once they were out of the snow he would eat and rest he said, but not before. He saved all nine. That is extraordinary and that is heroism. It was also heroism he never got contemporary credit for.

“Big, beautiful submarine captains come up to me. Covered with muscles, muscles like nobody has ever seen before. Tears running down their cheeks. They say ‘Sir, thank you for sending us to the South China Sea! Nobody ever sent us there before!’ But I don’t get angry! I should get angry and sometimes I do get angry, but with these captains I don’t get angry. They say ‘Thank you, sir! Thank you!’ But nobody ever thought of South China before! I came up with that, but nobody gives me credit for South China!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, thinking about Abraham Lincoln or Bill Clinton: “Yeah!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, aware of Donald Trump, with Tucker Carlson waiting in the wings: “Oh no!”

I’m just imagining being the poor sap working for a foreign power trying to extract useful information from his cottage cheese brain.

“Do you have nuclear subs in the South China Sea?”

“We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame. … The biggest problem we have is nuclear — nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That’s in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.”

“Where! Are! The nuclear! Subs! Deployed!”

“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible.”

There’s a tough lesson I learned about trying to get my friends into board games: It’s easier to turn gamers into your friends than it is to turn your friends into gamers. I’ve learned that some of my friends are never going to share my interests as much as I’d like, but that just means I needed to find people who were already in whatever hobby and start hanging out with them and some of them will eventually be your real friends.

Making and keeping friends as an adult is way more difficult than it seems it should be, but it’s a painful reality.

But if the viewer speaks French then they would understand the French audio dialogue, so if a (deaf) viewer speaks French, then they ought to have the opportunity to read the French subtitled dialogue.

Adjacent pet peeve: When there’s captioning, and a character in a movie speaks a foreign language, and the captions read “[Speaking in French]”, or even worse, “[Speaking in foreign language]”.

Just caption “Jette-le à l’arrière du camion et emmène-le hors de la ville.”! If I do or don’t speak French, and if I can hear or if I’m deaf, then the caption would serve the same purpose either way!

The Disney movie Moana made me furious with this, in the flashback during “We Know the Way,” when the islanders are singing (I assume) Polynesian, but the lyrics are just “[Singing in foreign language]”. The fuck, Disney?! You’re usually good at translation!

Like this?

Kamala is the best version of a normal politician fighting against Trump. It remains to be seen if that’s enough, because he’s just so goddamn weird that it’s difficult to even compare Tool A to Problem B.

I think she’s incorporated virtually all of the strengths of any of her comparable peers, and almost none of their weaknesses. I think that, given the nature of the opponent and his total lack of seriousness, she said everything I would reasonably hope she would have said during this debate.

I also think that I don’t properly understand the collective psyche of the American electorate. I don’t understand how the election could be this close, when it is a choice between a serious, competent, passionate, talented professional, and a man who is literally a collection of all of the worst possible traits a person could have. That it could come down to such a narrow choice is a mystery for the ages.

But more doctors smoke Camels!

You should have seen my fucking face when I was on unemployment and I found out that I had to pay income tax on my unemployment checks. Like… what the fuck? Why didn’t you just give me less money to begin with?!

In the book Dr. No, his briefing is “This important intelligence officer in the Caribbean has gone missing. Most likely he’s run off with his secretary. Here’s your gun. Go deal with this.”

Semple ran at Switzer and tried to rip her race number off to prevent her from continuing as an official competitor. In her memoir, she wrote:

Instinctively I jerked my head around quickly and looked square into the most vicious face I’d ever seen. A big man, a huge man, with bared teeth was set to pounce, and before I could react he grabbed my shoulder and flung me back, screaming, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!”

Semple’s attack removed one of Switzer’s gloves, but not her race number. When Switzer’s slightly-built 50 year old coach Arnie Briggs attempted to protect Switzer, Semple knocked him to the ground. Switzer’s boyfriend, Tom Miller, who was running with her, then put his shoulder into Semple causing him to fall down. Semple complained in a 1968 interview about Miller’s success in stopping his attacks, saying, “That guy’s a hammer thrower, for cripes’ sake!”

Imagine how lucky this Semple guy is that Miller exercised restraint. Dude probably could have literally thrown Semple through the nearest building.

Also, from Semple’s Wikipedia page…

Later in life, Semple reversed his position on women competing in the marathon. According to Marja Bakker (a later organizer of the race), “Once the rule was adjusted and women were allowed in the race, Jock was one of their staunchest supporters. He was very progressive.” Semple later publicly reconciled with Switzer. “Old Jock Semple and I became the best of friends,” she told a reporter in 2015. “It took a long time: six years. But we became best of friends.”

Semple died of cancer of the liver and pancreas in March 1988 in Peabody, Massachusetts. He and Kathrine Switzer had become friends and she would visit him at the hospital where he was being treated for his cancer.

They became friends! It’s nice when people can change for the better.