Total nonsense. If you consume enough of any substance, it will eventually kill you. Aspartame is THE most heavily studied food additive in human history and every well-conducted study has found it to be harmless. You need to consume the equivalent of 125+ cans of Diet soda per day to see an even slightly elevated risk of cancer or any other serious disease. This is disgusting, misprepresentative fear-mongering that will steer people away from low-calorie alternatives to sugary soft drinks, thereby contributing to increasing rates of obesity and diabetes and playing right into the sugar lobby's interests.

It's fine. Websites break on it less often than I would have expected and the “nuke your cookies and history" button is a fun feature. I've mostly moved to Firefox, though, just to get away from Chromium (although I realize the irony in that; my fingerprint is almost assuredly far more unique than if I stuck to Chromium).

Yeah, I've no doubt that Höcke is pursuing this for extremely cynical and gross reasons, but the broken clock is right twice a day. “Inclusion" is one of those policies that sounds so self-evidently positive and reasonable at a glance, that people's brains shut down and nobody thinks of potential downsides to it as a universal policy. A majority of kids who require special education fare much, much better in smaller classes taught by a special education teacher who can move through material more slowly and boil it down to easier-to-grasp concepts. Sticking them in a large classroom with 20-30 non-disabled peers, even with a SpEd teacher present, rarely has a positive effect, and more often than not leads to worse outcomes for all students present. Inclusion is at its core a cost-saving measure (it's cheaper to stick the SpEd kids in a GenEd classroom than making a dedicated class for them), but it wraps itself in progressive ideology so well that it's almost impossible for parents or teachers to argue against.

Probably not a popular opinion, but the GTS always looked ridiculous, even when it was executed well by Kenta. It's just an inherently silly move, and nobody above the midcard should be using it. Punk is insanely over the hill for a dude his age (especially compared to the NJPW wrestle dads who've been popping up since Forbidden Door I), and his matches are just generally sad to watch, especially when he tries to hit his finisher. Dude should be on commentary, not in the ring.

Düsseldorf is ugly and boring. Lots of big companies are there, so there are good jobs, but it's a cultural and aesthetic wasteland. Sorry, Kraftwerk.

The OG swamp cult Wyatts are now one of the great "what-ifs" of modern wrestling. For as much as Bray tried some interesting angles in his last few years, terrible booking and the lack of a stable to back him up made it fall flat. The original trio had a magic to it that none of the three ever quite recaptured on their own: Bray was the mouthpiece and had great ideas, Brodie grounded it, giving it psychological depth and deranged zeal, and Erick was the muscle who always seemed like he had his own motives for following. It felt real in a way that it never did when it was just Bray alone. The Wyatt Family got me back into wrestling, and it's extememely sad that circumstances conspired to separate them before they could reach their full potnential together. RIP Bray and Brodie.

Starcade absolutely rules. Protip: don't watch the first season; the host didn't give a toss about video games and it's pretty hard to watch. In seasons 2+, he was replaced by the utterly fantastic Mr. Jeff Edwards, who is proof that no one is ever too old to be enthusiastic and knowledgeable about an exciting new technology. He's seriously the best game show host I've ever seen, and he makes the episodes feel really wholesome and fun, even when contestants are mismatched in terms of age or ability. The whole series is available online, but please don't slam their servers; it's a one-person passion project from somebody who used to work on the show.

Townsends is phenomenal!

The 125 can figure came from the methodology used in some of the low quality rat studies frequently cited to demonstrate the dangers of aspartame back in the day. I'll see if I can find the specific studies.

This page by the National Cancer Institute provides a pretty decent overview of research on a variety of artificial sweeteners. https://www.cancer.gov/...

One very recent study (Debras et al., 2022) suggested a link between aspartame consumption and cancer, which I suspect is behind the recent hysteria. Pretty much every other high quality study over the past 50 years found no correlation. If aspartame is indeed a dangerous carcinogen, that fact should be clear through epidemiological data alone, like the 2013 study by Marinovich et al. cited in the article. I lend that study and those like it much greater credibility than one-off cohort studies like Debras.

Fuck that dude. Talk about destroying an incredible career by just being an absolute piece of shit.

I think that for the most part, the golden age of the show did a really fun job at poking fun at the sillier aspects of Freudianism, which is already a deeply silly way of understanding the world. Frasier's obsessive need to interrogate everything to death looking for hidden, subconscious meanings is comic gold. "The Impossible Dream" is my personal favorite example of it. Like Martin says, sometimes dreams are just weird.

I kinda wish the writers had done the same with Niles' Jungianism, but I think there's a lot less pop cultural knowledge of it to work with and the silly parts are more mystical and esoteric, so I don't know if it would have been possible. Still fun to imagine, though!

I thought the Kansas side was cute, but I also only didn't leave my car except to go into my hotel.

Fair points. Yeah, I hope it was clear that that last bit wasn't addressed to you, but rather the person reporting me. I appreciate your actually being civil and responding to the points I'm making. I wish that was more the norm.

This is ludicrously alarmist. I mean, archive whatever you want (it's good practice to back up things you think are important), but the United States is hardly a fascist dictatorship anymore than it was in 2017 (or 2021 or 2013...). The opposing party wins sometimes, and it hasn't ended the republic yet. Federal funding might be cut to new gender research, but nobody's going to go around to universities, confiscating copies of existing studies to be burned.

The Demi Lovato talk was hilarious to watch. She's an utterly charmless narcissist and literally asked a guest the question, "How bad would you have felt if I really had killed myself?". It's incredible no executive pulled the plug on it at any point during its production.

Hey, the corporations have spent tens of billions of dollars over decades to make damned sure the American public focuses exclusively on the most obscure and irrelevant issues. It's very invalidating to all that effort to point out that issues that affect less than 0.5% of the population are very obvious wedges to ensure that the blue-hair city libs and good ol' boy hicks are unable to ever come together to advocate for their shared material self interest.

This seems like the best decision for sustainability. It seemed like real frustration was building up around the battle passes being the only content released (even though everybody kept buying the damned things), and it felt like lots of other stuff was being neglected to churn them out. If Valve wants to keep Dota going strong, it can't afford to let the game grow stale chasing after whales who are going to keep playing regardless of whether there's a battle pass or not.

We kind of get to see this a bit in "Shrink Wrap," albeit with Frasier interrupting.

Bollywood Torrents used to be a thing. Haven't used it in a few years, so I don't know if it's still around.

This is art.