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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I get your point and totally agree that direction isn’t followed NEARLY often enough, but I personally find it to be open to interpretation whether what they encounter is truly “hell” in a biblical sense or just an alternate dimension that can be construed in such a way that anyone who’s ever heard of the concept would define it as hell, and I prefer the latter at least in my own head.

    If you look at it through the lens of it not really being Hell Original ™ it becomes almost Lovecraftian, given that everyone who comes into contact with the dimension loses their minds and that the ship itself gains a kind of sentience having just passed through it, but the comparison to Hellraiser is definitely valid given all we see of it is just wanton violence amongst the ship’s original crew, so for all we know it could be straight up Satan driving the boat.



  • This is gonna sound so fake it’s ridiculous, but at least it’s short. This was about a decade ago when I was about to go to college, so that factored into the setting, but the other part? No idea. Basically, I was riding around my college campus on the back of a raptor, saddle and all. I was having a blast, and everybody thought it was so cool that I had a badass dinosaur to ride around on, because obviously nobody else did. That was the whole dream, zero plot, nobody got eaten, just me and my raptor buddy having a grand ol’ time stomping around campus.


  • For me, it was kind of like taking off a pair of sunglasses you forgot you were wearing. Faith tends to put a tint on everything that after a while just becomes normal until you take off the glasses and see what the world actually looks like and you realize the sky IS blue and the grass IS green.

    I was born into a religious family and on the outskirts of any serious involvement with a church…I never really “felt” anything as a kid or ever later despite summer camps and bible school, so it was just this weekly burden and this unnecessary layer of thought to wade through in everything I did, so when I started working my way out of religion it was a massive weight off my shoulders.

    I still consciously do good where I can, still give to others in need, etc…I still try to be as kind and empathetic to people as I can regardless of their beliefs, but now with the knowledge that I’m doing it just because it’s what I believe is right to do, not because it’s tied to a rule book.


  • Well, it depends pretty heavily on price point. Assuming you’re looking at the middle-to-slightly-upper end EV market and have a Tesla Model 3 on your list, I’d suggest the Mustang Mach-E. Of the upper scale EVs I’ve driven, it’s honestly surprising how good this thing feels despite all the mental gymnastics involved in it being called a “Mustang.” Ford has honestly been killing it with their line of EV offerings, especially the interiors and controls. It’s so far one of the only ones I’ve driven where I’ve said I’d own one (if I could afford it.)

    On the less expensive side of things, the Chevrolet Bolt kind of surprised me with how solid it felt as well. They’re way cheap even in comparison to even the Nissan Leaf (I have not driven a current gen Leaf but the older generation were AWFUL) and from what I’ve seen from the now dead Volt (I know, not an EV but the same general idea) Chevy seems to skew towards well-thought out, overengineered products in this category, unlike some of their traditional offerings. Side note: I think the issue with them catching fire is overblown and not unique to Chevy - it’s more a limitation of current battery tech and Ford, Tesla, and practically everyone else has had issues here too.

    Kia’s EV6 and Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 also seem surprisingly nice, although they’re not exactly what I’d consider cheap. I can’t comment much more on them though because while I’ve been around them, I haven’t had the chance to really drive one yet, but I have driven a slightly older Kia Soul EV (not currently sold new in the States) and was blown away at how nicely appointed they were and how solid they felt for a subcompact, so I have to assume it’s an even better experience than that.


  • I’ve driven probably close to a hundred different Teslas and nearly every electric car currently on the market over my career working with cars, and I completely agree with this take even when you remove Elongated Muskrat and the semi-functional, utterly misrepresented Autopilot entirely from the equation. Sure, a Tesla (in proper working order) feels really good to drive, but practically every other electric car on the market (outliers being the Leaf and the Bolt) are working as hard as they can to capture that same experience and most are doing a really good job if not exceeding that standard. The only differences are that most other manufacturers have what I have to assume is a massively more robust design and engineering team, better quality control, and generally decades upon decades more experience in designing cars in general, and not taking advantage of that as a buyer is a pretty dumb move, especially when you start researching the myriad issues with Teslas. Sure, Tesla may have kickstarted the electric car market, but with all the current, similarly priced options on the market, buying a Tesla is purely for the status-symbol optics or because you actually buy into Elon’s BS, which is its own can of worms.


  • Hottest? Last summer, driving home, Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex area. The A/C in the car I was driving was busted, it had zero window tint and a plexiglas roof panel so there was no shade whatsoever. The area was getting that extremely dry late-summer heat that area gets during made worse by the heat dome effect over the city. The actual temp was likely 108°-110°F, but the “feels like” was somewhere in the upper 120°s. Add to that the fact that the wind itself was literally hot, and there I was driving down the highway with my windows down cooking in what basically amounted to a convection oven. I ended up finding that I was actually cooler if I rolled the windows up. When I got home my shirt was totally soaked and as a result, it has the shadow of a seatbelt burned into it.

    Coldest? Around -20°F in central Utah during winter at about 3AM during an impromptu snowball fight in the apartment complex I lived in. Zero wind and about a foot of snow on the ground. Again, surprisingly dry, so it was legitimately PLEASANT with a ski jacket, long johns and jeans, when compared to a humid, windy winter as warm as 32°F anywhere else in the same gear, but definitely the coldest temperature I’ve seen by the numbers.