Ironhold

Yeah - my branch usually shares missionaries with one of the wards in the stake.

Fanservice can be anything, including characters being in "cute" outfits that aren't necessarily revealing and characters spouting catchphrases from other works. The term was originally quite broad in nature until people started overusing it for certain things. ** The president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University just sent out an open letter telling all the special snowflakes on campus to shut up and grow up. A student got offended because the sermon at Sunday services in the campus church made them feel guilty, and so they wanted the president to do something about it. As you can see from the letter, the president did, indeed, do something: he blew his stack.

Beefcake / Cheesecake = work that shows off skin but does not meet the definition of being "adult" Hence my remark about it being unfortunate that the guy's page is littered with content that limits the number of places where I can directly link to his comic strip.

"The Good Dinosaur". Sam Elliott has an awe-inspiring cameo in the film, but beyond that it's quite forgettable. The opening "Sanjay's Super Team" short at the beginning was far more entertaining.

There's a guy over on Deviant Art who posts under the name Kukuruyoart. He's got a comic strip series going that makes fun of the SJW movement, especially as it pertains to their response to the Gamergate movement.* His strips are quite funny and spot-on, and he always has commentary (with links) below each strip, but his gallery does include a fair amount of cheesecake and nudes and so I can't link directly. That being said though, I supposed there would be an audience for "clean" material making fun of the SJW movement, especially material written by a woman and/or a minority. *Even though the "official" narrative of Gamergate is that people who identify as belonging to the movement are all hateful, ignorant male ogres, the truth of the matter is that the anti-Gamergate crowd has an extensive history of playing dirty. This includes numerous illegal acts, such as death threats against Breitbart contributor Milo Yanopolis and others involved with the Gamergate movement.

Even Australia is shaking its head at the SJW movement.

Talmage was a geology professor before he was called to join the church leadership; he's an academic, and so his works were written with other academics in mind. Hence most of his works being difficult in places and quite dry. As far as $$$ goes - Project Gutenberg is your friend. Search results for "Mormon" Search results for "James E. Talmage" Search results for "B. H. Roberts" The good news is that there's quite a bit which appears to have fallen into the public domain, meaning that you can read it for free if you read it online, or the cost of printing if you want a hard copy. The bad news is that we have a handful of vintage anti-Mormon works in the mix, likely the result of Gutenberg looking to archive anything that they can get their hands on without regard to how hateful it is. I would imagine that other LDS authors might be up there as well; you'll have to search.

Check the link I posted; it goes back to the origins of the Samhain holiday.

"Samhain: Season of Death and Renewal" by Alexi Kondratiev This one should help answer a lot of the questions about the origin of what would become Halloween.

The Good Dinosaur. Need some time to mull it over.

This is a catch-all thread for news reports dealing with "special snowflakes" and the issues generated by them. ** Framingham State University reported a "bias incident" after students saw a Confederate flag sticker on someone's laptop. The incident was considered so shocking by the college's leadership that they fear people suffered "traumatic" reactions, and the college will be holding a "campus-wide forum" on the existence of the Confederate flag. IMHO, if a sticker can shock an entire campus, what does this say about the administration's (in)ability to prepare kids for the real world?

It's been my experience that the biggest determining factor is parental involvement. In essence, when stuff like this comes on, you give the kids a debriefing in order to ensure that: 1. They understand it's all fiction 2. The content isn't affecting them in a negative fashion 3. They don't intend to emulate the more violent aspects of the show. I grew up in the 1980s, so that should tell you the kind of entertainment media I had at my disposal. Daily syndicated cartoons alone, if the "think of the children!" types are to be believed, should have permanently ruined me.

It varies from year to year and store to store. For example, back in 2011 Wal-Mart infamously had a special offer on Transformers. The "Power Core Combiners" assortment of product had generated interest among most of us long-time fans of the franchise, but there was such an absolute glut of Transformers product in 2010 / 2011 that they wound up getting lost in the shuffle. Wal-Mart decided to clear out all of their back stock of this assortment in one fell swoop. Each store got a pallet of product consisting of one random five-pack shrink-wrapped together with one random two-pack. A pack with two figures went for $10 - $15 retail. A pack with five figures went for $25 - $30 retail. Black Friday price: $10. That's right: it was basically "buy the small set, get the big set free". I would estimate that the pallet my local Wal-Mart got (which had about a five-foot stack of product) was cleaned out within 15 minutes. I counted myself lucky just to get the two bundle packs I got.

Yeah. For some reason, AoT is one of the hottest properties on both sides of the Pacific right now. The manga is a blockbuster, the anime is a hit, and the first two live-action movies were successfully screened in theaters the world over. We've even got an alternate-reality spin-off going in which everyone's in a normal high school. It's astoundingly bloody and violent, such that it's on par with some of the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns I've played. Given this, it's not for the faint of heart.

In the "Link's Awakening" Game Boy game, if you attack a chicken then the chicken will respond by going after you until you leave the screen or you're dead.

I can't afford to travel right now, so for me it's a moot point.

I once got a phone call in the middle of sacrament meeting. It was the stake president.

latest "Hunger Games" film

By now, you've likely seen reports that Anonymous has vowed to help ferret out ISIS' internet efforts and shut them down. Well, I'm seeing scattered reports that ISIS has responded to Anonymous' statement. ...by insulting them. I think ISIS just picked a fight they're not going to be able to win.

With me, I've lived through some rather scary / disturbing stuff (I can honestly say that I once skinned myself alive, for starters), and so horror movies don't quite have the impact on me that they should have. This is rather problematic, since I'm a movie reviewer and so I'm occasionally obligated to watch horror movies.

The internet SJWs who cry about "trigger warnings" can kindly get back to me when they can say they've been witness to someone dying horribly. Suffice to say that "trying to keep the building next door from burning down after someone plows their car into it" is no way to start a shift.

Facebook is pretty much your best bet right now.

MSN says that the death toll is up to 35 now.

Normally, I don't get homogeneous answers.

Every so often, I'll drop hypotheticals to shake up whatever board I'm on. Usually, it's because the board's not all that active, and so this gives people something to talk about for a while.