I'll just add -- during the floppy disk era, you couldn't even easily transfer a text document between systems. Every system had their own encoding schemes, not to mention their own disk formatting schemes. It was annoying.

That's insane -- he earned one way back in Chinatown

Never forget

A 1931 audience didn't yet have the cinematic language to understand the "voice over flashback narration". That didn't happen until 1939's Wuthering Heights.

In the movie, ya gotta have somebody for Frankenstein to talk to. The book full of stream-of-consciousness monologues -- so the assistant doesn't say much, just listens.

>I won’t have you kinkshaming

That's an excellent statement, and if Rand were just a novelist we could leave it at that. But she became a political inspiration, so we have to talk about her hybristophilia, much as we have to talk about King Edward's kinks because they led him to fall under the spell of Nazism.

Rand worships her own version of the Ubermensch; Guido von List and the Hiterlites had the Aryans, L. Ron Hubbard had his Clear, and Rand believes the world belongs to her "Real Man" robber-barons who are inherently superior to the rest of us.

Her works are replete with authoritarian strongmen who "take" women who want to be "taken". She obviously wasn't a fan of European or Soviet strongmen -- she got off on American wealth-o-supremacists

>Ayn Rand was a confident, independent, sexually liberated atheist woman

Those are all traits from her Soviet upbringing.. They had sexual liberation and gender equality before American women could even vote.

Rand and her fetish for being raped by a fascist might count as a form of liberation, I suppose, but its a far cry from truly sexually liberated.

If Rand pioneered anything, it was probably her nonbinaryness. She rejected identification as a woman, preferring to be denoted man because she associated the term with strength. Its easy to imagine Rand prefering he/him in the world of today.

>It's my grandmother trading a chicken for eggs from the neighbor. There has to be a name for this type of system and Capitalism is what it is.

Randians like to fall back on trading chicken eggs as though "Capitalism" just means bartering or that Capitalism is somehow 'natural'. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Property is what you can carry -- anything else is an agreement. Your grandmother can own the eggs, but not the chickens, and certainly not the land beneath the chicken's feet. Most of all, she can't own any songs she sings or ideas she has.

The dark genius of Rand was her starting off with "I'm just a simple unfrozen caveman lawyer, and when I wanted to trade eggs..." and yet somehow finishing with ultra-specific conclusions about the capital gains tax in the 21st century.

>We are constructed as selfish beings who care more about breathing and food and survival foremost, before we can ever think of others.

But we're not 'constructed' that way -- mammals in general but especially human parents will routinely prioritize the lives of their children over their own. If there's even ONE crying baby on a plane, every single person on the plane has an instinctive bad reaction that way out of proportion with the actual volume of the noise produced by the baby.

Nature abhors a vacuum, but damn it do like crabs.

It's a dessert topping AND a floor wax

Hey, that picnic blanket can totally stop temperatures hotter than the sun.

I would have loved to see Hoskin's take on Capone. De Niro is great, but he's also De Niro -- a force unto himself.

Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”

They weren't trying to suggest otherwise -- People with Williams Syndrome are _really really really really_ nice. Abnormally nice. Golden Retriever nice.

In a just world, they would be "normal" and we would be the ones with a disorder.

That's no tragedy. How many people you lose on a normal cruise, 30, 40?