Lord of Rhinos

Your suggestions for a better candidate is a bunch of women who haven't even completed a two year term in congress? That haven't ever won a competitive race against a Republican? You're objection to Biden is that he lost two presidential primaries so the better alternative is Bernie Sanders...who just lost two presidential primaries? I live in a mail-in-ballot state. Voting for president takes me less than five minutes. I don't need to feel a shred of enthusiasm to vote for him. I'm sure for people that actually have to stand in line to vote it is more of an issue.

Princess Bride always makes me smile.

That's because Rothfuss and Lynch didn't start publishing until after 2005. Which is to say even if they had sold far more books then they actually did, it wouldn't change the fact that ASoIaF was wildly popular and redefining the genre before they were published.

Old news, but it seemed like a few people in this thread might be unaware of it.

Except being the 2nd best selling Adult Epic Fantasy series and getting write-ups in major magazines about redefining the genre six years before the TV show aired would indicate that ASoIaF was in fact a leading the genre long before the TV show was around.

Because you didn't say WoT was bigger. You said they weren't in the same ballpark. WOT and ASOIAF were pretty much the #1 and #2 Adult Epic Fantasy series for quite sometime. Back in 2005, Time magazine (how's that for popculture appeal?) referred Martin as the "American Tolkien" and talked up how he was redefining the fantasy genre. The idea that Martin and ASoIaF weren't well know before the show is silly.

You're very much wrong. Back in 2005 Feast for Crows sold 375,000 copies to Knife of Dreams 500,000 copies. At the time, Martin's last book was A Storm of Swords and Jordan's last book was Crossroads of Twilight. You can guess what the general epic fantasy fandom's opinion of the writers was at the time. Comparing series total sales is silly when trying to establish pop culture reach. WoT has 14 books, ASoIaF has 5. Martin would need something like 3 times as many readers as Jordan to achieve parity of sales.

Washington has been doing mass testing of nursing home residents and staff since June.

The theory I like best is that young children simply don't give off many virus particles. Young children have a much lower lung capacity than adults and so are simply moving less air in and out. Coupled with their immune response doing a much better job than adult when it comes to shutting the virus down it seems like their viral load is going to be lower which leads to them being the opposite of super-spreaders.

I've always heard it as "Go woke, go broke". The presupposition seems to be that main stream American culture doesn't like woke politics and will therefore reject the piece of pop culture without the need for an organized boycott. It gets deployed selectively "lol, did you see the box office for the new Charlies' Angels movie? Go woke, go broke" vs. Captain Marvel ".....".

I don't know. I think anyone who has read Ellis's work should be unsurprised that he's a dickhead.

It is one of the most gruesome shows to air on TV. It is a very artfully done, but it revels in its grossness.

Fragile Bird, Michael Lewis wrote a book named Flashboys that heavily featured algorithm based trading and is probably what you were thinking of.

Disney+ has been working fine for me.

American healthcare has a patchwork of different rules on a state by state basis so it can be hard to tell. I believe for medicaid expansion states change in employment status is a trigger for an open enrollment period. Assuming your unemployment benefits were low enough you'd qualify for free government healthcare.