PicoBlog

Smash burgers will ruin you for most any other burger. They are made in a way that maximizes the browned crust on the meat that is what gives a burger most of its taste. They are comprised of 2 patties, good old processed cheese and light onion smashed and cooked into the beef. You can only debate the onion, but most don’t. Some have forced me to give them various other cheese variants….

Within the American Chinese takeout universe, there seems to be this thing called… “brown sauce”. For the unfamiliar, a quick google should fill you in. It’s – apparently – that stuff that’s smothered over your Egg Foo Young, the sauce that’s fried in with your beef and broccoli. There’s an absolute smorgasbord of English language recipes online for it, tons of blogs touting it as a ‘universal stir fry sauce’, the predictable cacophony of Redditors arguing over the most authentic preparations.

X-Men ‘97 ended on a high note. The breakneck pacing that characterized the season switched into a perilously high gear, even by the standards of cartoon superheroes. Compared to the plodding pacing of modern prestige TV, it was a runaway minecart. I understand the argument that it was a little too much — that some of the emotional beats might have hit harder if the show took time to linger here and there — but it’s such a refreshing clip that I’m hesitant to knock it.

About X/Z Song Trader: Steve is a musician, author and music journalist. Lucy is a diehard music fan and college student. They have always enjoyed a father/daughter bond over music. Each week one of them picks a song and they both share their perspectives. These are casual conversations based on musical connections. Opinions are their own. Keeping it positive. Leave a comment I fell in love with him initially from his infamous song “Stick Season” and haven’t looked back.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link. There aren’t all that many games in the Fantasy Zone series, which is both confusing and understandable at the same time. Confusing, because Fantasy Zone was incredible when it released back in 1986 and remains excellent to this day, so why not make more of them?

As of press time, we are in peak hoodie season. At some point, you may sit around in a bar with civilians and loved ones, and the question is sure to arise. “Why do you skaters tie your hoodie strings?” There’s a reason for this, or maybe there is not. It’s an unspoken thing to keep a kit tied. However, besides just looking cool, I’ve never had an explanation for this.

Recently, I came across a post that feels so perfect I had to share. It’s from Tumblr user prokopetz (and I initially saw it shared by Nick Mamatas so hat tip there): This post is riffing on Roland Barthes famous 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” a famous work that is often misconstrued. Barthes essay—it’s quite short if you haven’t read—argues the author is not a God imparting the one divine and definitive meaning of a text.

Hi friends, Fellow friend of the newsletter Leigh Stein asked a really great question: “This has come up a few times in my work as a book coach: how do you decide when/if a book should be YA if it has a teenage main character? Or, put another way, how can authors make a strong case for why their book with a teenage main character is literary fiction, *not* YA?”

Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, a pulpit rabbi, author of The Empty Wagon: Zionism's Journey From Identity Crisis to Identity Theft (2020), and host of the Committing High Reason podcast, discusses Zionism and its relationship to current conflicts the state of Israel. Covering the birth of Zionism that responded to European’s stereotype of the “the Jew as bad,” “disgusting” and “retrogade,” Zionism offered up “the opposite of a Jew…in personality and character” where this stereotype, attempting to remodel Jewish identity that was based, created quite paradoxically, an anti-Semitic Jewish identity.