They sure balanced out that social advancement with Fisher Stevens face painted to be an Indian engineer.

Well, there is a market in people who think their city has gone to hell all because of… those people. They’ll eat this shit up.

The best time was 100 years ago. The second-best time is now.

Hey I’ve seen this movie before… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

100%

Trump seems to just riff on his weak understanding of the last thing he heard. Maybe they were afraid of a weird rant about bulbasaur extinguishing clean coal.

If we give these knuckleheads a bit more time they’ll reinvent variolation 500 years late.

I think so Tasha, but where are we going to find rubber pants in our size at this time of night?

There isn’t near the kind of cultural narrative about stepfathers that there is about stepmothers, especially in media for kids. Kids absorb ideas from the fairy tales they see and hear. Stepmoms have to deal with tropes from “Cinderella” to “My Stepmom is An Alien”. Kids will then carry those notions, amorphous and unexamined, into their new relationship. Kids usually don’t have the capacity to recognize those kind of prejudices in themselves. So now the new stepmom has to deal with the kid’s indignance at a fictional character. But aside from the Dursleys in Harry Potter, I’m hard pressed to recall a wicked stepfather.

Then there’s the puritanical thread, and I’m a dude so I don’t even know what else is lurking in our culture that wants to take a piece out of a stepmom for being the second lady in the family.

Not to reduce what a genuinely good dad has to do, step or otherwise. But if a dad manages to use words to explain something calmly, that’s enough to get kudos from strangers on the street. I don’t think the ladies have the benefit of the same uncomplicated expectations, so they need specialized guidance.

What exactly are you looking for in advice? How to deal with the ex and their branch? How to deal with specific behaviors from the kids? You’ll probably do better to search at the level of those topics than the role of stepdad in general.

I’d suggest going for “How to talk so that kids will listen and listen so kids will talk” series. To be a good step-parent, you need to be a good parent.

The ideas were mostly neat but I just couldn’t abide the plot being driven by absurdly stupid actions over and over.

It’s a carousel of slides, you heathen.

Outstanding response and highly relevant username.

“The Final Architecture” series by Adrian Tchaikovsky has some elements of this.

It’s kind of like suspension of disbelief. Comes from pro wrestling. It’s a lot like pretending Santa is real when you’re 13 and know it’s not.

Ringworld on HBO with all the rishathra handshakes you can handle would at least hit a niche, I guess

What a savings.

Sheer pandemonium.

Read them all, with the novellas where the tin says they belong. It’s just unrelentingly good.