In bringing you that hard-hitting varanid journalism, one picks up some unexpected morsels of life in interacting with big lizards. There’s even more facets to reptile husbandry beyond the care and stewardship of monitor lizards, endangered Komodo dragons, geckos, snakes, and then their amphibious counterparts like frogs, toads, and newts…

Gal and Dino is one-third each live action, stop motion, and cartoon, and 100% adorable silliness that made me temporarily forget my woes. — Having just finished an anime that’s the diametric opposite of this show, Tokyo 24th Ward which is unabashedly political and full of moral quandaries, I found myself laconically browsing through Funimation’s vast offerings in order to satisfy my inner weeb. After paging past numerous shows with the same old themes…

Making and getting lots of phone calls was a raison d’etre for millions of Millennial girls in particular, but once we hit our thirties, the phone became the equivalent of junk mail. Did this have unintended consequences? — Millennials, especially those of us on the older end who were born in Reagan’s second term, are a generation of many dualities. Duality comes up in so much of my work and I always thought it was just because of a vast amount of personal circumstances and life events.

An iceberg story about how I chose my baby lizard’s name. — When I arranged to get a baby lizard, I initially thought I was getting a boy. I was going to name him Seamus. I hadn’t picked him out from the babies that were available. I transacted with the breeder through text message and the pictures and video he sent were…

What was once the rollout of curious innovations has now become a question of what kinds of spyware and predatory models are being forced on us now. — Once upon a time, I was a 16-year-old computer geek who longed for this very iBook in the cover photo. It was a time when anything nerdy was incredibly stigmatized, even in NYC’s punk and metal scenes. Mike Virus from The Virus was considered an outlier and I loved that…

Did Hollywood play a role in the student debt crisis? You may be surprised to find out! — I’ve written about college movies quite a bit on Fanfare: the quintessential Millennial series that followed us into our thirties, American Pie which was first about high school then about life, lesser-known turkeys like The Freshman, and even lesser-known satirical deconstruction pieces that deserve a bigger audience like Loser.

I noticed this fascinating difference between the way people view women refusing to give up pets compared to men who feel the same. — At the time of writing, I’m nearing the end of a journey for one of the dreams that brought me to California: raising a giant lizard from a baby. Well, medium-sized dinosaur for now. It’s no secret that I love big varanids, but I want to provide the best possible…

I wasn’t brought up with the idea of giving your all to some ungrateful corporation, and find the notion of managers whining about quiet quitting to be amusing. — If one thing belies the name, it’s that people are getting awfully loud about the notion of “quiet quitting”. …

It’s an unpleasant one-directional ride that provides the perpetrator with short-term pleasure, and the recipient with nothing. — Throughout my twenties, I was subject to a pattern that became as familiar as the leopard faux fur bondage skirts I regularly wore to punk shows. I’d be at a show. Playing it, or just happening to be there because it was the spindle that wove my life before we…