San Francisco’s answer to the Catacombs. I think I’m one of those people who’s content to look through the pictures… although I might feel differently if I knew someone who knew what they were doing.

Yes.

Messy Nessy Chic looks at a fair gob of beautiful old movie theaters kept running by Kickstarter. It’s alarming sometimes that so much of democracy is now run through where we put our dollars, but at least there are more options for making that vote go further. Also worth a look: Kickstarter’s highlights of 2013.

More advice to questions posed via search terms. I love Captain Awkward. So much, so hard.

“Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.” The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power. Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a “hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.” –The New Yorker, on hangovers.

I am lucky enough not to have food issues, but that doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally see a recipe or a dish or something and think, “THAT IS THE THING I WOULD EAT IF I WERE INCREDIBLY DEPRESSED OR SIMPLY HASTENING MY OWN DEMISE.” That weird, little-used part of my brain lit up like a freaking pinball machine at this.

Speaking of, here’s a roundup of eating challenges from my hometown. Dude, I don’t even go to buffets because I don’t feel like I can get my money’s worth.

Source Code in TV and Films. Spoiler: there’s a whole lot of bullshit in here. Also: I hear computer screens also do not project onto the viewer’s face, despite what we learned from Hackers. We can only conclude that the future is bunk.

For your listening pleasure this week: excellent classic scifi that partially inspired Idiocracy, courtesy of Escape Pod.

And finally, this week’s additions to the TRAVEL WANT list, which is currently stored in a 1,000-page, acid-free, handmade leather-bound book on a pedestal made specially to hold substantial amounts of weight. Additions are listed in order of easy to “kinda gonna take some planning, but we’ll see.”

• Cape Flattery
• Treehouses!
• South America, like most to all of it (I like this one especially because it talks about sex while traveling, which is not something I’ve seen addressed very often)

And general solo travel advice from Gigi Griffis, whose blog I spent a few hours on this week. Stellar writing on vulnerability and transformation aside, one of the greatest resources on this blog is something else I haven’t seen written about very often, and certainly not in this level of detail: budget breakdowns of life in various destinations. They’re quite thorough, quite aware of her advantages and restrictions, and quite useful in a way I haven’t really seen elsewhere. Panoramic photos of unpolluted starry skies and long-exposure images of the Northern Lights are very alluring and inspiring, but few things get my imagination going these days like facts, unadorned numbers, and a mathematical breakdown of certain kinds of possibility.