Bartimaeus

That would be classic Trump "negotiating" at work: rip up the agreement we had, bluster and threaten, get the same deal or a little better or maybe even a little worse (at the cost of a lot of good will), announce to the world how brilliant he is and that he got what he wanted.

Fun fact for those perhaps not caught up on all of their history: Adolf Hitler became the leader of his party (German Workers' Party, later renamed National Socialist German Workers' Party) in 1921, he was arrested and imprisoned for an attempted coup in 1923, he ran for president and came second to Hindenburg in 1932, he was appointed chancellor by that same Hindenberg in 1933, and he became dictator later in the same year with the Enabling Act of 1933 that effectively suspended all civil rights in favor of supreme government authority and discretion. It took 12 years from the time Adolf Hitler became the leader of his - at the time - little podunk party until he became chancellor and then dictator. None of us lived through those times, but 12 years can be a very long time in politics, especially in that particular era, and it doesn't take a lot of googling to determine that the Nazi party was incompetent, corrupt, ineffective, drunk, drug-using, chaotic, and very backstabby during pretty much its entire existence. They had fancy and well-organized ceremonies to be certain, but they were power-mad maniacs who didn't really know what they were doing, and none of that really mattered or prevented the totality of their evil once they controlled all the levers of power.

Love Serenade (1996). Australian cinema is so...very strange every time I watch any. Each time, it's like stepping onto an alien planet that more or less looks like ours but doesn't really act like ours. It's weird in the land down under... Miranda Otto is such a funny lady.

I could be misremembering (as it's been a few years), but I believe ShadySands was more of a Packers fan than a Broncos, but he's also more or less stopped watching the NFL. This was probably the least I've been interested in the NFL in the past decade (I only caught about half of the Packers games and really didn't watch much else), but it's probably less to do with the NFL itself for me, and more to do with sports just not being a super compelling method of escapism for me this year.

Stranger Things season 5... Just kidding, I ain't watching that crap. Nope, I watched Neon Genesis Pluribus. Really great. Kind of fantastic, actually. Final episode smashed it out of the park so good that I almost don't want them to make a second season, I'd be perfectly fine with them just leaving it how it is, despite it being a massive cliffhanger. I feel like you can really only go down from here, but I suppose if they got us this far, you have to at least give them a chance. The incredibly high-stakes scenario is contrarily married to a low-key, character-driven, and incredibly personal story, it was really just kind of beautiful and exactly what I want out of high-minded sci-fi or fantasy concepts, which for TV so often just gets bogged down with...all the normal yucks of a million different characters and increasingly complex plotting and set pieces. None of that was necessary here, I did not miss it at all, it stayed true to its colors all the way through. Will that be the case for season 2? We'll have to wait and see.

More amused than anything else, especially as I was so out of wack with my chronically terrible sleep that I got too sleepy and actually went to bed at 8 so I didn't see the game (though I did just watch the highlights after waking up a little bit ago), so while it's certainly another horrifically embarrassing and painful playoff loss (bonus points for being against the Bears!), I did at least have the good fortune of not watching it live. Deja vu of three weeks ago against the Bears but somehow even worse this time: 25 points given up in the 4th quarter? Yowch! It's been a very Jekyll and Hyde season for the Packers, but really, the Packers have been having these sorts of horrific playoff collapses under LaFleur since he got here, wonder if he's now in real danger of being let go after that. This Packers team did not have the legs to go the distance after losing about half its starters, most of them late into the season, but I did think there was a real possibility of them knocking off the Bears. Whoops. To fumble it like that is pretty inexcusable.

Eddington (2025). It got maybe just a little over the top towards the end there, but overall, it felt like a very wonderful, horrible look into the disaster that is the United States of America and its many crises, new and old alike. Very stressful. Probably don't watch it if if you live in the U.S. and having to think about the current state of this country and its future might push you over the edge.

A friend got me into this vocaloid bullcrap last month. This particular one, Kasane Teto, is the first one I've heard where I seem to actually like the voice. Now she's been using it as an excuse to send me a bazillion different songs of extremely varying quality and styles...but I like this one. Honestly, I used to have a really diminutive view of vocaloids, but ever since generative AI became a thing, they just seem so silly, tame, and harmless in comparison.

I'm sure you can appreciate the sad irony for your eternal refrain of waiting for the full story to come out against the actual legal reality requiring that someone speak as soon as humanly possible if they want to safely tell lies or drive an agenda...

Don't be silly: Just because I haven't taken the time to study the particulars of any of BruceVC's turds doesn't mean I'm blind or stupid: it's quite obvious who is being talked about when somebody like Zoraptor seems to call someone else disingenuous when there doesn't appear to be any inciting incident for it. That's only going to be one person responsible for that sort of thing around here these days, which is our very own BruceVC.

Correct. Come 2028, if we still have elections, the Democrat that runs on abolishing or at least completely firing and restarting all of ICE is very certainly to be the one that gets my vote in the primaries. Wiping out the brown-nosers in our federal agencies is going to be a requirement for functioning government after all of this.

I've been working very hard to get a warning for my treatment of Bruce the past ten years - I'm not likely to give up now, am I? One of these days, I'll finally get there... Yes, it's true: I do not believe free will exists in any meaningful capacity, and so I must accept that BruceVC is simply the product of conditions and forces outside his control. Still have to call a spade a spade sometimes, though.

The sad thing is, Volourn at his worst was never as bad as BruceVC at his best: at least Volourn was always exactly how he presented himself. I can appreciate that sort of sincerity, even if his behavior was generally kind of awful and usually not worth engaging with: he had real thoughts and beliefs, even some ones that didn't seem to follow what maybe anyone else in the world thinks, and he wasn't afraid to share them...and that's much better than all the "oh won't you please poop directly into my mouth" takes that BruceVC has always had.

Once upon a time, I reported one of Volourn's posts by saying that I and a few other people would start re-framing everything Volourn said as supporting dog-****ing if staff didn't tell him off for constantly re-framing everyone and everything he disagreed with as being or supporting Nazis, and while I never heard back from staff, he coincidentally decided to take his ball and leave the forums forever literally immediately after that. Food for thought, people.