Bartimaeus

I came across this lady that plays some of the weirdest, most random old garbage a few weeks back, and I've been slowly going through her YouTube videos. She has this...um, interesting icon for her YouTube/Twitch avatar, which I'd been wondering about ever since I saw it. Today, I discovered what it was from... It's possibly the best character creator of all time (timestamped): This video was from eleven months ago. I admire that she's kept it for so long.

...Is that a Matilda "Get Sticky With Mickey" reference? If so, you've earned my utmost respect.

I'm very glad to hear that, though personally I don't like to be slathered from head to toe in honey, but that might just be a me problem.

Dear Obsidian Moderation Team, Are you okay? Love, Bartimaeus

I can't help but laugh every time I see or hear the term "warfighter". Language is completely arbitrary, I know, but somehow that one in particular seems too absurd for me.

...Wait a second, they took the ancient fused uniques from Diablo 2 and made it into an actual mechanic now? Supposedly, Mephisto had a bugged drop table in the initial release of Lord of Destruction that limited how many uniques could drop at the same time, but it was coded badly and it made it so that in the extremely unlikely event of too many uniques dropping, you'd get the base item of one but the properties of another, hence the monstrosities above. Wizardspike Gauntlets in particular were duped to all hell and back, but there were a few others. I say "supposedly" because there's no video of this ever actually happening despite the fact that someone could go (dis)prove it if they really wanted to, those old versions of the games still exist and it's not at all difficult to change the drop mechanics to force only uniques to drop - it could just as well be that they were hacked items. Though unlike all the hacked items that were mass-removed from everyone's characters like twenty years ago never to return, fused uniques still exist on the official D2 servers, so maybe there's something to it after all.

I would assume that it depends on the brand/business/product. For ABC/Disney, it's probably safe to say that they would have more left-wing people in their camp than right-wing, so yes, I would imagine they would've been much better off just quietly ignoring all of this. There are enough other significant voices out there saying so much worse about Charlie Kirk than the nothingness that Kimmel did (his comment didn't even really directly concern Charlie Kirk but rather the shooter), this shouldn't have even been on anyone's radar, especially given the kind of audience Kimmel has in the first place. Foolishness all around on the decision-makers at ABC/Disney, though I do understand that the threats between FCC and Sinclair/Nexar were probably persuasive in the moment. ABC/Disney will still have to sort that nasty business out.

More and more, I think corporations are learning the hard way that doing anything to draw political attention to yourself in this polarized climate is pretty much always the wrong thing to do - you do something to score points and you get the other side angry at you, then you walk it back and now both sides are angry at you. You could've just done nothing and sat quietly in your corner, blissfully happy that nobody was thinking of you being political in any meaningful way.

If you continue to read BruceVC posts of your own free volition, you are mad indeed. Well, maybe I should check to see what he said myself... Oh wait, I can't! And I think to myself...what a wonderful world. Well, except for all the other stupid, disingenuous ****s out there, but it is what it is.

It's basically impossible. Susan Collins will be vulnerable in Maine and Thom Thillis is retiring in North Carolina: those two are the best pick-up opportunities for Democrats. After that, it gets a lot more dicey, with seats in Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, and Florida being the most likely to flip. I say "most likely to flip" but of course, none of them are actually likely to flip. In contrast, Democrats will be defending competitive seats in both Georgia and Michigan, and somewhat competitive seats in Minnesota and New Hampshire. There's a long time between now and the election, though: if the economy explodes even more between now and then, Democrats may have a hurricane storming behind them...or perhaps we might not have elections at all. I don't think anyone can really predict what will happen to the Republican Party once Trump goes...especially not knowing exactly where the party will be before he goes. Like other cults of personality, he's the linchpin that holds it all together, and history has numerous examples of both implosions and of someone successfully being able to fill the void...and while I don't see any obvious candidates for who could do it, the opportunity will certainly present itself.

It's, as of yet, unclear whether he was actually far-right, or far-left, or completely politically unaffiliated because actually 30-40% of the adult U.S. population doesn't bother to vote or be politically affiliated in the first place. But there's clearly already enough to debunk all this "violent leftist death cult environment/upbringing" nonsense, which from what I've seen from other people's posts in here, BruceVC can shove straight back up his nasty ass. You wouldn't catch me reading or responding to a BruceVC post, but it's difficult not to see everyone else doing so.

Transcription of what was found on the bullets, read out-loud by the Governor of Utah: https://streamable.com/i02zub "Notices bulges, OWO, what's this?" <- the one that killed Charlie Kirk "If you read this, you are gay lmao" <- unfired "Hey fascist! Catch! Up Right Down Down Down" <- unfired “O bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao" <- unfired A ****ing 4chan edgelord, which, as everyone knows, is definitely an extremist left-wing environment and most definitely not a breeding ground for nazis and other brands of right-wing scum And only arrested by Trump's gutted and incompetent FBI because his own father turned him in... It's so beautiful, guys. Truly wonderful.

So not a white guy in his 60s (turned out to be a false arrest), but a young white college drop-out in his early 20s, lives in Utah, father is a veteran, sheriff, and Mormon preacher. Dressed up as Trump for Halloween 8 years ago. Definitely sounds like a guy that was raised in a radical left-wing environment.

People shouldn't die for their beliefs. But I also think people's automatic response to schoolchildren getting murdered on the regular ideally shouldn't be saying absolutely psychotic **** like i t ' s s o m e t h i n g w e ' r e j u s t g o i n g t o h a v e t o a c c e p t b e c a u s e f r e e a c c e s s t o g u n s f o r a l l a l w a y s n o m a t t e r w h a t. . . especially if it's not actually your friends or family that are the ones being sacrificed by and for this mad, sick country. Like, talk about being hoisted by your own petard in a nasty fit of cosmic vengeance. The only country where this happens, and we've tried almost nothing to prevent it, and the little we have tried has been stupid and misguided, and it's all only going to get worse - especially as people are increasingly impoverished, isolated, radicalized, and deranged. Increasingly, I think the U.S. might well be facing something its own version of Ireland's The Troubles over the next decade or two... It's not going to be pretty.

As someone who had an active Democratic lawmaker in my state get assassinated (and with a nearly successful attempt on another) earlier this year with barely a media peep while I now have to hear right-wing conspiracy theories from brain-impaired troglodytes in real life about how the shooter was actually under orders from Governor Tim Walz because he'd been appointed to some 60-member work/labor recommendations board back in 2011... ... ...I'm guessing this will be a little more of a stir-up than those assassinations.

Charlie Kirk assassinated by some white guy in his 60s while giving a speech at Utah Valley University. Boy, our country sure is in an interesting place right now, isn't it? Utah just passed a "open carry at colleges is legal" law earlier this year, too... "Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment" Hey, as long as it's not you or your kids, I guess so, right? Well...one of those rare cases where some right wing piece of **** got the chance to actually practice what he preached, so good on him.

It all sounds pretty on-brand. Maybe #3 is a little extreme, but that's just some additional gamification of already existing issues underlining the series, really.

Sometimes, I kind of wish Keyrock were still around so that we could all make a point of repeatedly saying what a stupid piece of **** RFK Jr. is.

I've been in a re-watching mood. 12 Angry Men is so good, it's a film that can really change someone's entire outlook on how they perceive the world and all the assumptions they make about it, and the impossibility of really trying to figure out what's actually happened or what's truly right or wrong given our pathetically limited point of view.

3 Women (1977). Second time watching this. I didn't remember it being quite this potent a nightmare. Robert Altman was really off his marbles, but I'm glad he was able to make a truly great movie with Shelley Duvall here - I both despise and love her in this movie, and that's a very strange place for her to be and I think that's wonderful.

You only have to look at one of those grizzled old farmers that wore t-shirts and jeans for their entire lives to know sunscreen is a good idea: upper body, they look like a leathery dried out raisin about to keel over because of skin cancer, but lower body looks like they've de-aged 40 years. Yeah, I think I'll keep wearing sunscreen.

I was just thinking about your erstwhile watching of Space Adventure Cobra the other day... I think you'll enjoy it more than I did. I mean, I enjoyed it fine, but it was a little bit of a lukewarm enjoyment.

@Hurlshort, what post of mine did you like three hours ago and why is it now in one of Trump's extralegal gulags where I'm not allowed to visit it

What finally made me leave Google a few years ago was when I was suddenly and inexplicably logged and then locked out of my account from my home PC on my home IP address...and I realized that the whole system is completely automated and that it's impossible to get any actual support in the event of system error. No matter what information I gave them, they thought my log-in attempt was suspicious and just kept asking for more information until there literally was nothing else left to ask and I still wasn't allowed back in. I ended up switching to ProtonMail where I can log-in from any device on any IP, and where you can setup TOTP 2FA, which is pretty much the only type of 2FA that I want - texts, phonecalls, emails and the like are all dumb, as are Google's random security and account history trivia questions. ProtonMail isn't perfect from a UI standpoint, but at least I don't have to worry about getting banned by some automated system for completely inscrutable reasons anymore.

I re-watched Chernobyl. It's fantastic television despite the fact that there is way too much misinformation and even straight up lies for the sake of drama and also just because the showrunners apparently did not do enough research...but there's really always been one thing that bothers me more than anything else about this series, even the lies that are so blatantly in the face of the single most major theme of the show. In episode 4, there's a new POV from a hitherto unknown liquidator conscripted to help clean up Chernobyl. The POV is meant to help us understand the human element of the job, how difficult it really was to take everyone away from their homes and kill every last living creature in the Zone and upturn the very earth itself, and how many of these guys were basically just kids that wouldn't have ever signed up for any of this...but I hated watching it even the first time, it just didn't work for me. On this re-watch, I couldn't help but notice... Is that ****ing Barry Keoghan, from The Banshees of Inisherin, The Green Knight, Dunkirk? I seem to hate this guy literally everywhere I see him, automatically, no matter what. I'm really starting to think I just must not like this guy for some reason.