Bartimaeus

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.

The Boy and the Heron (2023). Uh... Hmm. The initial setup and pacing of the film really stink: it doesn't feel like the film starts until literally the 45 minute mark, and after that, the characters, writing, and direction are all still just...kind of aggravating. I'm very much reminded of a very slow and messy Spirited Away, which was already incredibly inexplicable and messy in of itself...but this is much more meandering and with way less appealing music and characters. Deep and meaningful themes unfortunately don't mean squat if I wasn't able to enjoy the journey meant to relate and explore them. I hope Miyazaki at least found meaning in making it. To be frank, I expected to dislike this movie at the outset, ever since I read the most basic details revealed about it, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised...but somehow, I liked it even less than Ponyo. Man, I wish Isao Takahata were still alive.

While the healthcare cuts are terrible and will cause many critical access (read: rural) hospitals and clinics to close (hopefully leading to as many completely unnecessary MAGA deaths as possible, though we regretfully know that there will be many affected who are anything but MAGA), I think the actual worst part of this bill is that it will increase ICE's funding by many times its current, and they're expecting to roughly triple its current workforce. Trump's secret police will be better funded than most countries' militaries, and I can't imagine there's anything else he wants more than his own private army that personally supports him and only him with the bill mostly footed by the taxpayers of all the states that he'll be unleashing them upon.

Jimmy Swaggart My mom's dad was a pastor involved with a lot of the scumbags like Swaggart and Copeland early on into their ministries/proto-televangelist careers. Swaggart probably isn't as evil as Copeland is, but I can't say I'm terribly sorry to see him go, little good it does now.

Bucks straight up waive Damian Lillard, let Brook Lopez walk, and then acquire Myles Turner. They're doing literally just about anything to keep Giannis, but most everything they've tried the past few years has turned out to be a disaster in retrospect. The East will be very crippled with star injuries next year, and I guess the Bucks see it as an opportunity with Giannis.

I got a hankering to roll up a sorceress in Diablo 2, and I saw that Diablo 2 Resurrected was coincidentally on sale for $13, so I decided to buy it. I decided to buy it, but it doesn't seem like my decision was meant to be, for every which way I attempt to purchase it from Blizzard - be it in the Battle.net game launcher, Firefox, Chrome, both PayPal and card - Blizzard refuses to accept my money, and I just get stuck in an error 500 loop. I don't quite understand: I suppose it must be the universe telling me not to spend $13 on an ancient game I already bought a few times 20 years ago.

A handful of episodes of 1970s' Laverne & Shirley. It's...charmingly amusing. I've heard that it gets terrible after the setting changes from Milwaukee to Los Angeles in the last few seasons, but I probably won't make it that far. For a show that was #1 on TV for a few years in the late 1970s, it's never had any blu-ray releases and is only available to stream in SD on something called Pluto TV.

As someone who has watched a handful of James Bond films spread a number of decades and came away disliking or hating them all, I'm personally very happy to see this pairing - so long as nobody tries to convince me to watch the resulting garbage. Confining Dennis' talents to James Bond seems a small mercy on the part of the universe, honestly.

All in the East, too. At least the Lillard experiment for the Bucks has already proven to not really work on the whole anyways, so I don't think it much moves the needle there. The Pacers and the Celtics, on the other hand...

Oh yeah, I watched an episode of that a while back and it made me want to die. This trailer...only confirmed that feeling.

I'll miss the old Rareware character designs, but I think my biggest issue is that the game just looks like Super Mario Odyssey, but Donkey Kong-ized. As a Super Mario Odyssey hater, this does not make me happy. Guide me, o' Lucifer, to some new road... Also, I lied, I just looked again and I think I like her "touring" skateboarding/rollerblading outfit the best out of all the new ones. That one seems the most Princess Daisy to me. It's like a better and more detailed version of some of her old soccer designs, and the little hair ribbon is cute...unlike the silly French beret or baseball caps. The swimwear outfit...if someone had explained to me in words its design, I probably would've thought that I'd have liked it, but for some reason, it just doesn't look great to me.

That's five minutes I can't play as Princess Daisy. What am I going to do in the meantime, play as Baby Daisy? My God.

MSRP is $450 ($500 for the Mario Kart World bundle), which everyone got mad about as being about $50 too high. Then the whole tariffs business started, and Nintendo retracted their MSRP and waited for the dust to settle...then tariffs were taken back(-ish), and Nintendo re-announced that $450 would indeed be the MSRP and everyone was like "phew, okay, that's so much better than what it was looking like", but then the initial stock was immediately sold out and now all we have are scalper prices, which are generally between $650-800. Depending on how the whole tariff situation ends up ultimately working out, it might actually get way worse. Anyways, I'm not familiar with WalMart or how their online store works, but I was looking at the shipping details and it says it's being shipped by a third party seller called "Sunrise Mail", so that's not WalMart's own price...and indeed, pricing aggregators seem to register the WalMart page as actually being "out of stock", with the listed price as being $500 instead. I don't think any of this much matters yet, since there ain't any games, not unless you count Mario Kart World as one, which I don't. Haven't ever enjoyed Mario Kart, and an open world version of it makes it exponentially less appealing to me, . All these cruddy open world games, I tells ya - at least it's a franchise I don't care about at all this time. You can't even start off the game as Princess Daisy, you have to unlock her in one of the cups. What an absolute outrage.

It's funny how the fall of cable and the rise of streaming services have actually made many more niche shows way more inaccessible than they used to be.

One thing I know that should stir up Guard Dog's heart and finally break through his paradoxically pathetic yet practically impervious shell of "both sides are the same"...the assassin even shot and killed the dog, a darling golden retriever. Find me any evidence of anyone but right-wing scum, be it this creep or cops or ghoulish governors of South Dakota, deliberately going out of their way to kill dogs in this day and age. Even their king hates dogs: doesn't that tell you both sides are, in fact, not the same?

Cool, Democratic reps and senators in Minnesota are getting assassinated now.

I'm not sure about either of those guys, but she was great and everything she said seemed to make sense.