Bartimaeus

Though the worst case scenario happened today - Steelers just won the division, and the Ravens, Titans, and Colts all won today, which makes it virtually impossible. The Titans and Colts play each other still, which means you actually need them to tie with each other among a host of other things for you to play a wildcard (namely, them losing their other games and you winning out). But yes, not mathematically eliminated! Better than the Packers can say - I imagine it's been some time since the last time that the Packers were eliminated before the Browns, . (e): Correction - Steelers haven't yet won the division, but rather guaranteed that they won it over the Browns (and the Bengals).

Looks like the Cowboys are making the playoffs after all.

It would be Cowboys-like to upset a top 3 team and then lose at home to a divisional opponent you've already beaten.

I mean, I'm 100% pro-magic - I just haven't found anything that works yet. Will use any combination of magical wand, pointy hat, mystical tattoos, and/or freaky mask upon receiving proof of magic!

Eh, I laughed super hard when we lost to the Cardinals of all teams at home, .

Yeah we're almost certainly getting an L next week. How's THAT for a reality check, guys?

Everything just seemed so "random" and/or mean-spirited. We watched one of the "better"-rated episodes of season 1 as our "last resort" for the show, which was about Mabel trying to win a pig and Dipper trying to win a girl's heart over some other random boy. It's not a particularly interesting setup, but with good writing, you can make it work...except some character with a time travel device suddenly appears and we just keep re-doing the same scenes over and over in an attempt to create the perfect day for both of them? Both of our protagonists are acting like horrible petulant children most of the episode (and never mind all the awful attempted manipulation on the part of Dipper towards the girl whose heart he's trying to win)? Random, unexplained things just keep happening over and over? Episode ends with everything still going exactly how they wanted it to (despite it being completely undeserved), while the boy that was trying to hang out with the girl Dipper liked gets pointed and laughed at - literally - by everyone for no real discernible reason, when he'd done absolutely nothing wrong to anybody other than incidentally (i.e. through no fault of his own) get in the way of our protagonist...which the boy didn't even know he was doing? It all just felt...so gross, contrived, and incomprehensible. It was causing my brain to shutdown. We wanted to like it - we really, really wanted to...but it was a complete no-go. We were actually rather horrified by how bad it was, and it was a big part in us giving Steven Universe another try, since at no point did SU feel like anything approaching that (e: and indeed, there is actually a time travel device in one of the early SU episodes, but it's handled so radically differently and so much more sensibly that that was like the perfect delineator illustrating the difference between the two shows).

Well, we can only give it another shot...I pray you're right, because I'm not particularly enamored of the idea of seeing anymore of that floating decapitated unicorn party animal (harr harr) that made me want to harm myself, . Hah. Yeah, getting some actual professional singers as voice actors and actresses really paid off for this show. They knew what they were doing.

It was brutal. It's a show that you just have to keep giving a shot until it suddenly clicks. I credit Pearl for being the bridge into liking the show - Steven and Amethyst are just so bloody obnoxious to start with, while Garnet initially comes across as such a non-character...until they're not, and suddenly you start understanding and loving the whole lot of them, flaws and all - and the additional Gems that start getting introduced are also somehow all great (I particularly love Peridot), too. But that initial learning period is just so brutal - especially because in the first season, too much time is spent on the much weaker human characters (Sadie and to a lesser degree Lars...and Steven's dad, of course, being the only real exceptions E: AND CONNIE JEEZE). Uh, actually, Star was one of the other shows that we tried after Gravity Falls. I think we gave it two episodes worth before we decided we did not want to have a repeat of Gravity Falls. Does it get...better? So much of it just seemed like, "wow, random things happen LOL!!!" (which is also what every waking moment of Gravity Falls felt like, which we'd decidedly had more than enough of - it starts to feel like an assault on your senses after a while). If it gets better from that, we can give it another try...

Last time I wrote in this thread, I complimented and recommended the new Hilda show on Netflix while disclaiming that I'm not really a big fan of this new wave of kids-cartoons-that-also-somehow-have-adult-audiences like Steven Universe and Adventure Time. I watched Hilda with somebody else at the time and we both loved it (see avatar), which inspired us to go looking for and give a few other seemingly similar shows a first or second try. Our first option was giving Steven Universe a shot, and we didn't really care for it, which made us go to Gravity Falls. We gave it about six episodes before we wanted to blow our brains out (it was probably five more episodes than we should've given it, but we've been trying to let shows get a running start before we dismiss them), which made us check out a couple of other shows before going back to Steven Universe and happening to land on an actually good episode, and a week and a half later, we've binged five entire seasons worth and it turns out, it's actually a pretty darned good show. Problem was, each season seems to have just a few episodes where we were forced to wonder if actual aliens took over the writing department of the show to make episodes that were just...bizarre and not very good. But besides that, it's actually a perfectly nice and lovable show that just gets better over time (season 1 in particular is a little rougher than season 2 and beyond). Now I'm kind of depressed that we went through it so fast and there's nothing left...until December when it returns for just a few episodes, anyways. I hate it when that happens. ...also if anybody here watches these kinds of shows (which I'm not sure that they do), feel free to give other recommendations

Punt on linebacker for the time being - Burks was a 3rd rounder, and his flaw is his game speed, which may or may not improve with time, and we have at least one half-decent ILB in Martinez. Pass rusher is the biggest need, and safety is almost equally as big of a need. Ye' gods, both our safety and EDGE play are just abysmal. Probably OT after that.

We're three games behind the top 3 wild card contenders (Seahawks, Vikings, and Redskins: it's actually 2, but they all have tiebreakers over us because they all beat us head to head, so it's effectively 3...and also, losing all your games against the other wildcard contenders generally means you aren't going to be a wildcard). There's also the Panthers that I'm not even considering as well. We're not making it. (e): Actually, I forgot about that stupid tie, so only the Vikings are 3 games ahead of us - the other two are "only" two games ahead of us. Still pretty bad.

Yep! ...No idea. College football bores me too much to pay attention, .

I think Redskins probably would've won the division had Alex Smith not been horribly disemboweled, but that's the nature of football. At least it won't be the Packers beating you in the playoffs this time, right?

IIRC, Comey in his pre-election press conference basically said you wouldn't generally prosecute for this type of crime/incompetence, but I think the implication was that you would probably get fired over it, which I thought was frustrating but probably fair at the time. Of course, you can't really fire the First Lady...

Tokyo Godfathers (2003). lmao, this was actually a pretty good movie. A bum with gambling and drinking problems, "an old homo" (their words, not mine) who fancies himself a mother, and a teenaged girl on the run are "appointed" the task of returning a baby that was thrown in the trash to its parent(s) in frozen Tokyo. It's about as insane, depressing, and hilarious as you might expect. The ending was a bit hackneyed, but in a way that I thought made sense for what's nominally a Christmas movie (as dark as it was at times).

Aaron Rodgers himself has been somewhat bewildering this year. He's my favorite player of all time, but...you have been seriously injured at the beginning of each the last two seasons, ya need to stop playing the hero. He gives up on so many easy passes that would help move the offense down the field. He is going to absolutely shatter the record for number of throwaways this year, and the number of sacks (especially on third downs) combined with our average 3rd and distance have just been terrible. I think some of that falls on Rodgers himself, surely, but there's no possible way we're getting rid of Rodgers...which means it comes down to the offensive coordinator, which is essentially McCarthy in this case, to get control of the offense and realize what is not working and what is. Having Rodgers hold on to the ball in the pocket for a few seconds to look for the big play downfield and then having to roll out and either work magic or throw it away is not a sustainable form of offense, especially for a guy that keeps getting injured because of this crap. It's so reminiscent of the second half of 2015 and the first half of 2016 (where he also had good stats, but everyone and their dog could see that there was something horribly wrong with how the offense was operating and how it was effectively giving away games) before we went on the "run the table" streak where we went to a short-and-easy + timing-based offense (which Rodgers was absolutely masterful at). You can do the miracle stuff in addition to your normal offense (that's what has made Rodgers the best in the business over most of his career), but it can't be the majority of the offense...it just can't. The defense has been fine - even admirable at times, considering our complete lack of pass rushers (Fackrell's coverage sacks notwithstanding). How we were in this game, or in the Rams game, is indeed a mystery to me...and yet, in both cases, it feels like we should've won. An offense run by Aaron Rodgers with a pretty decent offensive line and receivers (though neither necessarily great) should not be this wildly inconsistent.

Finally. One more loss and that should about do it for sure for the Packers. I am more than ready for McCarthy to be fired, and I'm pretty sure his contract was setup exactly to do that if he didn't deliver this year. He has been a good coach throughout the years, but it's a similar case to Andy Reid with the Eagles - even though he might have been a good coach for us at one point, we clearly, patently need a change. I have been wavering back and forth on McCarthy for so many years now, and the fact that he just has absolutely no control of even the offense, his area of specialty, is just...I'm just feeling done with him.

Down in Florida: Broward County uploads recount results two minutes past deadline, invalidating results. Apparently, they had trouble with malfunctioning machines and figuring out how to use their own website. Apparently it changed the result by a few thousand or something. Whoever's in charge down there needs to be fired so badly - some Democrat lady named Snipes something or another, I think, as this is not the first time Broward has been absolute garbage for Florida elections.

People link illegally shared music on YouTube here in the "what're you listening to" thread all the time. Pretty sure it falls on YouTube, not us. If it's anything like Ghost in the Shell (which I loved the music and atmosphere of, but thought basically everything else was super mediocre at best), it's probably not for me.

I'm pretty sure Avenatti is nothing more than a political opportunist anyways, and I wouldn't have wanted him for the SC even before them - if these accusations have any merit at all (still waiting to hear any sort of details), I am more than happy to let the man lie in the bed he made.

Night of the Hunter (1955). Great villain, especially for the time. But the actual movie was rather bewildering and hard to follow in its beats a good portion of the time, often leaving me confused and dissatisfied. I actually watched it with somebody else, and we were both constantly wondering what in the world was happening and why the movie was going down so many bizarre paths. So it ended up being a very bipolar movie in terms of good/bad: half of the time we were utterly hooked, and the other half we were groaning and/or facepalming. Still, it was much more interesting than something that was simply mediocre all the way through. If the movie had been kept just a little more in check in its unevenness and bizareness, I think it could've been great. Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956). First time watching, it was a little unspectacular but still pretty good. Probably doesn't need much more saying about it than that. @Alita: I don't like how anything about that looks. Can anyone even think of any big genuinely at least good live-action adaptations of cartoons - anime or western?

Thanks, I love it, .

My criteria for ignoring is pretty simple (and no, you are not on it): if you annoy me more than anything else when I read your posts, I don't want to read your posts. I don't go to forums to be annoyed. It is a personal problem, certainly, but it is not really strictly a matter of difference in opinions - for example, although I find Guard Dog to often be on the opposite side of things as myself, I generally find him to be a reasonable poster on most issues and to have an interesting, alternative perspective to my own. So though I nominally have much more in common with ktchong, I am actually way more inclined to read Guard Dog's posts than his. It's way more about style of posting than substance or anything else. @Jeff Flake: I think he has already commented on doing so. He'll almost definitely lose (Trump's approval numbers within the Republican party are much too high for them to eject him...and further, I am almost certain Trump would run again anyways even if he was, which would just torpedo the entire election), but it does sound like he'll try.

But by and large not by the same people who are crying racism now. Which does tell me something about where said posters' priorities lie. I mean, I've had the guy on ignore since he got here, too, and at this point I guess I'm more or less a progressive - at least for the purpose of the U.S. I didn't remember specifically why I put him on ignore at the time, but what they're saying does sound correct to my recollection (and I do remember a wack-job rant on asians and white women) - I found him, and am currently finding him, to be a rather distasteful poster. ...But then again, I have multiple pages of people on ignore. So that probably tells you more about me than anyone else, .