Bartimaeus

If there was any part of it that was false, no matter how major or minor, it probably makes sense to deny it, since they were attributed to his Special Counsel Office and that might wind its way back to him in the future. Makes it much easier to correct whatever was wrong with it later, too, and it probably improves the perception of his integrity. Wait for the full report with full context instead of stupid headlines, I guess.

One of our (Packers') first round picks this upcoming draft is the Saints', so how well they do determines how good the first rounder is. Saints have been looking mighty mortal as of the past handful of weeks, though, so I'm hopeful that the Rams beat them.

14 points on your first two drives, nothing for the rest of the game. Yikes.

what the hell

2 for 4 in my pick-em group so far...but today were the safe picks - I picked Chargers and Eagles for tomorrow. We'll see how that works out. The Cowboys not making it past the divisional round curse continues, it seems.

There are lame-brained people in every walk of life, unfortunately.

If that happens, it would mean two wildcards would be in a conference's championship game for the first time ever, and a wildcard would subsequently host a championship game for the first time ever. That'd be pretty cool, although I think I'd prefer a Chiefs-Chargers championship game.

I think I'd rather play them than the Chargers. Tough wildcards in the AFC this year. Chiefs have a history of losing playoff games to the Colts, though, while the Colts have a history of losing playoff games to the Patriots - I'm sure the Colts are happy it worked out this way.

Aren't the Cowboys usually pretty good in the wildcard round? It's the divisional round where they lose every single time, I thought, .

I've been subjected to a couple of those new Transformers movies and I think "numb" would probably be the best word for how they've made me feel.

Yeah, those were basically my thoughts as I wrote above. Plot and pacing got a bit muddled up in bits, don't care that much for the animation (especially the rabbits - character animation seems to always be the worst part of 3D animation in my mind, and it seemed especially lacking in both personality and finesse here), and it really just seems pretty mediocre...but it's not like offensively bad. Meh. The film, of course, has its flaws, but there's no doubting that there was some kind of vision there, and it did not pull any punches as far as I can remember (film opens up with a rather nightmarish scene pretty quickly, as I recall, and people are gored and killed without a moment's notice throughout it). I'm so desperately craving good wholesome fun like Hilda and Steven Universe that I've watched a couple of episodes of both Adventure Time and the new She-Ra. She-Ra seems...kind of mediocre, while Adventure Time just doesn't seem to my taste...yet? Gosh dangit, why do I have to be so selective about what I really like? I guess the fact that you just can't replace the things that are special to you easily is what makes them special to begin with, but it hurts in the meanwhile.

I actually watched an episode of it (there are four). It seemed...a bit dull and mediocre. The environments don't look half-bad, but I really don't care for how the rabbits themselves look (or how they sound, for that matter...kind of forgettable voice-acting). As a big fan of the original movie and book (I read the book first), it's not really terrible, but I definitely don't care for it. Buuut it's not exactly an assault on your senses, either. More The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. I'm still not really sure what to make of this show entirely, but it's been at least interesting enough to keep me watching the next episode. There are times where I kind of have to groan over some of the silly stuff included, but on the whole, it's not half bad. Still feels a bit up and down. I've grown to like the two aunts, Hilda and Zelda (also, I guess Hilda the new Netflix series that is currently featured as my avatar makes a nod to Sabrina, since someone mistakenly calls Hilda "Zelda" at some point in Hilda, and I guess that makes sense since...well, I'd rather not say), so that helps, but I really am not sure about the rest of the supporting cast still.

Yeah, I wanted our perfectly unperfect 0-8 away record. Look at what you did. We didn't even look good getting 40 points, either.

A TV show remake of Watership Down that looks like that? Yikes.

There have been some on the left who've wanted Oprah to run, as well as Michael Avenatti, but there were also plenty of others who've said "screw that". Not that the job should necessarily be limited exclusively to politicians, but if you're going to have any kind of celebrity run, it should ideally be someone who...I don't know, has some kind of experience being an actual person, preferably someone who has walked a significant portion of their life in a regular person's shoes? I'm not gonna vote for some crappy talking head who has a history of buying into obvious bullcrap and recommending it to others like Oprah (and never mind her political stances which I don't even know what are), or some awful political opportunist with a whole lot of baggage like Avenatti...but maybe I'd vote for...I'm not even sure, to be honest. Are there any celebrities who seem like real people that have some sort of vaguely qualifying experience?

Thanks. It does make it so I have to be slightly less strict about people I ignore (since there are people that I might like to ignore in some subforums but not others), but it's well worth the price of admission.

Yeah, pretty close to. We are in absolutely dire need of both pass rushers and safeties (as we currently have nobody for both...or worse than in the case of pass rushers, where we have two very expensive players who are horribly injury prone and have been lousy at best when on the field in the form of Nick Perry and Clay Matthews). We're also in pressing need of a reliable second WR, TE, and ILB (Randall Cobb has been a horrible, horrible waste of money outside of like one magnificent game each year, while Jimmy Graham was already on the downward turn of his career when we gave him a big contract and he has looked even worse since...). Furthermore, the right side of our offensive line has been frequently injured, shuffled about, and/or simply bad. Our RB situation seems to perpetually be crippled because of injuries, too. I think we'll probably punt on both the RB and WR problems another year simply because we still have young developing players at those positions, but yeah, we're in a pretty bad spot in most places.

It has a very...different sort of look, if nothing else. Over the Garden Wall. On the recommendation of TrueNeutral, it sadly wasn't to my taste. The protagonists were just so bland and boring that it unfortunately kind of set the tone for the whole show and simply didn't work for me. Felt like a lot of wasted potential - would have liked to seen how this played out with very different protagonists, less comedic antagonists, and a different sort of underlying plot arc (which also didn't really work for me, either). Watched an episode of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on the recommendation of Leferd above. It was really up and down (that cousin character that just keeps appearing out of nowhere to spell out random solutions to Sabrina has been sooo freaking bad each time he's appeared, and really, I'm not particularly enamored by *any* of the supporting characters so far), but it held my attention long enough I'll probably watch a second episode. I didn't really know much about it going into it, but so far, it hasn't been really what I expected. It's been much more silly in both content and appearance than I would have expected, I guess.

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).