Bartimaeus

I guess I don't know enough about Jimmy Kimmel to comment (except that it's a pretty common trend in our society when anything bad happens that the people more on the side of not overtly trying to restrict these bad things from happening always say "let's not politicize this", while those on the other are always in an uproar doing the exact opposite, and it seems like neither side ever realizes the hypocrisy of it all). I think this is literally the first time I've seen a picture of him.

...Context?

He's being painted as a hypocrite because he made it easier for the mentally ill to obtain guns...and then immediately blamed the massacre on the mentally ill while proposing to do nothing to actually solve our crisis of mentally ill people (...while also crapping all over our quite deadly opioid crisis). It's as stupid as it sounds.

I believe it's against the Russian constitution to extradite their citizens to other countries. Three Russian firms were also "implicated", and it seems more charges will be levied against Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager.

Thirteen Russians indicted by the special counsel for various crimes relating to election tampering, in addition to a California man. More to come in the coming months, it seems...

Yeah, they do that on purpose to make you pay more to get both. Almost all of the big cable-ISP corporations do that crap, and it usually works. @Majestic: have not heard that song in a million years.

There are a lot of things that I can absolutely consciously recognize as working or not working for me, and can explain them to others. However, there are times where it's difficult to recognize exactly what I like about a movie, or even a particular scene, and would struggle mightily when comparing them to other movies or scenes that are similar that I really don't like. Guess that's why I'm not a movie critic. Whisper of the Heart. I really enjoyed it - it was a very cute coming-of-age story. It was kind of like the as-a-child parts of Only Yesterday, except for the whole movie. Somewhat different themes, though, and not quite as interesting as a result, but I think more enjoyable.

Please, Don't Touch Anything on Steam (from our good pal ShadySands). One of those little wacky "end-a-thons", where you try to find all the different little secret endings through a variety of arcane steps or techniques in a very short game. It was fun to play around with for a couple of hours, and had decent music and visuals. Scanner Sombre on Steam (also from ShadySands). Apparently, this was meant to be a VR game, which I did not realize. Oh well, it was a little bit of horror-exploration fun with a nice little gimmick of "painting" the pitch black underground cavern you're stuck in with a scanner to reveal the area as you go along.

but nobody's played it

...And my first thought was armor class.

Yeah, U.S. sports are pretty annoying with the endless awful announcers who will never, ever shut up. Dead air is not the plague, you guys - if you used your voice more sparingly, and more thoughtfully, some of us would probably like you better.

My biggest complaint is that almost every character talking made me want to put my controller through my monitor. What the hell is up with almost every character giggling to close out every conversation? ...Why can't I be one of those nice people that aren't easily annoyed by things? :|

From the sounds of it, a heart attack.

Shocker: Trump has refused to authorize the release of the Dems' memo.

The first point about the dossier has probably been debunked already, based on the opinions of various reporters who looked at the specific wording of the Nunes memo. The memo said information that was in the dossier was used, but not the dossier itself. A weasely way of saying that information from another source that also happened to be in the dossier was used. I'm pretty that's one of the clarifications that we'd see in the release of the Democrat memo. For the second point, Obama had definitely been briefed on the Russian investigation - he had begged Mitch McConnell (Senate Majority Leader) to go public with him on it either before the primaries or as they were ongoing (I don't remember which), to try to nip it in the bud, but McConnell refused. Also, it's really weird that Strzok keeps getting painted as this super anti-Trump guy...when he was the one that convinced Comey to re-open the Clinton case, leading to that infamous Comey press meeting days before the election announcing exactly that. Strzok did not appear to like either candidates, which probably just means he had a good head on his shoulders. Except for that whole cheating on his wife with another member of the FBI while apparently writing some really stupid texts - that stuff seems rather contradictory to that point. (P.S. I don't think the Federalist is considered a very good source of news. It's not utterly terrible along the lines of breitbart, though.)

@Pidesco: Coincidentally, the idea for Fox News was originally coined in 1970 by Roger Ailes during the Nixon presidency when he was "media consultant" to the president. Discovered by Gawker (yuck) in old memos in the Nixon Presidential Library: https://web.archive.org/web/20111016200523/http://gawker.com/5814150 Originally envisioned as sort of state-run, pro-GOP news. Roger Ailes would eventually go on to help create Fox News, becoming its first CEO (starting the day it officially launched) until his resignation in 2016 as a result of a sexual harassment scandal.

Yeah, I can definitely see similarities between those three as well, but this felt even stronger than those. It's getting a little off-putting at this point. Disney needs to change up its animation style at least a little here...so many of their 3D movies just look and feel the same.

Zootopia. It was alright. Felt pretty formulaic, though, but I guess that's not totally unexpected. As far as talking animal animations go (which I don't ever bother with), this one was O.K., I guess. Could've been more interesting, though - there were several points where I was thinking that it looked like the film might be breaking free of the formula, but then it kept pulling me back down to Earth, which was disappointing. I couldn't but help keep thinking that the main character, Judy, was just Anna from Frozen, though - and it didn't help any that they made them look similar along with similar physical/expression mannerisms and voices to a degree. Princess Mononoke. Was this supposed to be a spiritual sequel to/remake of Nausicaa? Because that's kind of how it seemed. A lot of shared themes, character roles, and the structure of the film seemed pretty similar, too. I liked Nausicaa better in some ways, and Princess Mononoke in others - I'd rate them right around the same, I think.

*(not actually the same dev, although some of the guys that used to work at GSC Game World before they were all unceremoniously laid off did help form Vostok Games) BR market is already crowded, wouldn't be surprised if this made the company crash and burn. Furthermore, the connection to Stalker is tenuous at best due to BRs playing like the complete opposite kind of shooter Stalker was in most respects. Furtherfurthermore, it's not like the Stalkers were the best technically, and it seems like most BR games are utter technical disasters initially, so I can't see that going well for them when the current crop of BRs have had so much time to mature, and will have even more by the time it comes out.

pop music was a mistake I did recognize a few songs, but I think all of them were from weird al, neil cicierega, silvagunner, and postmodern jukebox parodies

Trump likes veterans who didn't lose their legs in the line of duty.

​You're not kidding. Almost all of the relevant images are of Obama and the Japanese Emperor. I did see the one image of him and the Saudis, though.

​Sorry, I'm a dummy, and was missing the greater context of "attacking the Wall". I think that's really up to Kelemvor. It seemed to me that a part of him hated the Wall (hence why he originally stopped using it, but was eventually forced to return to it after he was found to be screwing everything up and possibly risking his godhood because of it). So maybe it was his way of rebelling against the other gods, letting attacks to continue on it while only putting up a half-hearted fight so that he could claim he was defending it to the other gods. I was also under the general impression that though deities have those kinds of powers, they are not really supposed to use them except in extreme cases - direct interference will just lead to other gods directly interfering. This may be one of those extreme cases (attacks directly on a god's home subplane would seem to qualify), but Mystra, for example, seemed to still oppose the Wall of the Faithless - perhaps she would prevent something like the instant death from happening. I think the subtle resistance thing, and perhaps a sort of general kindness on the part of Kelemvor, is more likely, though - he appeared to have a better understanding of the plight of mortals than most, and probably wasn't really in the business of coming down as harshly as he possibly could on people trying to (in their minds) do a valiant act that he once would've strongly agreed with.

But doesn't that say that *any* greater power could do that, not just a greater power who also happens to hold the death domain? I mean, I guess the god of death could start killing people and then immediately start destroying their souls (maybe?) so that they can't be raised, but Ao and the other deities wouldn't stand for that for long - didn't Kelemvor get slapped around for trying to do the opposite? Can't see how the other gods wouldn't try to stop that. ​ ​​Yes, I'm reading now that both Kelemvor and Mystra were yelled at by the other gods for their favoritism and unbalancing of the realms, and it was put a stop to. So yeah, can't see how that'd work out.

​What makes you figure they could do that?