Bartimaeus

Tillerson claims that only discovered he was fired today, by Trump's tweet. So either an anonymous White House official is a hack fraud, or Tillerson is a hack fraud. Actually, there's a third option: they both are! If Tillerson was telling the truth, though, that would be very suspicious timing with his Russia announcement. (edit): Trump has also fired Steve Goldstein, the Under Secretary of State, immediately after Goldstein publicly confirmed Tillerson's account. That probably answers that...and look, there's another attempted coverup! Over something really dumb, too.

I thought maybe it was because he publicly said Russia was responsible for the UK assassination attempt, but apparently he was asked to leave last Friday. Isn't he also the guy that repeatedly said Trump was a "****ing moron" while on the job? Not that he was wrong or anything - easy way to smooth over meetings with representatives from other countries, I'm sure! - but I'm surprised he lasted this long. Now we'll have Pompeo as SoS, who, if I recall correctly, has ties to Russia himself... (e): And to replace Pompeo at the CIA, we have our first woman director, Gina Haspel, who was previously deputy director (promoted to there at the start of Trump's reign). The only thing I know about her is that she "oversaw the torture of two terrorism suspects and later took part in an order to destroy videotapes documenting their brutal interrogations at a secret prison in Thailand". Although I'm not really a fan of torture, we currently have bigger things on our plate that'll determine if she's just another hack. At the very least, she's apparently been there for a long time - not just some random political appointee...which can be a good or bad thing, coming from the CIA. We'll see, I guess.

​For our local DRM fanatic mkreku: https://www.pcgamer.com/denuvo-drm-performance-final-fantasy-15/ ​ ​"Denuvo DRM has no performance impact on Final Fantasy XV" ​ ​A much better test than the one he previously linked, since they tested with different thread settings where it actually clearly makes a difference. Though it's not quite "no performance impact", since it would seem to have a minor effect on load times, it's really close.

​They also took our former first round pick CB, Damarious Randall, in exchange for their previously starting QB, Kizer. Apparently, we were really, really close to cutting him last year after he gave up on the team midway through the season, so I guess that's why we were willing to get rid of him so easily.

Tempted to watch this based on this review. Classic sci-fi (or close to it) with an apparently all women cast...with no awful pandering (like that Ghostbusters remake), that's apparently actually good. Has anyone seen it?

Is this...just a glorified advertisement? No specifications or technical explanation how it works or meaningful benchmarks. A complete fluff piece. ​ ​Here's an article with better (but still relatively layman) information on the tech: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-optane-ssd-800p,5497.html ​ ​Conclusion basically seems to be that it's neat in a few ways, but not really worth buying (...though they seem to more readily recommend the 900P).

We shall not stand for these deadly attacks...our voices will be heard! No more shall anyone suffer the indignity of someone else lodging a disc in their cranium!

What's really, REALLY funny (and utterly bonkers) though is that the argument was often made against legalizing gay marriage because it would eventually lead to a slippery slope where you'd also have to legalize pedophilia (you know, ignoring the actual entire reason while we don't accept pedophilia: it involves the underaged whom we do not recognize as being capable of making that sort of decision for their best interest vs. consenting adults)...while meanwhile, here they are arguing the complete logical opposite - illegalizing this form of pedophilia will somehow mean that you have to legalize (or recognize, since the issue has been forced at this point) gay marriage.

Click on your name in the top left of the screen, then "manage ignore preferences". Note that you cannot ignore staff members.

Ah. Yeah, that definitely sounds like something that's better left set up for a different story. Sometimes you have to know when to refrain.

Oh gosh, don't remind me. I was basically like, "Oh come on..." when that was revealed - because of course they would pile that on in a neat little cliche when it was completely unnecessary. It worked well as a plot device to help explain why Mario was loathe to work with toons, and it really did not need to follow the classic Disney "let's wrap literally everything up in a neat little bow in the last 5 minutes of the movie" type of story-plotting. Not sure why Disney has such a terrible love for doing that - it's always terribly hackneyed. Some things are better off as a short and sweet little plot device that isn't ever referenced again later. It's like if in Frozen (where this DIDN'T happen!), it was revealed that Hans had somehow engineered the deaths of the characters' parents in his scheme to take over Arendelle - that would've been so lame, and it was lame here. Their deaths worked much better as just a very simple plot device to set the movies' events in motion, which is what I initially thought his brother's death was until they brought it up again midway through the movie and I got that feeling of dread that it wasn't... Thanks for the history, though - that definitely helps explain the setting more.

1. Can't answer that - I didn't know anything about the movie except that some famously hot cartoon character was in it (lol). For some reason, I just had the impression that it wasn't necessarily directed towards children, which it clearly was upon actually watching it. 2. Exactly the problem I had, . 3. Yep, I got that, but I didn't think he had a license to kill for no reason. He straight up murders the little shoe guy even though he hadn't done anything, and it seems like nobody even batted an eye at that.

@Hurlshot: I hope they watched the original trilogy before that, otherwise I imagine it might've been a little lacking in impact, given the movie. Oh yeah, I actually just watched Jaws for the first time, too. It was solid. Yeah, probably would've had more impact if I had watched it as a kid. What a shame, .

The children's movies with dark elements tend to be the ones that stick with you as a kid, so that's probably a good thing. Having terrible things happen to make the good things feel more real and deserved and such - that's just a part of movie-making, children's movie or not. That's actually something I don't really like about movies nominally marketed towards children these days - I think of scenes like in Disney's Pinocchio where kids were permanently and horrifically convulsing and turning into...donkeys, I think it was, and then being enslaved and sold. I watched that movie when I was like 3-4 and not again until nearly two decades later, and I had terrible memories of that sequence for years after I originally watched it (though more hazily recalled as the years went on - which is why I sat down to watch it again). Will kids viscerally remember the stuff they see today in 15-20 years like we used to? But the criticism with the Christopher Lloyd character was not that it wasn't too dark, but rather that it seemed clearly written for children in its ultra simplistic and over the top way. He straight up murdered one of the toons in front of the police before he had even attempted to seize control...just to make it clear how over the top evil he was RIGHT as he was introduced. And also, for some reason, the police had no problem with that, even though the toon had done nothing wrong? Uh, okay. You didn't need to know anything else about the story past that point to know where it was going - he's the main villain, it's super obvious, we know it's going to end up with some type of showdown with him. Everything was so hammed up, too - he ironically felt like the most cartoonish character in the movie! Well, not so ironically, as it turned out... I guess I would've liked just a little more nuanced and subtle character...but that's why it's a children's movie.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). I did not realize this was supposed to be for children...sort of. Had some fun stuff even so, but some of the writing was a little...simple. Christopher Lloyd's bits especially screamed "children's movie", which was rather unfortunate. Like I said, though, I still had some fun, and watched it all the way through. It's no Willow, thankfully. Ghost in the Shell (1995). This movie suffered a lot from a poor (although not full on terrible) English dub...and an even worse Japanese dub that was even more distracting than the English. Neat-looking world/setting, some nice music, and I thought the action bits were decent, but the film really struggled to effectively convey its ideas, which is really a shame, because it was about something that I'm interested in and have personally spent time thinking about in regards to the future of AI and what exactly constitutes consciousness/awareness and intelligence and how will we ever know for sure whether a machine might be "alive" (in the sense of being a unique individual like us) or not and all that...so that was a bit of a shame. Oh well, it was still decent.

every post is like its own little unique trainwreck

Shaub, who has since left the government and now works for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said Tuesday that Trump needs to act on the OSC report about Conway. "The White House cannot continue to have one standard for the federal workforce generally and a lower standard for appointees who are close to this President." Ah, yes, that seems like Trump's general MO. Accountability, as it were.

There are definitely cheaper amplifiers with better specs on Amazon, though - $200 is still crazy.

I bought a 1070 for someone for about $340 about a year ago. Now let's see how much they are...oh, only $715 for the very cheapest. By Grabthar's hammer...what a savings.

Sounds right to me. And I definitely would say a $200 splitter seems insane, and the Amazon one seems fine.

Delta was founded in Lousiana in the 1920s. They moved to Atlanta in the 1940s. Yeah, I actually specifically looked it up...and I meant to flip those two around - founded in Georgia, headquartered in Atlanta. @Gfted: companies move headquarters for tax purposes more frequently than one might think. Given that Delta dared them to do it (and those tax credits were previously given specifically to convince Delta to stay), I really wouldn't be terribly surprised if it happened.

I seriously doubt they would've doubled down on it when being specifically warned that exactly that would happen if that were the case. I understand that they also chased away Amazon from expanding into Atlanta with that little stunt. I hope that in a year from now we hear about Delta moving its headquarters into another state - that'll be a much funnier image. Georgia loses millions of tax dollars and thousands of jobs because their insane legislature thought the 13 people that actually had the discount were worth pissing on the state's 5th largest employer.

I hate those "race to the bottom" type of tax credits (or otherwise taxpayer-supplied funds) given to attract companies to come to your state...so I don't feel too terrible about Delta losing it. However, those credits were given to help convince Delta (a company that was founded in Atlanta) to stay headquartered in Georgia - it will not be terribly surprising if Georgia ends up the eventual loser there with such asinine and punitive action against one of its biggest employers...and so I won't feel too terrible if that comes to pass, either. At least, not until the people actually affected vote their awful politicians out.

Are all of those actually real? That's rather comical.

I mean, you don't even have to go that far. If they roll a 20 against your fighter (5% chance for every attack!), your fighter is almost certainly dead, too. Levels 1-2 in BG1 really sucked.