Bartimaeus

It was my understanding that that was true last night, but the bigger of the two counties that had outstanding absentee ballots have now been counted, and there are only around two hundred remaining absentee ballots remaining in the other outstanding county, and even if they were 100% for the Republican, it wouldn't be enough.

3.14. Pi. March 14th. Coincidentally, Albert Einstein was born on March 14th.

CNN says that Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster "[are] poised to depart soon." Not sure if of their own will or not. Trump also says, "I'm really at a point where we're getting very close to having the cabinet and other things that I want." Back to the clown show...

​ No recount? There is no automatic recount in Pennsylvania for non-statewide elections. However, I'm sure the R will attempt to pursue one.

​Connor Lamb (D) declared winner in Pennsylvania special U.S. House election, in a district Trump carried by 20 points a little over a year ago.

We seem to have increasingly few celebrated scientific minds out there, when there used to be so many. I don't know if that's because there are simply less of them (I would hope this is not the case), or because their time and services are more and more monopolized by governments and corporations. Hawking was rather unique for his incredible story of perseverance, too. RIP.

Speaking of economic influence, Trump is now considering tariffs on $60 billion worth of Chinese goods (presumably annually). He had previously rejected $30 billion for not being steep enough. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/13/trump-is-considering-imposing-tariffs-on-60-billion-of-chinese-goods-reuters-citing-source.html

we still have soft power?

He was a terrible secretary of state - the State Department is an absolute shambles right now, with something like 8 of the top 10 positions having gone unfilled under him, and a massive amount of careers resigning under him (though obviously not entirely due to him). However, Trump has that wonderful ability to constantly make the wrong choice at every possible turn, so I'm sure Pompeo will make the situation even worse.

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