Bartimaeus

None of the rest of us are lawyers or have that background; most of us see obvious wrongdoing (from our own individual perspectives on what is 'wrong') and want heads to roll. It's been about six years since the clear Trump political wrongdoings started (not accounting for anything he did before that outside of the political realm, which would be mostly irrelevant to us since before that, he was just yet another bastard billionaire - one of many), and that's a damned long time with regards to a very distinct lack of head rolling appropriate to the level of harm done to our government, institutions, and society at large...enough for a lot of us to get enraged and start thinking that maybe mob justice is an attractive alternative to a broken system where people like Trump can "get away" with everything he's said and done. As for the issue of legal vs. wrong, that only makes it worse - if obvious wrongdoing is not actually illegal and the ones doing it don't face punishment, then it only reinforces that the system is broken (particularly in the face of not being able to change the law in any meaningful way!), making the desire for wrath all the stronger. Never minding the issue of 'the system' and what certain individuals get away with, the last ten or so years have made it pretty clear that both sides of the political aisle have been pushed well beyond their limit with their counterparts: the divisions are so immense that so many (too many!) of us do not want to live with, talk to, or really even see the other because it's become increasingly difficult to view your political opposite as being anything but despicable and divorced from reality. Divisions that deep, combined with the times not being nearly so good as they once apparently were, are likely to reach their boiling point sooner or later, and this ever-swelling mass of fury would seem to be just a symptom.

Thought that happened like a month ago, but apparently it was last week.

Think I'd rather they cut out the bear entirely than go the animated route, but agree to disagree: something about this Wikipedia article for the bear being structured in the same way an actor would be made me laugh out loud. Based on what's in this article, it seems like he was a remarkably nice bear...still pretty frightening, though.

0 for 2 so far, . Sure would be nice to know whether anyone can see the videos that you can before you start posting them on a forum for other people to watch (or not, as it were). I mean, I can still watch them since I obviously have ways around it, but most nobody else can without a bit of trouble...which is probably too much for people to bother with. What, just because I usually like simple (i.e. borderline monotone) singers who stick to like two, maybe three notes for an entire song...and who also don't (or can't!) hold a note for longer than a second because long notes are the devil? Well, I never!

I'm at the point where I actually prefer fake film grain for at least some stuff (e.g. animation) just to give it something rather than the unnaturally clean appearance of digital. Jay specifically argued for it to be shot on actual film, which would of course be better.

I wish that there were a genre of metal fused with either dream pop or shoegaze - I need gentle or at least relatively measured vocal performances instead of all the yelling, screaming, growling and such prevalent in metal. The only metal I've ever consistently enjoyed is stuff modelled after video game music, which tends to be power metal-ish in instrumentation but minus all ludicrous fantasy nonsense and fascist undertones...and when it has vocalists, they don't play by the same rules that "proper" metal does, which I like. Well, if something like that exists as a genre, I don't know about it, .

While I agree with this literally, the spirit of it I can't, since he's one of the very few mainstream-ish metal vocalists I can actually bear to listen to.

Yeah, I didn't even watch the Red Hot Chili Peppers version until after seeing this one. No surprise, I also prefer this one, . My mom loved SOAD as I was growing up, so I have some familiarity with their 90s/early 00s stuff as I heard it a lot, which certainly doesn't hurt. (e): Apparently, SOAD only made music during the 90s and early 2000s, so I guess what I said covers pretty much their entire existence. Whoops.

Inscryption. I finished it, and it was pretty good! This particular developer sure likes his very strange narrative stuff that I'm not especially interested in, but on the other hand, it makes for a more succinct game that didn't take 300 hours to play all the way through a la most other roguelike games, and the gameplay and atmosphere were quite good, so I'm all for it in that case, .

Setting up some private email servers for Blinken.

I've played Pony Island but not The Hex; now I understand why the game has...

A couple of hours of Inscryption, a singleplayer roguelite-ish card fighting game that everyone was raving for when it came out. To my surprise (as someone who can't understate how much I don't want to play any deckbuilding, card fighting games...nor roguelike games), it's actually pretty cool and fun. Basically, every attempt to win you go through little maps of random encounters and events, like a little miniature campaign (pretty similar to Faster Than Light). The fighting mechanics don't seem too terribly deep, but that's not to say you'll always win; just the opposite, you'll lose but get stronger. Lots of variation with how cards work but not overwhelming so...and a few of the cards that you have are actually characters that give you drips of information about the setting/what you're trying to accomplish as you play, and all that's done fairly well so far too. Maybe this game earned its Overwhelmingly Positive score.

Unannounced FBI raid of Trump's Mar-a-Lago was executed earlier today, though the exact intent of the raid has not yet been released. (e): The retrieval of stolen classified documents from his time as president? Huh.

Olivia Newton-John. I've only ever heard a few songs she sang, but she did sing the intro song, Take Me Home Country Roads, for my favorite animated film of all time...which I know is a cover, but it matters not to me. RIP. Apparently, she'd been fighting breast cancer on and off for 30 years, and it's what got her in the end.

It's a very niche product. My preferred aesthetic for a PC is usually a small black box with no lights or decoration. The most "flashy" I've ever done is my current case, the Fractal Design Blackout Meshify C...and that's still relatively modest, especially given that I have no LEDs on the inside. So "spaceship" cases always get a laugh out of me, but I'm not really sure what to make of this one...but as I have no application for such an extremely light case, well, it's obviously not for me in the first place. At $1600 for just the case, that'd be a pretty tough sell without actually needing it, .

SpyxFamily, episode 2. Yor...seems to be a little bit of a smorgasbord of anime cliches, but they're at least not the worst ones that they could be, and it's still early, so there's time to get past that. My impression of Anya so far is that she's great...but I don't know why whatshisname keeps monologuing over his own dialogue (like, literally directly over it, with both sets of dialogue and subtitles playing at the same time) to tell us really obvious things that we already know. Overall, I seem to be enjoying it though.

The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021). I don't normally make note of the random kids movies/shows that I watch with my nieces (particularly as I don't usually have too much of a problem with most of it as long as it's not overly cringey or RANDOM LOL kind of stuff, and my nieces thankfully generally like stuff that I either like myself or at least think is okay)...with that said, my nieces are sadists (i.e. normal children that want to re-watch something endlessly), and I have been forced to view this film several times now - my face is going to melt off like the nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark if I have to watch this even one more time. I didn't like it the first time I saw it, but now my skin crawls even thinking about it: do not recommend.

SpyxFamily, episode 1. Very silly, but mostly enjoyable and certainly not too shabby for a first episode. My least favorite part so far is probably the overly excessive amount of internal monologuing, but...maybe the most basic of those will calm down a bit later. Bonus points: the animation doesn't make me want to throw up.

If it's an issue of political reality vs. actual reality, of course I want actual reality to win out. I think that ship has long sailed, though. I wish I could say it was uniquely a human problem to in all likelihood doom ourselves, but really, it's probably (at least) all Earth-based life, a necessary fatal flaw in the very basic biological building blocks responsible for making life succeed in the first place: everything is programmed to endlessly consume and multiply beyond their limits in order to "win" natural selection, and it is too difficult for the vast majority of life to resist (or even be aware that it may be necessary to resist) that programming. It's just that our minutely greater modicum of intelligence allowed us to find more and more extreme ways of consuming that the rest of our animal kingdom couldn't; given another hundred million years to evolve, I'm sure some other newly sapient-level species would do more or less same thing that we appear to be doing. Now that's no reason to throw in the towel, but with the way these things work, it's probably just healthier for everyone to look at the Senate as if it were currently not Democratic-controlled - a 50-50 split is simply too tight, and at least two Democratic senators that we know of oppose eliminating (or even reforming?) the filibuster that would be necessary to make anything but token changes possible. For myself, I mostly don't generally think too much about any of these social wedge issues, since I am largely unaffected. That doesn't mean that I lack empathy for people who are affected by them (particularly with regard to the specific states that they have the mis/fortune of living in) or that I would ignore those issues when evaluating whom I am voting for, just that my brain space is typically taken up by more pressing existential matters, such as, yes, the planet currently being on fire. So I get you from that perspective, I just...I guess it's pretty hopeless with how generally broken both our society and political system are, it feels pretty unfair to lump so much of the blame on one guy that shouldn't even rightly be a Democrat in the first place, who's more or less just fairly representing the constituents that inexplicably continue to put him there in the face of Senate elections not really working like that anymore. Undoubtedly fuelled by many of the same base emotions, even if applied for totally different reasons. I'm certainly no exception: I've personally had some eminently dangerous feelings and thoughts (quite recently too), much worse than anything that anyone else has expressed in this thread, but I generally prefer to keep them to myself. They don't do anyone, least of all myself, any good.

Yeah, don't get me wrong, there are reasons to not like him or what he's doing on a personal level...but on a political level, it's really difficult or me to muster up much fury about any Democrat holding what should be a 30 point or worse blow-out seat for Republicans, particularly when it's pretty widely accepted that literally nobody else could replace him...heck, if you could somehow get conservative Democrats in seats like that for other deep red states, the party would be absolute fools not to - just being able to control the majority party via that 50/51 seat caucus is very powerful for making sure what has literally already happened with the Supreme Court doesn't transpire. Unfortunately, voters have overwhelmingly stopped caring about the quality or positions of individual candidates in favor of pure party politics - more and more voters inextricably tie who they vote for to their political identities instead of evaluating who and what the candidates are....

It just doesn't make sense to me to think of it from that way given the political reality of that particular seat being the darkest shade of red possible. Looking at a WV senatorial seat as somehow being in any way equal to a blue or purple state's senatorial seat is just...not realistic: nominate any other Democrat for that seat, and it's forever Republican again. Accept the small blessing that is the Supreme Court not becoming 7-2 or 8-1 conservative when Republicans inevitably win the presidency again because Democrats couldn't ever get control of the Senate at the same time that they had a president - Manchin was critical for that. The lack of Senate control in the latter half of Obama's second term was pretty key to the current breaking of the Supreme Court. Once upon a time, the particular candidates for senate races mattered a lot more than they do now, so exceptions like this didn't used to be so uncommon and it lead to more "big tent" politics where the parties were able to get to the 60 senatorial seats required to pass general bills because their caucuses were allowed to have members with much more varied positions that would support most but not all of their party's positions, making it so that they could actually unite on and agree upon at least some bills rather than be in the never-ending fillerbuster deadlock that we face today (though admittedly, AFAIK the current fillerbuster rules are the most restrictive they've ever been). Now senatorial races are so nationalized that every single member of their respective caucuses needs to practically be in lockstep with each other or be dubbed a traitor (and god forbid they ever cross the aisle to support a common sense initiative that practically every voter supports for fear of giving the opponent party a "win"!), even when it makes zero sense for that to be the case. The situation is so dire that it seems likely the senatorial fillerbuster will be eliminated if Democrats are able to get to 52 or more members this upcoming November while retaining the House (though the former is probably a lot more likely than the latter, and if they don't get both, it won't happen), and there's a good chance of all hell breaking loose politically if that happens because they're likely to do some very stupid stuff with it that will lead to a huge backlash. If it ends up with Republicans back in complete control in the succeeding years, they will undo anything and everything Democrats tried to do...and worse. It is a most dangerous game when both parties keep pushing the envelope farther and farther out of "revenge" for what the other did, particularly when one of those parties is bordering on being openly fascist.

People are always complaining about Manchin, but if it weren't for specifically him being who he is, that seat in West Virginia would 100% be Republican. Be content that he caucuses with Democrats and doesn't block judge confirmations. Now Sinema, on the other hand...that I don't really understand, since it seems like she's just making her own constituents hate her. Last I heard, her approval rating was higher with Arizonan Republicans than Democrats...but it's not like Arizonan Republicans are going to vote for her come election time, so what's the danged point?

I've come to understand that it's more than just that for me, because it's not only the visuals/aesthetic (although that can be a big part of it): there's also something to be said for how even just characters are presented and communicate. Even when a lot of the old stuff (e.g. @Amentep's Space Adventure Cobra or your City Hunter) is not particularly interesting to me, I still find it way more...like, I feel as though I understand what they're trying to do, and it's not an active assault on my senses even when I don't care for it. With new stuff, I almost always feel like I've been rudely deposited into an alien hellscape where I don't understand why anything is the way it is, how anyone could possibly prefer things to be this way - like they're two different mediums with completely divorced styles of communicating to the viewer, and I just fundamentally don't get the new style. If this show, Yawara, was re-made now with the intent to be functionally faithful to both the story and characters, I would undoubtedly find it completely unwatchable. For just characters: how they look (faces and how eyes/lips in particular are used, bone structure, hair styles/colors, clothing, movement, ...), how they express themselves, the voice-acting casts, the particular direction in tones/cadence/word choice, how characters are written and framed and what's normal/accepted within that, et cetera. That's just on the subject of characters, and there's a lot more than that that goes into the style of a show than just its characters (even if I would personally say that's the most important). Plus, the more questionable elements of this show that I don't care for would surely be magnified a dozen-fold because that's what modern audiences apparently prefer. Well, I don't think any of these things are ever going to go back to how they used to be...which is probably good for me in a way, because it means I have very little new that I need to ever investigate or try, but I hate it at the same time too.

Yawara, episode 8. This show is pretty dumb, but...I continue to watch it.