Keyrock

It's in my brain for the rest of my life. I sometimes find myself unconsciously mimicking that growl. It's simultaneously the most awful and awesome 3 second sound clip. Once you hear it you can't unhear it.

Suburban Sasquatch (2004) A magical Sasquatch terrorizes a suburban community in Pennsylvania. It's hard to put into words what a pile of garbage this movie is. Everything is wrong. The very first scene is done in day for night. In fact, a significant portion of this movie is day for night, so much so that when a scene, roughly 2/3 of the way through, was shot in actual night I was genuinely astonished. This film features sub-high school play level acting, dialogue barely north of Breen levels, laughable CGI, a subplot that ends abruptly with no resolution, Halloween store props, mismatched police uniforms where they couldn't be bothered (afford?) belts, a hilariously awful bigfoot costume, and the greatest 3 second growl sound effect that you will hear hundreds of times. Also, the outro theme is *chef kiss* magnifique! This film needs to be studied and analyzed by scientists, philosophers, and mystics alike in a quest to figure out how something can fail so spectacularly in so many ways simultaneously. It's a crowning achievement of ineptitude.

The Bill Simmons podcast gon be gud tomorrow. A distraught ranting Simmons is best Simmons and my & Cousin Sal's Cowboys are taking his Pats to the woodshed. Mac Jones looks absolutely atrocious and muh Boys are doing whatever they want... Well, except scoring touchdowns in the redzone, that's still an alarming issue.

I have a very special treat that just arrived at my door today: This is one of my two most sought after movies to get a hard copy of, the other being Diamond Cobra vs the White Fox (I may have to give in and just watch that on Amazon Prime Video since it's out of print and I'm not about to pay $200 for a used copy). I won't have time to watch it today because football and rasslin' PPV, but I can't begin to tell you how excited I am to watch this train wreck of a movie.

Cryptz (2002) - A chance encounter on the street lures wannabe rappers Tymez Skawir, Fuzzy Down, and Likrish into the vampire underworld. This movie was not nearly as bad as I expected it to be, which may sound like a good thing but was detrimental to my watching enjoyment. It lands squarely in that unfortunate zone where it's not bad enough to be funny bad but it's nowhere near good enough to be actually good. It's watchable but not exactly entertaining. The best thing I can say about it is that it's only 78 minutes long.

Double the savagery since you can't put together the whole pig from that, just the belly.

This is about China, not Ukraine, which is why I'm putting it here, but I need to lay some groundwork, bear with me. tl;dr The idea that this war is weakening Russia is very plausible. The idea that this war is also weakening China is hilariously wrong. I attempted to watch some of the second republican primary debate, emphasis on attempted. It was a complete $#!+ show, the moderators completely failed their jobs and just allowed everybody to run amok; the candidates were constantly talking over each other to the point that much of what I was able to stomach before turning it off for the sake of my own sanity was unintelligible. One thing I got a chuckle out of, though, was Nikki Haley, who proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is a neocon in the 1st debate, parroted, almost word for word, a recent ad Bill Kristol and his neocon group put on TV trying to drum up support for continuing to fund the war in Ukraine as public opinion here in Murica is turning against it. The ad is at the same time refreshingly honest and full of complete and utter bull$#!+, as one might expect from Bill Kristol. For those not familiar, Bill Kristol is a notable warmonger who has drummed up support for every war Murica has gotten involved in over the last several decades. The refreshingly honest part of the ad is that it completely drops the pretext that Murica is doing this to help the people of Ukraine and straight up says that we are prolonging this war for our interests, except that it tries to sell our as "American people" when in reality it's the interests of a small group of wealthy and powerful people and does nothing for the people at large. The ad throws out some hilariously fictitious numbers such as "we've spent 5% of our annual defense budget to destroy 50% of Russia's military". I'm 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% sure that number is nowhere near accurate. It reminds me of some scaremongering tactics used decades ago to try to frighten teens away from having premarital sex, they would throw out completely fabricated statistics like "if you have unprotected sex you have a 50% chance to get a deadly disease". Anyway, the ad further goes on to say that this war is weakening Russia and by association weakening China. I believe this couldn't be further from the truth and I'll explain why. When this war didn't come to a swift conclusion, as some had predicted, and instead became a prolonged war of attrition, I imagine that the neocons hoped that China would seize this opportunity to take back Outer Manchuria that they lost to Russia some 160 years ago during China's century of embarrassment, knowing that Russia would not want to fight a war on two fronts and would likely not be able to put up much opposition, or, at worst, China would do nothing and stay completely out of this. That's not what happened, though. Now, I'm sure China does intend to reclaim Outer Manchuria at some point but Xi Jinping decided to play the long game and instead focus on more pressing matters. You see, China has a couple major hurdles (there are other hurdles too, but those are not relevant to this discussion) facing it as it grows as an economic superpower: Energy and fresh water, both of which they can not completely supply themselves and are forced to import. Let's tackle these 1 at a time. First up energy. China needs vast amounts of energy to power their growing industry and they lack the resources to supply it themselves. Before, they got the vast majority of their oil and gas imports via shipping lanes in the South China Sea that go through some rather narrow straits that are controlled by nations currently friendly with NATO. This presented a big problem for them in case China made any sort of power play for Taiwan, as those straits are easily blockaded, potentially cutting China off from the energy they so desperately need. Obviously this is, or was, a powerful bargaining chip for Murica and NATO as a whole. However, as it happens, China has a neighbor to the north that has an overabundance of the very energy that it needs. Obviously, I'm talking about Russia. Since NATO set up an embargo Russia desperately needed to find someone else to sell their vast supplies of oil and gas to keep their economy going. Well would you look at that, China could really use that energy, what a perfect match. So now China is getting oil and gas from Russia and at a discount since they were obviously in a position of strength when this deal was negotiated. Russia, I'm sure, would rather not give them a discount, but they have little choice in the matter and they can afford to do so given how vast their supply is. So now Russia has (mostly) solved their economic issue, which is why their economy has not crashed like NATO hoped, in fact they are doing better than a number of European NATO nations, and China has vastly decreased their dependence on oil and gas shipped to them via precariously located maritime shipping lanes, and at a discount to boot! Now let's talk fresh water. Much like energy, China does not have enough fresh water within its own territory to meet its growing demands, that's an issue. Now what would happen if we looked to the north again. Oh look, Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal, located in southern Siberia, has the world's largest supply of unfrozen fresh water, what a coincidence! China has in the past attempted to broker a deal with Russia to divert some of that vast supply of fresh water to them but the people that live in that area were, understandably, weary of this, fearing that they would divert all the water and ruin the ecology in the area. In the past, Russia has balked at making a deal with China to divert some of the water, but now that they really really need China to be a friend, they have softened their stance and China is in the process of building pipelines to supply them with the fresh water they need. Problem #2, for the most part, solved. The longer this war goes the more this plays right into China's hands. NATO is burning through some of their military supplies, Russia is burning through some of their military supplies, European economies are suffering, Russia's economy is becoming increasingly reliant on China, giving them more and more leverage, and 2 of their biggest problems got solved. This couldn't have worked out better for China if Xi Jinping had planned it himself, I imagine he's had several good laughs about this.

I got some gorilla arms, wouldn't exactly call 'em preem, but I'm just starting out. I don't yet have the reflexes for dash, so for now I'm using regular ol' sprint with wrecking ball for damage mitigation while I charge right into punks. When I get low on health I activate berserk and I have 8 seconds of essentially invulnerability and unlimited stamina with which to turn skulls into fine chunks. It's rather basic, but it will do for now. I could have bought more chrome but I wanted to settle my debt to Vik ASAP. There's really nothing to gain from it and 21K eddies to lose, but I'm a man of my word.

Pan seared boneless ribeye with garlic butter and garlic mashed potatoes garnished with chives: Freakin' amazing! Like holy **** this is good! Granted, you dump butter on almost anything and it will be good, but still.

Is the Fins dropping 70 on the Donks on there? /hides

@majesticnever misses an opportunity to throw shade at Team Red. I appreciate that kind of hustle.

Barack Obama, is that you?

Surprising and concerning. At the risk of being labeled ageist, I find it disturbing just how common extremely old congressmen and congresswomen are. Not just for the age itself, but I also think it's generally bad to have people in positions of power that have been there for decades and decades. There's something to be said for experience, but there's also falling out of touch with what it's like to be a "commoner" which is nigh inevitable for a career politician. We need new blood for new perspectives.

Two in this case: Female and Senator. I don't think that's excessive, but that's just me.

I'm pretty sure she was the longest serving woman in the senate, though.

Sseth is now a world record holder:

Her record breaking 868 year run in the senate has come to an end.

Switch & PC

I finished The Heist. I went full bloodbath this time (ghosted my first playthrough of The Heist). I'm level 10, I think you need to be 15 to start Phantom Liberty(?). Am I correct in assuming that once I trigger the PL quest chain I can still do main game content and hop back and forth between the two?

Oh boy, this week we get the Bleach Bowl sponsored by Great Value Lavender Scented Bleach. The Broncos visit the Bears in a battle of the league's two most putrid teams. Will Denver's defense show up for the game? Can Justin Fields throw for 100 yards? Who wants Caleb Williams more? Find out this Sunday! I might actually be morbidly curious enough to watch this game... Well, to start watching it, anyway. The Vikings visit the Panthers in the Wish.com Just As Good As The Name Brand Bowl. These 2 slightly less putrid 0-3 teams will battle it out to stay in the running for the league's worst record. The National Football League catch the excitement!

More oldie but goodie Onion shenanigans: "We could use griffins but we don't use griffins, that's what separates us from them."

I went ahead and took the plunge and ordered a box of meat from Moink. There was a card on the top warning that there may be dry ice and to not touch it bare handed. There was no dry ice but the inside of the box was cold and everything was frozen solid. It also came with a recipe book, which is a nice surprise. I chose Moink because they promise the meats are from small farms, ethically raised, grass fed, no antibiotics, yada, yada, yada (the super fun to say name is an added bonus). I found nothing online to dispute those claims. Plus, they offer seafood options, which I didn't take advantage of in this box but I probably will in the future. A lot of the competitors don't offer seafood but some have more exotic beef options. Anyway, I'm going to pan sear a ribeye tomorrow with garlic butter, I have it defrosting in the fridge. I'll let y'all know how it turns out.

Looking at the skill trees, I'm probably going to concentrate on body and tech with some reflex, at least enough to some of the dashing skills. Once I can afford it, I'm getting some preem gorilla arms and I'm charging in and punching chumps in the face and/or tossing them at their cohorts. Right now I have a baseball bat, a shotgun, and a LMG. That will have to do until after The Heist.

I'm still in act 1. I've done everything leading up to The Heist. Tomorrow I'll go through the heist itself.