majestic

Trump can't be Saruman you guys. Here's a picture with him and Saruman: So that's a bit of a pickle. He's clearly not Sauron either. How about Denethor II (the movie version, book Denethor is fraught with despair but not completely incompetent). He might as well try to burn Gondor down on his way out. So what's with the missing siege. Uhm, where did that migrant caravan invasion force go? Did it ever arrive at the border?

I've stated that before I guess, but... how can I refuse a time like this to shill some more. I linked both of those copious amounts of time. I only follow two gaming related YouTube channels - Joseph Anderson and Summoning Salt. Joe puts tremendous effort into his videos and they go beyond mere reviews, and Summoning Salt makes wonderful speedrun documentaries. Joe also streams but I rarely watch unless it's a game I played myself. His run through Celeste is insane. Gotta admit, I get envious when I see him play.

To venture back to streaming for a bit: Is it some sort of requirement for YouTube Let's Players to be complete schlongs, or is it just my nephew who has the uncanny ability to enjoy the greatest piles of garbage that YT seems to have spewn out? He's currently watching some Luigi's Mansion multiplayer footage an the guy's constantly complaining about how bad his team is - all the while he's consistently last in points, ghosts captured or whatever else the goal of the floor is. Yeah. Maybe it's you, not your team, you complete son of a prostitute?

Hey, how about this for being contrarian: Your post sounds like a competition for who has the tiniest pecker. You might win, but do you really want to?

Love Thy Neighbour was pretty good. Except no neighbors were loved at all. In fact it was a just slightly anatomically impossible lesbian threesome in a shower in Catholic school. At least it involed a virgin. No nuns, priests or prayer of any kind. Talk about a letdown after that buildup.

I'm glad my "prediction" that you'll might grow to dislike it didn't come true so far (and 'twas indeed me who said it becomes less ridiculous but fundamentally stays Sailor Moon). Minor caveat, the beginning of Sailor Moon R, i.e. the storyline with the Tree Aliens is filler made for the anime. It's really good filler. And... minor "spoiler", the conlcusion is really heartwarming fun. If I recall correctly.

The author biographies are a riot as well. Behind Hard Cloister Walls was written by Lili Luder (lit. translation of Luder: hussy). So an English approximation would be, say, Minxy Minx. Lili is in her early 20ies, tall, blonde, has deep blue eyes, biiiiiiiiig breasts and is a semi-professional gymnast since the age of five, and all her books are actually just excerpts from her diary where she keeps detailed records of her sexual exploits.

I'm pretty sure that's because the US and UK Kindle Unlimited has a better selection that ours. But there are a lot of erotic stories with the fanciest of titles. I think I'll read the "Behind Hard Cloister Walls" series now. Book 1, Title: Love Thy Neighbour I wonder why those books are marked as for mature audiences only. What's so mature about praying?

So Disney is trying to shaft over artists they hired or are in their employ... again. What else is new?

GTA was a fun top-down shooter with a lot of laughs but a modern... oh, wait. You mean those GTAs. 🤮

Apparently it is. I don't participate of course. Heh.

Fixed that for you, perv. (It's a joke, really! Promise!)

I don't think it is. In theory I do read enough for it to be worthwhile and Amazon suckered me into getting Kindle Unlimited by not allowing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to be picked as monthly library choice (I read the first six novels one by one over six months). The price for the books is quite frankly insane, so I figured a free trial period is long enough to finish the series. Like a good useless consumer lemming I so far haven't overcome my inertia to actually cancel it, and I'm not really reading anything that is on Unlimited. Or let's inverse that, nothing I wanted to read so far has been available on Unlimited. edit: It also looks like Amazon stopped offering the lending library service here sometime this summer. All the menu items are gone from my Kindle, the one book I still have is now listed under Kindle Unlimited and can't be returned (well, obviously, how would you return an Unlimited book). The only thing left is Prime Reading which was always significantly worse than being able to read one "free" ebook per month. Free being relative as you'd still need a Kindle and Prime, but that easily paid for itself if you used your one book per month on books with ridiculous cash grabbing prices (*cough* Harry Potter *cough*) or new releases. Pity. Probably turned out to be a bad deal for Amazon. Offering millions of books on Unlimited and most of them being ridiculous pulp is probably a lot better for Bezos' wallet.

Still chuckle every time at the line: "There's a crusade coming." But... but... Muslims don't go on crusades. *cough*

Does anyone know if any of the updates to Phoenix Point eased the loading times a bit? Loading was really slow for me back when I played right after it came out.

Bernd das Brot was created for a German kid's TV channel (KiKa - Kinderkanal - literally children's channel). The shows where he shows up, especially the ones made for the nightly loop where the station's technically off the air but keeps repeating a Bernd sketch and the parodies of films, books or fairy tales are simply genius. They're silly, colorful and full of slapstick for the children that are supposed to watch them, but Bernd's general disposition, his dialogue and the writer's use of puns and absurdist humor were clearly targetet at adults. It's most evident in one of the film parodies called Kasten (box). It's a parody of Cube and the protagonists wake up locked in a square room with no knowledge of how they got there.

This one seems to be so far. I'm at episode 10 now, Sailor Mars appeared and if I'm not entirely mistaken that means Jadeite is kind of done for in an episode or two. I'm loving every second of it, although I kind of am looking forward to the point where they tone Usagi down a bit (or Bunny as she was called in our dub version too - except ours wasn't mangled liked the DiC dub). Definitely not looking foward to Chibiusa showing up. Oh, and someone recently posted Bernd das Brot: Nerd Party with English subtitles on YT:

It's like a train wreck. I can't stop watching.

Somehow all of this reminds me of our last presidential election (but our president is little more than a ceremonial figurehead). The final tally without mail-in ballots had the right wing nationalist candidate lead by 52 to 48, but projections showed his opponent, an independent runner formerly of the Green party leading after the full count. Not by enough to definitely call it, but enough to see him winning with significant probability. Because statistically mail-in ballots in Austria strongly favor the Green party more than any other, followed by center-left and left wing parties, i.e. all voters with an interest in not having a right wing nationalist as president. Directly after the election the right wingers were posting on Twitter and Facebook that "strange things" were happening with the voting process. Breitbart London even covered the ongoing election fraud, being all up in arms about exit polls being used to declare a winner and posting pictures of the actual tally without mail-in ballots as proof that something strange was indeed going on. Then someone posted pictures of people calculating that some districts had an above 100% voter turnout. This is simply because mail-in ballots are added to the figures (as a separate value, mind) to the turnout of whatever district they are counted in, and they're consolidated and brought to districts with the infrastructure to handle them. That can - and often does - push the amount of votes in a district above the maximum of eligible voters in the district. But extrapolations are not exit polls... and no winner was declared yet - but when did details ever matter to those who see a conspiracy in everything? The other candidate won by .2% and the election was contested by his opponent citing irregularities in the mail-in ballot process as the reason. There were irregularities all right. Mail-in ballots are supposed to be counted on the Monday after the election (our elections are always on Sundays) but some districts already counted them on Sunday and only entered the final tally on Monday. Some were opened on Sunday already but counted on Monday, opening them up to manipulation (in theory, if someone were to break in and switch the ballots over night). For the vote counting each party involved can (and ususally does) send an observer. Everyone involved in the counting afterwards signs a written statement that everything went in accordance with voting law. Which obviously was a lie for the districts that counted early or opened the ballots on Sunday already. In every district that was contested, the Freedom party observers and counters signed the written statement without protest. The subsequent investigation showed that even if every irregularily counted mail-in ballot would have been manipulated to be in favor of the Green party candidate he would still have won. Not enough mail-in ballots were handled irregularily for this to be an issue. The supreme court chose to overturn the election anyway. Because reasons ("this undermines the people's trust in the democratic process, even though the outcome is not in doubt"). We essentially had to vote a second time to silence people spewing conspiracy theories. As if such a thing is at all possible. We voted a second time, and the Freedom party lost bigly. Bigly enough to call the race even before mail-in ballots were counted. Which I found hilarious, if it wouldn't have been such a waste of tax money. The conspiracy theorists just said that this election was simply manipulated with greater care than the last one. Haw haw. Way to go supreme court, way to go.

Imagine Bob Picardo would read this out loud: To complain about it later, of course... but I see your point. Heh.

Anyway, I of course also watched the new Discovry episode. Anyone else find it odd that the Federation would leave a seed vault starship alone with a family of four somewhere months out of reach? That seems kind of silly even if the Burn has stranded it there. Which it most likely didn't, I mean, that family wasn't there for 120 years or however long ago the Burn was. Almost as silly as that ship having no way of detecting a coronal mass ejection or shields to prevent such an event from being problematic. In (by now) time honored Discovery tradition Stamets, Tilly and Madam Irritable (eh, Commander Reno, I guess) treknobabble a bit about how one of the people on board was thrown out of phase while everyone else died. They come up with the idea that one of the vault ship's crew was currently in the process of beaming into the vault when he got showered with a nice helpful dose of beta radiation from the aforementioned CME. Yes, beta radiation, the thing that we know from junior high will not penetrate thin aluminium foil. Let alone an intact starship hull. Oh, and Burnham got upgraded again. She can do it all. Whether it is being Spock's hitherto unbeknownst adoptive sister, a Federation commander and first officer, scientist, counsellor, part time doctor, all around arsehole, all around nice lady, all around nice lady with an authority problem and last but not least, the person who always reaches for the best in everyone. Cue tears. Terrans from the mirror universe are all evil because it's in their genes. Georgiou promptly rejects that idea and says that she's one bad arse mofo because she wants to be. She's interviewed (well debriefed) by a not-at-all sinister looking person with an interest in Terrans from the mirror universe and fake glasses. Holy moly, such suspense. I wonder where this is going, surely nothing untoward happened during the interview there. Lol. edit: Admiral Levi Shur also confirms that the bad guys of the galaxy really are the "Andorian-Orion Syndicate", funny how the Federation and a couple of other Star Empires didn't survive the Burn, but a crime syndicate came out on top and apparently runs things now. Or at least has become Dune's Spacer Guild for the rest of the galaxy. edit 2: I'm going to call it now: The Burn was actually caused by someone from the mirror universe, or is in some way related to the mirrow universe "moving away" from the regular Trek 'verse. It kind of makes no sense to still seek revenge for what Kirk did a thousand years in the past, but hey, that never stopped Alex Kurtzman. It's the same guy that came up with the guy who brings a massively overpowered Romulan mining ship into the past by accident and then waits around to shoot at Spock instead of hauling his arse back to Romulus to warn them about the supernova that will threaten the galaxy and, dunno, maybe conquer their enemies with his hyper-advanced super miner that carries a weapon loadout that would make the Defiant blush. Geez. Am I being too harsh on this tripe?

Curious, does that come up in the series and I missed it or is that meta knowledge from the source material? And go me for finally making it into someone's signature.

I found the ending to be convoluted and unfitting. Kinda came out of nowhere.