majestic

Our government is both patting themselves on the back and running a major gaslighting campaign. After watching Ischgl (Tyrol as a whole) export Corona literally everywhere else in the name of money tourism they issued a massive lockdown order with edicts that were (or rather, are going to be ruled) unconsititutional, gave law enforcement a carte blanche to harrass people as they please and now they're pretending that the orders were never meant to intrude upon private meetings or people's ability to go places as long as they keep the distance rules. It's ridiculous. Up until last week the police was forcefully breaking up private gatherings and issuing heavy fines and now we're supposed to believe that there never was a government mandated order to not go visit your friends and family? That they appealed to our better sense and everyone just stuck to it? Several incidents of law enforcement breaking up private parties and heavily fining participants. People were accosted by the police for being outside all by themselves, fines given for other people passing by because distance. My neighbor was harrassed while she was waiting for her train to come after having to go to work, even with a permit. People with a holiday or weekend home were expressedly forbidden from going there (so how does that work if I'm allowed to drive around as long as I'm alone and I can do what I like at home?). Sure, there are bastards in the police and I suppose a bunch of them were using the situation to assert and exercise their power over the common man, but, yeah. They just acted like that because they wanted to, right? Not because that came down from the top. Riiiiiiiiiight. Sure. Here's to hoping courts will see right through this charade and people hopefully won't be deterred from suing the manure out of the bastards. We get it, the lockdown was deemed necessary to contain the disease after reacting way too slowly after watching Italy for a while, and it might as well have been. Who knows. Hindisight is 20/20 and all that stuff, but really... just grow a spine and admit to messing it up. Sheesh.

Everything is better with Eurodance magic added, exhibit B: Edit: Well to counter the happiness overload, have some more German Dark Wave:

Why waste this on pupils, I need this for users. Like, immediately. 😄

What's that "sad" supposed to mean, Hurlshot? You don't like herring either? Although when it comes to fish steaks in sauce I'd very much rather go with mackerel or tuna. Herring is best pickled and with onions and some hot sauce (and yes, onions, not gherkins, silly Germans ). Like... Mmmmm. Supposedly cure hangover, but yeah, as you guys probably know, nothing cures a hangover except copius amounts of mineralized water and time.

No, no, yes. They're mostly an interactive ARPG Barbie Dress Up simulator where you pick what you want your characters to wear without it really mattering all that much and then watch them kill everything. And I mean watch. Because apart from picking where you go the game runs without input. And no, that's not hyperbole. At least, not much...

Food porn time, lentils for today's lunch: And thanks to you guys talking about sardines, dedicated to Hurlshot, He Who Has No Taste (just kidding (or am I?)), sardine spread for later:

It probably goes without saying but don't forget the restored content mod. And, eh, skip the droid planet. Really. Just... don't bother.

Having happy little accidents, not making mistakes. Heh.

Of course he's Avery Brooks. Shady looked like him in my dream with the Meth dealers. Anyway, whenever people on a message board share their actual pictures I ususally end up bein weirded out by them not looking like their avatars. It would be quite a let down if Fio wasn't a real dragon for instane. Heh.

How do you turn an already good pop song into a betterer version? Why indeed, just make a Eurodance cover: Warning, Video might be NSFW in Utah.

Canned sardines are great, but I usually just go with ones in spiced olive oil (the ones from Nuri) and then put them on some tasty buttered rye bread and onions. Or combine everything into a nice spread, i.e. sarindes, butter, hard boiled eggs, onions and pickles. Season to your liking (garlic, pepper, etc.).

Browsing through my MP3 collection. Heh. Trips down memory lane, the bane of my sleep since... well since I've been old enough to travel memory lane.

If we set that in the Kelvin timeline it could still be directed by Baybrams, would have younger actors and a Trek 'verse that fits much better with the description. See... things come together anyway. (Also, why does the Kindle edition of that book cost 19€ on Amazon?)

On one hand Rise of Skywalker was the only Star Wars film of the new trilogy I wasn't bored at some point. On the other that was achieved by cramming three movies worth of stuff happening into an incoherent mess that I only enjoyed so well because The Last Jedi killed the past for me. What we really need is a Star Wars / Transformers crossover directed by Michael "Jar Jar" Baybrams.

Become? Bolsonaro never was anything but a stain on the human race. He's in good company, they seem to be very abundant these days.

Eh, does that link in all honesty compare monomyth based stories like Star Wars to epic poems and works of literature featuring a classical tragic hero (point in case, Hamlet) to make a point that classical literature never was about good versus evil before the rise of nationalism? Not only is that painting a varied and long subject with immense history in extremely broad strokes it is also flawed, I think, because that central conflict was always there, just not externalized as much, and the differences especially when compared to traditional folklore can also be attributed to the duality of good and evil as separate entities as taught by Abrahamic religion (instead of being an internal conflict beholden to divine will, i.e. fate as it was for classical Greek drama and epic poetry). Of course Hector would never stop being Trojan as much as Achilles would always be Greek. As playthings of the gods they simply had no choice. How would Darth Vader be possible in such a framework? That concept would be ridiculous to the people of the time as much as the concept of the gods controlling and playing with humanity is (well should be) to us if applied to the real world. Homer would scoff at Darth Vader changing sides? Yes, probably. Because were Star Wars a classical Greek epic, the force would be a capital "Force" and thus (a) "God" and the conlcusion of the conflict fated. Or if it were a Greek drama Luke would probably vanquish Vader, be utterly destroyed by Palpatine and then Zeus would lower himself down from the heavens to set right the wrongs. Deus ex machina was a staple of Greek drama. Today it's considered bad form (this has also something do to with how pervasive the concept of fate is in culture, no?). Back to your point I'd also argue that the term literary ficiton is somewhat arbitrary. Literary fiction is, essentially, what the literary academia decides that it is (not that academic consensus is a bad thing, it just takes a while to be formed). Go back a century and you'll have people arguing that Jane Austen wrote romance pulp and will never be considered literary fiction in much in the same way that students of the liberal arts these days argue that fantasy fiction or video games will never be true art and worthy of study. The concept alone seems ridiculous, a tenured professor at Oxford teaching Classical games of the 90ies? Bad literature is bad, but fantasy fiction isn't the only genre that has a lot of terrible books. I'll never get tired of bringing it up but the absolutely worst novels of the past few years were firmly in the housewife porn and romance genre and born of ascended fan fiction. Please, go and read Anna Todd's After series and then come back and argue that R.A. Salvatore writes bad Forgotten Realm novels. I mean he does, but it's by far not the worst you could come across. 😆

Well I don't like spam! Edit: Technically not true. I enjoy canned meat every now and then, though we of course don't have spam, just something very similar.

Spam spam spam spam spam...

But... but... Aliens!

He stated often enough that he only writes at home. Which, understandably, led fans to be extremely miffed every time he blogged about not being at home.

But flying pigs already exist. Duke Nukem Forever came out. Therefore, pigs can fly. On the other hand, that does not imply that flying pigs have wings. They could levitate via anti-gravity or have jet engine anuses.

In their Star Trek: Into Darkness Half in the Bag Jay speculated that Kurtzman, et al. simply put the cart before the horse by first coming up with scenes they really want to have, then writing them and afterwards playing connect the dots with a disjointed overarching plot that makes no sense. And Into Darkness was a two hour standard action movie. The most baffling thing is that after Trek 2009, Into Darkness and Star Trek Discovery they really thought Kurtzman could do this? Yeah, he got replaced, sure, but which buffoon thought it was a good idea to give him even more Trek to do?

Accusing the financial sector of being greedy and only interested in profit at the detriment of everyone and everything else is also a reputation they worked very hard for, and it is neither entirely undeserved, nor is it going to change for as long as people can get filthy rich by jacking up food and basic needs prices for financial gains. Look at food futures, like 3% of them actually lead to food being bought. Which inversely means 97% of the entire business is only there to make sure you rake in some sweet, sweet money at the expense of starving people. Are you honestly going to pretend that this is for the good of everyone and not simple, pure greed? What's next, accusing Nestle of being a collection of philantropists?

Gromnir's post in the Coronavirus thread reminded me of an old joke. An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are staying at a hotel. One night there's a fire. The engineer gets up, picks up the nearest fire extinguisher and quells the flames. The physicist does a few quick calculations, then jumps ouf of the window and into the hotel pool. The mathematician wakes up, sees the fire, says "on that's solvable" and goes back to bed.

It also really makes them look like (the) hyprocrites (they are) in a post-Snowden world. Please let us spy on you, not China. Polemic? Perhaps, but as you've so wonderfully stated the US has worked hard for the past 20 years on that dim view of them the world's slowly adapting. See that's the point, for as long as you're on the inside that statement rings true. When you're outside, though, it's the Obama drone program that blows up your wedding. It's US funded terrorism that gets you beheaded, shot, mutilated or blown apart. It's the sudden removal of support that sees all your hard work wiped away by a Turkish invasion. It's NSA spying pervading even the most intimate parts of your life. It's China that's selling you cheap knockoff products. Unless you're in Tibet, Taiwan or Hong Kong you're much more likely to accidentially catch a stray freedom cluster bomb than be spirited away to some gulag by the CCP. We also really don't need to discuss how the US has done more good than harm before BruceVC comes and has an aneurysm, and how even with the likes of Trump, Obama and Bush the US is vastly preferable to the dystopian nightmare that is China. Going back to having a foreign policy that reflects that would be a appreciated though, and also much cheaper, something I know you're agreeing with (for different reasons, perhaps, but it's an agreement nonetheless). I'm also very much in favor of making ourselves as indepdendent of the US and China as possible, even if it takes some doing and costs money, who knows, perhaps Covid-19 will finally give us a push in the right direction. I'm also with you on that we shouldn't kowtow before dictators and wannabes (which at the time includes The Donald(tm)).