a bunch of you really believe that trump is the unstoppable god king who can do whatever he declares and it is dumb as hell
House rabbit parent (Panda 🌈 & Redmond), #boardwargames, fan of classic movies & TV (especially the spy genre) & their actresses, #alternatehistory, #fashionhistory, #vintagepinup & the #Napoleonic & #Edwardian Eras. #SlavaUkraini
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a bunch of you really believe that trump is the unstoppable god king who can do whatever he declares and it is dumb as hell
RABBIT RABBIT RABBIT
#otd #didyouknow about this 1810 French naval victory over the famed British navy?
MegaTraveller scores from HPB (with additional 20% off - $8 total) - good condition, first printing. #traveller
#ClassicTravellerRPG #ClassicTraveller
Weekend #wargaming—check out my review of “2045,” a Taiwan invasion game from Mizo Games, at @armchairdragoons.bsky.social armchairdragoons.com/taiwan2045/
“Oh boy! ... It’s dog food again!”
Here's another #frockingfabulous greatest hit! From the #Maudrobe, this is just good enough to eat, thanks to #Laferrière’s stunning design for Queen Maud! #Fashionhistory of 1909 via Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo.
Back to the #Maudrobe for a pair of Queen Maud's boots! #Frockingfabulous footwear of c.1896, via the Nasjonal Museet, Oslo.
A trip to the #Maudrobe of our #Frockingfabulous legend, Queen Maud: Sleek looks of 1937, Maud style! #Fashionhistory via Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo.
🧵 Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics. The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.
Joan Blondell in "Night Nurse" - BOTD
Allen Drury’s books are…quite something at times, and I’ve read the whole series. He had characters using videophone technology some 30-40 years before it really matured, for example. On the other hand, he wasn’t wrong about the Russians.
Thinking about how ST:TNG depicts professional relationships. Ryker is an adult, not an especially young man, brought up early. But i think he is one of the few times I've seen someone in authority learning on the job. Rather than simply bullied into shape.
The Ukrainian Association of Football is launching its first Amputee Football Championship. Featuring veterans and athletes from the “League of the Strong,” the winner will represent Ukraine at the 2026 European Championship. 🧵 1/9
Nudge nudge, just 48 hours remain to pre-order Battlegroup Clash: Baltics at a discount of 30% on the MSRP. Experience modern warfare as a NATO or Russian commander in this game for professional & hobby wargamers. Delivery planned for later this year. Pre-order here: www.sapperstudio.com/battlegr
Bluesky has a scold issue, people bursting into hobby posts to scream that the OP should be DOING SOMETHING IMPORTANT. I have come to the conclusion that we must fight fire with fire and scold the scolds.
I'll confine myself to kibitzing on the cards, though. I have terrible luck at betting.
Two broiled lamb chops with baked beans & brown bread, soup of the day, lettuce head salad, pot of tea, and ice cream with wafers. (I won't fuss about the bread & butter this time because this isn't as fancy a joint as the Fairmont. You EXPECT a ritzy place like that not to be chintzy.)
2nd game you could win next week at the next Meeple Mansion Monthly is this in-shrink copy of Europa Universalis: TBG. Register at www.eventbrite.ca/e/1584229104... and hope to see you next week!
That Man, not really surprisingly, is swinging back to trying to double down, but Pritzker is going to push back, and harder.
The problem in this scenario is the assumption that he will still be (1) alive in 2028 or (2) that his sycophants will be able to disguise his total physical and mental collapse. I find both assumptions...problematic.
As the old saying goes, you can fix ignorant (not knowing things), but you can't fix stupid (not *wanting* to know things especially if they conflict with your dearly held beliefs).
Didn't the Alan Parsons Project do a variation on that image in their video for "Don't Answer Me"?
It's an especial shame as far as Heidi is concerned IMO because she's got a terrific figure which that dress just doesn't suit.
The Soviets followed the same tactic, and so did the Chinese when putting down Tiananmen Square.
I was going to express my astonishment that a Stalin-era Eastern European satellite would allow the release of an American movie, but then I reflected that very likely they did so because they thought it'd make the American imperialists look stupid.
The problem with that is that you can only push people so far if they have a scrap of backbone; one day somebody IS going to get fed up with him and leave his teeth scattered on the street.
I personally first became aware of Thiel when I read back in the last decade about some bonkers scheme of his to use the blood of young people to attempt life extension.
One of the classic animes, so if you're interested, heed this advice.
At the risk of sounding painfully obvious, it's by conscious design on his part - he made damned sure none of his advisors would have the gumption to tell him no & make it stick.
There's an exemption for under-$100 gifts which might serve as a loophole if you have a British friend willing to make the purchase for you.
I'm afraid I have some bad news. www.bbc.com/news/article...
That's as may be, but it actually sounds pretty clever - and pretty generous. I see a problem, though; how will the retailer be able to get packages to their customers in view of the fact that just about every major industrialized democracy appears to be suspending package services to the US?
Is that the same person who keeps putting the gravy into counterintuitive shelf sections at Walmart?
The National Guard is not just a mindless obedient tool; it's made up of people with families & responsibilities at home that they are missing to ::checks notes:: clean up parks while needlessly carrying weapons in a city they don't live in. Trump's actions are wildly unpopular. This matters.
It’s cool that Ms Marvel is into board games, but she really needs to stop buying from sketchy Amazon sellers:
According to the SPLC, Harris and Klebold had been flirting pretty seriously with neo-Nazism, even if they weren't "formally" so: www.splcenter.org/resources/re...
...but be careful to distinguish them from photos of two high school students who thought it'd be funny to dress up as the killers and pose playing dead for Halloween (they got suspended for their trouble).
There are also photos of the bodies of both Klebold and Harris lying in the school library after they'd committed suicide, but I won't repost them here due to their graphic nature. They're easily searchable online, though...
Assuming you're not trolling, I'm afraid you're wrong. This is the famous/infamous screenshot taken from CCTV footage of the cafeteria, only minutes before the massacre in the library upstairs. There are clearly two armed people in this picture.
If their bombs had worked, it WOULD have been 9/11, 2 years early.
Given that their original plan was to set off multiple bombs - which would have killed and/or injured dozens if not 100's of students & faculty/staff - & then shot as many of the survivors as they could, it escalates the whole thing to an attempted act of domestic political terrorism.
From my understanding a lot of people did think them at least slightly weird, but it now appears that that understates the case as to how off-kilter they actually were.
Not meant to minimize school bullying, which - as we all know - is in fact a real and desperately serious problem, but in this case, per the OP, that narrative seems to have been off course as, per the testimony of their acquaintances, the killers weren't subject to any particular harassment.
So...the people who objected to Harris and Klebold being memorialized along with their victims were right after all, though they might not have known exactly why they were right?
Think 9/11, but 2 years earlier and perpetrated by domestic terrorists.
That having been said, it's hard to absorb that as horrible as Columbine was, it could have been *exponentially* worse had the bombs worked. Schools are paranoid about security today as it is; how much more dystopian could it have been had hundreds of students instead of a dozen or so been murdered?
Actually, I think that particular detail did come up in the better print reporting at the time. I do remember reading about it at the time or soon thereafter.
...and therefore her story was obscured because she HADN'T become a martyr.
It's even more so because the girl credited with "saying yes" never said any such thing - in fact more complete evidence indicates she was essentially shot out of hand - while the girl who actually affirmed belief in God was, for some reason, allowed to live by Harris & Klebold...
Happy TOSS Birthday to Vonda N. McIntyre, who wrote Trek novels and novelizations, and apparently gave Sulu his first name. #TOSSatNight
This is a really, really, good letter. Absolutely *destroys* the transphobes without ever once using rude, aggressive, or other language that could cause handwringing.
This goes to one of the things I resent, indeed hate, the most about soi-disant "Christian" Nationalists; they've perverted a way of belief whose central theme is the triumph of faith over hell and death into a death-cult.
I mean, they could have spun it as "she was saved by her belief!"
Acknowledged. Further research indicates that poor Cassie Bernall wasn't even asked anything - the killer (don't much care which one it was) taunted, "Come out wherever you are!", then hauled off and shot her.
Carol Marsh enjoys tea and crumpets in a coffin, whilst taking a break from filming Hammer's Dracula, 1958.
Take note of this; I would recommend getting your flu and COVID vaccines at the earliest possible opportunity. The site vaccinefinder.org is listed later in the thread where you can find sites in your ZIP code.
Happy birthday to Florence Welch
Images from films shot by cinematographer James Wong Howe - BOTD in 1899 Mantrap (1926) Mark of the Vampire (1935) The Baron of Arizona (1950) Seconds (1966)
I never cared all that much for him myself, but until it came out how utterly shitty he'd been to Dita Von Teese - until then supposedly the great love of his life - I didn't have any really strong feelings about him one way or the other.
I always wondered what the Eagles thought when Castaneda was unmasked as a fraud.
...the beginning of the NATO campaign against Serbia to force it to disgorge Kosovo, likely because they were literally contemporaneous.
...dwelled much on, now that I think of it, because it would have interfered with/complicated the "Christian martyr" narrative. Isaiah Sholes and Kyle Velasquez, the non-white victims, also got rather short shrift in the reporting. For some idiosyncratic reason, I always juxtapose Columbine w/...
Minor quibble; Cassie Bernall, IIRC, wasn't asked (according to the myth, which I have to admit I thought was true at the time) specifically if she were Christian, but if she believed in God. Also, Kelly Fleming was, again IIRC, a Goth herself, which few reports...
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has reacted to Hungary‘s attempt to bar Robert „Magyar“ Brovdi from the Schengen Zone and invites him to Poland. Absolutely excellent action.
NEW: The Russian-created water crisis in occupied Donetsk is worsening into a fully-fledged humanitarian crisis as the occupation administration is failing to resolve water supply issues, instead using the situation to justify Russian aggression against Ukraine. Read more:
They don't feel shame, but they care deeply about status. Wanting to be liked--or at least envied--is their Achilles heel. We can use that against them:it's cheap, non-violent & effective. Social shunning of elites supporting Pinochet helped bring down the Chilean dictator: it can work here too.
Anais Nin
One wonders if Rubens or Rembrandt were in the habit of buying expensive supplies for their own work, particularly so they could brag to their clients and patrons about it.
Tell you what, I don't even know enough about watercolors to know what, according to those people, I ought to be snobbish about. I only ever worked with the inexpensive stuff my elementary- and high-school art classes handed out.
Of course, I always go back to it - this past time was actually because of PC hardware problems which required money to fix & thus took a goodly period of time to resolve - but I'm back at it again.
I've been working with 3D modeling/art program Daz Studio (which is NOT AI, making a good scene requires a lot of work, time & thought and often a lot of what scale modelers call "kit-bashing") for over a decade and I've had to take several lengthy breaks from it because it got drudge-y.
...a brush that looks like a...boob? Surely you must be joking. Though I wouldn't care to lay a bet on it.
I feel distinctly inferior. Garlic, salt and pepper have always served me well for most dishes, particularly meats. (With the addition of adobo for chicken and pork, though I wonder how it works on beef.)
Trump's use of red state National Guards in DC is really about viciously turning Americans against each other, about stoking hate and violence *among Americans.* JB Pritzker's response is so good because it lays *this* bare. Me and @brianbeutler.bsky.social on this: newrepublic.com/article/1997...
FDA is authorizing anybody with a risk factor from this list to receive the vaccines, as well as anybody 65+.
(Though not too much, as I find the whole notion distinctly unprepossessing.)
I've never indulged in the practice myself - not finding that orifice to be erotic, and let's just leave it at that, shall we? - but I'm given to understand that, if done properly and with due care, it's *not* painful, so I must wonder what those people who associate it with pain get up to.
I was never thrilled by either Gore myself. Or by Clinton, come to think on it, who honestly wouldn't have survived in the "Me Too" era.
You may have seen yesterday - I reposted about it - where he backed down from his much-ballyhooed plan to send the National Guard into Chicago, though not without a fling at "nasty politicians", after Governor Pritzker & other Illinois officials pushed back hard at him.
IIRC that's where the term "woke", which really REALLY ought to be retired & should have been as soon as the far right glommed onto it, first gained currency.
...of somebody sitting in an uncomfortable spot where they really didn't have to sit for way too long, getting a nasty pain in their keister, and blaming everyone else for it.
Oh right, now I remember! I don't remember if I replied to that, but if I did I hope you'll pardon my forgetfulness; the volume of what I react to here is such every day that I often misremember what I said or didn't say. I personally have always thought of "butthurt" as being more in the sense...
He's here, you know! Dee Snider, that is, and I remember that kerfluffle, too bloody well I do. I particularly liked his rejoinder during his Congressional testimony that he himself was a Christian and didn't appreciate Gore's imputations about his morality.
I wonder what that term was, but more to the point, I was on Tumblr myself and saw a LOT of those scolds (as well as people going positively berserk over their fandoms). Me? I contented myself with posting pictures of my favorite classic film actresses.
...what old Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, styled "manly firmness" (a phrase which, though I like, admittedly can stand a proper modernization).
I try to post/repost as often as I can that as bad and scary as things are, they're not as bad or as scary as the DOOMsters make them out to be, and That Man is a lot more vulnerable than it looks and, being a bully, will always back down when he's confronted with...
boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/35... Which I need to haul out and play again sometime soon.
And more bunnies. And they also need to take a trip back to days of yore via what @writegameread.bsky.social , in his book of the same title, calls "paper time machines" and see if they can, for example, outdo Napoleon Bonaparte's historical career in one of my favorite solitaire games from 2024.
Our heroine Laura Bayley, for example, did a nice little ankle-flash in her 1900 short "As Seen Through A Telescope". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Seen...
As far as ankles go, I think it was only the 1900's equivalent of the Very Online types who were up in arms about pretty actresses showing off their nicely-turned ankles (be it noted that by the 1910's skirts were climbing up to ankle level anyway, so most fashionable women were showin' em).
Which is a perfect example of how 2 things can simultaneously be true: (1) "terminally online people...(of) bad faith" started this whole kerfluffle, and (2) the Cracker Barrel logo redesign was crap, not for political but for artistic & even commercial reasons.
Mr. Ernest. Tyrell Davis enters less than five minutes before the end of Our Betters (1933) and proceeds to steal the whole film. In real life, Davis was married to an American beauty named—no joke—Lota Cheek.
*Also notable for its acidic caricatures of lawyers and the legal profession, especially funny seeing as how the author, R. D. Blackmore, was himself a lawyer.
Ha! That reminds me of a passage in the classic 19th-century adventure/romance novel "Lorna Doone"* in which the hero's horse, a sour, crabbed, unpleasant and downright vicious type, gives a pretty girl a nasty bite on the arm (& gets socked in the eye for its pains).
Timeline cleanser.
...during the Korean War, which, now that I remember it (I ought to hunt down another copy if it doesn't cost an arm and a leg, having been published in 1956) was a lot more amusing and interesting than the tales of phonies you describe.