Depending on my mood either "Driver 8" (bonus that it was also referenced heavily in one of my favorite comic book series, Grant Morrison's run on "Doom Patrol") or "Find the River."
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Depending on my mood either "Driver 8" (bonus that it was also referenced heavily in one of my favorite comic book series, Grant Morrison's run on "Doom Patrol") or "Find the River."
Yeah, I do love "Stand" and "Happy Shiny People" too, especially because the former was the theme song to GET A LIFE.
Depending on my mood either "Driver 8" (bonus that it was also referenced heavily in one of my favorite comic book series, Grant Morrison's run on "Doom Patrol") or "Find the River."
Fair point. I'm also thinking Mary Beard.
I can't remember who said it (one of the writers for Cracked (RIP), I think) but they said team sports games are basically just Magic: The Gathering for millionaires.
I don’t always say this, but this feels like a situation where any joke answer as to what’s being tossed out here won’t be funnier than what’s actually being tossed out here bsky.app/profile/nihi...
The difference between the intelligentsia of my youth, Gore Vidal and Molly Ivins, and the intelligentsia of today, Jordan Peterson and Matt Yglesias, is stark enough that I believe it's a real thing and not just me being old.
I love the smell of consequences in the morning. Thank you, @dragoncon.org
Going to address the actual points made about Gavin Newsom especially regarding his treatment of the homeless and trans people or...?
The scene at the graveyard that (I assume authentically) recreates a traditional shaman ritual was one of the most incredible and engaging things I've ever seen in a film.
...Throttle (Biker Mice From Mars), Beast (X-Men), and Zangief (Street Fighter II). Even at the time, I had a type, clearly.
Chad's Sexual Awakening Gallery: Soda from "The Outsiders" (the book, not the movie or the musicals), Grunge from "Gen 13", He-Man (natch), Robin Hood (Disney)...
Happy Labor Day 🙂
It's funny to think about Trump's staff driving him to the golf course and then just parking it (and him) in a garage for two hours to keep up appearances
Given how abrasive Lorenz is at least online, this is definitely one hell of a "glass houses" situation.
And yes, I'm not ashamed to admit that whole storyline made me tear up a bit.
*bigger spoiler* The fact that if you help him fulfill his wish of being "reborn" as a beautiful human it dooms him horribly and the only way to truly help him is to ignore his self-loathing wish and find and hand him an item that says "You're beautiful" every time it's used is pure Martin.
*minor spoiler* Like the character of Boc, who comes from a brutal society of monkey-like beings and is violently expelled because (it's implied) he's male and wants to follow his mother's profession of seamstress.
The interesting thing about getting into ELDEN RING now finally is picking up on the bits that are definitely George R.R. Martin.
Yeah, she's phenomenal in it, and it's worth watching just for the novelty of a show where things happen like the protagonists "defeat" the threat in one episode by literally sacrificing an innocent man to it.
And it hasn't tried to convince me to kill myself....well, except that one time, but that was a fluke, maybe.
Have you ever seen SAPPHIRE & STEEL by any chance?
Congrats to Sam Altman on being parodied by the Simpsons!
We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.
ok yes
No, not really *sigh*.
I agree completely.
I really have become convinced that one of the problems with the political discourse on this site is that people just see rural people as an absolute synonym for Republican voters and they don't realize or won't admit they're doing it.
Mamdani and Platner are giving me some hope if they turn out to be just the forerunners of an emerging movement. As much as I love Bernie, he did run into some pitfalls and have some hang-ups, and I think progressives have learned from that (at least so far, although it might be too soon to say).
At the very least it's an interesting experiment in how much a person having access to the best health care on the planet can keep a sundowning old man in bad health going.
If the light at the end of the Trump era turns out to be a Vance vs. Newsom election I'm gonna be the one establishing the first colony on the moon, Mars, or the skies of Venus
I don't know. I think there's a chance it would be as bad or worse, but also a really good chance MAGA will just collapse like a house of cards once Trump and his weird cult leader-like charisma is gone.
At least they're getting hit by this and the huge class action suit by authors simultaneously.
The Ha Ha Just Kidding Unless....? energy tonight is just burying the fucking needle
On one hand these are people trying to survive in an increasingly punitive and impoverished society but on the other hand they are so *unsightly*.
New episode of the Medici Podcast. Learn about the patronage, scientific achievements, and very gay sex life of Grand Duke Ferdinando II. medicipodcast.com/2025/08/28/e...?
I want a politics that widens the circle to include everyone, not one that shrinks the circle by throwing *undesirables* under the bus. I think this is basic. I am interested in a politics that is rooted at the sources of people's suffering. I am interested in a politics that attends to basic needs.
I fucking despise Chuck Schumer
So "believe" might be too strong a word but I am open to the idea that there could be a sentient species who exist in another state of being and/or dimension of reality who interact and screw around with us and that could be the basis for all kinds of fairy, jinn, and even modern alien stories.
Imagine if Gavin Newsom went on a Nazi podcast and said that he had “evolved” his position on gay marriage and agreed with the host that gay marriage was a cause of unforeseen social ills. Do you think these dumbass shitlibs would still try to claim he’s not actually a homophobe?
For 12 months, America had a limited proof of concept for universal healthcare, and it was so uniformly successful we had no choice but to obliterate our society
The real test to prove you can stand being around me is your ability to endure the inevitable "I think the Sandown Clown might have been real and could have been a jinn" conversation without slinking away or calling social services.
I spent two days with Platner and, as you’ll read, was as impressed by his theory of power as I was by his policies. I think it’s FAR more important than the “how do you talk to Trump voters” question.
If you want do hit me up if you ever show up at Pitt or CMU (seriously, I have no social life anymore, I need a reason other than work to leave my apartment).
One last thing then I'll shut up: it's always wild to me whenever I see any of my compatriots, liberal or conservative, embrace the principle of collective punishment because...well, if you're an American, you're probably not going to like where that premise logically leads!
He's like a clone of Kier Starmer in so many ways, and look how Starmer's turned out for the UK.
CDC scientists receive a heroes welcome after walking out today.
And the idea that people who do make a different choice from me, but choose to stay in certain places out of love or because they want to better a particular community, should accept a lack of medical care because of the political opinions of the people around them...that's just obscene.
It's not the choice I made and it's not even the choice I'd make now if I had to, but that's the point. Liberals and leftists shouldn't be aspiring to "rescue" people from their communities, but to give people the same choices my friends and I were lucky enough to have.
But they CHOSE TO STAY! I honestly don't know all their reasons, but clearly it is home for them, and they are providing something good for people who don't have a choice for where they live or even, unlike me, might want to stay and make lives for themselves in this rural "hellhole."
They made lives and careers there and they want to adopt a child and raise it there. They run a theater company that provides something different and new for the weird kids (and adults!) who find themselves stuck there. And they've got professional ties to NYC so they could leave if they wanted to.
Besides that...this talk of, oh, we need to get people out of rural areas through YIMBYism or education is so offensive. Not necessarily to me, but to a liberal gay couple I'm friends with who live in a place near where I grew up but is even *more* rural.
I left rural Virginia because I thought it would be easier to find community and opportunities elsewhere, not to escape some primitive backwater (although admittedly it may have felt so at the time). Still, I know it would have been more difficult but I could have found a place there too.
Of course this is purely anecdotal, but I can't help but wonder if there's a level of class at play here. I've worked alongside working-class people in cities before and they're not that different from their counterparts in rural areas, not as different as some of you are making it sound certainly.
And yet, I find the contempt some of the people on here showing for rural areas baffling, even offensive. I've lived in rural areas, suburbs, college towns, and mid-sized cities, and while, yes, you run into more reactionaries and racists in rural areas, it's not that radically different!
The point is that I paid a price I never agreed to pay for growing up gay in a rural, conservative area. I was hurt in ways that shaped me and deprived me. And I still do have a lot of anger about it. Also I worked really hard and took risks to try to move to more urban and liberal areas.
Note I said "middle-class family" because I don't think you can as cleanly separate class from regionalism as some people on here seem to think, but anyway...
Did I hate growing up in Amherst County, Virginia? *God yes*. Would I want to live there again? If I had a choice, no, but in my old age I'm not as hostile to the thought as I used to be. Would I have been better off being raised by an upper-middle-class family in a place like NYC? Probably.
It's hard not to take all the "lol let rural people not have health care" "debate" personally, which is why I'm limiting comments to my own space and not going around with guns blazing (well, aside from telling Leonid to go fuck himself, which was probably my inferior rural stock bubbling up).
Oooh I hope you don't mind if I save that one.
Can't wait to see the malicious compliance they do.
one thing i've taken away from surveys asking the public to evaluate trump's most authoritarian moves is that the ordinary americans have a much clearer sense of what's happening than most professional political observers
"Rural people deserve to suffer collectively because they believe horrible, ignorant things like the urban people are a monolith."
Fuck I love this guy. He's a breath of fresh air. #Resist
I hope it's a bit or just a rant because I seriously wonder if he even knows that lots of non-white people live in rural areas.
Anyway, all this is to say if it were up to me people like Leonid would be banned from all major metro areas and college towns and will have to make their permanent residence someplace like Pocahontas County, West Virginia.
Then I think of my disabled cousin who needs constant physical therapy and medical checkups and lives in a very rural area, and she could lose what independence she has.
I'm the first person to say "fuck Trump voters", but...well, I think of the fact that my deeply rural and very red home region is home to both a nationally notorious right-wing religious college and a thriving progressive theater company run by an openly gay couple.
On behalf of my disabled cousin who requires constant medical care and through no fault of her own lives in a deeply rural area.... Fuck you.
Oh, you also specified time of prosperity. Well, I had to jump at the excuse to mention Solano Lopez, one of my favorite all-time crap leaders.
Also 90% of the male population by some estimates. They had to make polygamy legal!
Kind of a stretch because he was appointed not elected by popular vote, but the presidency of Francisco Solano Lopez in Paraguay is the only one that comes to mind. He started a war with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay *simultaneously* that killed literally half the country's population.
we're heading into fall, so: I am a professional writer with hundreds of credits to my name, mostly reviews of TV shows but also books, movies, and video games. My work has appeared in the AV Club, GQ, IGN, and a bunch of other places, and I'm always looking for freelance work. Thanks.
Every single member of the GOP needs to be put on trial. That doesn't exclude members of the Democratic party. If you helped enable this, you're guilty. You committed treason. There is but one penalty for treason.
Mild example but I did have to get a new mic sooner than my bank account was willing because of this shit.
God it's depressing you probably make 12 times more money than me when your job is advising people in power to do nothing instead of something and to look weak and feckless, although I guess there is skill of a sort in that.
This is a real photograph of Washington, DC this week, where the United States president has ordered military occupation in peacetime, and ordered the display of colossal portraits of himself. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...
No beautiful obituaries today, but we’ve gotta have faith.
Not the worst but the most grating thing about our elites, even the MAGA ones, is their constant demands that we like and respect them.
I will never understand how American elites managed to convince themselves that uncivil debate — not fascism, not impunity and not widespread indifference to facts — is the defining problem of our time. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...
Time to step up your game, America.
As Lindsay Ellis pointed out in her great, recent video essay, making the Jewish community the face of censorship and repression campaigns carried out by extremist Christians is a feature, not a bug.
Of course these evil freaks want to go after Wikipedia, and they're using "anti-Semitism" as an excuse to do it. thehill.com/homenews/hou...
"Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television" is one of the most prophetic quotes from any film.
Well I do have one of him doing that with a pumpkin.
@mutualimsure.bsky.social
Timeline cleanse (for my fellow gays and the straight/bi ladies).
You don't say
remember folks, we cant have gun restrictions because if we do the federal government will occupy our streets, imprison people without due process, ship dissidents to foreign gulags and things of that nature
Hell is not hot enough for these monsters
This is both one of the best marketing stunts I’ve ever seen AND one of those painful reminders of the times we live in
There was something too about how one of the pollsters if not the main pollster behind the "Gen Z is right-wing" claim has a history of distorting how right-wing certain demographics are, but admittedly I haven't looked into it.
Horror is the genre that always gets dismissed and treated as lesser, but you know what actually deserves that scorn? "Drama." That ain't a genre, that's the inherent drive of narratives. "Drama" is just a marketing term to sell a story to a particular audience.
Something I miss from Twitter was the militantly anti-male circumcision people who would just pop up randomly all the time. I always suspected they were all just one guy.
If it helps some genius with too much time on their hands made Roger's personas the social links in PERSONA. youtu.be/huWIRRRieVU?...
He feels like a leftist who somehow simultaneously views politics like the technocrats leftists hate.
In an interview with the Prospect, the rising populist star Graham Platner spoke of a new Gilded Age and a need to take on billionaires and their control of our political system. Read the full profile from Austin Ahlman:
your gym teacher and your english teacher are getting married
Anyway whenever I see a mention of Cracker Barrel rebranding I think of that.