“Big, beautiful submarine captains come up to me. Covered with muscles, muscles like nobody has ever seen before. Tears running down their cheeks. They say ‘Sir, thank you for sending us to the South China Sea! Nobody ever sent us there before!’ But I don’t get angry! I should get angry and sometimes I do get angry, but with these captains I don’t get angry. They say ‘Thank you, sir! Thank you!’ But nobody ever thought of South China before! I came up with that, but nobody gives me credit for South China!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, thinking about Abraham Lincoln or Bill Clinton: “Yeah!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, aware of Donald Trump, with Tucker Carlson waiting in the wings: “Oh no!”

I’m just imagining being the poor sap working for a foreign power trying to extract useful information from his cottage cheese brain.

“Do you have nuclear subs in the South China Sea?”

“We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame. … The biggest problem we have is nuclear — nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That’s in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.”

“Where! Are! The nuclear! Subs! Deployed!”

“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible.”

There was a Limited Run Games release , and although they seem to be sold out online, I saw some physical copies in their retail store just the other day.

I’d be curious to see that chart for a Toyota Yaris. I drove one for a few years and it was almost unnerving how little hood it had.

With as much as they talked about the irrevocable destruction of the global ecosystem coming up in a matter of months, and then the constantly rotating day-night cycle, I imagine it would be possible to find out if your in-game time played actually was more or less than that deadline. It would be hilarious if the world was going to end in six months but then the math showed that you actually spent more than a year running around shooting the fins off of robo-pterodactyls.

I’ll be honest, I played through HZD and liked it a lot, but I came away with a list of minor improvements that could have made the game better.

If anything, Forbidden West had all of those same problems and more, and it had a less interesting story. Just to talk about the quests, for instance, I found myself running in boring laps trying to get a particular resource to upgrade a particular weapon, repeating the same battle so many times that it became truly tiresome.

Then I finally upgraded the weapon… and found that by the end of the story I had a bunch of incompletely-upgraded weapons and armor that nevertheless left me so overpowered that the final boss fight was hilariously trivial. If I’d invested the enormous amount of grind to actually max out all the top-tier equipment, then the fight would have been even easier than that.

The franchise has a lot going for it, but they need to figure out their pacing.

Edit: Also, I definitely don’t need a pointless little board game. “Hey, you want to play Strike?” “Fuck no! I’m out here trying to save the fucking world! Fuck off with your minis!”

But if the viewer speaks French then they would understand the French audio dialogue, so if a (deaf) viewer speaks French, then they ought to have the opportunity to read the French subtitled dialogue.

Adjacent pet peeve: When there’s captioning, and a character in a movie speaks a foreign language, and the captions read “[Speaking in French]”, or even worse, “[Speaking in foreign language]”.

Just caption “Jette-le à l’arrière du camion et emmène-le hors de la ville.”! If I do or don’t speak French, and if I can hear or if I’m deaf, then the caption would serve the same purpose either way!

The Disney movie Moana made me furious with this, in the flashback during “We Know the Way,” when the islanders are singing (I assume) Polynesian, but the lyrics are just “[Singing in foreign language]”. The fuck, Disney?! You’re usually good at translation!

PLEASE ADOPT VERIFICATION CAT TO CONTINUE

“To prove that you are human, donate $$$ to Doctors Without Borders.”

“To prove that you are human, register to vote.”

“To prove that you are human, adopt a pet from the local animal shelter.”

Did you catch all-despising baby skull last night?

Why is everyone wearing so much blush?

Not a widely beloved performance, but on this episode of Prairie Home Companion, he plays Jim from Huckleberry Finn, catching up with ol’ Huck. One of my all-time favorite bits.

Relevant part starts at 9:45

“Test Post, Please Ignore,” and that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera were high points for me.

From /r/theydidthemath, six years ago:

solpyro

An MSDS from naturalsourcing.com for “olive oil grade a” gives an LD50 of >2000mg/kg. (I couldn’t copy the link on mobile, sorry)

An average human is around 62kg (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_body_weight) and they would need to ingest over 124g.

Olive oil has a density of .918g/cm³ (https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/IngaDorfman.shtml) making this dose about 114ml.

…which, I’m going to be honest, seems low.

It’s not just sad, it’s one of the fundamental problems of our time. There are all of these obvious good things that government could and should be doing, but because they seem scary and revolutionary, the Democratic party is afraid (perhaps rightly so) that if that try to do them, they will lose to the Republicans. Then, people get upset that the government isn’t doing enough and seems stagnant, and that’s why candidates who seem disruptive get more attention.

On the good side of that equation, you get Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, who became much more successful than one would think on paper, because they branded themselves as Change candidates. The dark side of that is Trump, who appeals to people who think he seems not like a normal politician, and probably to a fair number of accelerationists, too. Obviously if you think about it for thirty seconds you can see that Trump is a fucking con man first, middle, and last, but the outsider branding might be his most potent tool.

Democrats have got to acknowledge that anger at the system feeling fucked, and they have got to make real changes to noticeably improve people’s lives. If all they do is try to maintain institutions and return to the pre-Trump status quo, then the fascists who want to set fire to everything are going to have that advantage over them.

In any sane society, closing a private prison would be cause for celebration.

I’m curious: what would that mean, within Brazil’s borders? Would they be able to prevent Starlink from being used? Broadcast a Starlink jamming signal over the whole country? Or turn it into a diplomatic issue, with the US State Department getting involved?