Honestly, I like CTD, but with just a few more songs, Superman’s Song, The Ghosts that Haunt Me, and Afternoons & Coffeespoons, you should probably have enough for a lifetime, LOL. Superman’s Song may even be vaguely familiar if you were reading comics in those days, as it came out not too long before the (in)famous Death of Superman arc.

Sticking with Strange New Worlds, though it’s getting exhausting trying to scrape off the exact right amount of surface crap to see if the actual plot and characterization of this week’s genre pastiche is actually decent. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.

I also just started TOS s3, and Spock’s Brain isn’t that bad. The endless slog of flimsy backlot-filmed concepts in s2 was way worse.

Ted Lasso S4 is coming around, but that show deeply, deeply misses Bill Lawrence’s voice. Too many actions are being driven by gag potential and sitcom tropes rather than arising out of character. Also, they let Michelle and the doctor off way too easy, but I’ll say no more.

Lanterns continues to be pretty good. Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre have really good chemistry.

Anime-wise, my kid introduced me to Bofuri and if she doesn’t want to get back to it soon, I may watch it on my own. I do find it interesting how much fantasy manga and anime engages so directly with CRPG and TTRPG mechanics and tropes, or even (like Bofuri) just removes the curtain and sets it in a game.

I’m sure “most hated” has already been covered, so I’ll go farther down the list and pick one that’s a little hated and IMHO more than “not bad”: Crash Test Dummies.

Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm gets clowned on by people who remember it, but (1) it’s pretty good, and (2) CTD’s first three albums are full of super catchy folk-pop-rock with decent lyrics. Some of the third album, and then subsequent stuff gets deeper and deeper into Brad Roberts’ then-current interests and generally doesn’t grab me, but more power to him.

Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm itself was undoubtedly picked to be sonically polarizing and grab more attention than some of the slightly less “Crash Test Dummyish” tracks.

Yeah, I think it blew up a little bit in the initial APIpocalypse, but while nobody really un-subbed, we ended up parking the poll and gameday threads over there. We tend to do one weekly thread with a parent comment for every game you want to discuss.

The Venn diagram of “into a very left leaning alternative social media site” and “into college football” is pretty slim, but it exists.

Jenna Maroney was very angry at first, but she came around.

Disappointing, but maybe not the hill to die on in this state and this election. I’d love to move the Overton window back to where this waffling risks his getting a viable primary challenger from the left, but first let’s work on getting the kids the HRT they need without the hospitals getting sued into oblivion.

!cfb@fanaticus.social

On the afternoon of August 20, I visited the website of a shadowy group called Neighbors for Strong Communities. Days earlier, it had begun spamming Californians’ phones with a bullying warning: Paramount might leave the state, taking thousands of jobs with it, unless Attorney General Rob Bonta settled the lawsuit he and 11 other AGs filed to block the studio’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The site offered to help me write to Mr. Bonta. It also suggested that I describe a time when I or someone close to me had lost a job or struggled to make ends meet.

I hate using AI for any of my writing, but I think we have to be looking more at the ground-level bad humans here. Seems like there is a background prompt setting the guardrails.

Especially when he’s lived there for 20 years and has sufficient fluency to be asked onto live television as a commentator.

Oh, but they did, though I reckon you have to be a special kind of whale to want to live in whatever space they can allocate to you on a starship.

It is, and you can absolutely understand her motivation.

I also read the linked article on Genevieve Bujold and that was brutal. The men in charge of Voyager fuckin’ hated her.

Strong for this season, but the gimmick of genre homages on every episode (even the Martians were pretty pulp-serial in their production design) has really backfired, I think. When everything’s special, nothing’s special. As someone who got stuck in watching one summer of Young and the Restless with his mom one summer in the late 80s, the parody itself worked pretty well, but I found myself mercilessly slicing that nostalgia away to look at the story itself in a way that I wouldn’t if it had been slipped into a more “normal” season as a breather.

Overall, it was okay, the crew manipulated into dealing with some stuff that they didn’t want to, and knowing that stubborn Pike had to be the one to pull them through. I’m an absolute sap for pulling dad heartstrings, though, so that part came together nicely for me, and as the one time where we even briefly explore the fact that some ST characters end up living double or triple lifetimes due to cosmic events.

And, if we can channel 30 Rock for a moment… https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/853ad834-2855-48d8-bef1-0e8ff9a12bc3.mp4

Fielder does well at letting crazy reveal itself by joining it on the journey just long enough. He may empathize with crazy a little too much, but he won’t generally demand that the audience does so.

The other thing is that he’s good with people who are broken but have some kindness in their hearts. Holmes may genuinely believe that she’s the same, but the specific way she’s broken is that she doesn’t care about other humans. This is not going to go how she hoped.

I think it’s because she’s rocking the baby from across the room with her foot, but Fielder absolutely lets her roll with it and stays in tight so the visuals match the energy. The psychological horror soundtrack is also doing some heavy lifting.

It also feels like Resident Alien probably did this better.

If you need the money that’s one thing, and honestly if you could just use the money and you get a lot of quality time with your kids then that’s cool too.

Most of us, however, have occasionally run across people who either actively dislike spending time with their kids, or who get pathological about one more dollar, due either to childhood issues they haven’t worked through or just to their being assholes.

Golf is so weird. “What is the thinnest veneer of red-blooded outdoorsy competition that we can slap onto socially exclusive drinking and socializing?” With carts and mobile drink service (generally always young and female) there’s not even the burden of actually walking anywhere or schlepping your own hydration (or your “hydration”).

I haven’t played in twenty years, and only about 5 times total. I didn’t even hate it the game itself, but it’s such a bizarrely huge and wasteful infrastructure to build around what’s basically bowling night for rich people. I guess really the extravagance is the point, with token efforts at public courses and community outreach to provide socialization for the ever-so-slightly upwardly mobile, and to scrub some of the elitist stink off.

It’s time for Star Trek: Cetacean Ops with a completely whale and dolphin crew to get greenlit. Somebody already did fully aquatic ship tech in Enterprise with the shell-less sea turtle people. Second Contact missions where a biped ship did the other half would be pretty darn funny. Somebody get Baby Ellison on the phone!

municipalities throughout the state who have created legislation regulating the projects

Gonna be interesting when the state government applies all the lessons they learned picking on Dallas, Houston, Austin, and Denton to towns whose only “sin” is pushing back on datacenters.

Who will pay for schools?

For good schools? Eventually it will be rich parents, with a little help from the “fuck you subsidy” as the voucher program expands. There are already idiots in state government (Epstein ranch owner Huffines, IIRC) pushing to double the voucher budget.

Poor minorities will get the absolute best public schools that the remaining budget can buy, which will, in a perfectly legal way, happen to be garbage. Poor white kids in bumblefuck too, but Abbott and the donors already gaslit their parents and grandparents into primarying the parochial-but-occasionally-pragmatic representatives they used to have. They’ve all been replaced with “Only Jeebus and the GOP can save us” stooges who will not do anything so inconvenient as evaluate what’s best for their districts.