Been watching Deep Space 9. I’m in the middle of S5 now, after sort of fizzling out during the original run in the 90s. I still haven’t decided if I like Avery Brooks as an actor. I like Ben Sisko more than Jonathan Archer, though. I can tell you that. Archer was a terrible character and Bakula rarely helped me like him more.

Also keeping up with Agatha All Along, which is a bit slight but has a very good command of mood and a likeable cast. I understand they made it on a budget as well, in which case good for them. It’s telling a story that works with the resources available.

My kid got too fixated on her crappy magical-girl animes during breakfast, so now I pick what’s on while she eats and I make her lunch. I picked Gravity Falls, but it turns out she likes it. Apparently Zoomers and late millennials made lots of memes about it, so she already knew shit I didn’t.

The wife and I are almost through Call the Midwife, which is proof that the BBC is wise not to let most shows outstay their welcome, both because it’s a bad idea generally and because they’re terrible at it in particular. It’s not quite hate-watching, but the eyerolling and our constant disappointment at

has become a large component of the fun. Also, wanting to punch Dame Vanessa Redgrave in the face upon hearing her barf out another increasingly random emotional voiceover is probably not a good headspace to be in.

Il a des couches, comme un oignon.

I knew O’Hare was an asshole, but I didn’t realize he was the Farmers Branch Immigration Ordinance asshole. Downballot matters. Midterm and off-year matters. These pieces of shit know they’re in the minority, but because of that they’re motivated and once you control the levers of power it’s easier to hold on to them.

Effectively you’re voting with your wallet, and that’s fine. I’m not spending zero on Marvel stuff myself, but I am definitely spending noticeably less, because even if I’m not completely tuned out of their house style, any sense of urgency is long gone. That’s what will cause it to burn through, though, people not paying. Marvel needs to rethink their formula, and the other studios need to appeal to audiences with ideas better than “Marvel but not as fun.” Maybe that is what Stan is getting at when he asks the industry to offer something “better.”

I do still think there’s a naivete among certain cinephiles in and out of the industry that Marvel can be blamed for things, when they’re really doing little more than throwing money and talent at Saturday serials from 90 years ago. I just don’t think the trends that are sending The Irishman to Netflix or forcing Megalopolis to be self-funded are Marvel’s fault, or if they are it’s in a very fungible way, and superhero fatigue will result in a different variety of mass spectacle, which will be lauded for whatever minor innovation it brings before growing stale and being derided by the people who still won’t be finding an audience to hit “legacy” box office metrics.

Now, one thing I have kinda started to believe is that there was a certain value in the fuzziness of not being able to predict what would work, which I guess is a way of agreeing with you to a certain extent. The studios have never done anything without an eye towards profit, and maybe the fact that the Marvel formula worked so well made it easier to keep going to the well (or trying to dig their own well), with less money being thrown around trying to guess what would fit the moment and blow up. We’ve certainly lost some stuff that would have been creative successes, but a lot of that talent has migrated to streaming in various ways, and most of we truly missed out on would have been just as cookie cutter as Marvel. The cinemas in the 90s and earlier were frequently just chock full of absolute garbage, and sometimes you’d watch the garbage just because the theater was a third-place and your only TV was a 19" glass box with two shitty speakers.

Yep, speifically the comments about how they are an economic engine for the film industry. I think some people have conflated audiences’ changing attitudes about what truly needs a visit to the local TEMPLE OF CINEMA, with the popcorn-factory that can most regularly still pack them in.

I am just as interested in seeing Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson convey the powerful emotions of a disintegrating marriage as I ever was (which is to say, I’m gonna get to it! Eventually. It sounds really moving. I think my kid wants to watch Gravity Falls, though), but I will be just as content watching it in my living room, and I have no intention of waiting for someone else’s start time or not being able to pause, or dealing with strangers just so I can see the actors’ nose-hairs.

Now, Adam Driver stabbing people with a crackling laser sword, or Scarlett Johansson blowing up angry robots to save the world? However good it is (or isn’t), it’ll be noticeably better on a ginormous screen with equally ginormous speakers blasting me into a suspension of disbelief, and I’m willing to put up with a certain amount to get that experience. Shit, if it’s actually done well, then having other people there with you is almost like being at a sporting event, and they may even add to the experience (maybe; let’s not get carried away).

Spectacle is not a dirty word, and though I admit I have no patience for things that offer nothing else, I don’t need the rest to be truly groundbreaking if it is fun and made with some sense of care and craft.

It had its moments, but overall I can’t disagree.

Yeah, in many places you can file damn near anything you want at the County Clerk’s office, especially if it purports to have anything at all to do with land ownership. They record things, but unfortunately for the SovCit, they do not actually confer legitimacy.

I would just about bet that as the scammers who fleece the SovCits realized their market included certain people who somehow could afford to travel overseas, they needed something beyond the fake passports and the information about the n number of stars on passport CARDS for land crossings to CA and MX. I bet you can buy all sorts of information about how to get a real passport without selling yourself back to the “government”.

Seems like it was pretty analogous, though it seems like there was a ritual value to hieroglyphics and the older forms of the language that’s a few steps beyond even what ecclesiastical Latin is today. I would say there would be a certain sense that something could only have top-tier religious import if it was set down in Medut Netjeru (“the Words of the Gods”). I thought this article by an Egyptologist was pretty interesting.

Nothing quite so explicit as that I think, though obviously preserving something is always the intent when carving shit into stone.

Ptolemaic Egypt was a culture populated by Greek and Egyptian speakers. Of those who were literate, many would only be able to read Demotic or Greek, but meanwhile there is a 2500 year history (at THAT time. Egypt is ridiculously old) of Hieroglyphics being the “official” way to write things down, and the scribal and priestly classes would be part of the cultural elites. Combine that with the Ptolemies attempting to situate themselves as both continuing Alexander’s legacy and being fully Egyptian, and there will be a place for all three scripts. Engraving laws onto stones and placing them in prominent public spaces would have been a pretty common way to “publish” them in a way that’s meant to be durable and secure. See the Code of Hammurabi and Draco’s code for just a couple of examples.

The fact that Alexandria was cosmopolitan and had a sophisticated regime ruled by elites who were foreign but invested in the local traditions created a situation where this was done often enough for some to survive, several in fact, although the Rosetta Stone was the first found/identified.

Yes. The system set up by the US Constitution was a reasonably good attempt for a country of several million people with different practical needs, entirely along the eastern seaboard, and with 1790s technology, knowledge, and attitudes.

The problem is that it has evolved pretty much the bare minimum amount to allow it to (mostly) continue to function. We are limping along on “Constitutional Republic version 2.27,” after version 1.0 was an immediate bust, but we need to be running 2.30 at least, and maybe even 3.0. We’re no longer feature competitive with many other Human Governance suites. :-)

There are many issues, but an “upgrade” to install Ranked Choice Voting, rebalance Congressional Representation, and maybe remove the Electoral College (depending on how the congressional representation thing goes) would go a long way towards keeping it viable.

Eric Adams must have wanted a domestic flight. Credit to the pilot, he was committed to making it work.

Boy, you’re not gonna be happy when you learn how food stores used to work. They’ve been offloading things labor used to do onto the customers for a century.

LOL, all in good fun. Except for the barbecue thing. It’s fine, but it’s just slightly less delicious Texas style, LOL.

Oh, and NFL refs’ love affair with Mahomes and the Chiefs.

My wife occasionally asks me to download books for her from Anna’s or Libgen. Recently, one was a survey and analysis of the Late Bronze Age Collapse by a noted scholar in the field.

God I love that woman.

Harrison Ford, or at least his cumulative body of work, is a goddamned national treasure, but the man is 82. Stop throwing money at him and encouraging him to leave Wyoming to do boring things. Besides, he might try to fly himself, and we as a country don’t need that kind of stress.

Anyway, it’s so unrealistic. Why would America ever elect an octogenarian president?!?!?!

Before being assimilated, she had a partial competitive jazz dance scholarship to the Academy.

https://xkcd.com/222/

Most cities do something fun with their kitschy rotating restaurant. Not Kansas City. No sir, they’re good practical midwesterners, and by god a surplus Air Traffic Control tower from the third biggest airport in the Dakotas will be fine! Plop it on a pre-fab concrete hotel and get on with your day.

Also, their barbecue is overrated.

I watch pretty much all of it still. Eventually. Sometimes months later. I think Echo is the only one I haven’t finished, but I saw several of them months late.

It’s mostly fine, but that’s about as far as I’d go. Among other issues, Multiverses dangle the specter of irrelevance in front of every story. I know it’s not always there in the script, but the meta commentary that everyone is replaceable and any event can be undone unavoidably reduces the stakes and my investment in characters. If they bother to make a point of concluding the “multiverse” arc, it needs to be something that promises to make the storytelling crutch mechanic of crossing between them much harder to invoke in the future. It can be utter handwavium, but I need that promise from the Marvel Industrial Complex to me as an audience member.

Then more generally, the Marvel “house style” is either so overwhelming that it ends up the equivalent of pleasant but low-stakes episodic TV from the before-times with 23 episodes per season, or else it’s shoehorned into a halfhearted attempt to let a director or showrunner do their thing and reduces the effectiveness of both. There was good TV then, and there is good Marvel now, but the specialness has worn off.

I haven’t listened in years, but even a decade-plus ago, you could tell he was desperate to be taken seriously as an interviewer.

Now, to be fair, with the right subject he could weave together empty-headed sex and gossip questions he knew would never get a real answer with questions that were probing but felt less invasive by comparison, and then use that to get some interesting answers. Any modestly savvy interviewee would know this was the schtick, though, and reveal exactly as much as they wanted, but even then it made it a safe place to “off brand” a bit.

I don’t know how many of the accoutrements of peak Howard Stern are still around, but I presume this is still a move by Harris to whittle a couple of points off Trump’s lead among white men in Pennsylvania, but with a host who is WAY over any fondness for Donald Trump.