Michael Hopcroft
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Posts posted by Michael Hopcroft
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On 4/22/2023 at 8:43 PM, unclevlad said:
Oh my. I didn't see this before.
2 were technical. The league rules say NO betting from any NFL-affiliated facility, including practice facilities. The other 3...for the entire season...were betting on NFL games, per NYT.
Blowing basically any control off sports betting has opened the doors, and there are going to be downsides. How much this will be, kinda remains to be seen. It's not clear it's a real institutional problem. YET. But the potential for something Really Ugly is there.
Funny, I remember in the old Colloseum days the Lions were always the safe bet.
The NFL practically owes its existence to organized gambling which they dared not acknowledge while it was a.) illegal, and b.) controlled by organized crime. They attempted to half-heartedly keep the players away from it because in those days it was impossible for any athlete to play with two broken kneecaps.
There is no bottle. The Genie was always there. Only now he dresses like a respectable businessman and not like a gangster.
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On 4/25/2023 at 3:50 PM, BoloOfEarth said:
NT: So, who is going to announce his/her presidential run next? (The sillier, the better.)
I'm Charles Windsor, and I am running for President. What do you mean I'm King Charles III? I have an eyepatch, an evil scar down my cheek, and a greasepaint moustache! The King has none of these things!
NT: How Foxbat plans to make his trademark big, splashy entrance at the Coronation.
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8 hours ago, Pariah said:
A: If you knew anything, you'd quickly confess to knowing nothing at all.
Q: So two by two equals -- what did you want two plus two to be anyway?
A: Two times two equals five for sufficiently large values of Two.
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7 minutes ago, Pariah said:
New Topic: Recipe substitutions that are a really bad idea.
Instead of milk on your corn flakes, try cola. On second thought, don't--Cola on corn flakes is nasty. Really, really nasty.
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7 hours ago, Cancer said:
A: If they are already in boxes, heads will not roll.
Q: And what do you mean hiring Erwin Schrödinger to run the guillotine?
A: They're going to send you back to Mother in a cardboard box! You'd better run!
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6 hours ago, Asperion said:
A: You touched my Eggo.
Q: OW! Hey, why did you have to break my hand?
A: Audience Participation Boxing.
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1 hour ago, Asperion said:
A: This boom went over our heads.
Q: Trickel-Down Economics doesn't seem to be working, does it?
A: In just seven days I will make you a man!
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20 hours ago, Cancer said:
A: And we will always try to keep it that way.
Q: Is it true that the gap between rich and poor in American is widening every year?
A: Him. He's John Galt.
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On 3/9/2023 at 11:15 PM, tkdguy said:
OSS 117 -- Double Agent: A 1968 Eurospy movie. At first I thought it was a James Bond knockoff, but it turns out the character was created several years before Bond. The movie was entertaining enough, but some parts were laughably bad.
The OSS 117 series was resumed this century but as satires of Western cluelessness about other parts of the world.
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On 3/20/2023 at 8:56 AM, Asperion said:
A: This is the Quill of Suggestion.
Q: What did Ben Franklin use to edit Jefferson's first draft of the D of I?
A: Moscow Is Still Standing!
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8 hours ago, death tribble said:
Cambridge win the Boar Race
7 hours ago, L. Marcus said:That's an awesome misspelling.
And oh, so apropos. Was the police detail able to account for all their hats?
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1 hour ago, Cancer said:
NT: "March Madness" phenomena that have nothing to do with basketball.
The International Festival of Military Parades and Chicken Eating Competition
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On 2/19/2023 at 8:59 AM, Asperion said:
A: This is what we refer to as a typical day.
Q: Why are all these superpowered people having an all-out battle in Downtown Manhattan?
A: For the record -- no, that is not a time machine. So get out of there before the thing switches itself on by mistake!
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2 hours ago, Ternaugh said:
The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. Released 50 years ago today.
Far away, across the fields,
The tolling of an iron bell
Calls the Faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell
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My first anime I remember much of was Voltron (Defender of the Universe). Then I saw Akira in 1988 (I ran into an oild con friend there) and referred to it as a crossover of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The big moment was when I rented the first episodes of Urusei Yatsura. That's what got me to the club at one last and it would be decades before I looked back.
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And even though there wasn't a preview for it, I went home to find this, and all I was thinking was "How the\ heck are they going to be finding apart for Bugs Bunny in MIddle-Earth"
Lord of the Rings New Movies Set at Warner Bros - Variety
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I'm still in a bit of a shock several hours after seeing Knock at the Cabin. The staging and acting are exquisite (Dave Bautista is a revelation(, and the premise is both fascinating and frightening.
But the shakenness afterwards was not pleasant, and being alone with this film in a darkened auditorium (49 seats and nobody but me was occupying any of them) had me wonder if I was getting sick -- not as in upchuck time but as in how the Hell am I going to get downstairs, and what if nobody comes lo0oking for me time. Bautista's gentle giant making impossible demands of himself and the inhabitants of said cabin was well worth the price of admission by itself.
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On 2/22/2023 at 10:51 AM, Cancer said:
Which means I really should stop wondering who decideda gujy with 15 career munytes or so in the NBA was a significant pro that people want to see in the contest, and will root for to win. I would be deeply offended if I was one of the other participants in the contest who's actually playing in The League.
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48 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:
MI was at its heart a caper show. You didn't really watch it for the characters, you watched it to see what inventive and elaborate scheme they'd come up with to undo the villain of the week. And of course they didn't just shoot the enemy, they were the Good Guys!
A tidbit about Leonard Nimoy: I remember an interview with him in which he said a big reason he took the role of Paris on MI was because his character would be playing a different role in every episode. He had some concern about being typecast as Spock in future (no kidding), but he said it's hard to typecast a chameleon.
This. The thing was they were masters of mind games. After all, why shoot a dictator when you can drive him mad and provoke a leadership crisis in his country? An assassination would have been like killing Putin in a very obvious way that points to you, and exponentially increases the chances of getting caught and facing a firing squad or worse.
The movies turned the concept into action thrillers with stuntwork and fight scenes replacing the true focus of the series on deception and ingenious planning and execution. It would be like Lupin III, which would be difficult to capture in a live-action film unless you truly understood the character and the world he lives in.
- Lord Liaden and Joe Walsh
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Manga has lost one of its giants with the death of Space Opera legend Leiji Matsumoto. His best-known creations are the legendary space pirate/rebel Captain Harlock, the pioneering Space Battleship Yamato (one of the first anime series to be released in the US, under the title Star Blazers) and the proto-transhumanist fantasy Galaxy Express 999. He also created the music video series Interstellar 5555 for Techno masters Daft Punk.
He was known for his distinctive art style with languid lines contrasting with detailed and realistic technology, his controversial relationship with war (to this day his film The Cockpit is banned in much of the world), and his powerful mix of space and seeming-anachronisms like space cruisers modeled on WWII battleships (which always held a fascination for him) and spacefaring railway trains. His legacy, as I mentioned, is complex, yet there is astonishing beauty in much of his work.
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19 hours ago, unclevlad said:
A: They seek him here, they seek him there....
Q: Where's the dog?
A: Dogs only know where I'd be without you.
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5 hours ago, Asperion said:
Q: Why are you attempting to enter your cat in the legless race?
A: All these weapons and nothing to destroy.
Q: So what was your trip to the Pentagon like?
A: Looks like we're running low on air again.
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M3GAN has to have been the creepiest and most disturbing horror movie I've seen in years. The idea is a sort of variant on Frankenstein, in which a robotics engineer builds a robot designed to look and act human, and intended to protect her "primary user", in this case the engineer's new ward who was brought to her after her parents died. But, while the little girl adores the robot and sees her as a person, and the engineer's boss wants to start a M3GAN production line, M3GAN starts to transcend her boundaries, and gradually starts building a frightening demeanor, until finally she has no problem with killing even dogs and children if it serves her purpose.
Like the original Frankenstein, it poses questions. Is M#GAN a person, albeit an evil one? If she isn't, then who is culpable for her crimes?
What Have You Watched Recently?
in Non-Gaming Discussion
Posted
For Mother's Day I brought some DVDs (I really need to get Mom a Blu-Ray player) and dinner. The one we ended up seeing was the original French comedy The Tall Blonde Man with One Black Shoe. The movie was an art house staple while I was growing up, but my mother had never seen it. It's a lovely combination of frothy comedy and Watergate-era political satire with a surveillance state run amok.
Infighting within the French Intelligence services has led to the head of the agency looking to get the goods on a treacherous subordinate by setting a trap -- he tells his most trusted aide to go to Orly Airport and choose a random stranger to see if the rival takes the bait that this is a supposed "superspy" that poses a threat to the traitor's plans. His random choice is a man with shoes mismatched -- he points out :"The Tall Blonde Man with One Black Shoe" and steps aside to watch what happens.
Sure enough, the bait is taken and the subordinate's entire crew devotes itself to discovering everything that can conceivably be known about this man, who turns out to be the Principal Violinist for a Paris orchestra. He is in fact trying to keep a secret -- that he's engaged in an affair with the wife of one of his friends -- but it seems that everything they watch him do or overhear him say leaves the man even further convinced that the musician poses a deadly threat. And the fiddler? He has no idea what's going on, how the toothpaste and shaving cream in his tubes got mixed up, or why the friend he is cuckolding thinks his wife is having sex with someone in the back of a florist's van.
Add to this the fact that the violinist i8s played by Pierre Richard, one of French film's greatest clowns at the peak of his powers. Fortunately, this was the original French cut, subtitled, and is sounds a LOT better than an appalling dub for English-0language TV.
That it is just as relevant a piece of satire as it weas in 1974 is profoundly saddening. But the movie is hilarious.