Zeropoint

Give a man enough rope, and he'll hang himself. Go ahead, Donny, we're all waiting.

I absolutely, 100% agree with you that this is how it should be. However, it's not how it IS. Unless and until we can turn things around and re-secure the rights of the common people, we need to be sure to operate according to our unpleasant reality.

Or you could just operate with the knowledge that your phone is an open book to the LEOs and, you know, keep all your subversive activities off of it.

I just want to acknowledge that Cate Blanchett absolutely nailed the role of Hela. She was completely convincing as someone with great power and confidence and came across as every bit as threatening and dangerous as she was supposed to be. IMO, she also looked damned good doing it. I found it impressive that she was able to project both "oozing sexy" and "oh hell no, I'm not going near that" at the same time. Mad props to her screen presence and acting ability.

I can't find the reference right now, but there's a verse in the Old Testament somewhere that manages to mess up counting to six.

Okay, I'll admit that I was hasty, and wrong, in drawing that conclusion. I apologize for throwing that label around.

A Roman soldier walks into a bar and says, "I'd like a martinus, please." "You mean a martini?" asks the barkeep. "If I wanted a double, I would have asked for one," replies the soldier.

The pic I posted got a downvote . . . looks like we found the pro-fascist.

This thread seems like an appropriate place to share this pic:

We should really go out and catch it. I suppose it's not feasible to mount such a mission on such short notice, though . . . especially allowing for the fact that we don't actually have the tech to DO that at the moment.

I sometimes wonder if offering a humane execution to life-sentence prisoners might be a small kindness that we could afford to give them. If you agree that someone should literally die in prison, doesn't it make sense to allow them the form of death that they feel involves the least suffering? If, on the other hand, you would use that as the argument against giving them the choice of death . . . well, when you're explicitly choosing to cause more suffering to the convict, I would suggest that perhaps you've shifted from "justice" to "revenge".

I have to wonder about this. I can only speak for myself, but I thought it was obvious from the beginning that Ludendorf was not Ares. Maybe I caught those "subtle hints" more clearly; maybe I'm just cynical enough to go directly to "humans don't need any help to be violent bastards", but at no point did I think that Ludendorf was Ares, or that the audience was ever intended to think that. Do we have an official answer from the film's creators on this? Does it even matter in these "death of the author" days? Edit: to put the subtext of this post into text: Is it just me? Am I wrong here?

It took me a second viewing to notice that the Dwarven baby has a beard.

Whoa, flashbacks to my biology class twenty years ago where I learned that sea urchins do that. That's right, that sea urchin has deliberately piled those things on itself! Uh . . . including the skeleton of a deceased relative. That's a little macabre.

It's an adorable little baby BRRRRRT.

I enjoyed the robot personalities in "Interstellar". TARS was a good character.

Lord Liaden, thanks for trying to keep things civil and not intending to offend. I don't understand how you can have trouble seeing that a fun, friendly sporting activity where everyone goes home with all their parts intact is very different from deliberately killing people. It's always possible that we're having a massive failure of communication here and not talking about the same things. However, it's hard for me to avoid interpreting statements like that in an uncharitable light. What am I missing here?

You said it out loud! You fool, you've doomed us all!

http://metro.co.uk/2017/11/09/man-found-with-14-inch-snake-in-his-trousers-7066843/ "Trouser snake" is supposed to be a metaphor.

I've fired thousands of rounds in recreational contexts. I've been to several cowboy action shooting matches, where dozens of people come together to enjoy shooting firearms in friendly competition. While I've never actually attended one, there's a thriving "three-gun" scene in which people do the same type of thing but with modern firearms. So, from my perspective, saying that "there are a few other uses for guns besides killing" is at best coming from a place of ignorance about how guns are actually used. Your choosing to compare recreational firearm usage to things like drag racing on public streets and surfing on hurricane swells seems a bit disingenuous, because you picked one example that is illegal and stupid and one that's legal but even more stupid. A much better comparison would have been, say, playing sports: people get injured playing sports all the time, but playing sports is not something generally recognized as foolish or stupid to do. I've spent more time at the range than I have at sporting events, but I've still seen more people injured through sports than with firearms. Should we ban football because the players often suffer brain trauma? If public safety is the central issue, why should I be allowed to scramble my brain on the football field but forbidden from enjoying a harmless afternoon of blasting steel in a gravel pit?

Well, at best they're also fun to use in a wide variety of shooting sports.

I would be all for taking guns away from people convicted of domestic violence. I would support this even--possibly even especially--if it meant that a lot of cops could no longer carry guns.

It occurs to me that a game that was trying to be "realistic" should have fairly harsh encumbrance penalties.

Re: the Franklin article: Well, it turns out that I'm in good company in going to bed at four in the morning! Also, I'm surprised that ANYONE benefits from DST.

That was supposed to say "Guy Fleegman wrote:" but I can't figure out the new software.