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Lawnmower Boy

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Everything posted by Lawnmower Boy

  1. Well, not the multipart galaxy-saving epic I was hoping for, I liked it!
  2. Have you heard Joe Biden is old? I knew an 81-year-old guy who died of oldness when he was sixty! That guy couldn't be President on account of being dead do long his corpse could vote. Just saying it's concerning. Has anyone considered just giving up? I mean, doing stuff is hard! Especially when you're old!
  3. Something weird is going on in American politics: i) That's not chaos-seeking. That's suicidal ideation. It's an issue with aging in general, and also substance abuse. ii) Given that Trump's decline has been obvious and well-documented, with plenty of live demonstrations, you think it wouldn't be news, much less provoke contrarian responses. We all age out and it's hard to find anyone who seriously thinks Trump was ever a competent administrator, as opposed to redirecting their suicidal ideation. Really the only question is the specific parameters of his ineffectuality as head of the Administration if re-elected this year, and this has an upside as well as a downside for everyone. In other words, his lack of grip may enable the worst elements in his following, or render them ineffectual. Either way, it's going to be a Presidency only a person with suicidal tendencies could love. iii) Trump is a historically weak candidate. The strong tendency for the last century has been for the incumbent party to lose re-election to a third term, with 7 elections going that way to 4 going the other way, a count even more lopsided when you exclude the New Deal years as anomalous. Trump's election in 2016 is in line with the trend; losing the popular vote was not in line with expectations. There is an even stronger tendency for incumbent presidents to win re-election, so Trump's defeat in 2020 is even more anomalous, though in line with his demonstrated level of voter appeal. iv) The rest of the Republican Party has been electorally underwhelming going back to 2018. Without going into the nitty gritty, he doesn't show many signs of having coat-tails; and as a separate but not unrelated issue, while you can't call electoral polling wrong overall in the last seven years, it has been consistently skewed to the right end of margins of error, with the effect of overstating GOP chances in many local elections and provoking numerous panics about predicted Democratic underperformance. (And much cathartic relief; either way, it has been pretty good for media clickthroughs.) v) Trump has entered the primary races in the odd position of being the effective incumbent. No-one has a clue what this means, but, overall, the scrutiny has been on what the size of his margins say about his popularity in the party. (And, also, while anyone cared, about that of Ron DeSantis.) Thus, as strong as 51% in Iowa or 54.3% was in New Hampshire by historic standards in multi-candidate primaries and caucuses, there was a hot take that it wasn't enough. vi) Given said hot take, one was obviously wondering what the margin would be in South Carolina. So when I flicked on the CBC news to listen while I did my knee bends this morning, my curiosity was piqued. Unfortunately, CBC did not have the numbers. Neither, when I turned on my devices, did the CBC website or AOL News. (Don't judge me!) I finally found the numbers with an online search at the AP (admittedly an update an hour after I tuned in to the news (I'm an early riser. Don't judge me even more!): 59.8% Trump; 39.5% Haley. Ten hours ago, the headline on Reuters was "Lopsided Trump win," and the body of the article talked about Trump's "expected victory," before an update noted that Haley "outperformed expectations based on opinion polls." In the most obvious and telegraphed conclusion imaginable, I believe that the media finds Trump very good for view counts from assorted doomscrollers, and so pumps up his candidacy. It correctly believes that evidence that Trump is a historically bad candidate is irrelevant to his supporters and obviously doesn't move the needle with people who wouldn't vote for him, anyway. I'm not going to say that he won't be the candidate in 2024, because I thought he was too lazy and defensive to push through in 2020, and look how wrong I was then. But he was being promised an autogolpe, which is a much bigger lift this time around. It sure seems like Trump will bow out before November.
  4. Enough to make anyone a super villain. Go Blues!
  5. I'm with Chris on this one. He might not have picked the best example, but you can't possible deny the escalation. If I recall the vampire thing correctly (the story blurs together for me a bit, not a good sign), I was more upset with the way that Butcher killed off Dresden's girlfriend/baby mother, as that seemed like a sign of incipient character stasis, which has certainly come true since. All series end, and I had the mistaken impression that Battleground was going to give us closure. Butcher is fabulously wealthy and 53. He can throw Dresden off the waterfall go into semi-retirement. write more books in the Aeronaut's Windlass series to keep himself busy, and buy his son a hobby farm or a congressional district or something so that he doesn't have to turn into another Brian Herbert.
  6. Oh, wow. This probably isn't the place for it, but it's kinda political. So, anyway, I devoured the British show Slow Horses on Apple recently, and it was promoting Mark Wahlberg's Family Plan pretty hard, and it looked like light hearted fun, so I gave it a whirl recently. I know Wahlberg as a pretty personable guy, and that was definitely on show from the first minute of the movie and I could go on at length, but there is a lot off about the movie, of which the bit about the very well developed tendency for the bad, worse, and worst characters to be non-White, bothered me the most. I think I now understand the decision making processes that went into this movie better.
  7. I am so sorry to hear this. I feel as though our online family has lost one of its own. mainly, I think, because it was before her time. Please take care of yourself, Cancer. My father died this weekend at 92 after a gradual and gentle and surprisingly happy slide for the last decade. That's a good death, and you have twenty years of a good life to live for yourself and your family.
  8. The urban dictionary defines "Hawaiian" as [puts book down, backs away slowly]. It's the bananas, dude.
  9. Oh, okay, I see where the confusion comes in. The sign says "people," not "homeless." . . . Always good to see the guy who hangs out in our underground parking all night shaking himself violently for hours on end so as to not die of hypothermia.
  10. Australia's a big place. Almost like a continent!
  11. What the heck is this? Christmas isn't until December 25th! There's still plenty of time for shopping, travelling, and decorating!
  12. I offer 100 quatloos to the sapient who can figure out what I did with my copy of Post-Apocalyptic Hero. There's a reason, or, rather, two reasons that fantasy roleplay continues to dominate the market. Medieval stasis and dungeon crawls give gamers something to do. Oh, wait, no, and levels. They're a good mechanic for minimising the magic user problem that ultimately derails campaigns in the unlikely event that the go on long enough that the MU gains a campaign-breaking spell (Flight, not Wish.) Other campaign settings lack this. Apocalyptic/Post-Apocalyptic is actually a fairly strong contender against FRP in that the first few sessions are going to be a blast as you run away from the apocalypse, but then the campaign reaches an impasse. Either the players reach shelter and begin to think about the next step --or they do that and then get cut off by the knees by the GM so that they have to flee the lava/zombies/bad software again. The first makes planting potatoes the next adventure path, the second is not a solution to the first. Hey! At least it's not a science fiction game, where you do all the work of setting up the characters and can't think of anything to do with them other than explore a space dungeon. Anyway, all of this is boring old news, and the best post-apocalyptic game is still Gamma World because it does the best job of hauling over the FRP elements and giving them a fresh coat of paint, and in retrospect releasing Gamma World, Gamma Warriors and Gammarauders together as a box set in 1980 would have been a boss move. Again, boring old news. So what am I doing here? Boosting Graydon Saunders' Commonweal books (self-published, available through Google Books, yes, I know, even so). They read like someone has taken their Toronto-area Gamma World setting back through an FRP filter and then turned it into a top-tier anti-Tolkien comment. (Socialist, not awful, like The Aspect-Emperor.) Now that's a post-apocalyptic setting with possibilities. I think.
  13. There's something suspicious here. Didn't he just have one last year about this time?
  14. Clearly Pogo's uncle who pretends to not understand English is a giant Stooges fan, 'cuz that's the only way a girl Pogo's age would have heard of them. Not that I disapprove of her hanging around her Uncle Whatsisname. (I'm imagining Ernie, a good Chinese uncle name.)
  15. Hermit: Your giant lyrics-royalty cheque has been accidentally delivered to your friend in Canada. ...Along with a reminder that your Guild dues are late
  16. Yes, Mandarin is much more common among recent migrants, to the point that Cantonese is almost as endangered in California (probably BC, too, these days) as it is in Guangdong and Hong Kong.
  17. Ahem. I've been keyboardless on vacation for the last week, or I would have responded earlier, because my thoughts were having little baby thoughts. Apart from it being unlikely that a family descended from railway workers would speak Mandarin at home as opposed to Cantonese, I liked it! And I was acutely reminded of it when my brother walked in on my niece, K., discussing the graduate school application process at me and held up his hands in the timeout position and said "Pause," just to get a word in.
  18. Brother Twelve: "There's nothing worse than egotists hijacking communal fun. We should do something before social solidarity is undermined." Maid of Gold: "Oh, don't be such a stick in the mud!" Queen's Fist: "You're good with these Boomer maniacs? Are you even the real Dora?" Maid of Gold: "What? No! I'm disagreeing with Twelve! It's fun!" (Elbows Twelve in a way that brings her in under his shoulder. Looks expectant; speculative glance at the group from Twelve; Charlotte rolls her eyes.) Rush: "They're going to ruin the parade. I'm with Twelve --Brother Twelve. Have I mentioned you need a better codename in the last minute and a half?" Brother Twelve: "It's been forty-five seconds. Which I know is a long time for you. Codenames are for the bougies. Parades are for everyone. With the cartoon animals and everything. They must be weird where you come from, though." [Rush smiles; It's nice of Twelve to feed her a straight line]: "In dark, post-apocalyptic future, all cartoons are Heathcliff. It's hard to enjoy a parade in an underground city. There's no sightlines. Sometimes I think people don't appreciate just how much not-fun it is to grow up in an underground shelter. Anyway, there won't be any sightlines for these guys, either, when they get thrown in Clown Jail." [Scout appears out of nowhere]: "Have y'all considered the value of some toomfoolery and harmless pranks, a bit of turnin' reality on its head, some mistaken identity shenanigans? Ah know sometimes Ah just want to light things up!" Queen's Fist: "Pranks aren't harmless if you're always the target, Hick Boy." Scout: "Like, who's the hick now? Ah been to Hope once!" Queen's Fist: "Seeing it in a movie doesn't count. Say, have you seen Bruce? It's not like we're going to be able to do anything in New York without the Goblinjet." Scout [Nervous]: "Heh. Well, I--Ah-- guess that settles it. It's a New York problem an' New Yorkers can fix it."
  19. See? I knew you were going to have some fun with Pinprick and all that nutsy-cuckoo archer stuff!
  20. Pardon me, I have a note from Slime, who was unaware that human dermal collagen accretions accumulate approximately uniformly and that the observed variation is due to "grooming," a practice explained with heavy reference to human-style assisted mitosis, a subject that Slime frankly wishes had never been brought up. Slime assures us that although they involuntarily inverted and released the contents of their digestive vacuoles on learning all this, they are fine now, and there is no reason for alarm. Although they are embarrassed for not noticing this themselves, considering that they rely heavily on the accretions to tell their human friends apart in the first place.
  21. Three? Three? THREE? I have to think one, two, three times for this? Hermit, old buddy, old pal, you owe me forever. So, Pogo, obvs. Next up, Pinprick, not because I like the annoying little dude (archers, sheesh), but because clearly he's your favourite and I expect to see you fly free when you're channeling his voice. Finally, Slime, because their perspective is going to be the weirdest and hardest to communicate and I am an evil person. If it helps, I was trying to put myself in the mind of an amoeboid functioning in a solid world, and I suddenly found myself imagining a Hanna Barbara world. For an amoeboid, real humans and their built environment blends into their visual comic art to an uncanny extent. "As usual, especially since he started secreting his upper octant down-oriented vertex dermal collagen structure, seeing Caleb burst into the room left me wondering why no gawky, oversized Great Dane came skittering in after him." Anyway, that's what I think, so it must be true.
  22. Pogo! As I get older, young women increasingly remind me if my nieces: But Pogo us all nieces everywhere.
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