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Perhaps you should knight another of the boarders so they could ban hammer the shit out of those p(r)oxy malcontents!

I'll do it! I promise I would not use these powers for evil.

Promise.

Honest.

Well, maybe occasionally. But not much. Only a bit evil... now and then.

I quit Twitter last year, partly because the constant doomscrolling was doing me no good, but mainly because I noticed that the 'Trending' section was increasingly pushing right-wing content and talking points at me, in a manner that simply couldn't be based on algorithmic analysis of my own useage of the platform.*

It seemed very obvious to me that, under Musk, the platform was being used to advance an agenda that I simply couldn't support or be passively complicit in.

Well, it certainly hasn't got any better since I left. This, from NBC:

Verified pro-Nazi X accounts flourish under Elon Musk

We're far beyond "freedom of speech" and "hearing both sides". If you're still using Twitter/X, I'd urge you to reconsider.



*Mostly comic stuff, occasional frothing lefty rants. 

she said "Ask it where my Victor[her husband] is"

A good question!

Can it be Inspector Inaba next to Slaine on Prog 2016? Doesn't seem likely though...

That does look like a Hondo uniform, so maybe it is Inaba.

What you might see as a fun and whimsical way to illustrate throwaway jokes, Sharky, I see as another step towards the complete redundancy of all the skills and techniques I've spend decades trying to learn and hone, not to mention potential unemployment.

This may have been mentioned before.

Perhaps something best left alone other than acknowledging the passing?

(Forum needs a 'like' button.)

God, but they're just poisonous.

(Forum needs a 'like' button.)

Anyway, Dug's getting on my nerves and I just wanted to vent a bit.

Somewhere around paragraph three, I would have killed him and fed his body into a wood-chipper. Or perhaps skipped the unnecessary effort of killing him and gone straight to the wood chipper. Congratulations on your admirable restraint!

I've noticed that as well, Jim, about the younger generation. Mini-Solo is non-binary, as it happens.

It's their turn. We've fucked the planet, but it might not be too late. Let's turn it over to them — they can't make a worse job then we have. Time to go full workerati on the place, IMO. 🙂

He's happily married to another man these days. How far we've come.

For all the gloom I feel about the future, when I talk to my friends' teenage kids, the fact that they're so fantastically relaxed about their friends who are trans, non-binary, gay or bi, genuinely gives me hope. I honestly want to see them take over the planet, and I'd quite like to see what they make of it.

for a pack of comic nerds we're surprisingly non-toxic.

Sez you, fuck-face.

Well, it turned out not to be an addiction.

Boston Legal turned up on Disney+ and, having not watched it since it originally aired in the mid-00s but remembering enjoying it, we thought we'd give it a go.

The stuff I remembered liking? Great performances from Spader and Shatner (and pretty much everyone else, especially notably Candice Bergen)? Check. Sharp, witty script? Check. Willingess to grapple with some uncomfortable issues through some terrific courtroom scenes? Check.

But...

But... my God, it's sexist. Every man in it, literally every one, is a creep. One might handwave that away claiming it's a critique of how high-powered law firms really are, except that the show positively revels in the male character's casual sexism, inappropriate behaviour, and frequent belittling of women.

On top of that, every single woman is hot*. The camera leers at their tightly-beskirted legs or their backsides as they wander in/out/across shot. Are we supposed to think that makes it OK when they're propositioned multiple times per episode?

I stuck with it for the first season because, as I said, the good stuff is really good... but season two is, if anything, even worse, so I bailed a couple of episodes in.

*OK, not Betty White as secretary to Alan Shore (Spader). But she's in that role because Shore literally admitted that he was incapable of not making unwanted sexual advances to his previous (young, attractive) secretary. The company's solution? Give him a secretary he doesn't want to bang. Even so, White spends more time making waspish remarks about the hot women's appearance than taking the men to task for their universally inappropriate behaviour.

You kind of need population density on a map like that too, to show just how much a lot of red areas are just a dozen shitheads and some cows.

Of course, a big part of the problem with the US political system is the disproportionate weighting it gives to those rural shitheads, both through the electoral college (which means that one person's presidential election vote in, say, Wyoming, counts the same as four people's votes in California) and the Senate (Wyoming, population 576,000 = two senators; California, population 39,000,000 = two senators).

Snapshot from 3 / 4 / 99.

Congratulations, Jim, and happy anniversary to you both.

Not sure why, but that image isn't displaying for me (in fact, I only realised there was an image when I quoted this post and saw the URL).

Anyway, thanks for the kind words, folks!

Belatedly, here's a photo of the happy couple at Whitby registrar's office in 1999... 

Oh, hello. Finally able to log back in... thank you for the fix, hard-working IT droids!