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[Bohemian Rhapsody]

Bohemian Rhapsody

Best bit was Freddie's wife finally twigging that he was gay:
"Say, Freddie seems to be getting on really well with Kenny Everitt... (face slowly changes to a look of realisation)"

... "but Q says it so it must be true ..."

I saw a fascinating interaction on twitter earlier today.  Someone had posted a joke about a Fox "news" man pretending that Qanoners have never actually existed outside the mind of those crazy liberals, as evidenced by Qanon not being a website.

This was followed up by a guy insisting this was true, and that no-one actually believes in Q.  When it was pointed out that only a few weeks before he had himself been tweeting in support of Qconspiracy theories, he claimed to be a victim of a liberal conspiracy.

Honestly, I thought Q was something akin to 4chan or Anonymous: just an online, decentralised bunch of people posting stuff and doing the odd bit of IRL activism, and it was pretty late in the day before I twigged that Q was (supposedly) an actual individual - and I consider myself pretty online.  Now admittedly I don't fall on that side of the political spectrum and wouldn't have been seeking out their latest news or updates, but Q genuinely seemed more akin to an idea than anything else and I'd be surprised if I was the only one who thought that way.  It's not hard to see "Q" becoming something more intangible and nebulous.

When the conspiracy that made you feel special turns out to be baseless, just change the rules and pretend you always believed in something else.

There's an obvious joke about the last 6 years of British centrism somewhere in there.

Or we could impugn a female journalist's professional integrity without suggesting that she's an ugly slut ... right? There's a time and a place for that sort of casual, everyday misogyny.

This is just sad now.

[Halloween]

That would certainly explain why her mouth always looks like that.

"Marshall" Mathers.  Michael Mathers is the primary antagonist in the Halloween film series.

I think you'll find that's the Austin Powers guy. Michael Mathers was Mr Blonde in Resevoir Dogs.

No, you're thinking of the guy who shot Brandon Lee.

[Halloween]

"Marshall" Mathers.  Michael Mathers is the primary antagonist in the Halloween film series.

Losing trust affects your standing, even if something you say later is provably true.
I can only speak for myself, but I believe the BBC if it says that 5G towers are not transmitting the Covid virus, but I don't trust the BBC on an objective basis, because they lost that trust many times over down through the years, and have done nothing to earn it back.
If it matters, it started with my awareness of the dissonance between their reporting on Northern Ireland and my own experiences (starting with a demonstration in our town center that I attended and which involved a sit-down protest that lasted 30 minutes and then dispersed peacefully that was described by the BBC as "clashes" with police)  I also gather Scottish nationalists in recent years have had some thoughts on the idea of BBC impartiality.

To speak to the mentioned case of the BBC - I keep hearing people say they're not to be trusted, but in a very ad hominem* way

Operation Yewtree?

Indisputable rocket-genius that I am, I was of course using the flippant parlance of the plebeian gutter to make a point about trusted sources and their place in a media landscape that has aggressively devalued objective truth.
Or to put it in the filthy worker's tongue of this forum, we've just had five years of "objective" media showing their whole ass, and a lot of people keen to "get back to normal" seem determined to pretend that never happened while simultaneously lamenting a rise in conspiracy theories and far right indoctrination.  An uptick in the public suddenly believing more daffy shit than usual while also feeling like they can't trust even monolithic organisations like the BBC are not-unrelated things.  Without objective truth, people will find their own.

I am thus interested in how Sharky evaluates the veracity of the things he reads online, and what sources/platforms he finds trustworthy and/or untrustworthy (and why).

Tip for forum discussion stay within the two three layers of this pyramid (and be careful on the third level).  Stay well away from anything below that.

The problem with the bottom rung of the pyramid is that "yeah but Nigel Farage is a twat" is actually a solid rebuttal to any argument he might make.

Meanwhile, a new book is coming out detailing the dark side of Stan Lee, including allegations of racism, homophobia and misogyny.

I suppose with all the Lee hagiographies, an author has to stand out somehow, but that really reads like a bit of a lazy hatchet job.  I'd be more surprised if someone had got to Lee's age and managed to not say something stupid, offensive or thoughtless - especially in the context of a heated family argument - because they'd likely be the only person in history to do so.

It was a shame Matt Ryan's tenure as the character didn't have the best material to work with, even before he turned up as a regular in the various DC television shows as Doctor Strange on a tv budget - though kudos to the wonderfully silly Legends Of Tomorrow for unambiguously making Constantine's bisexuality canon, and for not treating it like a joke in the way the show compulsively does everything else.

I can never forgive Dr Zaius - not for his crimes against humanity because they technically haven't happened yet, but for the mean things he said about Clint Eastwood.

I have no idea what the comic is/was like, but the show is a diverting take on the concept of "what if Americans ruined Doomlord by turning it into yet another buddy-cop murder mystery with a mismatched odd couple?"  Some amusing jokes, but it looks like it's going for the serialised approach rather than the murder-of-the-week route, which usually happens in the second season of SyFy shows and kills them stone dead - looking at you, Killjoys and Dark Matter.
I guess we'll see how it pans out, but the accusations of tonal inconsistency and lack of a clear protagonist to root for are entirely valid.

[gone mad]

I don't care what the "updated science" and experts say.  It was the truth when I was taught it in school and it's the truth now and forever: Pluto is a planet.  Just look at it - it's right there in the sky.  I refuse to update Pluto's pronouns to "dwarf planet" - this is political correctness and/or more precise scientific categorization based on discussions among experts in the field and their subsequent agreed consensus gone mad.

Rowling has raised questions about the implications of Trans rights for women's rights.  Understandably that has caused distress and offence.  That said, there are strong views on both sides of the argument.

A cynic might suggest Rowling has ulterior motives for preemptively gunning for the exact lobby that was going to take issue with her novel that has a plot about a serial killer who wears dresses to lull women into a false sense of security.  A cynic might go so far as to suggest that while she does indeed hold troubling views based on outdated essentialist notions of gender as a binary and have a vested interest in preventing the public holding wealthy celebrities to account, Rowling has been doing nothing more than running a long con as a gender critic during the writing of her novel to ensure that eventual criticisms of her work can be dismissed as irrational or based on quote-unquote "trans ideology".
If you have 90 minutes to spare - God help us all, who doesn't these days? - then centrist pin-up girl Contrapoints covers JK Rowling's public statements in depth and explains why, in her opinion, Rowling's arguments are neither good faith nor reasonable.

The in-universe explanation is that she resembles wood all the time because it was essential camouflage in the Endor campaign.

[Walker: Texas Ranger]

The Wire is okay, but it's no Walker: Texas Ranger - no idea why I started watching this, probably because people were so publicly annoyed at Chuck Norris for being a douchebag at the Capitol Riot, but it didn't worry me none as he's long been problematic because of his extreme Christian fundamentalist views, but even those are part of the bizarre Chuck Norris package: karate champion, musician, fiction and non-fiction writer, occasional televangelist, pro-cop, anti-government - I mean, clearly I am describing the lead character from a series of pulp novels about a truck driver that fights vampires in post-apocalyptic America, and if he was left wing it would just sort of ruin it.  It just would.
Anyway, this show is a complete load of bollocks, but it does have lots of explosions and someone usually fights a bear every 12 episodes or so.  Around the third season, it just starts doing stuff about ghosts, with Billy Drago cosplaying as a Native American witchdocter raised from the dead to kill white people, or Chuck Norris pulling double duty as the ghost of a cowboy out to stop modern day crooks finding his cursed gold, and then Chuck fights a bear but they achieve mutual respect and team up to fight Bigfoot, who is actually a cyborg - that probably sounds a lot sillier than it actually is in the show, because you see the cyborg is actually a crook that Walker has been pursuing for years after he murdered Walker's sheriff friend who was one day from retirement, and Walker shot the plane the crook escaped in out of the sky with his handgun, but it was lost in the mountains and years later, Walker discovers that the crook didn't die in the plane crash because he welded parts of the plane to himself to replace the missing parts of his head and body, and now he wanders the mountains looking for victims to dismember using the proportionate speed and strength of a light aircraft - so you see, when you break it down, it's no different than something you'd see in The Wire.
I also just realised that long before he makes his first appearance and when characters ominously hear Bigfoot off in the distance, he's not growling, he's making plane engine noises.  When one episode starts with a mid-air shootout between hot air balloons, it barely registers as unusual.  Needless to say, this show is very silly.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuut...

It is still significantly better than Walker - the 2021 reboot of the above, reinvented as an ensemble drama about a cop's 16 year-old daughter and her boring-as-fuck daddy issues, because that is naturally what you do when you have to reinvent a show about a lone wolf karate cowboy supercop.  Everything bad about the original is bad in the remake, too, only it's 2021 so there's no excuse for it.  I mean, it's a fucking cop show in 2021 - shot in and around the Texas border with Mexico - and yet it has nothing to say about institutionalised racism to the point that one character gets a visit from ICE and our supposed moral touchstone character doesn't even bat an eyelid, because This Is Fine.  Three episodes in, no-one has fought a bear or a ghost, and I am beginning to suspect that the show's producers think they're too good for that sort of thing.
I expected better from one half of the lead actors of Supernatural and/or The CW.

2020: Gina Carano being in The Mandalorian is SJW woke culture ruining Star Wars!
2021: Gina Carano not being in The Mandalorian is SJW woke culture ruining Star Wars!