It’s time to make some bruises, it’s time to make some welts. It’s time to get things started as I’m taking off my belt.

Make no mistake, her job is incredibly simple: stall and waste as much of the court’s time as possible and give Trump potential mistrial grounds.

Had a woodshop teacher steal my dad’s hat exactly like this.

The appropriate phrase, by contrast to Trump and his followers, is “nobody worships Biden”. Many of us appreciate what he’s accomplished, and like him as President and as a person, but we don’t have a cult-like attitude of unconditional admiration and worship of the guy like MAGA do with Trump.

Came here to suggest this.

Yeah, some elements of Snow Crash have definitely not aged well. The pervy sex scenes with the underaged girl have definitely outlived their welcome. Stephenson has certainly come a long way as a writer since he wrote this.

I really need to read the Expanse series! I loved the show, and I’ve heard the books are significantly better.

If you’re gonna check out Gibson’s Neuromancer, maybe check out Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Both are foundational cyberpunk.

Edit: Also, Project Hail Mary is one of my favorite novels. Can’t gush enough about that one. Reminded me a lot of Greg Bear’s Eon.

Lemmy.blahaj.zone, startrek.website, sh.itjust.works are all good.

Action Masters were hot garbage. Especially since some of them managed to somehow have even less articulation than their original transforming counterpart, which is saying something.

Hallelujah, holy shit! Where’s the Tylenol?

Love that movie. Favorite holiday film ever.

Bruh… Transformers have been in almost continuous production in one for or another since 1993. They were briefly discontinued in the late 80s and early 90s, and were brought back with the Generation 2 line and then Beast Wars. The longest period that Transformers haven’t been on the market since their introduction to the US market was between Generation 1 and Generation 2 from 1990-1993. Generation 2 fizzled in 1995, and was replace a little over a year later in 1996 with Beast Wars. Since then, the brand has had some continuous shelf presence.

And it’s a huge brand today that is largely sold to adult collectors with an attachment to whichever show or comic they indulged in as a kid. Yes, discontinuation can definitely drive nostalgia and a desire to collect something, but it isn’t a necessity. In the case of Transformers, it’s just created an ever-widening pool of things for new adult collectors to be interested in. Right now, there’s a growing interest in modern updates of the Unicron Trilogy characters (Armada/Energon/Cybertron), which were shows being aired from 2002-2005, followed by Transformers Animated and the Michael Bay films.

That really is the whole point, too. The entire conflict is based on the fact that Barbieland is a construct of the imaginary world created by girls playing with their dolls, in which Ken has only ever been marketed or existed as an accessory to Barbie. His entire existence, in both the real world of marketing and consumerism, and in the imaginary world of Barbie, is predicated solely on giving Barbie arm candy. I’m not entirely convinced that this point was entirely deliberate, but it really does highlight that, in creating a product to give girls a role model that says they can do and be whatever they want, that those girls internalized their understanding of the male-dominated world around them, and flipped that on its head. Their imaginary world is a very literal mirror to our own, and as a result, it is still dominated by the same inherently sexist attitudes, only kinder and gentler because they are created through the lens of childhood innocence. Kids are only able to create with tools and media they understand, and the polarized nature of the world around them, and our intense need to make everything a binary, means that a “fair world” never looks like one where everyone is treated the same. It’s a world where they’re in charge.

I’m not even going to get into the overtly sexist assumption that only girls play with dolls, and with Barbie in particular. Toys are toys, and I never understood the need to tell a kid that something is off limits because it’s pink or is “a doll”. The people who most strongly hold these beliefs tend to be the ones that grew up when GI Joe was a full size doll just like Barbie, with his own clothes and uniforms and such. Well before the idea of an “action figure” came around. These folks played with dolls that were, for all intents and purposes, functionally identical to any girls’ doll of the day, and yet are so quick to slap a Barbie or a Bratz doll out of the hands of their grandsons.

Anyhow, long story short, it’s a great movie that explores some very heavy subject matter, and almost but not quite gets its own premise. Most of the people who are irrationally angry with the film have never seen it, and probably won’t for fear of being turned gay, or worse: liberal.

You really don’t know anything about the history of the early 20th century, do you?

Judging by your vernacular, you’re from the UK. I think the entire globe has something to say about the nightmares brought upon them by the British Empire. India and Pakistan in particular. Nothing the US has done comes even close to the outright chaos and bloodshed sown by the British in pursuit of global conquest. To quote the old PSA: We learned it by watching you. Except the US never quite had the stomach for for mass murder the way Britain has, so thankfully we’ve failed to live up to the legacy you’ve left.

In your own parlance: Slag off, mate.

I used to drive truck over the road, and I can attest to the fact that those red light cameras can also be made very deliberately unfair. The city of Hannibal, Missouri had these cameras at the intersection of Highway 61 and Red Devil, at the bottom of a steep hill. About 1/5 of a mile up the hill south of the intersection was a pole with a sensor on it set to about 12’6". I observed that any time any vehicle over that height passed that sensor, the light would trip to red. And it was set at a distance that a loaded semi would be all but guaranteed to run that light. Those of us who traveled that corridor with any frequency knew the sensor was there, and would try to want other drivers over the CB, but a lot of drivers had stopped routinely using the CB by then, so the light proved quite lucrative. At least, until it started causing wrecks from the trucks jackknifing in the intersection in the winter. That setup ran for three or four years before the city was dragged into court over it and forced to remove the red light cameras, though it was done in such a way as to question the enforceability of the tickets and without ever directly acknowledging that the cameras were set up to entrap commercial vehicles.