Probably not, but given the choice (term used loosely) between “ignore it at best, get rid of it at worst” and “fire the journalists and replace them with state-funded sycophants”, the apathetic option suddenly seems more appealing. Obviously the preferred option is “stop letting the big companies eat all the smaller ones,” but I don’t see any formal crackdown on that any time soon, what with that slime mold and all.

Oh, make no mistake, it’s still a bad merger. It’s just that someone was going to buy Warner either way, and the main competing bid was from Paramount-Skydance with the express purpose of gutting CNN to appease the strange grayish-yellow slime mold that’s been growing in the White House, because the news won’t stop telling people how slimy it is. Which, of course, gives the adherents of the slime mold reason to try and turn public favor against Netflix’s acquisition. Or something along those lines, I’d be lying if I said I was all the way in the loop myself. Maybe there’s some other reason it’s propaganda, I don’t know. It does certainly seem to be echoing the same victim complex that cinemas have been playing up since COVID, but I’m not sure “theater propaganda” is really a thing.

I may be inclined to more sympathy had theaters and cable providers made any effort to stay competitive in the, what, 15 years since streaming started to take off? These guys are about to get hit by an oncoming train that they’ve been standing motionless in front of for a decade, have made no effort to save themselves - barring, perhaps, having Nicole Kidman politely ask the train to stop - and are now at the last possible minute begging the engineer to switch tracks, even though it would run over like a dozen other people in the process and, really, there’s no guarantee the train would actually be going fast enough to hurt them beyond the word of some people that have, again, been sitting in front of an oncoming train for 15 years, one of whom is the guy in the tophat and handlebar mustache that tied all those other people to the tracks in the first place. Sorry fellas, you woulda had my condolences six years ago but now you’re on your own. I’ll be over here in my much cheaper boat with a five-meter-high stack of DVDs, which in this metaphor represents a five-meter-high stack of DVDs.

Also, I can’t make this fit the train metaphor, hasn’t Netflix been doing more theatrical runs recently anyway? Like, as recently as last week? Am I just completely misremembering that one K-Pop movie having to add screenings because too many people bought tickets, drawing a bigger audience than the competing Disney and Dreamworks movies in the process? If anything, these guys have got to be salivating at the idea of being able to charge people $19.99 for one movie plus arbitrary processing fees and 30 minutes of unskippable preroll ads.

learned quite a bit about being a whackadoodle from playing murdock, though

I’ve had to construct an entire narrative around this to make it make sense but I think I’ve saved it.

Realtor goes out to survey the property or whatever the hell they do. She takes some notes on those little flip-out notepads that they stopped making around the time everyone got an iPhone. 3 bedrooms. But, the twist! Her handwriting is shit. Maybe it smudges a little. Who knows. She heads back to the realtor store and hand the notes off to an intern. She’s got a hot date, doesn’t have time to stick around all night Zillowing. But the intern, see, he left his glasses at home and then he spilled coffee on his keyboard. So he’s there squinting at the notepad dictating into the text-to-speech software. He gets to the bedrooms. Reads the number wrong, but quickly corrects himself. “8- oh, 3 beds.” Doesn’t notice the mistake. He’s in a rush. He’s got a hot date too. With the realtor. Scandal ensues. Everyone gets too caught up in the resulting HR investigation to realize until it’s too late, and the house is on the market. And now the district attorney wants to buy the house, and they only have three days to build 800 bedrooms or they’re going to jail for architecture fraud. Eva Longoria, Joe Keery, and Walton Goggins star in Halfway House, from the director of The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and The Tooth Fairy, and visionary producer Timur Bekmambetov, in theaters this January. “This estate is anything but real.” Rated PG-13.

Call me when they get a baseball team. I wanna see the St. Louis Cardinals square off against the Actual Cardinals.

Man, fuck this horseshit.

Search Engine Optimization. Basically gaming search engine indexing algorithms so that your content appears more “relevant” (read: crammed full of as many keywords as possible) and thus higher up on search results, usually at the expense of having, you know, actual content worth reading.

I use uBlacklist with this filter and that generally keeps the repeat offenders at least out of image search, but clearing out every SEO-spam print-on-demand mimc-site was already a game of whack-a-mole before consumer LLMs became a thing; I imagine now it’d be like playing whack-a-mole with a hydra. Still, it does at least help.

My class was set to graduate right around the time the pandemic hit and a lot of people ended up graduating late because the school literally couldn’t offer the classes they needed to finish their degree. Anyone to whom your date of graduation is actually relevant likely isn’t going to bat an eye at anyone who was in college within the last 5 years graduating a couple months late.

And, of course, there’s that old stand-by moral of “the only reason it seems like all your peers are doing better is because the ones in the same situation as you aren’t going on social media to brag about it.” So don’t rely on that as a metric too heavily.

They spell it out under their FAQ but I doubt that’s legally binding

Motherfucker looks like he sleeps in a space blanket and knows a lot about the Magna Carta.

“Hale and well-met, everybody.”

“Nørmr!”

“What would you say to an ale, there, Nørmr?”

“I’d say ‘Make peace with the spirits of your ancestors, for you shall soon greet them in Valhalla.’”

if anything they’ve reopened their account with Master Don

Seems like everyone’s been getting that noise lately. I’m on my third.

I think I’m gonna head on down to the Bong Recreation Area and take the Green Trail for a while if you know what I mean

(I mean I’m going to take a scenic nature walk in one of Wisconsin’s beautiful state parks, what the hell did you think I meant?)

“We’ve erected a 3-kilometer-long tied-arch bridge so people can get into and out of the Superior bay area quicker and easier, and we’ll be dedicating it to World War II pilot Richard Bong.”

“Okay, what are you calling it?”

“Right now we’ve got ‘Dick Bong’s Long, Curvaceous Erection for the Repeated Entering and Exiting of a Wet Superior Inlet.’”

“…We’ll workshop it.”

Where on earth would you find a wall on a road with a fotorealistic continuation of the road printed on it?

Spoken like a man who has never relentlessly pursued a roadrunner, nor taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

Fine, you take it off the shelves and I’ll just torrent it. Nobody should be able to stop me from doing that as long as I don’t seed it, right Meta?

This has happened enough times that the euphemism for piracy in my household has become “renting a film from my man in Bangladesh”