Chips represent sexual favors.

Scotty might be a space dwarf, but O’Brien is a space hobbit through and through.

I never have had to do one of these, and I promise I’m not deliberately trying to ask stupid questions. Would this system be fooled by holding up a mannequin head?

“If you build it, they won’t pull out when they come.”

Hold up a photo of any random schmoe?

It’s a crime that Doug Jones has never played The Scarecrow in a live action Batman movie.

“Realistically proportioned”

The combination is 1-2-3-4-5!

INTERNET PASSWORD LOGBOOK is probably a paper slip that you can remove, and then it’ll just be a blank leather journal.

Now a REALLY secure physical logbook would just have the cover of a boring, unremarkable-looking book on the outside.

And the rest of the people in the room, in front of and behind the camera, don’t immediately shut him down, cut to commercial, and then return with an apology for having platformed a fucking Nazi.

You know what they say about a Nazi at the table and ten other people sitting there talking to him…

I think originality is overrated. Hear me out.

Example 1: Star Wars should plagiarize more. Original Star Wars is Hidden Fortress in space, plus a bit of WW2 dogfighting and some car culture flavor. Late period Star Wars has been taking original Star Wars, blending it up, and pouring it back out again. Not enough plagiarism. Top Gun, but make it Star Wars and call it Rogue Squadron. Three Musketeers, but make it Star Wars and call it Three Jedi. Take your pick of old detective noir stories, set it on Coruscant, and call it the The Dantooine Falcon. Stop ripping off Star Wars in Star Wars, and go back to ripping off other properties, and it’s a license to print money.

Example 2: Stop trying to make movie franchises progress forward in time; continuity and originality are overrated. James Bond has been making virtually the same movie for over sixty years, and people still love it! Bond goes to exotic locale meets and beds some number of beautiful women, engages in a bit of extreme sports, foils the plan of some flamboyant villain. The actors are regularly changed without comment. The movie is always set “right now.” Bond has (almost) always been 007 for “a while.” Continuity virtually never spans more than a couple of movies until it gets reset to zero again. And it’s still going strong as a franchise! Pirates of the Caribbean could have used this pattern and just kept making crazy pirate adventure movies forever, but they got wrapped around the axle trying to keep a continuous plot going forward. Should have gone the James Bond route.

Stop trying to make original movies that advance an overarching plot across a franchise. Make movies that have already been made and that don’t take the franchise anywhere. You can’t go wrong.

Don’t forget about PFAS!

Could they do the thing that airports do with geese, where they get a Labrador to run around and bark at the birds and the birds say, “Ehh… fuck this area” and leave of their own accord?

There’s no way in fucking Hell that Trump would willingly stand in the way of a bullet.

There’s no way in fucking Hell that Trump could keep quiet about it if he was actually an active participant in a conspiracy. He’d have tweeted about it by the end of the week.

There’s no way in fucking Hell that the people around Trump could orchestrate an attempted assassination without it blowing up in their faces somehow.

The ear was probably hit by a tiny fleck of glass from a shattered teleprompter, and then with Trump no doubt on blood thinners it would bleed like all get out.

Just keep assuming ever greater stupidity and incompetence all around and you’ll usually arrive at the correct answer as to what happened.

Kirk was described by one of his peers at the Academy as “a pile of textbooks with legs.”

Picard got stabbed in the heart during a game of space pool and had a laugh about it.

Kirk barely survived encountering Trelane by getting Trelane’s parents involved.

Picard tangled with Q on a regular basis and continually maintained the respect and admiration of a nigh-omnipotent being.

Kirk fucked around.

Picard fucked hard.

via SMBC:

You’re correct. I’m sorry, I had my numbers screwed up in my head.

These are the numbers from Wikipedia. It still fucks me up that Trump increased his vote margins, even to the point of winning the popular vote. It’s probably going to haunt me to my grave and be a thing that I deeply wish wasn’t true, but there it is.

What I ought to have said was that comparing 2024 to 2016, it’s not that Democratic support fell off precipitously, but rather that a lot of people showed up in 2020 to vote for Biden, and then a lot of them stayed home in 2024.

Trump gained some, and that fucking sucks, but apathy and disengagement is a big factor in what got him back in the White House.

Accurate.

Trump got about the same number of votes in 2024 as he did when he lost back in 2020, whereas Harris got fewer votes than Biden did, so strictly speaking we are getting exactly what all too many of us didn’t vote for.