We used to play Halo CE and Minecraft at school with copies saved on thumb drives. Before that I installed Zoo Tycoon on one of the computers in my elementary school library.

I remember the internet before Google, and how game changing it was to have all of the internet indexed in one place (even if that wasn’t actually quite true back then). If you had asked me 15, 10, even 5 years ago if I would be cheering its downfall and yearning for a return to a simpler, far less centralized internet, I would have called you crazy. And yet here we are.

They are building an American Freikorps.

All of this is accurate, but it is still hilarious seeing NPR of all organizations act aghast at the idea of a supposedly “independent” media organization serving as the mouthpiece for Empire.

It might have something to do with both countries being founded and governed by Fascists. It bears remembering that the KMT colonized the island of Taiwan in much the same way that Israel colonized Palestine; with a swift and brutal round of ethnic cleansing to secure their local hegemony, followed by decades of military support from Fascists in the West.

I don’t think China should invade Taiwan but it drives me up the wall that so many people think that they are some plucky little democracy standing up to the big, bad, commies, when the reality is that they are just another hyper-capitalist settler-colonial project in the same vein as the US, Israel, Canada, etc.

Good people do not, as a rule, seek personal power for themselves, and a drive to do so is a prerequisite for seeking public office. The result is that the best you can hope for in electoral politics is a psychopath who shares your values, because they are all psychopaths, and most of them don’t see the rest of us as human, much less their equals.

Not just any propaganda network, Radio Free X is the umbrella under which the CIA disseminates black propaganda abroad, and also the organ which delivered kill lists to the anti-communist kill squads in Indonesia during the us-backed mass killings there.

All of this is declassified and public knowledge btw, not a conspiracy theory, although plenty of folks would like to still pretend that the US grew a conscience at some point and stopped wielding the CIA as a cudgel against global democracy, but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.

If you are interested in learning about Radio Free Asia, or US led mass killings in general, I recommend The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins.

I had that watch! I wore it until the cheap plastic band crumbled to pieces. I haven’t thought about that in years haha

Do you have an HDMI cable? I have my laptop more or less permanently plugged into the TV for exactly the purpose of watching movies, whether pirated or otherwise.

Having lived in Austin and seen movies at the original handful of Drafthouse theaters for decades now, every time the brand has expanded, quality has dropped. I’m not expecting this change to be any different.

Yes! I work for a non-profit, providing a highly in-demand service to my community, for free or at a reduced cost. Nobody is getting rich doing what we do, but we are actively enriching and supporting our community. It is also a fantastic foot in the door for other forms of cooperation, community support, and mutual aid.

Not all non-profits are on the level, but no company with a profit motive will ever provide the kind of environment that a good non-profit can.

He was an off-duty pilot catching a ride in the jump seat behind the pilots in the cabin, which is completely normal. The guy being a fucking lunatic is where things went wrong.

I dig RLM, and I like seeing what they thought of movies I’ve already watched, so I’ll definitely give that one a view once I track down the next few in the series.

Ha! I’m glad you appreciated it :-)

I used to watch Mary-Lou’s Flip-Flop Shop every Saturday morning as a kid. Apparently it was locally produced in Houston, where I lived, so I wonder if it was even known about elsewhere? Basically she had a Saturday morning kids’ show that ran for one season, and it aired at like 6:30am. For some reason I was obsessed with it (despite being slightly older than the target demographic by the time it was airing) and I would wake up ungodly early on Saturdays to watch Mary Lou do somersaults and tell jokes.

Thanks, I’ll be posting them here, as well as to my Letterboxd and a few other forums. If you haven’t read them already, you can find my reviews of the other Halloween movies (and others) here.

Unironically the best entry in the series. I play 5 occasionally, but 3 all the time.

I’m watching them all before the 31st. I am prepared for the high-water mark to be behind me at this point. I remember enjoying H20, but I saw it so long ago that that impression means nothing. I’ve heard good things about the most recent reboot trilogy, but I’ll have to make it through Rob Zombie-land before I get there.

The difference is that ‘color-blind’ liberals who co-opt the language and appearance of the civil rights movement without actually understanding or living the ideals behind it were the target of the joke, it wasn’t supposed to be funny just because it was blackface. I feel that the backlash to that movie is 100% the result of a lack of media literacy. Like, it’s not Citizen Kane, but to accuse Downey Jr. of racism for taking that role is to miss the point so hard it’s hard to imagine that the people who feel that way watched the same movie that I did. You have to be coming from a place of total refusal to engage with the subtext (or really just the text, absolutely nothing about Tropic Thunder is subtle in the least) of the work, and an axiomatic understanding of certain actions as always-racist without regard for context.

God I miss dollar theaters. The last one I know about closed down in 2012, but for about a year I saw movies there almost every weekend. They would get the reels from the local cinemark after they had run there, and they ran two screens all day, starting at 9am. The local film society would screen cult classics there too, and I saw some things I would never have discovered on my own. It’s a little slice of the human experience that is just kinda gone now.