I liked the way they’d introduce non-dinosaurs (and sneakily, the main pterosaur family are not technically dinosaurs either) from the fossil record, like the giant snake. There were definitely WAY worse things that I sat through, but PBS kids of that era had a ton of good shows (and now too? I dunno because it doesn’t have Hatsune Miku and friends so therefore my daughter doesn’t care). She actually still has an “Odd Squad” lore book in her backpack.

Matt Groening is his former brother-in-law. Dinosaur Train was in the rotation when mine was little. It’s not a top-tier “parents will notice the layers” one, but it’s very tolerable and a good show for the littles.

I received a metric fuckton of texts that were like, “ZOMG YOU GUYS WE ARE SO REPUBLICAN AND CROCKETT HATES ICE CAN YOU BELIEVE IT-ZORZ?!?!?!?” They seem to trace back to a shady republican group. Apart from a couple of milquetoast Cornyn ones, everything else I got was for various Dem candidates despite my living in a very red zip code.

The campaigns have excellent lists, and somebody on the right wanted blue voters to know how very “terrified” they were of her. The only reasonable alternative is that she ran them herself as a low-grade false-flag, and in either case it made me go ahead and decide on Talarico, though I’d have happily voted for either in the general. I think he’s made such a brand of being a blue christian that he’d probably feel obligated to make separation of church and state an important part of his brand, and he’s speaking very explicitly to the wealth divide in a way she hasn’t.

I do tend to think the dust-up over the Talarico’s Allred comment has at least some truth to it, but while I assume he’s much more calculating than his public persona, even in the worst case the story hit my (admittedly white) ears like someone who assumed that his allyship exempted him from micro-aggressions, rather than his being some cackling hypocrite. He’s got his work cut out for him, but if he can energize the base, recover Trump 2024 Hispanics, and get a couple of percentage points’ worth of red voters to flip or even just say, “meh” and stay home, he’s got a chance.

Realistically, I think the most likely scenario is that we’re looking at a pre-guns Beto campaign that comes close but can’t get over the hump versus an unpopular Republican, but I think he’s the best chance we’ve had since then to flip a seat. All of which is incumbent on elections happening semi-normally.

Imagine if that one fire were the series finale. All-time great show if you end it there.

Rubio’s gonna get fired anyway. He made a speech that that didn’t terrify people in Munich as badly as MAGA speeches usually do, so he got a standing ovation, and Trump HAAAAATES that.

I think they’ve both had their issues with where their money comes from, her corporate PACs, him with the Adelson family that’s trying to somehow get gambling legalized in Texas without any Native American reservations and with a Christofascist state government. That said, neither one is a Schumer-style appeaser. He wears a brand of class-conscious social justice theology on his sleeve, throwing the Christian Nationalists’ so-called faith into clear focus, but because of that he’s also very much pitching “electability,” which in Texas right now means “I’m a cishet white guy so maybe some of the racists will stay home on election day.”

She is a firebrand who has made calling out Trump and the gang her full-time job, but her campaign seems to revel more in the idea of pissing off Donald Trump than in letting us know what she’ll do. There is a zeitgeisty element to that, and I think she’d be a more prominent and powerful advocate in Congress, but I think either would slot more into the Progressive wing. Ultimately, either would also be an insane improvement over Cornyn or (gag) Paxton.

Would be remiss of course without mentioning the dustup where a Tiktoker left the Talarico camp for the Crockett camp, saying that Talarico told her he was expecting to run against a mediocre black guy, not a talented black woman. He’s admitted to using the word mediocre about Colin Allred’s prior campaign, and TBF it was extremely mediocre (like Allred knew from day one he had no chance, so why knock yourself out?), but if Talarico did try to add in Allred’s race as (one would hope) a rhetorical flourish, then it was a tone-deaf moment that harmed his credibility in promising to advocate for the black community. “Electability” with white people doesn’t help if you simultaneously depress the vote of the usual 4/9 of Texans who vote blue. I’m as white as Talarico is, but it really gave me pause.

Have you been privy to any of the discussions about what it means for the show to be set a thousand years later than most of the franchise, like where it makes sense for a previous entry to guide the interpretation, and where it maybe makes as much or more sense to let things go a little crazy. The interplay probably has to drift more toward storytelling realities within the brand than it does gaming-out what would “really” happen over a millennium of Star Trek time.

Honestly, when I think about it, the post-Burn era seems downright conservative in terms of societal change, certainly at least within Starfleet. That’s obviously necessary for it to be recognizable as a property, but it’s kind of funny to think that it’s as static as it seems, like closer to the difference between 426 and 1426 than between 1026 and 2026 CE, and I’m probably understating how different the first two were.

They say they used a paid actor. Of course, even if that’s true, it’s not particularly hard to find someone with a similar pitch, accent, and timbre, and then finish fixing it to make sure it’s as confidently soothing as the NPR voice you wanted to steal in the first place. I suppose in one sense it’s not utterly different from hiring a soundalike, but now the soundalike is damn near perfect (the clips in the article are VERY similar and feel more like the difference in recording equipment than anything else) and doesn’t need to actually be available to perform for new impressions. Yet another example of “withstand motion for summary judgment, string it out, lobby against future guiderails” as the totality of Silicon Valley’s legal philosophy.

They’re about to find out what we actually were getting in return.

This is one of the huge under-analyzed aspects of all this. The US “over” invested in defense and foreign aid, and got virtually all the soft power benefits of a hegemonic power, and by simply setting an upper limit on the worst abuses of imperial overlords, it generally had its allies saying “Thank You” for the privilege, with no particular signs that the bloc was weakening.

If the US is not an accessible market or a reliable guarantor of security, or if (for fuck’s sake) it’s threatening the territorial integrity of its own allies and trading partners, then it’s just China with less cheap shit to sell. Hell, even China doesn’t do the last one (offer not valid in Taiwan).

Ahh, but which one? LOL, I’m just kiddin’, they all have serious issues.

I grew up in the suburbs of the Florida one. It’s… fine? Go Jags!

Maybe it can repost racist MAGA slop, creep on the granddaughters of ex-girlfriends, and put private messages into the public feed, just like your dad!

When we were not-quite engaged and doing long-distance, my wife ganked my dumbphone and quickly edited my contact from {her name} to {her name}-mywife, no spaces, no capital letters. So now, twenty+ years later, that’s what it still says, and that’s how I address greeting card envelopes to her.

This is almost exactly what happened in the US a hundred-plus years ago. The fallout vastly improved medical education overall, but also ossified the field into a modern fortress of protectionism that hurts the public by ignoring the supply part of supply and demand, but also hurts the clever (and typically already privileged in most ways) young people who manage to get med school, by saddling them with huge amounts of debt and grinding them into powder for the first decade of their career. I also have a pet theory that the hypercompetitive selection process results in too many doctors who are not well-rounded or particularly good at processing information outside their fields, but are told over and over again that they’re too smart to have any blind spots. If you have the right credential and especially if you’ve made enough money with it, society does the Dunning-Krugering for you.

I had to sit on the floor to invite cuddles, but he finally came in and is now resting on his stinky blanket. To be completely honest, he was only out like that for a few minutes, but bless his heart he was trying so hard. The fosters called him “Sergeant” because he was bossy and protective of his siblings.

At this point dealing with the predictable and polite asshole is easier than the unpredictable and rude one. Trump is making a diplomacy mess that will take decades to clean up, if ever.

If nothing else, and back in the Bush days it’s pretty much all we had, they accept the possibility that they can lose elections. The bar is literally laying on the ground, yet MAGA still can’t clear it.

drive through Lubbock

Well, yes. Lubbock is as Lubbock was. It is known.

Texas is a mess.

This is also true.

This is pretty much what I said to my wife while scritching my dogs. First it’ll just be expanded to missing kids and olds, because of course everyone wants to reunite families, but eventually it’ll be something that “law enforcement” can request for whatever the hell they want, because after all they’re the good guys keeping us safe!

But, and here me out, it’s also wicked cool.

Ours is more stick-shaped though, and really only good for candle wicks. If we smoked, you might be able to get a cigarette into the arc. It’d probably also work well if your grill’s or gas stove’s spark iginter was broken.

All with full 40s sets?

Oh, God no. Sorry! Mostly they’re on more normie boards, but the Mitospeed being R3 and full of nonsense legends would go well on a 40 or 40-adjacent.

I’ve reluctantly come to realize that I just don’t like the feel of Cherry all that much. I prefer DCS if I’m going to go cylindrical. The sharp edges on Cherry are just all wrong for my poor typing technique.