“Goddammit, he was so good at playing a creep! Why did he have to turn out to be a real creep?”

Just doing a tiny bit of research…

This is cool news. It’s always great when politicians who think their jobs are secure get a reminder that voters really do get to decide who will represent them. That said…

• Sri Lanka has a form of ranked choice voting. It looks like it hasn’t seen much use, with the two major parties trading the Presidency back and forth for some time, but it exists, and that’s a lot better than first past the post, which a lot of us are stuck with for the time being. If you’re trapped in America like me, then I definitely recommend agitating and organizing for voting reform, but until that happens, voting as if it doesn’t exist yet, because it doesn’t.

• This election had fewer total votes cast than the last California gubernatorial election. Major political upheavals like this can happen, but they are more likely to happen in smaller elections. If you care about outsider political parties, the best move is to organize at the local or state level, and build a respectable foundation. The next time I hear someone talk about voting third party at the US Presidential level, I’m going to have a Ralph Nader / Florida / Bush vs. Gore flavored aneurysm.

Sweet Jesus, I wish that Democratic voters and politicians were unified enough that if we had a solid majority in this country that we could be considered a one-party state. Even if we somehow did manage to finagle things such that we won the next election 60-40 or more, it’s obvious to anyone with a brain that we would immediately celebrate by turning on each other like dogs. The neolibs can’t stand the hippies. The hippies can’t stand the tech liberals. Most of the people pushed left by identifying with one oppressed minority group or another are in a coalition approximately as stable as the Balkans in 1913.

Democrats’ favorite activity is infighting. We like it more than winning elections. The times when we actually manage to get our shit together enough to win are the exception to the rule.

And don’t forget that quite a lot of the rivers are likely clogged with downed trees, landslides, and other debris, further showing the draining process.

“Big, beautiful submarine captains come up to me. Covered with muscles, muscles like nobody has ever seen before. Tears running down their cheeks. They say ‘Sir, thank you for sending us to the South China Sea! Nobody ever sent us there before!’ But I don’t get angry! I should get angry and sometimes I do get angry, but with these captains I don’t get angry. They say ‘Thank you, sir! Thank you!’ But nobody ever thought of South China before! I came up with that, but nobody gives me credit for South China!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, thinking about Abraham Lincoln or Bill Clinton: “Yeah!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, aware of Donald Trump, with Tucker Carlson waiting in the wings: “Oh no!”

I’m just imagining being the poor sap working for a foreign power trying to extract useful information from his cottage cheese brain.

“Do you have nuclear subs in the South China Sea?”

“We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame. … The biggest problem we have is nuclear — nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That’s in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.”

“Where! Are! The nuclear! Subs! Deployed!”

“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible.”

Also, this is just a really negative set of statements. “I DON’T want X, Y, and Z.” Even giving anon a pretty big benefit of the doubt and assuming they didn’t state it like “No fatties,” they aren’t really saying what they want in a partner, just a bunch of standards by which they would judge somebody.

The search for a romantic partner should involve more positives than negatives. You should have ideas about what things you like in people and yourself, and what interests and activities that you’re passionate about and would like to share with someone. If you start with a laundry list of things that you don’t like, that’s not just going to be off-putting, it’s going to be limiting you to thinking only in those terms, rather than finding something that brings you joy, and finding someone that has that in common with you.

When asked whether Vance believes Robinson’s denial that the comments were made by him, Vance said that the situation needed to “play out.”

“I don’t not believe him, I don’t believe him — I just think that you have to let these things sometimes play out in the court of public opinion."

Remember that for Republicans it’s not a matter of how despicable a candidate is, it’s only a matter of if they’re popular or not. Vance came right out and said that the truth doesn’t matter, just public opinion. If 50.1% of voters in North Carolina were going to vote for Robinson, the GOP wouldn’t care what he said. If that number was 49.9%, it wouldn’t matter if he was an amalgamation of Jesus Christ and Captain America, they’d throw him to the curb and claim they’d never heard of him.

They have no principles. The only thing they believe in is power; getting it, and using it against the people they hate. That is their only true ideology.

A fair number of the original artists have been outlasted by Al, but I deeply wish we could get an album of them covering Weird Al’s style covers. I think TMBG would be up for it, and I suspect you could get Trent Reznor to cover “Germs.”

In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the blackened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.

He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed. Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet.

When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump taking an eyebrow with it.

—Neuromancer, William Gibson

This is my hole, Charlie Brown! It was made for me, you blockhead!

Capt. Picard:

The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it’s scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based. And if you can’t find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don’t deserve to wear that uniform!

—TNG, The First Duty

• Reservoir Dogs / Pulp Fiction / Kill Bill

• Stand By Me

• Dirty Dancing

• The Lost Boys

Draft horses: “Am I a joke to you?”

Honestly, I think the biggest problem is that Colm Meaney and Rosalind Chao have negative chemistry. They probably cast her in TNG thinking that O’Brien was a second-tier supporting character, and that she had good “nervous bride” energy for her first appearance in “Data’s Day,” and that would probably be about it for the character. It’s not the actor’s fault that a fictional pairing that wasn’t very well thought-out on the writers’ and casting director’s part didn’t turn out to be strong enough to survive as a primary plot driver.

That said… I would have loved to see Miles and Keiko go through an amicable divorce. They virtually did, between Keiko basically throwing Miles and Kira together during their pregnancy and Keiko’s long-term journeys to Bajor. It wouldn’t have been that much further to just have them realize that they’d grown apart and agree to separate, and it could be a way for Star Trek to explore a subject that a lot of people had real-life experience with. I don’t suppose that mid- to late-90s Star Trek producers would have gone for it, but there was some real narrative potential there.

That is one of the stupidest takes I have ever seen, and I’ve been on the internet since AOL chatrooms.

Not voting makes politicians less accountable to you. If you somehow organized everyone who thought like you do, regardless of your agenda, and convinced every single one of them to not vote, then you would achieve the lofty political goal of… absolutely ensuring that no politician would ever try to pursue your goals.

Voting, by definition, is what makes politicians give a shit about your cause. There’s a reason why the Greek word meaning “one who does not take part in public affairs” is the root of the modern word “idiot.”

There was a Limited Run Games release , and although they seem to be sold out online, I saw some physical copies in their retail store just the other day.

For the record, we do and have done all of those things. This isn’t a story about my dog getting aggressive with the cats. If anything, we need to make a point of keeping the cats out of her food bowl because she will let them take her food away, all the while looking at us to please do something. It’s just that she seems to sometimes get ambivalent about whether she is in fact hungry or not… but that ambiguity immediately disappears if a cat comes over and sniffs her bowl.

Racism and picking John “Charisma of a Pile of Wet Laundry” Kerry to run against him.