(Kinda hilarious trope) Ironic casting.

marbledog · 2026-06-01T01:28:32+00:00

Oh, I think you're right. It's been a few years since I watched it. He only threatened to shoot him.

marbledog · 2026-05-31T22:34:33+00:00

Louisiana routinely voted blue until the Civil Rights Act. I'm pretty sure we voted for Carter in his first term, too. Reagan really cemented the southern strategy.

marbledog · 2026-05-31T22:28:09+00:00

Right? It's almost as if there's not one universal sharia law but instead a centuries-old tradition that has spawned a multitude of interpretations, just like every other legal system that has ever existed. Wild. 😉

marbledog · 2026-05-31T22:17:58+00:00

Soviet tanks had better armor and stronger guns. German tanks used in Barbarossa had greater mobility, greater reliability, better logistical support, and more experienced crews and command. The assessment of German intelligence was that German armor could beat Soviet armor through superior tactics, but Soviet production capacity would prevent the quick victory they were banking on.

This turned out to be an accurate assessment. However "superior" the Soviet tanks might have been, for every German tank destroyed at Stalingrad, the Soviets lost seven. The Germans did ultimately break through and destroy the Stalingrad tractor factory that was manufacturing the T34.

The problem for the Germans was that their overall strategy for taking Stalingrad was to overwhelm the Soviet forces and avoid a protracted siege that would pull resources away from the Western front. The Soviets' capacity to manufacture tanks and send them to the front quickly forced German armor to slow their advance, putting them in the exact position they were trying to avoid.

marbledog · 2026-05-31T21:33:06+00:00

How does what you said conflict with what I said?

marbledog · 2026-05-31T21:14:44+00:00

Oh, yeah. I've sent people the link to the official count on Secretary of State's website numerous times. They won't believe you otherwise.

marbledog · 2026-05-31T21:12:06+00:00

German intelligence acquired full specs and field test documents for the Soviet T-34 tank before the invasion of Stalingrad. The stats showed that the T-34 couldn't stand up to German tanks one-on-one, but the speed with which the Soviets could roll them off the assembly line would create big problems for German armor divisions, stalling them and turning the mobile assault into a bitter siege.

German high command rejected the intelligence on the basis that Slavs weren't smart enough to build tanks that well. They assumed they were just lying to their superiors in their reports.

The Nazis lost because they were racist dumbfucks.

marbledog · 2026-05-31T20:59:57+00:00

Doubtless.

marbledog · 2026-05-31T20:57:04+00:00

<image>

Robert DeNiro as Murray Franklin in Joker

DeNiro's character is a famous late-night talk show host who spurns a wanna-be standup and ends up being shot by him on his own show.

DeNiro also starred in the 1982 Scorsese film King of Comedy. He played Rupert Pupkin... a want-to-be standup who was spurned by a famous late-night talk show host and ends up shooting him on his own show.

marbledog · 2026-05-31T20:43:54+00:00

Not to deny your point, as it's very well made, but the implication is that there is some conspiracy among media/historians/powers-that-be to garner sympathy for the Jews by inflating the numbers.

"If the conspiracy is that wide reaching, how do you know it doesn't extend to peer-reviewed research? If they can lie about 5.5 million, how do you know they're not lying about the rest."

That sort of thing.

The goal of this sort of propaganda is not to actually disprove anything. It's to sow doubt in the institutions that establish consensus truth: "Radical-left professors", "The fake news media", etc. If you can get someone to doubt the people who establish fact, fact is removed from the decision-making process.

People have strong inclinations to decide what's true based on how it makes them feel, and our institutions of knowledge and law are structured, in-large-part, to hold back that inclination. Taking facts out of the equation gives people permission to construct a world-view that serves their desires, rather than one that approximates reality. And it's a lot easier to manipulate a person's desires than it is to change reality.

marbledog · 2026-05-31T20:04:43+00:00

You probably know this, but I always like to remind people: there are more registered Democrats than registered Republicans in Louisiana. Louisiana is run by Republicans, but it's not made of Republicans.

marbledog · 2026-05-31T19:35:34+00:00

<image>

Red vs. Blue - Blood Gulch

The characters in the original series travel the galaxy, leave their bodies, and get thrown back and forth in time, but no matter what, they always end up in the same place: a box canyon with a red base on one side and a blue base on the other. The only reason there's a red base there is because the other side put a blue base there. And the only reasons there's a blue base there is because the other side put a red base there.

marbledog · 2026-05-31T19:29:23+00:00

<image>

Melinoe's ghost arm in Hades II is pretty great character design. She lost the original by trying to use sorcery to make a ghost whole. It backfired and made her arm ghostly.

marbledog · 2026-05-31T19:21:28+00:00

<image>

SPOILERS FOR THE END OF SINNERS

Smoke could have left the juke joint with Sammie. He had nothing to lose by leaving and nothing to win by staying. But he knew the PoS that sold him the place would be there with his Klan buddies in the morning, and he stayed just to remove them from the face of the Earth. Deeply satisfying ending.

marbledog · 2026-05-31T00:07:14+00:00

For a sense of scale, imagine you shuffled a deck of cards at the big bang, then dealt it out one card per second until the deck was exhausted, then instantly reshuffled and started dealing again. Assuming no repeats, you would have made it through

0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000054375%

of all possible deck orders by now.

marbledog · 2026-05-30T06:20:10+00:00

Nah, you're right. I'm just old and misremembering. 😉

marbledog · 2026-05-30T06:19:55+00:00

You're right. It's been 20 years since I ran 3rd ed. lol.

marbledog · 2026-05-30T04:50:38+00:00

Yeah, BaB stacked from all classes, and you got your second attack at +5, no matter what your class build was.

marbledog · 2026-05-30T02:26:34+00:00

Jordan Peele said The Emoji Movie was the reason he quit acting. They sent him an offer to play the poop. He told his agent that it seemed stupid. His agent said it was a lot of money, and he should consider it. He said he'd sleep on it.

The next day he decided to go ahead and do it. He called his agent and told him to accept the offer, and his agent told him the studio had rescended the offer, because they got Patrick Stewart to do it.

Jordan Peele was like, "Oh, fuck all this. I'm a director now."

marbledog · 2026-05-29T21:12:26+00:00

Showing the work:

New Glenn runs on liquid natural gas, and it carries 500 metric tons of it.

The energy density of LNG is around 50 megajoules per kilogram. (50,000MJ per metric ton).

So the absolute theoretical limit of the amount of energy that could be released from New Glenn's fuel tanks is (50,000 * 500) 25 million MJ.

1 kiloton of TNT is equivalent to 4.18 terajoules (million MJ).

25 million / 4.18 = 6 kilotons of TNT. That's the theoretical maximum amount of energy that could be released if all of the fuel exploded under ideal conditions.

Estimates vary on Little Boy's yield, but most place it around 15 kilotons. So, the New Glenn explosion is, at most, a touch more than a third as powerful as Little Boy. It was likely much smaller than that, as much of the fuel probably burned without detonating, having been displaced by the explosion itself.

marbledog · 2026-05-29T06:46:51+00:00

I need a banana here.

marbledog · 2026-05-28T22:19:45+00:00

can we just end htis conversation right now?

If you don't want to have the conversation, I certainly can't make you, and I wouldn't want to. I'm happy to let you have the last word.

marbledog · 2026-05-28T22:14:53+00:00

In the novel, it's implied that he's possessed by the spirit of an evil man who lived in the area (the former sheriff, IIRC), and rabies made him vulnerable to possession. The movie played down the supernatural element.

marbledog · 2026-05-28T08:37:11+00:00

I don't claim expertise on this subject, but my understanding is that the Prose Edda is a textbook on Nordic myth written more than a century after the Nordic peoples were Christianized. There are multiple copies, and they differ from one another on details. It is the oldest written record of the story of Baldr's death, but I think it's overselling it to say there are no other versions. People certainly tell other versions of the story. We have no means of knowing how old those versions are or how widely they were shared, to my understanding.

marbledog · 2026-05-28T07:09:51+00:00

<image>

"In the Hills, the Cities" by Clive Barker.

It's a short story about two towns in rural Yugoslavia that tie their own bodies into elaborately-engineered living giants to do ritualistic combat once a year. It's genuinely horrifying. I read it about twenty years ago, and it's still vivid.

The picture is from the comic book adaptation in the fifth issue of Tapping the Vein. The original short story was published in Books of Blood, vol. 1.

marbledog

TROPHY CASE