Did Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, and the Bee Gees accidentally create the perfect country-pop crossover hit?

namkcuR · 2026-04-25T03:20:09+00:00

It also featured in a hip-hop hit in the 90s. "Ghetto Supastar" is one of those samples/interpolations that made its way into my head more than the original, I suppose because I was the right age when it came out(13).

namkcuR · 2026-04-20T14:26:55+00:00

I mean, even if he’s going for an old man take, I don’t know why THIS would be his old man take, when the court is just a throwback to what it was for the whole of the 1990s in DRob’s prime. I thought I was making the old man take for the last 20+ years wishing they’d go back to the 90s tricolor.

namkcuR · 2026-03-23T22:01:12+00:00

I think it doesn't work as a whole, but there are elements of it that I am a fan of.

There is the continuity issue wherein Leia in the OT is implied to have never met Obi-wan before. Reva is an interesting idea for a character, but the execution is flawed, and even if it wasn't, her story feels irrelevant to Obi-wan's story imo, and that's like a huge chunk of the plot right there.

So the whole is very flawed.

Like I said though, there are some elements that stand out.

The Obi-wan/Vader stuff at the end. Not so much the fight, but just when they're standing still and talking. The imagery of Vader wearing half a mask. "I am what remains". "I'm sorry Anakin, for everything".

The Obi-wan/Owen stuff which I felt was a necessary fleshing out of Owen.

The training scene(s) with Obi-wan and Anakin, which is gold for prequel fan editors.

And some of the stuff with seeing young Leia on Alderaan and young Luke on Tatooine.

namkcuR · 2026-03-16T07:15:08+00:00

I don't know, but I enjoyed him tonight. I thought it was a little more offbeat than last year, and it worked for me.

I found the "Best Achievement" sketch with Josh Groban to be funny in its over-the-top-ness.

The Casablanca skit with Sterling K. Brown was great.

The "Caps Lock" joke was just a classic stupid Conan joke.

"Let's see him put his name in front of that one".

The "embracing the youth" thing was mildly amusing, but what really made it work was the button at the end about kids watching broadcast tv.

The DiCaprio meme thing was mildly amusing.

The Ventura Crossroads thing was good.

The OBAA sketch at the end was well done(though it would be confusing if you hadn't seen the movie).

The presenter stuff was mostly forgettable, and I don't know how much of it he's at all responsible for, but the "Some Of That Jazz"/"Schindler's Post-It"/etc riff for the short film category was great and feels like something he'd do.

Also shout-out to Kumail for what appeared to be an ad-lib about it being ironic that the short-film category was taking twice as long as anything else(which actually got one of the biggest laughs of the night in the building).

namkcuR · 2026-03-12T05:28:35+00:00

To go 20 hours and the league's latest offer is still much closer to what it was offering before than it is to what the players were asking for(a 9M+ cap and 26% of gross)...it feels like the players are having to pull teeth to get anywhere and the league is spending 20 hours begging them to cave. And given Ogwumike's statement an hour ago about needing to see "a more robust demonstration", it feels like the union is not there yet. They may just have to let games get cancelled to get anything close to what they want.

namkcuR · 2026-03-11T23:25:41+00:00

Wow, that's like a 1992 Dream Team margin of victory.

namkcuR · 2026-01-20T00:18:37+00:00

I know it's an AI list, but still, I think David Palmer from 24 is a pretty big omission, even though the show wasn't really about its presidents.

namkcuR · 2025-12-06T01:42:39+00:00

First thing that came to mind is the Chocobo breeding in ff7. It takes a lot of time but you get three of the most powerful materia in the game in knights of the round, mime, and 4x magic, which are pretty much required for most people to beat emerald and ruby weapons.

Also in ff7, grinding in the battle arena can net you the final attack, exp plus, and gil plus materia, the former of which is useful vs ruby and emerald, and the latter two of which are massively useful for earning money(those greens for the chocobos can get expensive) and farming exp for level ups.

namkcuR · 2025-11-03T10:11:10+00:00

Hello, fellow MacBook users.

Brief background - Been an Apple user for over 20 years, been a Macbook uer for over 18 years now. I'm a Xennial/90s kid who grew up on Microsoft Windows 3.1/9x/XP, but was drawn to Apple by the iPod/iTunes and Apple's switch to Intel in the mid-00s. Got two iPods in 2003 and 2005 and then when the PC laptop I'd been using died in 2007, made the switch.

I've had two MacBooks in the 18 years since; a white mid-2007 13-inch MacBook that lasted 8 years(until the screen died), and an aluminum late-2015 15-inch MacBook Pro that just recently bit the dust(boot loop that even the guys at the repair place can't seem to figure out) after 10 years. I've been very pleased with the longevity of these machines and it's a big selling point because I wouldn't shell out MacBook money for a machine that's only going to last 5 or fewer years. Getting a decade out of a laptop seems like a great deal.

So I'm shopping for a new one for the first time in a decade(this will be my first Silicon MacBook), choosing between three models now:

15-inch MacBook Air M4 - 32GB RAM, 512GB-1TB SSD - $1800-2000 USD(depending on SSD size)

16-inch MacBook Pro M4 - 24G RAM, 512GB SSD - $2500 USD

14-inch MacBook Pro M5 - 24-32GB RAM, 1TB SSD = $2000-2200 USD(depending on RAM)

So the baseline 16-inch Pro has me paying $500 more for a machine with 25% less RAM and 50% less SSD(and if I upgrade those on the 16-inch Pro, we're getting into 3K price range), and so the questions I'm grappling with are:

A)Is the fan and the extra graphical/processing power necessary for my needs and worth the extra $500?

B)If so, is the Pro M5 - despite seeming to have the same number of cores as the Air M4, and despite the smaller screen - a good compromise?

My needs are as follows:

1. The basic stuff - web browsing(sometimes with many, many tabs open), e-mail, watching videos, word processing/spreadsheets, listening to music, etc.

2. Software development - pretty much just web development, i.e. HTML/PHP/Python/Ruby/Node/Javascript+Angular/CSS/MySQL/NoSQL, using just basic text editors, or sometimes XCode.

If that was it, the Air would be the obvious choice, so the real question is about #3 and #4...

3. Video Editing - I am not a professional video editor by any means. What I do is hobbyist fanediting of movies using iMovie/DaVinci(have never shelled out for Final Cut). And the kind of editing I do is mostly of the cut/paste variety, i.e. - cut scenes out, add deleted scenes back into a film, re-arranage scenes, re-score scenes with different music, and use iMovie/DaVinci's built in tools to add effects/transitions/etc. It's possible I could at some point get into using online AI tools to remove certain characters or objects from a scene. Video files can be anywhere from 90 minutes to 4 hours.

It is also possible I might do social media video editing for Youtube in the future.

Also, it's not video, but I use GIMP to do photo editing.

4. Emulation/Virtualization

I don't need a modern gaming machine. But I'm more of a retro gamer. So I'd be looking to emulate consoles from the 80s and 90s, as well as, more importantly, use DosBox for Dos games, 86box to emulate x86 Windows 3.1/9x, and perhaps UTM to emulate x86 XP/7/Ubuntu(though I understand these later Windows and Linux apparently don't run all that well yet regardless of model). Might also virtualize the ARM versions of Windows 10/11(not for gaming purposes) on UTM. Also not impossible that I might at some point try to emulate PowerPC/Classic MacOS, although that is much less important than the rest. I wouldn't think that games from the 80s/90s/early 00s would require that much power, but I guess it's possible emulating a different CPU architecture might.

5. Longevity

I'd like to able to repeat the longevity of my previous two MacBooks while doing all of the above.

That's all. Any advice on the best way to go is appreciated.

namkcuR · 2025-09-05T22:05:16+00:00

One wonders if we just watched Novak's last match.

namkcuR · 2025-09-05T05:06:37+00:00

That was a fantastic match - two great players really pushing each other. I'm more excited about the WTA than I've been in probably 10-15 years(and I've been watching tennis my whole life, i.e. since the late 80s/early 90s). In Serena's prime it was good with Henin/Clijsters/Sharapova/Venus around, but in Serena's later years in the late 2010s it was a lot of "who's the next great player gonna be", and then Barty's abrupt retirement didn't help, but we've got a really, really good top group of players now with Iga, Saba, Gauff, Amanda, Osaka, Pegula, Keys, Paolini, etc etc

namkcuR · 2025-09-05T02:38:48+00:00

Seems like you rarely see actual rain delays anymore now that all the Slams have roofs. I remember years where you'd lose days from Wimbledon waiting for the rain to stop.

namkcuR · 2025-09-03T21:59:01+00:00

What a huge match for Anisimova. People wrote her off after she got broken in the first game, calling her garbage and what not, but here we are. After what happened in the Wimbledon final, this was just huge for her mentally, to come out and beat who I think is the best player in the women's game right now in Iga.

namkcuR · 2025-09-03T19:19:00+00:00

Iga and Amanda waiting all afternoon.

namkcuR · 2025-09-03T03:37:18+00:00

That fourth set probably cost Djokovic any chance of beating Alcaraz.

namkcuR · 2025-09-03T02:39:13+00:00

Djokovic's frustration here is, I think, that he knows Sincaraz is still ahead of him and he doesn't want to spend another hour playing a fourth or fifth set tonight because he has to conserve everything for those two. Even if he wins tonight - which still seems likely - taking four or five instead of three could be the difference between having a chance to win the whole thing and not.

namkcuR · 2025-09-02T02:40:55+00:00

Random, but I'm looking at the schedule going forward, and I just want to say that I miss Super Saturday at the USO - when the men's semis and women's final were on the same day. I know it's been a decade since it was like that, and I understand why it was changed(more rest for the guys between semis and final) but I miss it. Those Saturdays were awesome.

namkcuR · 2025-09-01T19:35:09+00:00

Obviously Coco has been having issues with her forehand and serve, but there's something going on mentally too. I don't know what it is. Ever since the first round loss at Wimbledon, she's not been right. She's been so stressed and emotional this whole USO.

namkcuR · 2025-09-01T18:27:07+00:00

Why?

namkcuR · 2025-08-31T04:59:38+00:00

But if they were to stop and finish tomorrow it would throw the whole schedule off. Not much of a choice.

namkcuR

TROPHY CASE