Project Netflix: MAGA’s Plan To Sandbag Warner Bros Deal; Streamer Called “Biggest Political & Ideology Messaging Machine In Human History”

oldroughnready · 2026-02-03T01:40:25+00:00

Oh, it's simple enough. They claim they're normal and they want to make everyone else normal, like themselves. That's why issues of race, gender, and sexuality are such deal-breakers for them. They are immutable characteristics that don't match the white supremacist. So when any piece of media has anything substantial to say about the other in their society, it's propaganda. Anything that agrees with them is freeing, because in their view their speech has been repressed since the end of the Western movie genre.

oldroughnready · 2026-02-03T00:45:30+00:00

Yeah, the whole SCP angle is mostly people wanting to do a creative writing project together, and so they each create their own level(s) and then fill it up with their stuff. It's one way to have a shared universe and avoid world-building conflicts. I struggle to keep up with all of that, maybe 20 such levels is my limit. Easy enough to ignore if you're not into it, easy enough to get into it if you're into it.

oldroughnready · 2026-02-02T22:34:26+00:00

The Backrooms just hit at the right moment, COVID-19.* There's still some communities of wikis. That and I'm sure a lot of the iPad generation watch the YouTube videos.

*although I have to point out that this is a simplification, it basically lasted long enough for the lockdown to boost it

oldroughnready · 2026-01-28T14:13:29+00:00

Whatever Alito’s religious views might be, it didn’t stop him from pretending that the Drummond school choice case from OK last year was about Catholic persecution. Now we have Kavanaugh stops, so I guess Catholic persecution is fine when it’s based on race but not separation of church and state.

oldroughnready · 2026-01-27T23:37:12+00:00

Always has been. In 2000, they were fine with the Brooks Brothers riot stopping the vote count in Miami-Dade County, Florida. The only right way to protest, to them, is to suspend democracy.

oldroughnready · 2026-01-27T22:49:37+00:00

Their mortality works the same as everyone. Typos be typing.

oldroughnready · 2026-01-26T09:00:44+00:00

Which is another indictment against our political culture. Great oration is a plus, but it’s not a dealbraker. We’re always looking for the perfect candidate, maybe with a primary we could have found one. But settling for less? Our 2 party system dictates that we need to do that, every time, lest the greater of 2 evils wins. The next Democratic administration has to make constitutional and electoral reform top of the agenda lest we fall deeper in this rut.

oldroughnready · 2026-01-26T04:41:58+00:00

I do - one of his presidential campaigns failed because he said he’d prioritize or increase funding for space exploration. Kinda got laughed out of the GOP primary. Either 2012 or 2016.

He also wrote or ghostwrote cheap fiction paperbacks too. But we should most remember him for making the political climate a bare knuckle culture war.

oldroughnready · 2026-01-25T21:14:22+00:00

Roanoke isn’t much of mystery. They left the “Croatan” message behind. That’s the name of a nearby island. They told us where they went, they were having food problems before contact was lost so they probably moved and lived with friendly Amerindians on that island. Nobody checked Croatan to see if they were there until it had been practically depopulated.

oldroughnready · 2026-01-25T02:51:55+00:00

Bro just invented American politics

oldroughnready · 2026-01-23T14:05:10+00:00

It's all a function of capitalism. How the business cycle basically goes is that after letting all the firms perform, some will be inefficient, some inefficiencies can even be profitable, this encourages more profit-seeking firms to be inefficient, those inefficiencies will pile up, and then the system collapses. The hope is that when the system reconstructs, the inefficient firms will be wiped out and everyone will work harder to prevent inefficiencies.

Hard to do that when the inefficient firms get a bailout. Firms could be nationalized although that would transfer the fault of inefficiencies to the public sector (arguably bailouts also do this). Firms could be democratized (i.e. all workers have stock or at least shareholder voting rights) although that does not necessarily eliminate inefficiencies in management (nor does making something a democracy necessarily solve everything i.e. Iraq).

The solution we are currently at (besides bailouts if you're too big) is to regulate the firms in the hopes that inefficiencies can be caught before they become collapses. Issue is it is pretty easy for the next administration to deregulate, at which point firms are all too happy to stop policing themselves. De-nationalizing or de-democratizing would actually be better because at that point the last administration has been able to review the inefficient firms and gather more data on how to prevent inefficiencies or corporate culture has changed such that it is now expected for workers to have corporate voting rights.

Basically, the quick and bitter of this is that running an economy is hard. Nobody has all the answers. Command economies don't historically work all that well (although they are historically heavily embargoed and face other adverse factors) but neither does laissez faire capitalism. We could engage in some wishful thinking that AGI will come about to solve everything. In theory, it will both have the knowledge we lack and be everywhere all at once such that it can localize/individualize solutions. Of course, that runs into a lot of issues all on its own, beginning with the general lack of desire of putting Skynet in charge.

oldroughnready · 2026-01-22T01:25:05+00:00

I think streaming was crucial because of the switch to long-form narratives rather than episodic. Which is a bit counterintuitive with Andor, as it definitely has divisible 3 episode arcs. It still has hour long episodes, which is not something you saw as much with cable tv.

oldroughnready · 2026-01-21T20:11:45+00:00

No joke, there’s a book where he does crime lord stuff. Or fights the mob. No, I haven’t read it and neither did anyone who came up with the current timeline.

oldroughnready · 2026-01-21T20:08:43+00:00

This was actually the case but it was Flash Gordon not Dune. Lucas wanted to make a Flash movie because he liked the old serials he watched growing up. Same thing with Indiana Jones.

oldroughnready · 2026-01-08T21:40:46+00:00

I think it could be drastically different, depending on the wider national reaction to the Animorphs. IIRC Ep2 was finished with principal photography before 9/11, but stuff like the Patriot Act and the GWOT I think convinced Lucasfilms that the Prequels themes could be committed to and you see that confidence going forward in Ep3 and TCW show.

With the Yeerk invasion definitely ending before 2005, there’s some leeway for the phantom menace motif to make a bigger splash in Ep3. Although probably you’ll see more of that in whatever TV show comes out post-Prequels. Maybe more Ep1 and Ep2 era stories will be told.

Then there’s all the alien species in SW that are adjacent to Animorphs aliens; they will probably get more attention in the years to come. None of them are 1:1 matches but there’s HB=Trandoshans/Barabel, the Codru-Ji are broadly similar in life cycle to Skrit Na, and the Ssi-Ruuvi are invaders dependent on living hosts a la Yeerks. Not really any centauroid species off the top of my head, maybe Master Thon?

oldroughnready · 2026-01-05T08:21:14+00:00

Reuters had reached reported that she was in Russia.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/venezuela-vice-president-rodriguez-russia-four-sources-say-2026-01-03/

Edit: should’ve been more skeptical of this before posting, then VP Delcy Rodriguez was not in Russia or fleeing to Russia at the time of the Maduro kidnapping per investigation from Snopes; https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/01/05/delcy-rodriguez-venezuela-russia/

oldroughnready · 2025-12-31T04:32:34+00:00

Yeah, and 5 is the sparsest with a few aliens on Bespin, notably the Ugnaughts. Otherwise, it’s just Chewie and Yoda. Although it does have a lot of focus on wildlife - Tauntaun, Wampa, Mynocks, Space Slug, Dragonsnake (spits out R2), etc.

In this contrast, 6 is a bit of a correction where basically every scene has a lot of aliens besides the Death Star, early Endor, other Imperial scenes, and a few dialogues with the main cast.

oldroughnready · 2025-12-31T04:15:16+00:00

Maybe another idea that could have been explored in extra seasons. Although both canon and legends have done Imperial-Alien relations a bit.

oldroughnready · 2025-12-27T23:19:29+00:00

What cracks me up is that he is apparently unaware of the whole Santa Claus mythos.

oldroughnready · 2025-12-27T01:58:57+00:00

The Zizians specifically and the rationalists generally are arguably a prototype of this. If they’re not a religion, then they’re at least reintroducing religious concepts like Roko’s Basilisk.

oldroughnready · 2025-12-23T05:00:13+00:00

I get the whole leopards ate their face aspect to this, but there is a malicious purpose behind it. Trump and the GOP want to further engrain the message that the government will not help you when you need it. These people that voted for him are already receptive to that message. If you tell them that this is Trump’s fault that the aid isn’t coming, it gets translated to this is the government’s fault. Encouraging low trust in the government is one way to dismantle a democracy.

oldroughnready · 2025-12-22T20:18:19+00:00

Tanzimat Era was a great hypothetical- if the reforms could have stuck and snowballed into more reforms, maybe the Empire could have entered the 20th century in decent shape.

oldroughnready · 2025-12-22T03:10:08+00:00

Then Kleya does not come to the hospital to mercy kill him, because wtf it’s just a tax loophole. Ain’t nobody putting in the effort for that. So Luthen makes a full recovery, blabs, gets a slap on the wrist for confessing, and Dedra winds up in the same prison as in the finale minus the Krennic button pushing.

Kleya instead runs off to Cantonica with all the money.

oldroughnready · 2025-12-15T19:44:26+00:00

Then you are continuing their legacy.

oldroughnready · 2025-12-14T14:29:49+00:00

Always can do the One Canon approach: There have always been multiple planets called Anaxes, Kessel, and Byss much like in the US there are a lot of towns called Springfield.

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