It’s a two pronged attack.

It has always been a two pronged attack.

The rich assholes who want to fuck everyone over can’t just come out and say it, they need a Face to rile up the crowds, but that Face is a problem. The Face can turn on the rich fucks. Well, to an extent. They’re a useful charismatic fool, and possibly a danger to the rich, but mostly a danger to everyone else.

Anyway, the solution is to stand next to the fool king, and pass him “advice”. Like a list of judges to appoint. “Don’t think about it, we vetted these guys, and they love you”.

Then there’s the congressmen. “Don’t have time to write a bill? Well, we saved you the trouble. It even does some of the shit you’ve been ranting about, but mostly it makes us richer”.

And that’s how it goes. People like Leonard Leo, Peter Thiel, Joel Kaplan. They’re the brains.

They also funnel a shit-load of money into pushing their twisted ideologies.

Guardians 3 was good.

Mostly because they weren’t trying to shoehorn future movie plot setups into it.

On that note, the Holiday Special was also pretty good.

Shang-Chi wasn’t a bad movie… Not one I’m likely to rewatch much, but a good popcorn movie…

Other than that, no Marvel has started falling into producer interference mode, where every movie must explicitly set up the next, even if they don’t have a full plan for what’s next.

They’ve lost sight of the key to their success; telling a tight, self-contained story made by people who love the characters.

Say the wrong thing and make things super awkward?

The sad thing about Oblivion is that there are in-game books in Morrowind and previous games that describe the empire as being in the middle of a bamboo jungle. The vibe comes off as the Roman Empire in South East Asia.

Instead we got generic high fantasy with the occasional guy wearing Roman armor.

Only as far as storyline and setting go. Other than that, it was an okay shooter.

The North Sentinel Island Sentinelese are not cannibals. They just want nothing to do with anyone not born on the island.

Which is a good policy to have, seeing as how the British genocided the rest of the Andaman Islands. They even landed on North Sentinel, kidnapped a few old people and children, and then sent the survivors back as plague bearers. (this was in 1880)

The main one would be, in 53 years of Trek before Discovery, Spock never mentioned a sister.

Which is mostly of explained at the end of Season 2 of Discovery.

If you just noped out in Season 1, which a lot of the more conservative sort of trekie did, then you’d miss that.

I do like that they sort of explained the Klingon Empire was getting really into genetic experimentation. It kind of ties in the DS9 tribbles episode as seen here.

The simple “We do not discuss it with outsiders” line is great. Which actually makes me want to watch more DS9…

Anyway… some of the continuity issues are explained away in the second season? Sort of?

It’s still my least watched trek. I’ve even watched more of the Animated Series than Discovery.

Reciting from memory is a bardic skill, but those “other people” were his dedicated assistants.

Well, possibly. We don’t know when Homer went blind, or if he was ever actually blind.

All we really know is that the two biographies written about him were written at least 400 years after his death. Both are highly questionable, but both still say that Homer was literate, or at least well educated, before losing his sight.

All we actually know is that Homer wrote the Iliad (or parts of it) and the Odyssey.

And we know the works of Homer because they were written down.

Bards aren’t just the run of the mill musicians. They are so much more than that.

And most of that “so much more” requires extensive training. Which requires some form of reading.

Bards are historians and have some magic of their own.

Well, as long as it’s not any smaller than the hummingbird, it’s still possible.

A hummingbird is pushing the limits of the wild shape ability, and would actually not be allowed under some versions of the game

A flea is too small for wild shape.

They literally go through the class schedule in each book. General studies are not in it.

There was Arithmancy, the Harry Potter wiki says that it was using numbers to predict the future. It was an elective and Harry didn’t take it.

The only other class that would have had math would be Astronomy, which was a required class for all students. The students are required to make star charts and such… Seems like rote memorization was the only thing taught. The wink says that the end of year 5 tests was filling in a blank star chart from memory.

They might get some English pointers in the dozens of essays they wrote, but since essays are graded on the length of the scroll… it becomes questionable.

While replication of research is important, one must be sure to use a diverse selection of subjects to compensate for any discrepancies caused by subject idiosyncrasies.

One may argue that a follow-up study may be warranted for any specific individual subject, yet without that additional, supplementary testing on diverse subjects, the follow-up study might present the appearance of some sort of emotional attachment.

I do apologize for the tone of my rebuke.

Cutting costs and laying people off makes the books look slightly better (more cash on hand) which makes the stock price jump, which is all these ghouls want because they’re going to sell off on the high, and then bail out.

That’s not how it works. Making money today is the only thing these ghouls care about, ruining a company or brand is just dandy because they won’t be holding the bag when it bursts. They’ll have passed it to someone else. Someone else who will then work to gut the company even more before selling it to someone who will gut it and close it down.

And nothing of real value will have been made, but lots of rich asshats will be slightly richer.

To be fair, they’ve also earned that hatred. Several times over.

There was a podcast I listened to some time back where one of the people was describing exotic pets, particularly lions and tigers, and how their uncle had kept some, and they were told to never let the cats play bite, because they would keep doing it into adulthood, and then you’d have a dead owner.

This is why Joe Exotic’s “Tiger petting zoo” had such a high body count. Turns out that meth and tigers shouldn’t mix.