Itch.oi is like the old flash games sites like Kongregate

This is why so many festivals just fill up their lineups with tribute acts. People mostly want to sing and dance to songs they know. If the band is a few years old then chances are the tribute act will be more fun, because they’re mostly fans enjoying pretending to be The Stone Roses or whoever, while most artists who were famous a while back resent having to do the songs they wrote 30 years ago.

Just this summer I was talking to one of the managers at a semi-large festival. They used to always have original artists whose moment had passed, but one year the orgniser was persuaded to go with tributes. His expenditure went down to about 10%, and his takings, reviews, etc, remained the same. It’s been tributes ever since.

FWIW, the last time Apple released a new product with the prefix “i” was the iPad in 2010. They favour “Apple” now, as in “Apple Watch”, “Apple TV”, and “Apple Vision Pro”.

They found that you can’t copyright/trademark “i” as a prefix in and of itself. That means that while nobody else can bring out a product called “iPhone” or “iPod”, they absolutely can bring out a product called, say, “iLaptop”. And that’s what people did for all kinds of products, hoping that people would buy them, mistakenly thinking they were Apple products.

So Apple abandoned it as branding on everything that wasn’t already well-known for that branding.

Your point is right in spirit, but wrong on that one specific point.

That Avril Lavigne is dead. From her second album onwards it’s been Melissa, a woman initially hired as s lookalike by her record company for things like meet-and-greets. When Avril died, the record company covered it up in order to keep making money.

I love it because:

• it’s so blatantly nonsense
• Lavigne has very distinctive teeth and the idea of finding an exact lookalike itself is incredibly unlikely
• people believe it anyway
• there’s all kind of videos comparing live footage and how different her signing voice is
• some people** really** believe it
• it was started by a guy on his blog with an explicit statement at the start that it wasn’t true and his intent was to demonstrate how easy it was to create a conspiracy theory…

That’s almost certainly true. And i believe him when he says those tattoos are commonplace, that marines don’t consider the original meaning, and that he knows black & Latino people with them.

But i think, at the very least, not getting it covered up before choosing to run for office demonstrates a staggering lack of political acumen and is a very large indication of a lack of good judgement.

I mean, we don’t give ordinary people a pass if they fly a Confederate flag and say it’s just because they’re from the US South and it’s meaning for them is entirely divorced from slavery. Same thing here, except politicians are supposed to be held to higher standards.

I’d also say that the times the US is finding itself in, with rapidly encroaching fascism, open racism, and the slightly-more-gradual embracing of Nazi symbolism from the current administration, makes it even more important for the left to reject someone with a literal Nazi tattoo - regardless of how they got it and what it may mean to them.

The etymology is from “t”, being short for “truth”.

I’ve said this before, but I listen to a politics podcast and one of their commentators was in the US for several weeks in the run-up to the last election. They said that over and over again they heard variations on “I hate Trump and everything he stands for, but I couldn’t trust the country to a woman”. That includes people who’d voted for Obama and Biden.

Obviously that wasn’t the only factor, and it doesn’t mean that AOC couldn’t win, but we definitely shouldn’t hand-wave it away, either.

The next president will probably be Vance. Trump has major health issues. He’s unlikely to be alive in 2028.

This is wise when reading or hearing anything

Right? What don’t people get? The world would be a better place if everybody lived by this wisdom.

Say “ma-ah!” at them.

That’s apparently cat for “come here”.

I’ll just quote what you said:

If it were brought up as a suggestion that didn’t happen, that would be even weirder than it actually happening. As a writer, you don’t go around finding reasons to block your character’s ideas, because that’s a horribly anti-climactic thing to do, teasing your readers for no purpose, but worst of all, you don’t get to see how the action pans out if it does happen, which is the primary thing that makes fiction interesting to begin with.

My characterisation of what you said is s lot closer to reality than yours is. Perhaps that’s not what you intended to say, but it is what you did say.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but don’t underestimate the role of misogyny. A commentator on a podcast i listen to was in the US in the run-up to the last election and they said that something they heard over and over again in the people they talked to was variations on “i hate Trump and everything he stands for, but i couldn’t trust the country to a woman”

It is a major plot point in the book. The fact that you skipped over it doesn’t mean that it isn’t.

And to claim that the main thing that makes fiction interesting is every character’s expressed desires being istantly granted is a wild position to take. In this particular instance there are any number of ways you can make a child sexual abuse survivor expressing herself in an unhealthy way into a meaningful, cathartic moment without her go through with what her initial instincts suggest.

Do you mean that when the concurrence for the overturning of Roe v Wade said that they should also have another look at marriage equality, that meant that this was on the roadmap? Huh. Who could have possibly seen this coming?

IIRC, in supplementary material (maybe the Animatrix?) it’s revealed that the machines kept trying to sue for peace, but the humans insisted it had to be genocide, so the machines settled on the Matrix as their way not to have to kill all humans.

Pyramids of Mars

People always praise his characters, but they always come across as flat caricatures to me. And he seems to have maybe 10 of them that he just repeats over and over again.

Clive Barker says that the story is him working out his feelings about discovering he’s gay, and his experiences at BDSM nightclubs

Oh, trust me, I’ve had the “right, I need you to do x for the plot”, “well, I wouldn’t do that so I’m not going to” conversation with characters I’m writing.

But, let’s give King the benefit of the doubt and say that that’s how and why he came up with the idea…that’s a reason to have Beverly suggest it. Not a reason to have it actually happen.

Also, if “relating to people sexually” was a consistent character trait of hers, I don’t remember it actually coming up in the novel before that point. It’s been a long time since I read it and maybe she does proposition people often and inappropriately, but I remember thinking that the orgy came somewhat out of the blue, and I’d have thought that if it was the natural conclusion of a theme woven carefully through the narrative more people would bring that up as a defence whenever this topic comes up.