Just doing a tiny bit of research…

This is cool news. It’s always great when politicians who think their jobs are secure get a reminder that voters really do get to decide who will represent them. That said…

• Sri Lanka has a form of ranked choice voting. It looks like it hasn’t seen much use, with the two major parties trading the Presidency back and forth for some time, but it exists, and that’s a lot better than first past the post, which a lot of us are stuck with for the time being. If you’re trapped in America like me, then I definitely recommend agitating and organizing for voting reform, but until that happens, voting as if it doesn’t exist yet, because it doesn’t.

• This election had fewer total votes cast than the last California gubernatorial election. Major political upheavals like this can happen, but they are more likely to happen in smaller elections. If you care about outsider political parties, the best move is to organize at the local or state level, and build a respectable foundation. The next time I hear someone talk about voting third party at the US Presidential level, I’m going to have a Ralph Nader / Florida / Bush vs. Gore flavored aneurysm.

“Big, beautiful submarine captains come up to me. Covered with muscles, muscles like nobody has ever seen before. Tears running down their cheeks. They say ‘Sir, thank you for sending us to the South China Sea! Nobody ever sent us there before!’ But I don’t get angry! I should get angry and sometimes I do get angry, but with these captains I don’t get angry. They say ‘Thank you, sir! Thank you!’ But nobody ever thought of South China before! I came up with that, but nobody gives me credit for South China!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, thinking about Abraham Lincoln or Bill Clinton: “Yeah!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, aware of Donald Trump, with Tucker Carlson waiting in the wings: “Oh no!”

I’m just imagining being the poor sap working for a foreign power trying to extract useful information from his cottage cheese brain.

“Do you have nuclear subs in the South China Sea?”

“We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame. … The biggest problem we have is nuclear — nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That’s in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.”

“Where! Are! The nuclear! Subs! Deployed!”

“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible.”

• Reservoir Dogs / Pulp Fiction / Kill Bill

• Stand By Me

• Dirty Dancing

• The Lost Boys

Draft horses: “Am I a joke to you?”

There was a Limited Run Games release , and although they seem to be sold out online, I saw some physical copies in their retail store just the other day.

I’d be curious to see that chart for a Toyota Yaris. I drove one for a few years and it was almost unnerving how little hood it had.

There’s a tough lesson I learned about trying to get my friends into board games: It’s easier to turn gamers into your friends than it is to turn your friends into gamers. I’ve learned that some of my friends are never going to share my interests as much as I’d like, but that just means I needed to find people who were already in whatever hobby and start hanging out with them and some of them will eventually be your real friends.

Making and keeping friends as an adult is way more difficult than it seems it should be, but it’s a painful reality.

Star Trek: TNG

Batman: The Animated Series

Space Ghost Coast to Coast

It’s very easy to play the Nazi card.

I went to a Viking festival and had a great time, but I wonder about how often they have to look askance at the people who are really into runes and Thor hammer symbols.

Sexual positions are locked behind tiered paywalls. The most basic ones are free, but as they get more interesting, you have to pay increasing royalty fees.

Chemtrail conspiracy theorists in absolute shambles.

Donald Trump is Pantone 16-1449: Gold Flame.

You must never go there.

That’s basically a plot point in Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, where visitors have to pay for the amount of air they intend to breathe while visiting the moon.

Also, Idea: invent a copyrightable method of filtering or otherwise treating air. Release your “specially modified” air into the atmosphere. Start charging for every time someone inhales one of your AyreMolecuulz™.

But if the viewer speaks French then they would understand the French audio dialogue, so if a (deaf) viewer speaks French, then they ought to have the opportunity to read the French subtitled dialogue.

Adjacent pet peeve: When there’s captioning, and a character in a movie speaks a foreign language, and the captions read “[Speaking in French]”, or even worse, “[Speaking in foreign language]”.

Just caption “Jette-le à l’arrière du camion et emmène-le hors de la ville.”! If I do or don’t speak French, and if I can hear or if I’m deaf, then the caption would serve the same purpose either way!

The Disney movie Moana made me furious with this, in the flashback during “We Know the Way,” when the islanders are singing (I assume) Polynesian, but the lyrics are just “[Singing in foreign language]”. The fuck, Disney?! You’re usually good at translation!

Like they say in the Altered State of Druggachusetts, “Only take what you can handle, and always know your dealer!”