hayden_horn

yeah, the fact that all uk programming is now live news is telling. the palace would tell them to knock it off if it wasn't very serious. god save the queen.

yeah, it's not a huge surprise as podcasts and such have risen so spectacularly. it is a weird thing, though. I prefer local voices to national ones most times. i really enjoyed jeff ward with ed clements for instance. great local voices sometimes just talking local nostalgia is good local content, imo. or local stories, or how national stories affect local stuff. i really enjoy the new morning show with matt and bob on 93.7. it's a bit formulaic at times, but i listen regularly on the podcast. chuy is the hidden assassin on that show. dude is sneak attack funny, but you gotta be ready for it or you'll miss it. but these guys make shit, and i think it's because radio hasn't figured out how to exist in the modern world. to be fair, the fcc has really shit the bed here with a bunch of arcane and old-fashioned rules about airwaves that mix things up unnecessarily, but i see no reason why two local sports channels cannot exist in this market is obscene. austin is nearly top ten in terms of population nationwide! there's no reason why it shouldn't work. but the ad and ratings models are both massively fucked from my outsider perspective. i don't know how much a typical prime drive time 30 second ad runs, but i'm guessing it's not enough to sustain long-term quality content. we have so many fucking local businesses, it's mind boggling to me that they will put billboards on bowie baseball fields but not buy a radio spot.

can you put a little context around this? did he not show up? they say anything on air?

also, they have the most heavy metal bands per capita: https://finland.fi/arts-culture/finnish-metropolises-vie-to-win-capital-of-metal/#:~:text=Finland is the heavy metal,other nation in the world.

seriously. criticized for going to music festivals? shit, i'd rather have a leader doing cool young people shit like music festivals than old white man shit like golfing. hell yeah, go have your kind of fun. i love finland. the people are nice. the food is fucking weird, but as long as you like salty fish, you should be good.

https://www.kvue.com/article/news/education/schools/austin-isd-tea-recapture-710-million/269-2f5ea2dd-8e32-4f62-ae0f-2ab08ed2ee27 the state is purposefully strangling austin (or letting us do it) with property values. aisd is fucked for many reasons, some of which include some overinflation of admin, in my opinion, but when half your shit is gone before you even start, it's sort of a non-starter.

so, uhhh, that's weird. should i nuke that shit from orbit? i have no idea who that is, and the ip is clean, but they clearly have it out for vapa. right now, i'm thinking nuke from orbit, but i really want to see where this goes.

9 years. for some pot. they convicted her on drug smuggling. i mean, we knew this was a foregone conclusion as soon as she was arrested, right? as someone who travels (more past tense since covid, though it might pick up again soon) to many foreign countries, i'm sympathetic to the "don't fuck around and you won't find out" philosophy for the most part, except for a few exceptions, one of which almost landed me in a holland jail, but that's a story for another time. this situation, however, is amply clear in that the russian government set her up. i don't really even care if she was carrying a couple of thc vape cartridges and is technically guilty of possession. everything about this from the jump was political and that goes to the highest level in russia. putin wanted her guilty. he probably even came up with the number 9 years. we should not let the idea that we should not domestically imprison non-violent drug offenders stop us from trying to right this foreign injustice. if she got a commensurate charge and sentence, say possession and 2 years, or whatever, yeah, that sucks, but you play with fire, you'll get burned. there are several sacred things in this world that you don't ever mess with. one of them happens to be another man's fries. another happens to be russian largesse.

btw, live youtube link: live comments are chef's fucking kiss too

is this grounds for ineffective counsel? the giving away of the texts, i mean. judge is so done with alex

i have a weird perspective on this issue, i suppose. my two sons are adhd and were very poorly served by their austin isd elementary public school. so we moved to a free, public, secular charter school, where my wife eventually worked as well. it was a great experience. class sizes were smaller, there was more attention paid to the students, etc, and my boys are further along now (the youngest going into aisd high school the oldest already there after doing aisd middle school), and my wife now works in aisd. the problems i see are largely top down rather than bottom up, as is often the case in many organizations. aisd as an organization is a bit of a mess in and of itself, but it's also completely fucking hamstrung by the state and recapture. couple that with falling enrollment, and you have a dying school district that doesn't need to be dying. add in a massive layer of self-serving administration (that is a state-wide problem, to be honest), and you have a healthy appetite for public school alternatives that help serve the demands of more needy students, but that are still publicly funded, because believe it or not, folks who cannot afford private school tuition can actually still care about the educations of their children. republicans are trying to kill public schools, when of course they should be trying to fix them. but why bother. they don't want to fix anything. they want to break everything. fuck them kids is the republican mantra.

it's a weird kind of psychology. i would argue that it's not evil, like @NameAlreadyInUse said. it's just sad.

nah, peleton did that

for real. either she was used to being above scrutiny or this is a hell of a coincidence. i'm inclined to believe that, like anything else, russian security lulled her (and everyone else they want) into a false sense of security by overlooking tons of shit for years. now that she can be important politically, of course they'll find something on her. but also, 2 cartridges would last her like two weeks with some disciplined intake. and two cartridges is nothing. so i've heard. so she no doubt had a domestic supplier too. i once left a lighter in my luggage on a domestic china flight. they pulled me out of line and dragged me into an interrogation room until i found the lighter in my dop kit. they refused to give me any clues as to what i had done wrong. i was sweating to say the least. that's forgetting something. i get it, going from a state where weed is legal to another state is one thing, but leaving the COUNTRY, one needs to be sure of what is carrying.

seriously. i don't even take american courts at their word most of the time.

haha, okay. maybe she did, maybe she didn't. i'm inclined to not believe the russian authorities, and citing her confession in court as any sort of actual evidence is hilarious.

that's hardly anything. this country is so backwards.

posrep

drugs weren't planted, but they were clearly "found." i'm willing to bet residue on a vape pen, not even the oil itself. she was purposefully targeted, imo. russians apparently don't take a dump without a plan, but they completely submarine their international athlete market for...some kind of political endgame? i don't get it.

weird. the consistency inherent in this take. this is the cloak room.

but see, i kind of also agree with this. go to russia and some russian gangster shit happens to you? well...

as someone who studied russian in high school, is fascinated with russian culture, art, and history, and who very much wants to see much of that country.... fuck all that. i ain't going there anytime soon, if ever. i'd love to see syria and iraq as well. however, i feel for griner. i don't even care if she was set up - her detention is bullshit. it's very clearly a political prosecution.

nothing out of her testimony surprised me at all. but i'm happy it's on the record. the guy is a fucking lunatic. we know this. those of us who care anyway. but, i don't think it'll matter.

plenty of things that were a bit inconsistent, but on the whole, i think we got a pretty nice little series. obi wan has a terrible memory. doesn't recall ever owning a droid, doesn't let on he knows leia (nor does she, after he dies during her escape, etc); shit, threepio and r2 were with him the whole goddamn time. completely unnecessary, but not worth talking about here. here, i thought they did about as well as they could without wiping leia's mind. not sure reva was necessary but i see why they needed a young face to represent the younglings and to try and get her (selfish, sort of) revenge. this was peak darth vader. i loved the bit at the end of rogue one (whatever, fuck all you cynical assholes) and i loved darth's badassery in obi wan. i don't think anyone could beat peak vader, not even peak luke. they did such a great job with him and some of the parallels. the hoth callback, obi wan and the fire, and the lightsaber training which was a scene i told my wife that we needed in the prequels. felt nice for hayden christiansen to get a bit of redemption for that role. were there things they could've done better? yeah. but let's not forget that leia fully mouth kissed luke in empire. there were plenty of weird continuity issues in the ot as well. these weren't deal breakers for me. i thought it could've been a bit tighter, but i kind of disagree with @henrygandorf (happy birthday!) about a movie for this content. but 6 episodes did feel long, and even then they were 0:45 etc, including recaps and credits. so maybe it could've been a longer movie. but i had a great time with it. vader doing vader things like breaking necks of randos...goddamn, perfect shit there. just dragging that one person because he could...damn. so great.