The big news over the weekend in Arizona has been the weather. Evidently, here was only 2” or so of rain yesterday, but thats enough to completely flood out the streets since they designed them to flood and direct the flow to certain parts of town. Which is fine unless you’re driving, and have to decide if your 5” of ground clearance is really enough to attempt to circumvent Arizona’s Stupid Motorist Law.
My kids are happier now that its sunny out since their sports and activities can now be had, instead of being bored out of their minds at home.
¡enalces!
The storm that hit me was the remnants of a hurricane that went through Mexico. They had much worse results. That’s pretty much the news from Mexico.
Perfect, Milei becomes Mi Caudillo.
I am going to assume the answer is direct and/or indirect US involvement.
The person worthy of the Nobel Committee’s attention seems to think someone else should’ve won. Weird.
Spain is doing something right? Weird.
I admit I heard the phrase “nothing more” in conversation and decided to look up today’s tune.
Wait – why are people consuming english language slop? I’d expect the streaming to be in the local vernacular.
English is the global lingua franca (although Spanish is a distant second, and I see learning Spanish as becoming a necessary life skill, like learning to drive or swim).
Even if that weren’t the case, do you want to watch Manon of the Spring over and over again because the offerings in your language aren’t as plentiful as in English? People want good stories and English-speaking people provide more of them.
I’m kind of shocked but also not at all shocked that Spain is right up there. They’re an incredibly creative people with a very rich history, and they have a bit of a different outlook on the world than the rest of Europe or even the rest of the Mediterranean countries.
I suppose they could be watching the back catalog, I suppose.
I’ve come to associate streaming with garbage content.
You know what you’ll never see? Me Firsting in Spanish.
Never going to learn that language. Fuck them.
I edit gud.
El primero es el mejor
Tua mater caligula gerit.
Streaming is not straight-to-video slop (although there is some of that).
There is A LOT of really good original work, creative, shit that would never get on network TV because they’re too busy putting out stupid sitcom retreads with a live audience that claps and laughs when told to like trained seals, or medical/cop/fire/NCIS dramas that all descend into who’s sleeping with whom and have the same tried-and-true gimmicks, punchy lines, and plot holes.
Amazon Prime did The Expanse, which was top-notch and utterly wonderful.
Bro recommended Severance on AppleTV, which will just blow your mind in an Inception sort of way, and Ted Lasso is a gem.
Hulu has Only Murders in the Building, which is brilliant.
Netflix had Wednesday, the first season of which was adorable. I haven’t seen Stranger Things, but apparently, it was excellent.
Those are only the things I’ve seen, off the top of my head.
I don’t have that stuff anymore because I stopped watching because I have the attention span of a gnat.
Non, caligae eius magnae sunt.
Spanish is a necessary life skill if you’re living in a country where Spanish is an official language. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As for our host’s assertion, I am not clear on why “generous federal and regional incentives” is such a good thing for Spain…?
Only after SyFy cancelled it.
When cable came out 40 years ago, they promised us “narrowcasting”. Networks would specialized, and niche genres would have a place to call home. It didn’t work out that way.
Streaming is beginning to approach this. But the economics are still fucked up. Three years between “seasons” is not sustainable.
I looked up how much people are paying for streaming. I found this article. Those are cable prices when the content is spread over different services.
But for every Expanse how many Rings of Power do they make? A handful of gems in a river of shit don’t really improve my view of the delivery medium.
TV was never an ideal medium either. I drifted away from it for much the same reasons.
Narrowcasting died when the History Channel discovered they could make twice the money on half the budget by cancelling all the shows recreating famous battles and replacing them with ancient aliens and ghost hunting.
About 2 years ago we added everything up, and between cable and streaming services we were paying over $300 per month to watch TV. We dropped cable and all but one streaming service, and of course kept our Internet. We have a Roku, and they have their own free TV channels, so we had that too.
We’re still doing just fine, although when we upgraded our phone plan they gave us another 2 streaming services for an extra $3 a month. We had been just mindlessly watching anything at the end of the day, and now we still do that, but it’s usually on the free channel.
Hulu has Only Murders in the Building, which is brilliant.
Just don’t think about the plots too much (they’re all ridiculous and make no sense).
I don’t do any of the streaming services or cable.
I’ve heard very good things about IPTV. It’s dirt cheap and gives you everything, especially sports.
But I tend to just pirate shit, so…
Got a warning from MGM for downloading From within seconds.
Wait, isn’t Manon of the Spring in French?
Yes.
Cmon UCS, you didn’t like Zarabanda?
According to the first article series I did for Glibs – I don’t like anything.
When I was there in ~1988, there was one street in particular which really needed “NO WAKE ZONE” signs when it rained.
And so now (((@OMWC))) is far closer to [[[the next Prophet of the Lord]]] than I’ll ever be.
Spurred by generous federal and regional incentives, production has boomed in Spain, with more shows increasing in terms of both quality and volume. The Spanish government’s active investment in the TV and film industry has bolstered local creators and also attracted foreign productions to shoot in Spain.
The world would be a barren wasteland without government subsidies.
And- are they bringing back spaghetti westerns?
Hollywood needs to — they’ve run out of their fistful of dollars.
I’m sure they can find a few dollars more.
Thats not good or bad but ugly
I wouldn’t know. When it comes to spaghetti westerns, my name is nobody.
I agree, rubber bullets should not be used to break up riotous assemblies. Jacketed hollow points work much better both to end the current riot and forestall the next.
Replace the fire hoses with vehicle mounted flamethrowers.
That will disperse the crowd PDQ.
In an open square your idea has great merit, but for clearing looters out of stores it has some drawbacks. I say we combine our plans for maximum efficiency
Just close the doors and turn on the Zyklon B sprayers.
The fires can be put out, the cyanide would be a problem for uninvolved people.
Night of the Long Pig?
The article was so fawning that I must assume the man was actually carrying a machete and threatening cops. He most certainly was not singing Kumbaya to catch a bunch of rubber bullets.
I read a bit, rolled my eyes, and moved on.
I don’t believe any of it.
The old Israeli (?) method of dealing with violent demonstrations has some merit (assuming that your ethical concerns take a backseat to ‘eliminating riots and rioters.’)
To wit: deploy spotter teams around the fringes of demonstrations to observe and identify the organizers (generally easily identified through their behavior – with Antifa riots they’re usually the ones wearing the reflective work vests.) Once identified, the team shoots the organizer through the lung with a silenced .22 rifle. This is unlikely to kill them outright, but will absolutely require treatment at a hospital, which gives the police/internal security the opportunity to pick them up for questioning and further intel exploitation.
Cannons packed with nails and lengths of chain.
Grape shot.
Just a whiff
That’s referred to as Purple Shot these days
+1 spaghetti western.
Which is fine unless you’re driving, and have to decide if your 5” of ground clearance is really enough to attempt to circumvent Arizona’s Stupid Motorist Law.
Australia says hi.
That’s what it looks like in the northern part of the state.
In a super liberal state in a super liberal town and county of that state.
https://montclairlocal.news/2025/10/montclair-speaker-series-called-off-after-ta-nehisi-coates-cancels-cites-security-concerns/
Coward.
Hey, anytime he speaks he is at serious risk of being found to be insane, mendacious, or simply retarded.
OFFS!
The guy is one of the most celebrated race-hustlers in history. What a drama queen. I don’t believe a word of any of that.
^This.
Amazon Prime did The Expanse, which was top-notch and utterly wonderful.
And then they excreted The Boys and Good Omens part two, which cured me of ever watching A Prime content again.
The Boys started out well…
I don’t know about that, Starlight sucked at the start.
That’s Deep, (((Jarflax… really deep.
Well, I mean, I didn’t mention the second season of Wednesday for a reason.
HOWEVER, very often sophomore seasons aren’t that good because the writers weren’t expecting to get renewed so they have to scramble for a storyline. Then it evens out in season 3.
Let’s see, I dipped on The Boys at the beginning of season 3. I don’t remember why now, but I was no longer interested.
@kinnath above
Oh, I ABSOLUTELY agree. This is one reason I just stopped watching things. I forgot about the story and stopped being interested in the characters.
@ucs above
A. I’m not going to copypasta a Wiki list of every good show coming out of all streaming channels.
B. Your view of the delivery medium isn’t fact, and it doesn’t negate anything I said about the overall quality of the offerings. Of COURSE there’s going to be straight-to-video slop, but that’s absolutely no worse than every insipid sitcom the networks put out. Even M*A*S*H was awful in retrospect because of that stupid laughtrack.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing for or against except that you equate “streaming” with the straight-to-video bins at Walmart, and thus trash it as if that’s true. But, okay. That’s fine.
Season 2 of Wednesday wasn’t horrible… other than I don’t know who her parents are… because they damned well are not Morticia and Gomez Addams. (Gomez in particular seemed completely emasculated… “I’ll just hide at the base of a ladder and let my wife and daughter fence the mad scientist zombie…” Yeah… that screams Gomez :eyeroll:)
I’m not sure I’d pitch it to anyone as must-see-TV, but it didn’t completely turn to suck like The Boys (I think I gave up late Season 2)
Three years between “seasons” is not sustainable.
Laughs at your impatience in anime fan
I didn’t watch Wednesday, but it’s pretty typical of Netflix and most of these streaming services (with some notable and strangely successful exceptions, imagine that) to completely emasculate their male characters.
@Jar – Wait, you don’t start watching Anime after production has wrapped and localization complete?
Yes, I bow out at the point the men are being emasculated. I had that feeling about Gomez in the first season, and I’m like, hey, you can have a heroine-centric story without cutting off all the men’s dicks.
For all Gomez’s fawning over Morticia, he was NEVER emasculated. He was in love with his wife, but very chill and stepped up when necessary, which is mostly what women like. And he would not let his kids run the show.
Until Wednesday.
@UCS Ideally I would, but determining if something is getting more seasons can be… interesting, and some of the one’s I started early on especially were only one or two seasons in when I started, Freiren and Spy x Family especially.
Well, this is why people write fanfiction and (now) can put something into ChatGPT that says, “Write a whole story with X plot with Y tropes and Z characters in the style of ABC Author” and get something to fap to until the author can put something else out.
It takes one weekend to consume Cryptonomicon, but how long did it take to write it? 6 years.
It takes one weekend to consume Dunham, but how long did it take me to write it? 25 years.
I wasn’t enamored with The Boys either.
Prime did do Upload, which I enjoyed as a lighter show; they did do Leverage: Redemption, which while going further left, has still been fun; and they’re doing Invincible, which I’ve had very few complaints about.
Regarding cable TV and streaming in general, when I retire TT can jolly well start paying for the cable TV and/or streaming (the latter of which we don’t currently do) or we ditch the cable TV and only watch what we can get over the digital antenna.
It will be fun times when Politico selectively quotes the comments here.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-young-gop-club-members-00592146?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR6Y3IdwEQXl1XraDjQNfyw18wpMO0VQlkKKpxxjYSP1V-rRb_p2vXTanUI7jA_aem_7J5gXJyDrXaMwuJ0uqTkyg
Oh, my vapors! Young men troll and shit talk each other — often turning into the equivalent of Dead Baby jokes! I do declare, Politico… you have shaken me to my delicate core!
(Maybe just maybe we can realize that this stuff happens, no one means anything by it in 999 out of 1000 cases and if we’d just stop dancing on eggshells due to too many Karens in HR, people would probably get along better as they could recognize a joke, take a joke and give a joke right back… But no…. have to continue to try to make everyone as safe as a 3 year old pretty pretty princess… until the barbarians storm the gate and won’t be talked nicely to, at any rate…)
I know. I don’t see anything too odd there. Just shooting shit.
Has Politico bother to comment on the guy running in Virginia who called for murder of his political opponents and their children? If not, they can shut the fuck up about off the cuff humor.
See, that’s different because reasons, many reasons. Which makes it totally different.
/Politicunt
Japanese Government Calls on Sora 2 Maker OpenAI to Refrain From Copyright Infringement, Says Characters From Manga and Anime Are ‘Irreplaceable Treasures’ That Japan Boasts to the World
Well they already borrowed the name from Japan.
I don’t know about the video generating new stuff, but all my playing around with image generation and text generation models has told me that the computer has absolutely no ability to create. You have to handhold it on every detail and drag it kicking and screaming to make something within a broad margin of error of something “readable”. It will still be bad, repeditive, and constantly lose track of details.
Image generation at the consumer level is useful for memes and social media and little else.
Pro models seem to have Hollywood quite worried.
I’m still sure that if not herded like a swarm of feral cats, it wouldn’t make anything even watchable.
Fixed that for you.
As for pro-level image generation models…I don’t see any level of AI turning out another Casablanca or The Third Man. But I also don’t see any modern Hollywood studios turning that level of work out either. Perhaps what can be destroyed by AI, should be?
So, we see what kind of Prompts Sheldon has been giving his LLM.
UCS is right about the hand-holding.
Having AI generate anything requires a level of precision usually reserved for teaching toddlers how to put a fork in the drawer in its proper place. Not only that, but the first image it generates is usually pretty okay. But THEN you start refining it and it gets worse and worse with each iteration no matter how precise you are or what instructions you give it.
DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING ELSE BUT THIS THING I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU. [explicit instructions]
*changes everything else but gets your instructions wrong*
I ask ChatGPT (yes, I pay for it) about a lot of weird things. Code, marketing strategies, website revamp recommendations. After about the third time I start out with “this is what I want to do” ENTER, and it starts talking about what I should do but has assumed what I want to do VERY BADLY, I always start out a chat with DO NOT ASSUME ANYTHING. WAIT UNTIL I TELL YOU I’M DONE BEFORE YOU SPEAK.
Then it says “Okay” in about 50 words.
Also, it’s so fucking OBSEQUIOUS. At least I can yell and curse at it and it’ll cheerfully tell me I’m right and/or that my frustration is totally understandable.
What I LIKE about it is that I can ask questions in my usual manner most humans find incomprehensible. This is why my googlefu skillz are not mad. I can also give it screenshots and it’ll be able to tell me the problem. *image* This is what’s happening. I want it to do X. It usually comes up with the right answer or close enough to it I can parse out the rest myself.
The nice thing about AI furry pr0n is that when the LLM flips out and starts adding in extra limbs, I can write all that off as OC canon.
…
In reality, outside the repulsive sewer of my imagination, most of my LLM prompts are along the lines of, “I need a Python/PHP/PowerShell script to do X, Y, and Z.” Then I spend a few hours debugging it, instead of a few days writing something from the ground up.
My latest transcription gig is for a big company, of which my friend-former-boss recruited me to help her out of a bind. Okay, no problem. I’m a contractor, as are most (medical) transcriptionists (which means they use their own equipment) and I’ve had formatting clients galore. I have a setup. It’s s00per d00per swell, and I’m not giving that up.
HOWEVER, this company requires me to use their laptop (hence my previous KVM switch frustrations spilling out), which is…onerous. Really onerous.
But my OCD document-formatting soul, with just enough computer knowledge to fuck things up royally, gets in there and sees the templates they’re using (trust me, they were bad), and I go to my friend and say, “Dafuq.” That leads her down a rabbit hole of inefficiencies. Oh, hey, I format documents for a living. This is what I think needs to happen, and this is how I’d do it, and oh, look, this is what I did. Friend is dazzled, goes on a crusade to fix a problem that, when fixed, will pave the way to a ginormous contract that is currently on the fence.
Yay!
I go to MY setup because, remember, I’m a contractor, and I a) don’t have anything I need on their computer and b) am not allowed to have anything I need on their computer to do what I need to do. And so, I email stuff to myself. NOTHING has patient info on it. I don’t need it to work over some document templates and work a little VBA voodoo.
Got the prototype up and running last night, went to bed very pleased with myself, friend is pleased, everybody’s happy–until she requests permission to send me the rest of the templates to complete this project for this contract they want.
O.
M.
G.
Shit hit the fan, and now IT is tracking everything I’ve done online/with their computer. Like, duh. I would assume you’d get alerts if I did something awful, but I haven’t.
So my friend’s panicking because the company is treating me like an employee who did a boo-boo, and I said,
“They DO understand this is what I do for a living and that I have been doing this for 17 years and I’m an actual company, right?”
“They don’t care.”
“What makes me ANY different from any OTHER outside vendor/consultant they have to hire that does NOT have to use their equipment to do the job they hired them to do, and don’t tell me they’ve never done that.”
“That’s a good point. I’ll ask. But you will probably get a strongly worded email.”
“Please gently remind them I am not an employee and they are my client. I’ve fired clients before.”
“Okay. Hold tight.”
KPIs don’t apply to me, assholes.
IT for anything beyond of group of 20 people is asshoe? Say it ain’t so.
My husband is my IT department when I’ve completely fucked things up. I have no dealings with IT departments, so I wouldn’t know.
God help my wife if I am her IT department.
I actually am my wife and son’s (and God help me… my parents’ — those are fun phone calls at 8:30 pm when I go to sleep at 7 because “The AppleTV isn’t doing what I think it should”)… I like to think I am a benevolent IT Overlord for them… Mainly try to make sure they have backups and don’t do stupid crap that might give us a virus, really.
You know what’s really bad when your mom calls you because the cable isn’t working AGAIN?
When it really is the cable company’s fault and they won’t own up to it until you get nasty.
Nope!
Regarding Spanish productions on Netflix. I started watching “The Money Heist,” in Spanish with subtitles because I’m like a film snob like my dawg R.J. I liked it well enough but tapped out when something better came along.
BTW, when they are planning for a global market they often shoot everything twice, first in the native language of the country of production, then again in English for the global market. Even if the actor’s accent is bad, like Indian call center bad, it’s easy to overdub the physical actor with a better voice actor. Most dialogue is actually re-recorded in a sound booth anyway, this thing called looping. The on-set sound is generally only used as a reference point for looping.
I couldn’t get into The Money Heist. Alpha Males was pretty entertaining though, but a little creepy at times.
Tulip got me started on The Beforeigners, which is Norwegian. It had subtitles. It was lovely.
Season 2 comes along and this time, they dubbed it. The voices were NOT AT ALL like the actors’, that I’d come to know, and I couldn’t bear the cognitive dissonance, so I bailed halfway into S2E1.
Someone here recommended the Norwegian Occupied a few years back. That was good (until the last season)
Call out accepted!
There is another way – such as the Spanish version of Dracula shot with different actors on the same set, during the night when Todd Browning wrapped his film. That is a very cool way to make a film for a foreign market. No dubs, and different actors on the same set. That’s awesome!
Tonio, try watching La Reina del Sur. Totes good.
https://www.netflix.com/title/70205672
I just had another pusher of TPO PPA solar stop by. I can’t wait for the credits to expire.
Another thing about ChatGPT that didn’t frustrate me so much as amuse me, which is one reason I’m kind of not scared of it (at the moment).
I fed it one of my novels. I wanted it to analyze it for very specific things I’m too lazy to map out. I was very explicit about my instructions. Yes, include X, but not Y. No, I don’t want to know how many instances of articles there are.
It crunched through and did EXACTLY what I asked it to.
Everything speck of data was utterly useless for my purposes.
The data wasn’t WRONG, but it also didn’t address the question AT ALL.
====
Saw this. Howled.
====
Then one day I asked it for something “unobtrusively obtrusive” and it almost took umbrage at the thought. “That’s an oxymoron. These are the definitions. Something can’t be at once unobtrusive AND obtrusive.”
Well, I mean. I guess we know how YOU did on your Nuance 431 final exam last semester.
Oops. https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2025/10/13/danville-teachers-defense-he-meant-to-send-video-of-his-genitals-to-prostitute-not-teen-girl/
Was the prostitute another teen girl?
Was the prostitute the same teen girl?
(There’s a Danville in VA, too. It’s probably about culturally equivalent to the one in the Bay area.)
Narrator: It is.
Male cheer coach, more Iikely a male teen prostitute.
I don’t think I’d ever trust a male cheerleading coach personally.
And speaking of novels, never in the history of publishing did I think I would need to register a copyright. But, in the spirit of not being half-assed about shit, I did it.
Turns out, that was the difference between a $3,000 class-action settlement and not.
My first novel was used to train LLM, and to submit a claim, a copyright registration number was required.
Thank you, Past Self.
Birdbrains of a feather
Letitia James, New York’s indicted attorney general, spoke at a campaign rally for mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani in her first public appearance since the Justice Department charged her with bank fraud.
James, a longtime foe of President Trump, received a standing ovation from thousands of supporters attending the Democratic nominee’s event Monday night at the United Palace Theater in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood.
James did not mention Mr. Trump by name, but remained defiant in her remarks.
Fight The Man. Speak truth to power.
I hope AOC and Bernie were there.
Grifters of the World, unite!
I am watching Lust for a Vampire and feel like I am watching a Victorian Ozzy Osbourne. The resemblance is uncanny
Shadow of the Vampire is still my favorite movie in that genre.
That is on my list to post when it comes up free streaming. I will post it with the version of Nosferatu that has the New Wave soundtrack. Double feature!
<em.The exchange is part of a trove of Telegram chats — obtained by POLITICO and spanning more than seven months of messages among Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont. The chat offers an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.
Hook, line, and sinker.
Shadow of the Vampire is still my favorite movie in that genre.
Is that the Malkovitch one?
Yes.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0189998/
The BBC has their readers covered when it comes to the World Cup in the US next year. Under the sub-heading in an article: What Will the Political Situation Be Like?, they provide the following (because, you know, the political situation in America is close to, say South Africa in 2010 or Qatar in 2022):
“There have been a series of political assassinations in the US so far in 2025, and were more than 500 mass shootings across the country in 2024.
Forced deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have also increased on the orders of President Donald Trump, who has deployed National Guard troops in Democrat-led cities, including Los Angeles, which will host eight matches.
ICE and National Guard deployments have drawn mass protests from distrustful communities in some cities, and Trump has threatened to force matches to be moved from cities he deems “unsafe”.
In March, he claimed the political and economic tensions between the US and co-hosts Canada and Mexico would be good for the tournament.
He made the comment after he imposed tariffs – taxes charged on goods imported from other countries – on the US’ two neighbours.”
I’m A-OK with the BBC scaring Brits away from the U.S.
Do people actually wear this as a costume? Maybe I go to the wrong parties. And yes, there is a sexy ladies’ version.
https://www.spirithalloween.com/product/adult-flamin-hot-cheetos-bag-costume/227247.uts
251 times
Mixed into formal conversations about whipping votes, social media strategy and logistics, the members of the chat slung around an array of slurs — which POLITICO is republishing to show how they spoke. Epithets like “f—-t,” “retarded” and “n–ga” appeared more than 251 times combined.
Rookie numbers. What a bunch of pussies.
Like I said put them here to see what they pick up.
That is on my list to post when it comes up free streaming. I will post it with the version of Nosferatu that has the New Wave soundtrack. Double feature!
Yakuza Apocalypse is on tubi, I think.
Slightly different film! But I will mark you down for it. The films suggestions will run all November and probably into December.
“The Young Republican National Federation condemns all forms of racism, antisemitism, and hate,” Padgett said. “I want to be clear that such behavior is entirely inconsistent with our values and has no place within our organization or the broader conservative movement.”
He should have referred them to Lenny Bruce.
Whatever. Buncha pussies. Own it.
Never apologize.
None of what I see here qualifies as any of that. Words are not vIoLeNcE.
Grow up, people.
Tucker Carlson’s fourth episode on 9/11 is up.