I will say this though, there's one huge age gap trend that you'll see from time to time, particularly in Hollywood, that I do find highly questionable for both parties involved.

You'll have a man who's well into his 70s or even 80s, he'll have been married to the same woman for a vast majority of their lives, the wife dies, but then just a couple of years later, the man will have hooked up with another woman who's no older than her early 30s. Just . . . why?

J_Scarbrough wrote:


You'll have a man who's well into his 70s or even 80s, he'll have been married to the same woman for a vast majority of their lives, the wife dies, but then just a couple of years later, the man will have hooked up with another woman who's no older than her early 30s. Just . . . why?

There's a reason why such a young wife is called “a trophy”. Someone has the money and power and can get a trophy: some hot young piece to spend his twilight years with. It's a prize to hang on your arm or have lounging around the pool. Like you won the lottery but you look like an idiot.

I should mention that my wife of thirty years is nearly five years older than I am. But some relationship between her with me 13 and her 18 just isn't conceivable or even imaginable. Twenty-eight and thirty-three is something else entirely.

Getting back to the topic of Seth Rogen's TMNT movie, I do have to admit that the overall art style and production design is really incredible, and its perhaps one of the more visually pleasing incarnations of the franchise since the 2003 series, but the more behind-the-scenes stuff I see, the more questions it raises from me, like. . . .

• Did April O'Neil really need to be race-lifted?
  
• Do we have to keep handing over voice-acting gigs to former SNL castmembers on silver platters?
  
• With how woke Hollywood is these days in that characters of a certain race/ethnicity must be portrayed by actors of the same race/ethnicity, is there going to be any backlash over Jackie Chan voicing Splinter because he's Chinese while Splinter is Japanese, or will he get a free pass because at least it's all Asian?
  
• When is Paul Rugg ever going to get more love than Paul Rudd?
  

J_Scarbrough wrote:

Will he get a free pass because at least it's all Asian?

Rogen should be granted a forever pass from all of Asia after everything endured from The Interview.

Wow, there was some deep discussion here. Unusually for me I can't follow it XD

——–

Today was horrid. I had a migraine I couldn't shift! I had to use my last rizatriptan wafer and it didn't work. So I had to go for the emergency Pelexia I put aside from my Hernia operation. :(
I had only one left because I gave the other I was saving to my mum when she had server back pain.
I absolutely loathe opiates so it was a desperate thing for me to need that. I've kept that in reserve for almost 2 years. It actually worked though.


-The reason I don't like opiates isn't the crap scare-monger stuff: They're not going to ever kill me because I'm very well aware of dosages and that is very, very easy to manage. There are no addiction issues what-so-ever either for me with any opiate painkiller I've ever used.

The reason I hate them is because they can make me feel horribly apathetic, depressed and grumpy with everyone the next day. It's the worst feeling. They also give you constipation, and opiates are terrible for managing pain in the long term because the body adapts to them so fast. They're only useful once in a while. Basically they're crap for a migraine sufferer.
Good in an emergency like this but generally to be avoided!

They gave me Pelxia when I was taken to the hospital for my riding accident a few weeks ago too. It barely even touched the pain at all. It was useless in that instance.

Getting back to the topic of my preference to Hitler's Testicle Us over L fucking I Us in comic fonts, I've found an example that perfectly illustrates my preference:



I know it's supposed to say Netflix, but with that kerning, it almost looks like it's Netfux.

EDIT: Okay, I guess you can't hotlink from the site, so here's the direct link to the comic page. . . .
https://www.webcomicsfeed.com/comic/update/pomos-bar-grill/38531

The joke works better if it did say Netfux instead of inviting copyright whatever by using Netflix not that it's funny to begin with.
Can't anyone do funny as opposed to eye roll/forehead slap or should I just go back to 1940s radio shows?
And what's with No Country for Old Men? For such a critically acclaimed Oscar winning movie its narrative ducked any attempt at conclusion. Why did I spend two hours watching such great acting to just leave everything so ambiguous and unsatisfied? I was really drawn into a novel and it's like the writer didn't bother to write the last three chapters of the book.

With all the terrible, terrible things aside that it caused, I sometimes miss the COVID-times of being unemployed. Not that I could afford to be unemployed, I need money and all, but having several months to myself not having to do anything and just digging myself into creative work 24/7… That was so good. Now, I'm stressed out if BD will have to go on a hiatus from October, because I couldn't even manage to start making the new chapter yet and I've got almost 3x the usual workload, I have to take extra shifts, because a co-worker of mine called in sick twice now after his 10 days of vacation (and my employers won't find any good replacement either, no matter how hard they look, they're lucky if someone comes in to work and sleeps through it), so I'm basically just going home to sleep, so I could function. I can only pray my gf won't leave me if I spend weeks in October just sitting in front of the computer non-stop instead of spending time with her, and all because the pre-agreed schedule can't be maintained. Because reliability is rewarded with extra workload from those who don't even give a shit and with a burnout (which will happen in a few weeks to another co-worker of mine, who's taking 5 shifts a week, day and night for the same reason. Yeah, I think he'll quit before the end of summer). And I'll be the one ending up with the guilt if I prioritize my creative work over my partner. It's a lose-lose situation. But going somewhere else, working for even less, something I have to learn, under uncertain circumstances… that'd be too much stress.

Here in America at least, the American workforce is blaming COVID for making people lazy and not wanting to work, thus apparently causing the workforce as a whole to suffer. . . .

But there's the thing, American workers have been suffering for decades because of the American workforce. Why? Because the American workforce treats workers like absolute shit, and the lower you are on the corporate ladder, the shittier you're treated . . . and not only that, but the pay is shit for a lot of jobs too; while CEOs and other white collar workers continue to get huge pay raises and make tremendous profits, the average joe is barely able to survive paycheck to paycheck. The powers that be want to not only exploit their workers, but pay them as little as possible, which is one of the mains why immigrants are “stealing our jobs”: it's not even that they're stealing our jobs at all, it's that they're willingly taking the shit jobs that everyday Americans don't want.

So when COVID forced so many people to start working from home, of course those people didn't want to go back to work outside of their house: why would they want to deal with shitty people in-person day in and day out and be degraded and treated like mules from their supervisors, when they can remain in the comfort of their home?

Okay, this is absolutely hilarious! I wasn't even aware of it, but apparently me and a friend of mine were featured in not one, not two, but three news articles (and maybe more) because of something we tweeted about THE MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL!

https://www.fatherly.com/news/disney-change-muppet-christmas-carol

https://doyouremember.com/157966/disney-backlash-erasing-part-of-the-muppet-christmas-carol

https://www.disneydining.com/our-faces-will-melt-and-our-heads-will-explode-disney-erases-parts-of-classic-holiday-movie-some-fans-are-furious-bb1/

I'm actually even laughing over the fact that one of these articles actually took a quote from my tweet and used it as part of their headline!

J_Scarbrough wrote:
COVID forced so many people to start working from home…

I miss CoVid-19 times. That was a really interesting period.
It was crap too for a lot of reasons but it was special and unusual. I Loved social distancing in public, that was the best! Love wearing masks everywhere. Lockdowns were cool. Walking around in the middle of a work day in almost abandoned city streets was surreal! And you gave any other walkers a wide berth, like you were in some post-apocalyptic future world… complete with masks or a scarf over your face… That was JUST like how we imagined the future in the 1980s, it was awesome ^_^

Of course we had it very easy here in Perth Western Australia, our lockdowns didn't last long because we had almost zero CoVid cases. All the cases were isolated in hotel and home quarantine and while it was running rampant across the globe all over the place I think we had only about 5 or 6 local transmissions despite over two and a half million people living here…

Then all the isolation and lock-downs ended. :(
And people actually started to get the damn illness, including me.
But I think it was worth it. By that time we knew what we were dealing with, we were all vaccinated so spread was slow (I never gave my CoVid to anyone else), hospitals weren't overwhelmed, we had zero deaths…

That's exactly the reason why COVID was so rampant and widespread here in America, because our politicians and such refused to comply with lockdowns, quarantines, and even mask mandates - they claimed it was because all of these notions infringed on our Constitutional rights and freedoms, but what it really was was they didn't want businesses to shut down, nor for people to stop working, and as a result, people were walking around spreading the virus, infecting each other, and basically killing each other. It also didn't help that the dictator we had at the time who pretended to be our President kept insisting outrageous claims that ranged from the virus all being nothing more than a liberal hoax (something that the right still claims to this day), to the virus magically disappearing like a miracle in the spring when the weather warmed up, to pushing fish tank cleaning solutions as the end-all antidote for the virus (and yes, an elderly couple actually ingested the stuff because he said it was safe - the both were hospitalized for it, and the husband actually died from it).

It was very frustrating for the medical profession and scientific community here, because here they were fighting a battle to save lives from a very serious and fatal virus, but it was the politicians who knew nothing about science who kept overriding them and insisting that it was nothing to get people to stay in business and keep working as if nothing was happening - that's exactly why our country had the highest rate of spreading and the highest death rates than any other in the world.

There was but a small handful of politicians who took the virus seriously enough, but they too refused to comply with lockdowns or mask mandates, because their propaganda was herd immunity, in that we should all make each other sick to see who can build up a resistance to the virus. Even so, some of these politicians also propagated that the eldery in our country would have been willing to sacrifice their lives anyway.

You're not talking about the Northeastern US or the west coast. Here there was tital lock down except for essential workers. It was just like Australia. Vaccine mandates for public employees. But they sacrificed those in nursing homes because they knew they could contain the spread within the homes and that with enough proper care. No. They were careless. Different world here in the strongly blue states. I was an essential worker. We had to report every little transmission. Isolate and test repeatedly. I was finally exposed because of a co-worker who had gotten it in a doctor's office because you can only do so much to contain a virus without total PPE suits.
There was also a very nasty variant of the flu going around at the time. COVID19 was bad but that flu was worse and it lingered for a month. Had to go crazy with the Listerine to keep going after the isolation. Actually pulled a muscle in my side from all the coughing.
The USA is a different world up here in the blue states. Sorry you have to suffer in a red state but you want people doing everything and even more and it still not being effective just come live in the socialist paradises we have up here.
And according to all the political belief tests to see where you stand, I'm a classic liberal but as Ed Koch used to say “a liberal with sanity ”
The population is too dense for the isolation to be truly effective in the USA. Short of completely stopping all infrastructure there wasn't any way to totally isolate in the US. But at least it finally ended my addiction to talk radio amd I discovered jazz. Best thing ever.
But then what do I know, my sister was deeply involved in the state government amd my wife in hospital administration and I actually had to enforce protocols as a security guard. It's not like I wasn't right in the middle of what was going on as opposed to just watching it on TV.

And I got a cool tee-shirt for being an essential worker too! Wow. Been there, done that and a tee-shirt.

Sounds like you guys really suffered!

My work shut down for a couple of months and I burned through my long service leave. I had nothing to but hang out with my girlfriend all day and night… which was a bit too much for our relationship in the end!

The shortages in the shops were quite weird though… I'd never seen the lake. The issues with CoVid cause many rolling shortages. But even afterwards there were even more shortages of all sorts of other stuff.
Perth is a very isolated capital city, thousands of kilometres away from the rest of the capitals in this country, which are all relatively close to each other. This means that it's much easier to isolate us and the entire state from things like CoVid, but we're also prone to shortages when it comes to supply lines.

bravo1102 wrote:
You're not talking about the Northeastern US or the west coast.

True. I speak of what the experience was like down here in the southeast, where the red politicians rule with an iron fist. My state's governor, Bill Lee (who is gradually turning more and more into DeSantis Lite) wouldn't stand for the lockdowns or business closings, and began insisting that everything reopen and go back to normal as early as May of 2020. You know what happened? By Christmas that year, our state became the world's new COVID epicenter. . . .



After all, this is the party that puts politics and especially profit over people, and with businesses being closed and people staying at home, that was a tremendous no-no for Lee.

The only strange thing right now is for whatever reason, there's one specific KFC restaurant in my town that still hasn't reopened its indoor dining area post-COVID yet; it's still drive-thru or pick-up only.

HAHAHA! Twitter changed its logo to an X
How embarrassing ^_^

Because that's what Elongate is rebranding Twitter as: X.

Also apparently he's limiting and restricting the number of DMs that non-verified users can have in their inboxes. It's like he's regressing the platform back into an early 2000s message forum.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
Because that's what Elongate is rebranding Twitter as: X.

Also apparently he's limiting and restricting the number of DMs that non-verified users can have in their inboxes. It's like he's regressing the platform back into an early 2000s message forum.

I'm never not surprised by how badly high profile, big budget systems and apps are programmed- ie extreme lack of ability, terrible UX.

E.G. Facebook has never been good but in the beginning it was soooooo shiz. Even I could've designed and program better stuff with way more abilities and better UX. I'm not bragging or yapping with that either- at the time I was good enough to program that I could have easily done better that early Facebook.

Twitter has also never been very good XD

That why I held out with MySpace for so long before I finally relented to migrated to Facebook . . . at least Facebook, you could actually fully customize the appearance of your profile, you could embed music and videos on your profile, and there was also that blogging featuring.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
That why I held out with MySpace for so long before I finally relented to migrated to Facebook . . . at least Facebook, you could actually fully customize the appearance of your profile, you could embed music and videos on your profile, and there was also that blogging featuring.

You could do a lot of customisation with Myspace, true, and it had usefulness and usability beyond the basic bad coding of crappy facebook, but my issue with MySpace was that it encouraged people to make profile pages that exactly resembled all the crap we used to joke about with bad free websites made on Geocities and Angelfire etc XD

I mean they used huge mismatched images and background, millions of links and font, hundreds of animated gifs, and auto-playing music. This was the mid 2000s and yet for some strange reason people were exactly replicating what we all laughed about in he mid 90s. XD

True. Myspace was far superior to Facebook.

Has anyone confirmed whether “Tom” from MySpace is/was a real person. I did have a college friend who knew someone who claimed to know him in real life. The reason I bring this up is because I was recently rewatching the Agent Smith interrogation scene from the Matrix (1999) and Neo’s full name was Thomas Anderson, which shares the same last name as “Tom” from MySpace.

I just remember whenever somebody registered an account on MySpace, Tom was always the first person who was on your friends list.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
I just remember whenever somebody registered an account on MySpace, Tom was always the first person who was on your friends list.

Tom was every user's Number One Friend.

When DD instituted our silly friend system, which doesn't do much, we copied that Myspace thing which was just becoming popular at the time. Afterall we started before Myspace hahaha! But we didn't do friend stuff till we came back from the dead in 2006 I think.
Anyway, Volte was everyone's friend because he was our creator and founder XD

It's sad and strange how sexist our culture still is I find- in weird ways.

Mostly from guys, especially young men who think women should be more “feminine” (It's 2023 man, get with it you idiots), but also from women as well who continue to talk about the “female experience” as something other and unusual… A weird kind of internalised sexisim where being male is seen as normal and the default while being female is unusual and unique.

That's just so ewwww when you think about it. Our culture is still massively unblanced. Still male focussed.
Even though we seem more equal now and we've made great strides the existence of that type of thinking indicates we have a long way to go.

It is all male point of view. Men just don't get it so women are all mysterious and different. Can't be that men are too busy with beer and football to pay attention to the needs, wants and desires of another person. Oh no, it's mysterious and “feminine ”.

That'll be the guy who's barely ever spent fifteen minutes talking to a woman other than his mother. XD ;p

I love having fun with these archetypes and stereotypes. Yeah, they were fun in 1930s movies even “battle of the sexes” Hepburn and Tracy movies but can we get a new shtick?

My former doctor who was an old codger well into his 80s before he finally literally dropped dead in church one morning (no really, that's actually how he died) had a philosphy that he was known for: “Women are meant to be loved, not understood.”

I've never been one for the dating scene, and I've always considered myself a married-to-my-work kind of guy anyway, but from the perspective of other friends and peers of mine, men my age have absolutely no idea what to do or say around women anymore, a lot of which seems to have stemmed from the whole #MeToo Movement and a resurgence in modern-day Feminism. Apparently, chivarly is the new cheauvanism, so if a man tries to be polite and mannerly for women, like hold doors open, pull chairs out, help them in or out of a vehicle, that's all seen as sexist and misogynistic now… but on the flip side, apparently if the men go so far as to split the check at dinner to keep things fair and equal, then women lose their shit over the man not being decent enough to pay for the whole meal himself.

Is it any small wonder I've never been interested in dating? I only ever fell in love with one woman in my entire life, she used to be a friend of mine, I pined for her for years, though she never returned my feelings because she couldn't see me as anything more than just a friend. In hindsight, I'm glad nothing ever progressed between us, because long about the middle of the previous decade, I gradually saw more and more of her true colors, and realized what a bitch in sheep's clothing she really was: racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic (yes, she was a misogynist), bigoted… I'll bet now that she lives in Florida, she feels like she's in paradise with all the shit DeSantis has been stirring up down there.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
so if a man tries to be polite and mannerly for women, like hold doors open, pull chairs out, help them in or out of a vehicle, that's all seen as sexist and misogynistic now… but on the flip side, apparently if the men go so far as to split the check at dinner to keep things fair and equal, then women lose their shit over the man not being decent enough to pay for the whole meal himself.

Your whole post is interesting and brings up some points to think about, so I'm not just pulling this out of context to put you in a certain light , it's just that I wan t to to talk about this stuff specifically. :)

Culturally many people Do want to to be seen as their gender, they identify with it strongly and they love to act that role- whether it's a man holding a door or a woman having her chair pulled out for her…
BUT when we get right down to it we're NOT men or women or any of the other genders, we're humans.

I've always found that's the best way to interact with others. As soon as you start thinking in terms of gender it's like thinking in terms of “race” or class in that it changes how you think and act around that person. It harms communication. Just think of them as a fellow person like yourself.

Now if you want to be romantic or intimate that's a different matter entirely XD

There's a song from Camelot that summed it up nicely. Arthur can't understand Gwen so he remembers advice he got from Merlin. To handle a woman “you love her, simply love her.” Worked for me for thirty years.

And the couples counseling back when we first got married didn't hurt either.


You know the real reason men don't understand women? Many men don't know how to listen. They know how to do stuff and talk at people and occasionally follow directions (poorly) but not listen.

Empathy begins with listening. Understanding begins with listening. And when you're listening, you're not talking or spouting your opinion but Understanding the other person's wants, needs and desires. One mouth and two ears because you're supposed to listen twice as much as you talk.

But then I've worked very hard at developing these skills and fucked up a lot and still do a lot, but at least I know how and not waving my arms in the air claiming I don't understand. Let me listen awhile, I might get it. If you smell wood burning that means I may even be thinking on it.