Merry Christmas, Lorcan
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@todd
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From the tape, Anthony Joshua is over 20 lbs heavier, more muscle, longer arms (reach) and less removed from his pro career than the others Jake faced. When he KO’d Jake, he made this slit throat sign. Anthony just got a whole new following. 🤣
He’s talking shit that he could have beaten Joshua at anytime. Then why didn’t you? Becasue you’re garbage, that’s why.
The fun part is because of the broken jaw, he may never be allowed to fight again.
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That’s pretty disgusting.
Too soon?
I think you nailed it.
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What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck is going on with Chris Evans’ face there? I can see why people thought this was AI, if it in fact isn’t.
Here’s a picture from this year.
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My parents taught me that Santa Claus was a concept, not a person. Santa was the spirit of love and generosity, and that anyone could be “Santa Claus”. While there were presents from “Santa”, it was always known they were from someone in the family.
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And in more good news, Andrew Tate lost his fight by being knocked out.
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Buck Rogers Star Gil Gerard Dead At 82
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Carl Carlton, ‘She’s a Bad Mamma Jama’ and ‘Everlasting Love’ singer dead at 72
This really saddens me. In the last month or so, I’ve been listening to “Everlasting Love” a lot.
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Even by the standards of this year, this is bonkers:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/10/trump-times-new-roman-font-return-state-department
Fonts are woke now, Calibri is woke. Next they’ll be going after subtitles.
Considering the idiots involved in this administration, I’m surprised they didn’t go with Comic Sans.
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A fun, short documentary about Yello and their song, “Oh Yeah”.
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It’s so clever, because she’s a teenage girl and they say “whatever” all the time.
She’s wearing sunglasses, headphones, and a trenchcoat! Real young people do that, too!
She’s relatable!
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Especially for Christian:
Nice beaver you have there!
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Spain, Netherlands, Slovenia and Ireland have all pulled out of Eurovision
After the shitshow with Isreal last time, I’m surprised they let them come back.
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Yeah I probably should stop following Russia news so much. It is scaring me. I know it’s a lot of bluffing and mind games, but it just becomes a heavy weight on my mind after reading articles about it.
It may be healthier to just skim headlines and avoid diving into articles.
I get a lot of push notices on my phone, so I have a basic awareness of what’s going on. I will occasionally check out the story if it seems important to me. I am also picky about the sources I choose to read the story. Associated Press is a fairly unbiased news source.
I would recommend reading other things than the news. Read some things for entertainment and education. A constant diet of news is pretty unhealthy.
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I think continuing past the first series hurt the show…
It really did go off the rails starting with Season 2 and got worse after that.
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I think continuing past the first series hurt the show…
When the satisfaction/pride in producing a successful single-season miniseries bumps up against the potential $$ in producing numerous sequel seasons, greed is always going to win out over creative integrity.
That’s what happened to Squid Game. Seasons 2 and 3 really didn’t add anything to the story. If they had ended Season 1 with Seong Gi-hun just standing in the bording gate after receiving the phone call then smash cut to credits, I think that would have been a more powerful ending. Leave it ambiguous as to what he did and let the viewers’ imagination decide what he did next.
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The 100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time
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The Kickstarter model has been a god-send for shady comics companies all round, frankly. You get publishers that can absolutely afford to produce the product anyway (several Image studios, Dark Horse etc) using it as an elaborate pre-order service built on FOMO, in which tenuous stretch goals are used to obscure high margins (see that aforementioned Transformers one from Skybound) and you get fly-by-night indies ripping people off, as Doran’s explained there. Yet only the projects that don’t deliver anything on time or as advertised (Goldtiger, Sullivan’s Sluggers, that covid lockdown short story anthology) ever seem to be “acceptable” for criticism from most parts.
The only comics Kickstarters that make any sense are actual small press publishers, like formerly of this parish Russell’s Freaktown, where it is literally raising the money to get it printed.
Mark Millar has two Kickstarters going, Psychic Sam and Conquered. Hell, his daughter Emily is doing one for pins and art.
I’m sure he could go to Image and do this. Hell, he could pay for them himself with all his Netflix money. All of it feels really icky.
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That blew up in Elon’s face rather spectacularly…
Elon Musk’s new X policy unwittingly exposes MAGA influencers as foreign trolls
Changes at Elon Musk’s X may have unwittingly revealed that many MAGA accounts are actually foreign actors profiting from the sowing of division in the U.S.
On Friday, X introduced a feature called “About This Account,” which allows other users to see where an account was based when it joined the site, how often it’s changed its username, and by what means they downloaded the X app.
Once the feature was live, political rivals began to dig into each other’s accounts, and a trend began to emerge — many popular MAGA and right-wing influencer accounts were not based in the U.S.
The discovery led Democratic influencer Harry Sisson to call it “easily one of the greatest days on this platform,” the Daily Beast reports. “Seeing all of these MAGA accounts get exposed as foreign actors trying to destroy the United States is a complete vindication of Democrats, like myself and many on here, who have been warning about this”.
Dozens of right-wing accounts pushing U.S. political content were actually started in places like India, Russia, and Nigeria.
MAGANationX, for example, includes a bio line that reads “Patriot Voice for We The People,” but was actually started in Eastern Europe, according to the new feature.
Another account, using an image of President Donald Trump in a tuxedo and using the name “MAGA Scope” with an American flag emoji, was found to have been started in Nigeria in 2024.
Micah Erfan, a left-wing influencer, noted that “like half of their large accounts were foreigners posing as Americans all along.”
There is some question over the accuracy of the information on the “About This Account” pages, as users pointed out that anyone opening their X account while using a VPN could have an origin reflecting the VPN’s use and not the actual country where they reside.
Nikita Bier, the head of X’s product development, said on Friday that the company was planning to resolve any potential discrepancies that might have been caused by VPNs. She also said that the feature had “a few rough edges” that the company is planning to smooth.
X users noted on Friday that the feature was removed a few hours after it went live, leading to some speculation that the sudden change was a reaction to the discovery of the right-wing accounts’ countries of origin. The feature does appear to be functional again as of this report.
There is virtually nothing stopping someone from a different country using social media sites to sow political division via U.S. politics and earn a profit by doing so.
“Just think about the foreign influence operations that are happening right now on this app,” MeidasTouch co-founder Brett Meiselas said in a video on social media about the development. “Think about the lawmakers who feel pressured by accounts like this. Think about the disinformation that spreads as a result of all these accounts out there.”
The revelation that some MAGA accounts are fabricated is not a revelation to some social media monitors. During the 2024 election cycle, the Centre for Information Resilience, an independent, nonprofit research group, found more than a dozen accounts that stole the photos of European models and influencers and used their images to pose as young, attractive women who support Trump and the broader MAGA-sphere.
Liberal influencer Ed Krassenstein speculated that the MAGA accounts from outside the U.S. were working for foreign governments, though there has been no concrete proof of that for any specific accounts.
Last year, the Department of Justice discovered that a number of popular right-wing influencers were — reportedly — unwittingly working for a company that was actually a Russian influence operation, meaning they were taking payment from a Russian company to push their ideas.
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It s tough to predict how much of MAGA or this type of radical right direction will remain if Trump is gone. If MTG were the one to lead it, I think it might become too unpopular to win elections. But I’m not sure of that.
Vance is difficult to see what he is about. He could be playing the long game, like I think Pence was doing, pretend to get along with Trump, but then when he is gone try to steer the Republicans back to “normality”. It looks like Vance is trying to maintain some kind of balance between the different factions that inform the Republican mindset, the tech oligarchs, the postliberals, the Christian nationalists, and the groypers.
The important thing to remember about Vance is that he’s Peter Theil’s puppet. He pushed to get him on the ticket.
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Colleen Doran posted the following on her Substack:
I’m not trying to single anyone out here, and I realize we all gotta start somewhere.
But I like to reality check.
Indie presses like to make much ado of how successful they are about sticking it to the man, and a couple out there also make a point of what generous page rates they pay. Why, they have successful Kickstarters that bring in The Dough, and LOOK! They pay a whopping $125 a page to contributors! And sell thousands of copies! Look how successful they are!
But I like to do the math.
40 contributors and you sell all of 4000 copies. OK, 4000 copies isn’t bad for a small press, but that boils down to an average audience of 100 buyers per contributor. That’s not exactly rolling in it.
And the page rate is $125 per page! OMG, that is three figures! Real Money!
Nice spin, I guess.
But that’s $125 per page for writing, pencils, inks, lettering and full color.
$125 per page is what a quality colorist gets at a mainstream company. For colors ALONE.
It takes roughly two days working VERY quickly to turn around a fully written and print ready color comic book page. ( So your $125 per page breaks down to all of $7.81 per hour assuming you only worked 8 hour days on that job.
Wow, that’s McDonald’s money!
More likely you had to work 10 hours or more per day to make that schedule: $6.25 per hour. Oh, and no benefits. No employer paying social security. Nothing. Take out that money as well, and you are working for something like $5 per hour.
Read that paragraph again. I want it to sink in.
But, hey Artist, you get to keep your rights, right? No work for hire, here! We indie presses are so generous!
That’s nice. Except it is highly likely there will be no market for those rights after that Kickstarter anthology comes out, and since the contract keeps those rights for X number of years after the book goes out of print, you’re talking, maybe, 5-10 years before you can do anything else with that work. Maybe. And even if you did, what is the likelihood that your short story from that anthology will have value after all that time? Short stories in comics have short shelf lives unless the creator is name enough to sell anthologies on their own.
And will you be able to move the original art?
Kickstarter braggadocio makes for nice publicity for these small presses, but the creators aren’t really getting much out of it, and they don’t even know it. Perhaps some of them are happy working for minimum wage, but in truth, they are working for even less money, when adjusted for inflation, than indie publishers paid back in the 1980’s. Indie companies paid a low of around $25 per page for a single task like penciling. I was being paid a crappy $50 per page for story and art. But I wasn’t lettering or coloring that art.
$50 a page when I started out is worth over $200 now. I got $65 a page for pencils. when I first went to Marvel and DC
Most small presses don’t pay $200 a page today. And adjusted for inflation they sure don’t pay $250 a page for pencils alone.
Yeah.
I get the idea that people want their work to be seen, and that maybe if the project does well, they’ll be able to build on that success. But what’s really happening here is that certain indie companies built a business model on poverty rates. None of these supposedly successful indie publishers would last five minutes were they not being subsidized by workers getting paid minimum wage or less.
You can work there if you want, you can take a chance. Maybe you can get some extra money selling copies. Go for it.
But be real about what’s going on here.
When you point this stuff out, the first thing the indie press publisher does is declare anyone who criticizes them is A) a bully or B) jealous.
It drives me crazy seeing these people promote themselves as huge successes when they want publicity, and then as poor, put-upon delicate creatures when they want protection. They’re slippery buggers. Bottom line, they’re using young creators to finance a lifestyle and build their rep.
And they can do that.
I’ve never known young creators to be very savvy about their choices. They are desperate to be seen. Even if you tell them point blank what is going on, there is a new generation lined up right behind them to take their place, certain they are the special snowflake nothing bad is ever going to happen to.
All I can do is post stuff like this here. But as long as people are going to fall for hype in press releases, these companies are going to continue to get what they want: the next desperate wannabe lined up to work for minimum wage. Considering a lot of those desperate wannabes are coming from web comics that pay nothing at all, that’s a step up, and there is an endless supply of suckers in the candy dish.
I certainly don’t expect beginners to get top rates. That’s not what I’m saying here. But many indie presses also get major licensed projects while still paying dead low rates. It’s ridiculous.
When I wrote about this years ago, one Patreon supporter got so angry they walked off in a huff re: my discussion of this issue. It seems odd to me that people will readily criticize Marvel and DC, but if you criticize a smaller publisher for dubious business practices, it’s like you kicked their puppy or something.
Well, being discrete was not only a waste of time here, but totally unnecessary because a website survey of industry rates is here for you to read.
For the record, I did not respond to the survey. Top earners are less likely to bother to fill it out. I know for a fact that top rates with major publishers are higher than those listed on this website.
OK.
I have not worked for many of these publishers and have no dog in this hunt other than seeing that year after year rates in comics are generally pretty terrible, adjusted for inflation, significantly lower than creators were paid forty years ago. Page rates then didn’t include everything – pencils/inks/color story – as many indies do now.
What’s worse, publishers fail to provide contracts for projects, and claim digital rights on property that they have not contracted for with no payment on the digital sales and nothing for foreign sales. I was sent letters by a number of creators complaining about it, asking what they could do. I am not a party to the action and have no standing in the matter, other than advising them to seek legal representation.
Creators who dare to question rates and business practices are bullied, sometimes by company stans who are sure their fave indie press is going to save comics. All of this is unacceptable and exploitative.
I throw up my hands.
People are cultish, the idea of a thing is more important to them than the reality of a thing.
Someday creators are going to get a clue that they have not signed away publishing rights to reuse works, and that their copyrights are being violated. And they are going to want to get paid for those rights. And someone is going to get the idea that they can get a lawyer via the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts with branches all over the country, and that they can get pro bono legal representation for their issues, which might just end up in a class action suit.
Ideally, these publishers will start doing right by creators before it gets that far. A lawsuit could destroy a small press.
No publisher has the right to anything beyond first use editions of your work in the absence of a written contract signed by you. There is no implied transferal of other rights.
No digital rights. No foreign rights. No subsidiary rights of any kind. NOTHING. http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Tasini-Case-Final-Decision-Authors-Win-17563.asp
People want to be mad at me for pointing this out. I do not care.
They’re going to believe what they’re going to believe. I do not care.
I care about creator rights.
If your publisher is not paying you for use of your work and if your publisher failed to provide a contract, get a lawyer.
Now.
But after all these years and with so many resources at their disposal, creators STILL refuse to act in their best interests.
Whatever.
I blog and move on.
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New York Jets Release Fanbase to Free Agency
In what is being hailed as the most compassionate move this season, the New York Jets announced this week they have released their fanbase to free agency: allowing Jets faithful to freely choose a more successful franchise to support.
“We believe all fans deserve a chance to be happy. Simply being born into the Jets fanbase should not prevent someone from experiencing the joys of winning,” said Jets GM Darren Mougey.
The announcement comes off the back of three consecutive “rebuilding” decades for the Jets and no sign of the scaffolding coming down anytime soon. “There’s an old saying,” said Mougey, “If you love something, set it free. The entire Jets organization believes we’ve put the good people of the tri-state area through enough, and from the bottom of our hearts, we wish all of them the best of luck with their new franchise.” Mougey closed his remarks by hoping Jets fans find a team that can provide the winning records, deep runs into the playoffs, and championship ring that they never will. “At the beginning of the season, every fan thinks ‘this is our year’ and with any luck, after today, that may actually be true for some former Jets fan.”
At publication, the entire Jets fanbase said they don’t plan on rushing the decision. Instead, taking the rest of the season to consider their options and savor the final disappointment before committing to a more successful franchise.
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I mean, call it America First, call it neo fascism, whatever. Greene is positioning the Trump White House as Neoconservative so she’s trying to get out in front to be the person they flock to when the current framework collapses – either when Trump dies or when his coalition collapses under his inability to fulfill promises.
I definitely see that. Unfortunately for her, I’m not sure she has charisma to pull it off.
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And @Todd, I must say it’s always refreshing to find a Texan who ISN’T a Republican/MAGA. My cousin and her husband, who grew up in New York and should know better, are both GOPers (their gay son, however is definitely not!!) Thank you restoring my hope for a better American people.
I appreciate that. I’m in the Houston area, which is a very blue city.
I will admit in my youth, I was a bit conservative. But as I get older, I find myself hard charging to the left.
It hit me not that long ago that I am probably more leftist than liberal, and have been for some time.
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Greene is positioning herself to take over MAGA from Trump. Don’t mistake her for having had a change of heart or having found the light.
MAGA, as it exists now, dies with Trump. That is a fact. They are inexorably linked. Trump’s ego and narcissism would never let anyone share the spotlight with him, nor would he ever name a successor.
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating:
MTG is seeing the tide turn against MAGA. She sees Republicans get eviscerated by their constituents in town hall meetings. She sees the polling of Trump and the Republicans going down the toilet. She sees the Republicans covering for Trump over the Epstein files and the backlash that’s generating among her own party.
She sees all this and knows she has to distance herself if she wants to have a viable political future. The ship is sinking and she’s grabbing a lifeboat. She’s vocally flipping on unpopular issues that she knows her constituents agree with her on while trying to remain quiet on the ones she still backs.
Make no mistake, this is all about political survival. She doesn’t care about anyone but herself. If others benefit from the issue flips, that’s just gravy for them. But that’s just collateral. This is all about her and her future in politics.
That all being said, Trump is unwell and there’s a very high probability that he will die before the end of his term. He has dementia. Everyone knows all this and they are planning for a post-Trump Republican Party. The power players already consider him a lame duck president. The GOP is going to have a civil war. It won’t be quick or easy. It will be messy.
And they have no clear successor. The Republicans, for the last 10+ years, have put every single chip they have behind Trump. And because of that, they have fucked themselves.
Trump had the unique charisma that appealed to the base so completely. (Reagan was probably the last Republican to do that.) Because they put everything behind Trump, they never groomed someone to succeed him. And let’s be honest, Trump simply wouldn’t allow it. But now that the sun is setting on the Trump era, they are starting to scramble. Who do they have? JD Vance? MTG? Mike Johnson? Some tech billionaire? They don’t have anyone. Trump spoiled them, and I use “spoiled” because it applies on multiple levels. They went all in on him and now, they have nothing left.
Whoever the Republicans choose, they are going to have deal with the fallout of Trump’s biggest legacy: a tanked economy. It was slowly recovering under Biden, but it was still in critical condition. Then Trump came in and shot it in the face, with his tariffs and “gifts” to the ultra wealthy. All indications show that very soon, it’s all going to crash and it will be devastating. It may take a decade or more just to stabilize things. Because Trump burned so many bridges internationally, they may be much help from abroad. To be fair, the world will also be affected as well. Even if the US elected the most leftist administration possible, it would still take long time to recover. This will be Trump’s legacy.
So yeah, we’re pretty fucked. Here’s hoping something good will eventually come out of all this madness.
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This is far more of a Quintesson thing
And they contracted the job out to the Junkions.
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Well have an 8-episode series about them finding the Stargate and figuring out how to activate it.
It ends on a cliffhanger, with Season 2 premiering three years later.
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I have this fear that they’re going to try to release the “Epstein files” with all the Republican names scrubbed…
That’s Trump’s goal. He’s already said he wants to go after Democrats.
I can’t wait till he’s dead.
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Gen V had a pretty strong season. It’s overall done quite well in keeping that world alive in between seasons of The Boys… it’s come to a kind of natural conclusion now, but still might be renewed, apparently.
I finally got around to watch Season 2 of Gen V.
It was excellent!
While it had its over the top elements (which is to be expected), it also had some great character scenes and performances. Something I noticed is that for those dramatic scenes, many had no music for emotional cues and they didn’t feel rushed. They were allowed to breathe and take the time needed.
There was no sophomore slump here!
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Have you seen the Netflix documentary, “Who Killed the Montreal Expos?”. It’s pretty good.
So, yeah. Good on the differing opinions, even acting like you’re giving me the finger, and may believe what you’re saying (your master loves you and will protect you), I will take it all in.
So, first I will say, the “consortium of owners” doesn’t work if you think you have your percentage on the steering wheel.
You put in, and it’s all about the eventual sale and reap you rewards (or has no one noticed people crying poor with millions of losses and leaving town with a goddamned handsome profit?).
Then whenever you’re in the “new stadium stage” but government will not, then put forth a new plan where you buy the land and own, now with new revenue streams of parking lots on the northwest and southeast corners.
Having someone come in and be a savior? They want their way handed to them, or will force the issue (because of course that’s a part of the plan.
And shame on Canada too.
“We don’t have that American family money”
Well, apparently there was a ton of people/families that look back and “well, we didn’t know short term loss could turn into major long term money maker”Montreal Expos = Washington Nationals
Quebec Nordiques = Colorado Avalanche
Winnipeg Jets = Phoenix Coyotes (now Utah Mammoth).Vancouver Grizzlies = Memphis Grizzlies
Don’t know how the Seattle Supersonics went to Oklahoma.
But the NBA really wants back to Seattle, and has the love of Vegas, so thats the next two teams (heavily assumed).“We feel bad about Vancouver and would love to put a team back there” is an invite for someone to help increase the price of Seattle and Vegas).
What killed the Expos?
Money.
And stupid short term thinking.
And inviting vampires in.Always come back to “building a new stadium”
Why assume government will do it?
Turn the tables while hearts are emotional, and negotiate additional revenue streams that you own at cut rate tax prices.Because government needs to realize what the franchise means to the city.
Bringing in other rich players for half your teams schedule?
They spend, and they spend downtown.
Vancouver is a known spot for a disproportional amount of “Rookie Dinners” (where a restaurant gets a ton of money from 23 people having dinner, drinks, and a whole cake for dessert, and the first year players pay).And that asshole that paid $18 million for a 24% stake into the Expos, used his clause to buy out the other 76% (locked into low prices but unknown) and then sold 100% for $120 million.
I saw the Houston Oilers become the Tennessee Titans over new stadium demands. I then saw the NFL bend over backwards trying to give Los Angeles the new franchise and not Houston. LA kept telling them no, so they finally gave it to Houston because we agreed to build a new stadium.
Outsider looking in on the Expos, that ownership arrangement was doomed from the beginning. There was no way that was going to work out in the long term. It was like they didn’t even talk to any MLB owners at the time. It looked like they wanted to keep the ownership centered in Montreal, when they probably could have found a wealthy Quebecer to back the whole thing. Even later on, that was still an option.
Yeah, a stadium is a short-term loss that yields long-term gains. That would have led to a revitalization of the area and lifted a great many ships.
The Expos did have choices that could have been made to save the team, but everybody acted in the most ass way possible.
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What brain have you if you see Godzilla in that picture?
A fully functional one.
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Warner Bros. Exec: “You know, we haven’t pissed off Alan Moore lately. I wonder what we could do to set him off?”
V For Vendetta TV Series In The Works At HBO (Report)
The fifth of November may have been last week, but “V for Vendetta” fans are getting a belated gift: a TV show based on the titular comic series is in development at HBO, Variety reports.
Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, “V for Vendetta” was first published as a graphic novel in 1982 before DC took over publishing rights in 1998. The series takes place in a British dystopia under the control of the fascist Norsefire party. The government is targeted by V, a mysterious anarchist in a Guy Fawkes mask, who seeks the help of a woman named Evey Hammond.
From Warner Bros. Television, the series adaptation is reportedly being written by Pete Jackson, with James Gunn and Peter Safran executive-producing for DC Studios. Additional EPs include Ben Stephenson of Poison Pen and Leanne Klein of Wall to Wall Media.
“V for Vendetta” was famously adapted into a feature-length film in 2006, directed by James McTeige from a script written by the Wachowskis. Hugo Weaving played the masked anarchist V, with Natalie Portman portraying Evey.
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Watched the Guillermo Del Toro Frankenstein on Netflix tonight and really enjoyed it – I’ve always liked the book and this is a fairly traditional take on the story with a good cast and amazing production design. A really lush, visually rich film and a proper gothic period piece.
Christel and I watched it last night and enjoyed it. Oscar Issac was born to play a mad scientist!
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I’m impressed the Dems managed to only passive-aggressively try and ratfuck Mamdani and not actively sabotage him.
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Gavin Newsome is gearing for a POTUS run. Yeah, trolling Trump was funny in the beginning but that got old quick. Yeah, you got Prop 50 passed, but what else have you done? No mu
Hey, he has transphobia, a deep love of persecuting the homeless and is willing to platform the far right. If that doesn’t cream left-wing candidate, I don’t know what does.
You forgot that he also looks like a Republican!
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Mamdani promised a lot of stuff he will never be able to deliver. I think voters know that, but they look at him as someone who will fight for the people and not the rich. That is the lesson the Democrats need to take
Very much this. The top Democrat leadership seems to be paralysed, they won’t fight for anything unless they can win, and even in that narrow window they’ll compromise in the name of bipartisanship even though that will never be reciprocated by the Republicans. So they’ll stand there and lecture people on how the things they want just aren’t possible. Meanwhile if Mamdani fails at something, he’ll get some level of forgiveness if he clearly tries.
And when they have all the cards, they don’t do anything. I genuinely believe that if they had done more, especially under Biden, Trump 2.0 may not have happened, or at least he could have been somewhat curtailed.
Gavin Newsome is gearing for a POTUS run. Yeah, trolling Trump was funny in the beginning but that got old quick. Yeah, you got Prop 50 passed, but what else have you done? No much.
Pelosi has said she won’t seek reelection next year.
Small miracles.
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Yeah, including not even saying they’d endorse him in many cases!
Yeah, the lack of endorsements was very telling.
Mamdani promised a lot of stuff he will never be able to deliver. I think voters know that, but they look at him as someone who will fight for the people and not the rich.
That is the lesson the Democrats need to take home.
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I’m impressed the Dems managed to only passive-aggressively try and ratfuck Mamdani and not actively sabotage him.
After he bested everyone in the primary, they figured their best play was to stay quiet.
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Woke up, huh, all the money in the world can’t make NYC elect a perv, great result.
Trump endorsed Cuomo, so they did try!
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Willuam and Harry can deal with it in the traditional manner – each raises an army, then beats the crap out of the other.
Air it as a PPV event and I think a lot of money could be made from it.
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Oh yeah, do not listen to the media, fans, relatives, wives, girlfriends, and anyone who says hi to you.
As I said before, my wife and I are rooting for the Blue Jays!!!
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“We already see a lot of actors — based on this monetization of platforms like X — that are using AI to produce content that just seeks to maximize attention,” Törnberg told Ars. “So misinformation, often highly polarized information — as AI models become more powerful, that content is going to take over.”
“I have a hard time seeing the conventional social media models surviving that,” he added.
That’s actually maybe a hopeful note, isn’t it? If social media is flooded entirely with made-up AI shit, sooner or later people will just turn it off, won’t they?
Won’t they?
We are in Dead Internet Theory territory now:
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The Toronto Blue Jays had a 1-1 series tie heading to LA .
Then they lost an 18 inning classic game 3, with multiple chances to win.
That would have broken most teams.
Not these guys.
Leave that baggage in yesterday and get on with it.Now they’ve won games 3 & 4 and take a 3-2 series lead back home to Toronto.
My god, backing these guys is fun.
Painful, and nauseating at times, but fun.The wife and I are rooting for the Blue Jays. We really want them to win.
Have you seen the Netflix documentary, “Who Killed the Montreal Expos?”. It’s pretty good.
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I think there is something in social media that stimulates just general nastiness. A relaxation of certain norms of behavior and etiquette, letting loose the unpleasant side a lot of people have. Being extreme is incentivized. Linehan probably always had that nasty streak in him, but social media can exacerbate it.
Scientists Created an Entire Social Network Where Every User Is a Bot, and Something Wild Happened
It’s no secret that social media has devolved into a toxic cesspool of disinformation and hate speech.
Without any meaningful pressure to come up with effective guardrails and enforceable policies, social media platforms quickly turned into rage-filled and polarizing echo chambers with one purpose: to keep users hooked on outrage and brain rot so they can display more ads.
And given the results of a recent experiment by researchers at the University of Amsterdam, they may be doomed to stay that way.
As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, coauthors Petter Törnberg, AI and social media assistant professor, and research assistant Maik Larooij simulated a social media platform that was populated entirely by AI chatbots, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o large language model, to see if there was anything we could do to stop social media from turning into echo chambers.
They tested out six specific intervention strategies — including switching to chronological news feeds, boosting diverse viewpoints, hiding social statistics like follower counts, and removing account bios — to stop the platform from turning into a polarized hellscape.
To their dismay, none of the interventions worked to a satisfactory degree, and only some showed modest effects. Worse yet, as Ars Technica reports, some of them made the situation even worse.
For instance, ordering the news feed chronologically reduced attention inequality but floated extreme content to the top.
It’s a sobering reality that flies in the face of companies’ promises of constructing a “digital town square” — as billionaire and X owner Elon Musk once called it — where everybody coexists peacefully.
With or without intervention, social media platforms may be doomed to devolve into a highly polarized breeding ground for extremist thinking.
“Can we identify how to improve social media and create online spaces that are actually living up to those early promises of providing a public sphere where we can deliberate and debate politics in a constructive way?” Törnberg asked Ars.
The AI and social media assistant professor admitted that using AI isn’t a “perfect solution” due to “all kind of biases and limitations.” However, the tech can capture “human behavior in a more plausible way.”
Törnberg explained that it’s not just triggering pieces of content that result in highly polarized online communities.
Toxic content “also shapes the network structures that are formed,” he told Ars, which in turn “feeds back what content you see, resulting in a toxic network.”
As a result, there’s an “extreme inequality of attention,” where a tiny minority of posts get the most visibility.
And in the age of generative AI, these effects could become even more pronounced.
“We already see a lot of actors — based on this monetization of platforms like X — that are using AI to produce content that just seeks to maximize attention,” Törnberg told Ars. “So misinformation, often highly polarized information — as AI models become more powerful, that content is going to take over.”
“I have a hard time seeing the conventional social media models surviving that,” he added.
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Yeah, nobody should shary any information with the US for the next three years, that much is for sure.
The problem really is that even if there’s an election in 2028 and the Dems get back in, unless they actually work to fix the root causes of the dysfunction in the US, it’s only a matter of time until someone even more venal and capricious than Trump gets in and fucks stuff up all over again.
Exactly.
Trump has irrevocably broken the US to the point where you can’t put it back together to what it was in 2024.
The POTUS and Congress will have to build something new from the wreckage. Assuming good people with good hearts are elected (HA!!!) and can quickly devise a strong plan to address underlying problems, it will take decades to right the ship. Yeah, they can perform triage to fix some of the bigger problems, but this won’t be a quick fix.
This also assumes everything will go mostly right. And we know that won’t happen.
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This Internet Theory of Late Night’s Decline Is the Strongest One Yet
There’s been a lot of hair pulling recently about why late-night programming is struggling. The only one who’s seemed to really crack the code is Gutfeld! That doesn’t really count, though, because it comes on at 10 p.m. and is watched by people who are so fueled by hate they need 24 hours of Fox News programming. Plus, some of that large audience has to be the old people leaving their TV on when they sleep, right?
But, because of the rapid decline in late-night viewership, there are plenty of people who blame the hosts for failing to keep a large audience. Gutfeld’s success and the massive numbers of views on YouTube for Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers suggests that the problem isn’t the hosts themselves.
In a Substack post shared to the r/LateNightTalkShows, the account ThinkingAndData suggested that the real problem with late night has nothing to do with the white men helming the major network shows.
“In the past, late-night was a jack of all trades — comedy routines, sketches, celebrity interviews, music performances — but with the dawn of the internet, it has emerged as a master of none,” the Substack post posits. “This theme has played out twice before, with two major predecessors of late-night: vaudeville and variety shows.”
The article traces how both prior forms of entertainment were killed by new forms of technology. “With vaudeville, it was motion pictures, and with variety shows, it was cable TV. With late-night, it’s playing out over the internet and social media,” the post continues.
This isn’t an entirely new theory, but the response on Reddit shows that it best reflects most late-night fan’s realities. No one is tuning in at 11:30 p.m. to watch Kimmel or Colbert on TV — very few people even pay for cable anymore, especially young people. “I actually watch all the late night on YouTube the following day and I’m 34 years old,” one person on the Reddit post commented. “It’s become a way for me to stay informed without going insane about what’s going on.”
“You NEVER need to watch anything when it ‘airs,’” another person chimed in. “You choose when to watch. And so the communal element and the sense of anticipation is gone from late night and other shows that historically have relied on being fresh with commentary on the day’s or week’s events.”
“‘Did you catch ___ last night?’ has been almost entirely replaced with ‘did you catch that ___ bit on YouTube?’ at this point,” a third Redditor commented.
So, where does this leave late-night programming? YouTube revenue isn’t exactly going to cover the production costs of these massive shows.
The Substack post frames it like this: “The issue with current late-night shows is that they operate on a business model of mass appeal, but today’s attention economy is built on niches. As the economics of late-night become more dire, I expect more of the remaining late-night hosts to either retire, reformat their shows or eventually get kicked out.”
Some on Reddit think it might just be time to scrap this form of entertainment altogether, and invest in whatever comes next. “That 75-year-old format is definitely stale, especially with a middle-of-the-road host,” one person commented. “But yes I agree the main problem is it’s just a weird old from of entertainment from a bygone era.”
If this is what the people active in the r/LateNightTalkShows subreddit are saying, it’s likely an even more grim prognosis from the general public.
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How ‘Tron: Ares’ Ran Off The Grid: Disney Sci-Fi Movie Set To Lose $132M+
There’s more bleeding red neon than imagined coming out of Disney‘s Tron: Ares. Deadline has learned from sources that the third chapter in the 43-year-old video game matrix protagonist story actually cost $220 million net, not the reported $170 million-$180 million that was floated out there.
This means that the Jared Leto-Greta Lee-Jeff Bridges light cycle movie is headed for a $132.7 million loss after all ancillaries, that is if its final global gross smacks dead into a wall at $160 million. The Joachim Rønning-directed movie counted through its second weekend as of Sunday a running worldwide cume of $103 million, with a 67% second-weekend domestic plummet of $11.1M.
At a $160 million box office threshold, Tron: Ares triggers $72.2 million in worldwide theatrical rentals, $37.6M in global home entertainment, close to a $100M in global home television, with an extra $5 million from airlines for a total of $214.8M in revenues. Put this up against the $220 million net production cost shot with Vancouver, BC tax credits, a $102.5M global P&A spend with stunts at San Diego Comic-Con, touring light cycles, a laser light Nine Inch Nails laser-light concert at the Los Angeles premiere that closed down Hollywood Boulevard, $10.8M in others costs and $14.2M in residuals, which gets you to total costs of $347.5M. That gets us to a $132.7 million loss.
Exclaimed one astute talent rep on why it was game over for Tron: Ares at this October’s box office: “There was no specific vision, to be honest. The idea that Disney would spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a Jared Leto film that is a franchise that hasn’t worked in four decades is insane.”
While we’ve told you the shortcomings with this Disney reboot swing and miss — i.e., the finite appeal of the Tron franchise (it bombed when it first came out in the 1980s, gained cult status on home video, and had an OK revival in 2010 a year after the first Avatar making $400M) and the limited draw of non-Star Wars and some non-Star Trek sci-fi movies overall (such fare typically opens in the $24M-$40M range; anything over $50M or even $100M is far and few between) — ultimately Tron‘s faulty battery was its screenplay. Great screenplays overcome great historical hurdles; read Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean proved pirate movies can work, and more recently, Denis Villeneuve followed another pricey, finite sci-fi fan reboot that flopped in 2018’s Blade Runner 2049 ($185M cost, $92M domestic, near $278M worldwide gross and also starring Leto) by proving post-Covid that there was heart and chills in Frank Herbert’s Dune series (combined global gross of $1.1 billion). The latter IP had sunk like quicksand 41 years ago with a domestic take of $31.4M.
So, don’t blame former Disney production head and Tron: Ares producer Sean Bailey for doing his job, championing a franchise revival (duh, it’s those events that work theatrically), carefully. Tron: Legacy‘s box office haul was an improvement definitely upon the original, though not Avatar spectacular. That 2010 movie was early proof of the talents of filmmaker Joseph Kosinski, who would later deliver unto the world Top Gun: Maverick and F1. Hence, a sequel because of Legacy‘s alright results wasn’t rushed to the screen. Originally, the third Tron was conceived as a sequel to Legacy, with Kosinski returning alongside the characters played by Olivia Wilde and Garrett Hedlund. The notion of Tron coming into our world ala Ares was always part of the third chapter, I’m told.
However, I hear that Rønning wanted a different script for the film other than the Jesse Wigutow one that Disney pushed to greenlight. The filmmaker, who can deliver character-driven stories at a low budget ala the Oscar nominated Kon-Tiki and Young Woman in the Sea, as well as Disney commercial fare such as Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, was lobbying for Ford v. Ferrari‘s Jez Butterworth. At the end of the initial shoot, we hear that Oscar-nominated Captain Phillips screenwriter Billy Ray had to step in to deliver pages to fix various parts of Tron: Ares, that work amounting to less than a month’s worth of reshoots.
Many would like to throw tomatoes at Disney for the casting, that there’s zero audience attraction for the likes of Leto, Lee, etc. First, despite tabloid headlines about Leto, such noise doesn’t factor into moviegoers’ decisions to buy or not buy a ticket; it could be argued most were not even in the know of the June Air Mail exposé on his alleged behavior. Tron is the star at the end of the day. Had the fan faithful declared it was a better movie than the last, perhaps we’d see an expansion of the audience and some box office momentum, rather than falling short of its $40M domestic opening projection with $33.2M.
Moviegoers gave Tron: Ares the same CinemaScore as Tron: Legacy, a B+, which indicates there was no reason to have any FOMO. Definite recommend was an OK 57% on Screen Engine/Comscore’s PostTrak; a score in the mid-60s- to 70-percentile range indicates a hopeful tentpole has electricity. Tron: Ares was older skewing with 70% over age 25, indicating both the Gen-X and Legacy millennial fans showed up. However, as far as making new fans, Tron: Ares had little appeal from the 13-17 crowd who showed up at 6%. While the core Gen X Tron fans gave Tron: Ares a very high 71%+ definite recommend, the 18-24 set gave it the lowest of any demographic at 44%. Not good.
Even with Tron being the headliner, when we look at the remake of Dune, there was something undeniable for audiences in watching Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet in what is a Byzantine IP. Natch, yes, there is something to be said about star appeal, but there are few who can open a film, and typically IP is enough for studios’ execs to sleep soundly at night. Still, a Tron reboot with someone bigger than a star of House of Gucci and Morbius could have worked. But again, the blip with Tron: Ares remains its story.
“The franchise is dead” was the emphatic proclamation about Tron: Ares after it failed on opening weekend. Let’s take that with a grain of salt. First, those close to the project believe that ultimately Tron: Ares was an advertisement for the Disney theme park rides (also one of the catalysts for Tron: Ares being made, versus say any Disney+ viewership of previous Tron movies). In any given day at the Shanghai theme park and Walt Disney World in Orlando, next to Pirates of the Caribbean ride the Tron ride is the one with the biggest lines.
Second, with any of these sci-fi franchises, even when they stumble, there’s a gap in years between bombs and revivals, i.e., 1997’s Alien Resurrection and 2004’s Alien vs. Predator, Tim Burton’s poorly received 2001 Planet of the Apes and 2011’s start of a new trilogy Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and so on. Let’s face it, even Superman looked like he was gone after the last two Christopher Reeves movies Superman III (a zany Richard Pryor comedy with a final global of $80.2M) and 1987’s Superman IV: Quest for Peace ($30.2M global), and Bryan Singer’s bloated-budget 2006 Superman Returns ($391M off a $204M net cost). But this past summer we had James Gunn’s Superman which is one of the highest-grossing movies of all time for the DC superhero at a near $616M.
It’s fair to say that time heals all franchise wounds. However, we can’t say that about Tron: Ares this time around.
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Dodgers sweep 4 from Milwaukee and go back to the World Series.
Shohei Ohtani pitched 6 innings and hits 3 HR last night.He is the modern day Babe Ruth…
We are a long way off from calling Ohtani a modern day Babe Ruth. Let’s come back in ten years to discuss if he is or not.
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I saw this on Facebook:
Ultimates writer Deniz Camp has released a statement on the end of the Ultimate Universe:
“Okay, the End of the Ultimate Universe (from my perspective):
It’s true that the original plan was not to “end” the universe. A lot of my run is setting up characters I hoped would go on past me, I think I’ve made that clear and obvious.
BUT
John was ending his run at 24, that was always the case. He was done. Peach and Bryan were both ending their stories when the Maker got out as well. That was their decision. (according to what Iv’e been told/my interactions with them)
(And it makes sense. Think about it – Peach is writing and drawing every issue for 24 issues. That’s insane. She works like 20 hours a day on that book, no joke. She’s the hero of the line. She deserves a break, if she wants one).
Wolverine was only meant to be 12; then it got extended to 16. The other creators were offered more issues to run alongside Endgame, but they declined (I saw that happen).
The only person who planned on continuing was me.
Initially, still very early, those books were going to end as those creators left, and Ultimates would have continued and new books launched (I was pushing for Hawkeye, Guardians was discussed, etc). This was all very vague.
But then, Wil Moss came to me and said, hey, I think we’re going to end it. End it end it. This was a long time ago, at least a year before now I think, but I’d have to check.
Not because the books are “too woke” (if it were that, they’d interfere with the writing of it, which they haven’t) or because the main line is jealous (this is silly, money is money to them), but because everything seemed to be coming to a natural conclusion.
They felt that they had something special with the universe as it was, consistent creative visions that told their stories and had a clear beginning, middle and end. An accessible, creator-forward re-imagination of the Marvel Universe. A version of the neverendingstory that ended.
And that the purity of that vision, they though/think, could pay dividends for a long time after, if it didn’t overstay the welcome, dilute it, or fumble the ending.
Yes, I had plans for stuff coming after, continuing this world, and part of me was bummed about that, but in my heart I think I knew that they’d be “lesser”. Moreover, for me, the Ultimate Universe has been a place for TRYING new things in comics. Radical things.
Whether it’s the real time pacing, or the radical interventions of marvel characters, or the formal play that have characterized my run, that’s what excited me about the Ultimate Universe. Excites me still.
And this –really, truly ending the universe on a high note, having it be this contained thing, giving a story an END– that’s radical for big 2 comics! It’s something that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been done on this scale by Marvel or DC. That is exciting to me.
I hope it is exciting to you!
But I don’t mean to tell anyone how to feel about any of this. And I don’t want to speak for anyone. Perhaps I’ve been misinformed, or feelings have changed – I don’t know. But this is how it is from my perspective.”
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Some good times there…
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Jared Leto Changed Tron: Ares to Make Himself the Star of the Franchise
Nobody really asked for another Tron movie. Well, nobody, except Jared Leto. And that’s probably where it all went wrong for the sci-fi blockbuster. Disney’s Tron: Ares was supposed to revive the neon-lit sci-fi franchise about the Flynns and The Grid. Instead, it became a $200 million Jared Leto project that crashed harder than a Light Cycle in the film’s fictional arena.
Over the weekend, Tron: Ares limped into theatres with a miserable $33 million domestic debut, nearly $11 million short of projections. Add another $27 million overseas, and you’ve got a worldwide total of $60.2 million against a production budget north of $180 million. You don’t need to be Kevin Flynn to see that’s a catastrophic system error. “Sources say Tron will likely retire from the big screen,” The Hollywood Reporter noted in a recent article. And it’s probably a good idea now.
The tragedy here is that Tron wasn’t supposed to be about Leto’s character at all. Screenwriter Jesse Wigutow admitted, “The first iteration of the [Ares] script was a different movie, but it had a character named Ares.” That version was shelved until Leto showed up. Determined to make his version of the film happen, Tron: Ares changed quite a bit. By 2017, thanks to then-Disney live-action chief Sean Bailey, Leto had muscled his way into the producer’s chair and reworked the story so Ares actually became the lead. Suddenly, the Tron universe wasn’t about the Flynns anymore; it was about Jared Leto’s digital messiah.
To be fair, Leto has always loved spectacle. This is the same guy who climbed from the 86th to the 104th floor of the Empire State Building to promote his band, 30 Seconds to Mars (who James Gunn clearly hates). “Ever since I was a kid, I was fascinated with the Empire State Building,” he told Jimmy Fallon.
Behind the scenes, Disney executives were reportedly sweating bullets, though. And not just over the film’s budget, but over Leto himself. Earlier this year, Air Mail published nine allegations of sexual misconduct, which his representatives denied. Still, the studio feared more headlines might drop mid-promotion. They didn’t, and Leto went on to lead the global campaign. But as one insider told THR, “With Ares flopping, Leto’s currency in town has run colder than Morbius’ vampire blood.”
Ah yes, Morbius, the film that somehow bombed twice. Hollywood’s been side-eyeing Leto since its release. After that disaster, he became the poster child for big-budget misfires, following House of Gucci and now Tron: Ares. As one top talent manager bluntly put it, “In a world where Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor and Benedict Cumberbatch are having a hard time getting lead roles, why would you even go to a person who can’t open a movie and who has question marks around him as a person?”
You can’t say Disney wasn’t warned, though. The first two Tron movies barely turned a profit, yet they handed Leto the keys to The Grid for the 3rd one. The result is a big sequel no one wanted and a franchise now unplugged for good. Plus, Leto has committed a series of cinema sins over the years: Suicide Squad‘s Joker, Nick Lowell in The Outsider, Paolo Gucci in House of Gucci, Dr. Michael Morbius in Morbius, and Adam Neumann in WeCrashed.
Jared Leto, of course, still has Masters of the Universe lined up, where he plays Skeletor. Could the He-Man film already be doomed too?
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Doctor Who is missing almost 100 of 253 episodes from the show’s first six years, but an archive expert has shared an exciting update about the discovery of at least one of those long-lost instalments.
Appearing on the Doctor Who: The Missing Episodes podcast, film collector John Franklin spoke on behalf of Film is Fabulous, an organization run by film collectors and vintage television enthusiasts, sharing an update on a recent post made on the Film is Fabulous Facebook page about missing Doctor Who episodes.
The Facebook post read, “We are aware of several missing episodes of Doctor Who in private film collections in the UK. We are liaising with the individuals about cataloguing and preserving their entire collection, including the missing Doctor Who episodes, and ensuring that copies are returned to the BBC. We expect to make a detailed announcement shortly.”
Franklin shared more details, explaining how, since 2023, he and other members of the Film is Fabulous team “have been aware of a large collection of films, thousands of films, that have become vulnerable.” He confirmed, “That collection contains some very important material including a missing episode of Doctor Who.”
He added that the collection is “large” and could possibly contain “other episodes of Doctor Who,” but noted, “at this moment in time, we know of one.”
Doctor Who debuted back in 1963 on the BBC, and at the time, the network erased or reused tapes to save on space and storage costs. This led to the loss of many classic era episodes (97 in total) until archiving became a policy. However, some of those missing episodes still exist in private collections.
Franklin explained that the collector recently died and, while they’d previously received permission to catalogue the collection, there are now new legal obstacles to overcome.
“We are doing everything legally, with propriety, to make sure we secure that collection and can return that missing episode of Doctor Who and other items to the rights holder,” he stated, per the Radio Times.
Franklin added that once the legal situation is sorted, fans should expect some exciting news. “Give us the space to conclude the things that we’re doing,” he said. “You will be very, very happy with the announcements when they come, but we just need the space to be able to do that now.”
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10-3 Mariners over Blue Jays
The Jays have their work cut out for them.
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‘Amoral, evil’: vitriolic backlash builds against comics who played Riyadh festival
To paraphrase TS Eliot: and was it worth it after all? A question to ponder for those who have taken the coin of a government once described unequivocally as “the worst of the worst” by one human rights advocacy organisation.
The past decade has seen Saudi Arabia invest in everything from football to opera to video games – all part of the regime’s efforts to diversify its oil-dependent economy and its execution-heavy reputation.
Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) latest interest? Comedy. The Riyadh comedy festival, which ends today, has attracted a number of big hitters. Among them: Pete Davidson, Louis CK, Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Aziz Ansari, Whitney Cummings and Jessica Kirson. While most of the performers are US based, Jimmy Carr, Jack Whitehall and Omid Djalili also appeared as headliners.
Organised by Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority (GEA), the festival was intended to “amplify Riyadh’s status as a leading destination for major cultural and artistic events”. Or, as Visit Saudi didn’t put it: come for the weather and the entertainment! Stay because you’ve been arrested!
The organiser of the festival and chair of the GEA, Turki Al-Sheikh, is a big fan of culture. Indeed, he reposted a song on X that celebrated the lead suspect in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder.
It’s interesting that MBS has discovered a sense of humour, though, as the crown prince wasn’t laughing when Masameer County, a South Park meets Family Guy-style satire, was picked up by Netflix and became one of the most popular shows in the region. Instead, its creator, Abdulaziz Almuzaini, was sentenced to a 13-year jail term and a 30-year travel ban for “terrorism and promoting homosexuality”.
Others who have left MBS stony-faced? Fahad Albutairi, known as “Saudi Arabia’s Jerry Seinfeld”, who was allegedly handcuffed, blindfolded and put on a plane to Saudi Arabia when performing in Jordan in 2018. (He was also reported to have been forced to divorce his wife, a women’s rights activist.)
Abdulrahman al-Sadhan was jailed for 20 years for running a parody Twitter account. Tala Safwan, an Egyptian TikTok influencer and prankster was arrested for a joke with “lesbian subtext”. And in 2018 a specific law was introduced to punish, with jail sentences and fines, anybody who produced satire online deemed to be “mocking public order”.
You might think, then, that comedians most vehement in their protestations against cancel culture – Chappelle, Ansari, CK, in particular – would balk at performing in a country whose predilection for silencing extends to (alleged) murder by bone-saw.
Pete Davidson has said that there were no restrictions on the material he could perform, a dubious claim given that Atsuko Okatsuka leaked a prospective contract she was sent. The “content restrictions” section detailed anything that “may be considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, embarrassment, or ridicule … the Kingdom of Saudi, the Saudi royal family, its legal system … religion”. (Okatsuka declined the offer.)
Another reason: Tim Dillon had his invite rescinded after making a quip about slavery in the kingdom, as did Jim Jefferies after he said: “One reporter was killed by the government … unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I’m gonna die on.” Outing himself as an absolutely awful person and then not even getting the cash? Unfortunate. Oh, and then there’s the fact that Bill Burr, who did perform, confirmed there was censorship. But “the royals loved the show”, he said – so that’s nice.
Perhaps the likes of Chappelle, Ansari and CK felt there was less at stake because, by their own estimation, they have already suffered cancellation. Except that their exile from public life appears to include fresh Netflix specials and Grammy awards. Louis CK should count himself lucky; if he’d been caught with his dick in his hand in Najd, rather than Colorado, he may well have retained neither of those appendages (punitive limb amputation is an actual thing).
CK’s stance on murderous dictatorships seems to have changed since this full-throated criticism of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. But fair play to him in one sense for getting out of his comfort zone – he has a whole bit about giving up weed and yet here he is visiting a place where getting stoned is common. CK has defended himself thus: “I struggled about going once I heard what everybody was saying.” Truly, a man of integrity.
Another performer who has seemingly discovered their conscience after the fact is Jessica Kirson, a lesbian Jewish comic. Kirson has tied herself in knots worthy of a grovelling balloon-dog since. In a statement post-performance, Kirson asserted her “deep regret”, saying that she was “surprised” to be asked. Disingenuous to the extreme, given the fact she openly solicited an invitation on a podcast months ago.
Then there’s Hannibal Buress, widely praised for his significant role in taking down Bill Cosby; Buress is now taking money from a government that sentenced a 19-year-old victim of gang-rape to 200 lashes and six months in prison. Meanwhile, I remember Jack Whitehall doing a skit about “grown adults getting wound up about cartoons”. Presumably he doesn’t mind the grown adults who got so wound up by cartoons that they sentenced satirist Al Hazzaa to 23 years’ jail time for lighthearted illustrations about fasting.
Of course, the primary – and here consider primary as a euphemism for only – reason for entertainers becoming sharply severed from their morals is the riyals. On the state’s Soundstorm festival bill for this December, for instance: Post Malone, Halsey and Tyla. Actors who have taken million-dollar paychecks to attend the Red Sea film festival include Will Smith and Johnny Depp.
At least some comedians were honest about the money grab, rather than Kirson, who called the festival “a gay-affirming event”, a stretch when its sponsors have beheaded people for same-sex activity. Davidson was more straightforward: “I see the number and go: ‘I’ll go’”. (The SNL alumnus has come in for particular criticism given that his firefighter father died during 9/11). Chris Distefano said that he didn’t want to do it, but that his fiancee had instructed him to “take that fucking money”.
A more nuanced take came from Nimesh Patel, who initially said yes before backing out. “They offered a lot of money. I’m not in a position to say no to life-changing money. But it wasn’t life-changing.” Which, given the people involved, and as David Cross said in a fiery rebuke, will be true of all of them. The actor called out peers he admired who “would condone this totalitarian fiefdom for … what, a fourth house? A boat? More sneakers?” I suppose Davidson is on record as loving sneakers.
Of course, some will argue that performing in authoritarian or oppressive countries is a means of reaching the masses; opening up art to those underserved. And while that may be true on occasion, it is a different thing entirely from being sponsored by the state itself to launder its sovereignty. As Vinny Thomas sarcastically put it: “Sometimes to fight the power you have to be paid by the power.”
Others argue that cultural boycotts and campaigns make little difference, even when South Africa, BDS, and more recently, Nan Goldin’s dismantling of the Sackler family’s art patronage have proven otherwise. Plenty of comedians joined Cross in condemnation, including Nish Kumar, Marc Maron and Zach Woods. In typically forthright style, Stewart Lee described participants as “evil, amoral, grifting bastards”.
And Shane Gillis, Leslie Liao, Stavros Halkias and Mike Birbiglia turned down offers alongside Okatsuka. The stain on the reputations of the comedians who stood up for Saudi’s project whitewash? A deep, blood red.
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They should probably wait and see how many days the ceasefire lasts before writing any cheques their asses can’t cash.
Or you know, look into the rules of the Nobel Peace Prize and pay attention to the nomination dates.
Lorcan, you know damn good and well that MAGA can’t read.
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I finished the Peacemaker finale.
This whole season has been total crap.
Yeah, it had its moments, but they were few and far between. This season felt like they compressed a 24-episode season into eight episodes. And the finale was just terrible. I kept looking at my watch wondering how they were going to wrap everything up. As the minutes ticked by, I knew it would be unsatisfying and I was right.
I loved the first season. It was fun and deep and told a complete story. Beginning, middle, and end. Season 2 felt unfocused and like Gunn was using it to set up more stuff in the DCU than to tell a good story here.
Season 1 was A+, and Season 2 was F-.
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Bill Burr is coming off worse and worse with this whole thing.
‘How Could You F—ing Do That to Another Human Being?’ Bill Burr Once Cared About Jamal Khashoggi
In 2018, the kidnapping, torture and murder of Washington Post journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s paid assassins shocked the free world and all believers in the free press, democracy and human dignity — a group that once included Bill Burr.
When Burr agreed to headline the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which started September 26th and concluded yesterday evening, he clearly underestimated how much the rest of the American comedy community would disapprove of their colleagues playing a Saudi state-funded festival that was organized by the guy who has so many political prisoners that there’s a wing named after him in the Riyadh jail. Ever since Burr returned to the United States, he has been angrily defending his participation in the Saudi Royal Family’s official comedy festival, and he continues to argue that his decision to take a check from the same Crown Prince who ordered the murder of Khashoggi was actually a big win for freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia, where, he reports, they even have a McDonald’s.
For all his many attacks on his critics, Burr has been cagey about actually acknowledging who organized the festival (Turki Al-Sheikh) and who paid his performance fee (MBS). Perhaps that’s because Burr is ashamed of how, shortly after Khashoggi’s murder, he went on the Jim & Sam Show with fellow future Riyadh comic Mark Normand and expressed his disgust about the brutal crime commissioned by his recent patrons.
Just two weeks after Saudi operatives loyal to the Crown Prince tortured and murdered Khashoggi, Burr expressed his moral outrage at the brutality of the killing on the record. “How could you fucking do that to another human being?” Burr asked when host Jim Norton pointed out that audio tapes of Khashoggi’s killing captured the moment the murderers cut off his fingers. “Listen to them scream in agony and then you continue?”
“Human beings, we deserve whatever the end of this is. We’re just awful,” Burr lamented of the brutality of Khashoggi’s killers, whom he joined on the Saudi payroll late last month. However, even then, Burr realized that his outrage wouldn’t lead to any kind of positive action.
“Now what am I gonna do, as a person, to continue — to make sure that doesn’t happen?” Burr asked rhetorically. “Am I going to get involved? Or am I gonna go buy a New York Post and get a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich?”
At the time, Burr didn’t realize that there was a third option that he would gladly take: perform a show for the people who ordered the horrific murder and accept enough blood money to buy every bacon, egg and cheese sandwich in New York.
In a Reddit thread about Burr’s past comments on the Khashoggi killing, Burr’s fans mocked him for forgetting that the Saudi Royal Family once made him so disgusted with humanity that he looked forward to our extinction. “330 beheadings in 2024,” one commenter wrote of the well-documented increase of Saudi executions in the last few years, often of journalists and dissidents just like Khashoggi.
“Indeed, Bill. How could you do that? Stand on that stage built by slaves and tell jokes to drown out Jamal Khashoggi’s screams to the world,” another fan asked.
However, Burr’s defenders pointed out that Burr simply didn’t have enough information about Saudi Arabia to make better choices in the past. Said one apologist, “To be fair, he didn’t know Saudi Arabia had a Chili’s when he made those comments.”
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Yeah. You’re probably right on that. It’s just that things seem so bleak. Could use some fun.
If you look back on the Relationship Thread, Al, this last discussion involved one of the members posting about how his girlfriend of six years just told him she wants to break up. Not exactly “fun”.
In fairness that is quite young for a girlfriend, probably for the best.
This is why you never let Jeffrey Epstein play matchmaker for you.
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Although I basically only use for comics, sci-fi, and fully clothed ladies.
Uh, huh. Suuurrre. We totally believe you.
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Things have been so downbeat lately. I’d like to reboot the Relationship thread just to have a fun thread here.
So… yay or nay?NAY. That thread never goes well, especially for you.
Besides, there aren’t that many people here to make it really worthwhile.
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(Sorry, it’s a Bleeding Cool Link.)
You think saying “sorry” absolves you from this sin, Todd? Think again.
You misunderstand.
When I said “sorry”, I was actually saying “fuck you”.
;)
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and this bot said I was upset about it so now I am
He’s blaming bots. Whatever.
He never really addressed why people are pissed at him. Poor showing by Conan for not calling him out, whereas Jimmy Kimmy took Aziz Ansari to task over doing it:
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Last night, the wife I watched the documentary Ozzy: No Escape From Now on Paramount+ that dropped yesterday.
It was excellent. It basically covers the last few years of his life. The way it was shot, it kind of felt like a coda to The Osbournes reality show. Have some tissues handy, because you will get teary-eyed. It is honest and raw and does not hold back.
I highly recommend it.
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I wonder what 2010 Bill Burr would say about the 2025 version?
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So basically, fuck Bill Burr. He no longer has any credibility.
Bill Burr Says Playing Riyadh Festival ‘One of Top Three Experiences I’ve Ever Had’
It’s funny how quickly Bill Burr went from “put the billionaires down like the rabid dogs they are” to “performing for the Saudi Royal Family was the honor of a lifetime” once the blood money started flowing his way.
Now that the many A-list American headliners at the Riyadh Comedy Festival are starting to return home from Saudi Arabia, the stand-ups who scored massive paydays in exchange for their participation in a propaganda campaign to whitewash crimes against humanity have the unenviable task of justifying their actions as anything more than a soulless, morally bankrupt cash-grab. For weeks now, comedians and comedy fans have been blasting Burr, Dave Chappelle, Aziz Ansari and the rest of the Riyadh crew for their complicity in diverting attention away from the Saudi government’s horrific human rights record by advancing the Saudi Vision 2030 campaign to turn the country into an international entertainment destination.
As a proud servant to Saudi Crown Prince and ruthless butcher Mohammed bin Salman, Burr is now selling a Saudi Arabian vacation with the hyperbolic, fantastical praise that one would use to advertise weekend passes at Disney World. “It was a mind-blowing experience,” Burr gushed about the Riyadh Comedy Festival in the newest episode of his Monday Morning Podcast. “Definitely top three experiences I’ve had. I think it’s going to lead to a lot of positive things.”
It will certainly lead to Mohammed bin Salman blowing more minds — or, more likely, removing them by the neck.
“On the road, Ol’ Billy, fuckin’ trying to go to as many countries as he can,” Burr started of his stand-up tour in the Middle East. “I went to two new countries: Bahrain and then I went to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.”
Rather than discussing how the same despot who cut Burr his exorbitant check was the guy who commissioned the torture and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Burr framed his trip to Saudi Arabia as a humanitarian effort to spread the gospel of stand-up to the other side of the world.
“You know, stand-up is new to this part of the world, so they always have, like, fuckin’ restrictions and shit when you go over there,” Burr said of the list of banned topics that he and his fellow comedians had to avoid if they wanted their sweet, sweet blood money. Before signing on for the festival, the Riyadh comics had to agree not to make any jokes about the Saudi government, the Saudi Royal Family or any of the country’s religious or cultural practices.
Burr admitted that he was “nervous” upon his arrival in Saudi Arabia, given what little he knows about the country. “My whole fuckin’ idea of Saudi Arabia is what I’ve seen on the news. I literally think I’m gonna land, and everybody’s going to be screaming, ‘Death to America!’ and they’re going to have machetes and chop my head off, right?” Burr said of his flight to Riyadh.
“And then we land, and now here we are, right? And we end up driving into town, it’s a city and everything, right? And everybody’s just regular,” Burr said of the Riyadh residents. “Like people are just shooting the shit, like, ‘Hey, how you doing? Welcome!’ And we’re like, ‘Hey, we’re happy to be here!’ And we’re driving around, and I’m going, like, ‘I thought this place was going to be like really tense,’ and I’m thinking, ‘Is that a Starbucks, next to a Pete’s Coffee, next to a Burger King?’”
As for the show itself, Burr explained how exciting it was to get the royal treatment. “They say, ‘Alright, the front two rows is going to be all diplomats and these padded seats, and then up top, the Royals are going to be there,’” Burr described of the Riyadh Comedy Festival audience. “And it was like in the round and everything, and everyone was like ridiculously excited that there was going to be standup comedy there.”
“This is what’s amazing about the arts and stand-up comedy, is comedians have always pushed the boundaries,” Burr congratulated himself. “And this was a classic case — I guess, tipping the cap to the people who set up the festival over there, when they first set it up, the rules on what they had about what you could and couldn’t say in Saudi Arabia, the people running the festivals were like, ‘Alright man, well that’s game, set, match. If this is all you can talk about, and you want some good comedians, this isn’t gonna work.’”
“And then, to their credit, they said, ‘Alright, what do we gotta do?’” Burr said of the Saudi Royal Family’s gracious compromise in letting comedians joke about absolutely no part of their country, culture or government. “And they just negotiated it all the way down to, like, you can talk about anything, other than a couple things.”
So, when Burr took the stage, he bravely made no mention of his bloodthirsty billionaire patrons, the setting of the festival or any aspect of Saudi Arabian life. And, as Burr reported, he absolutely killed. “I had to stop a couple times during the show (and say), ‘I’ll be honest with you guys, I cannot fucking believe any of you have any idea who I am. This is really amazing,’” Burr said of the show. “And it was just this great exchange of energy. They know their reputation. So they were extra friendly.”
The fact that Burr is blatantly ignoring is how this “great exchange of energy” and “mind-blowing experience” wasn’t just a bunch of comedy fans coming together to bring A-list talent to their home country. Like Burr himself, the organizers of the Riyadh festival were under the employ of the Saudi Royal Family, who have been executing journalists and torturing political prisoners all throughout the planning stages of the festival. So, when Burr agreed to never utter an unkind word about the Crown Prince, he was taking a payoff from one of the most brutal, bloodthirsty billionaires on the planet to put an end to the whole “eat the rich” shtick he’s been doing for the last year.
Burr’s decision to reframe his participation in the Riyadh Comedy Festival as an artistic mission to the far corners of the globe is a sickeningly insincere attempt at a high-mindedness that has no part in the international discussion about Burr’s new masters and the horrific crimes committed by the Saudi government. No matter how much Burr bloviates about how everyone in the world is exactly the same and we should all just get along and eat fast food together, that wasn’t the point of the festival — the whole reason the Crown Prince cut Burr that check was so that the comedian would go on his podcast and gush about how warm, welcoming and tolerant his hosts were, despite what you read about them in the news.
This schmaltzy rationalization for laundering the reputations of billionaire tyrants is a disappointing loss for anyone who believes that comedians like Burr should speak truth to power when human dignity desperately needs defenders — and a complete win for power.
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This is all just an attempt to manafacture consent, to make AI feel inevitable and people should just accept it.
When in reality the bottom is falling out of the industry just like it did with NFTs and Crypto and every other tech scam of the last few years, OpenAI have admitted there literally isn’t enough capital in the world to fund the level of expansion they envision they need, on top of demanding free access to all copyrightable material because the amount of nonsense AI output in the public domain is poisoning new generative AI models. Lionsgate went all-in on using AI to make a movie and discovered they can’t do it.
There is definitely a bubble that is ready to pop, and it will burst sooner rather than later.
Here are some good videos summing up where things are and where they are going:
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Is this a bad time to mention how my theatres are in a practical walking range of my front door?
Not all at!
That’s something to be proud of!
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Currently I can’t see how the PS6 or XBNext can be sold. This time around the clear sell was 4k gaming, with a side of SSD fast loading. On PS5 it was load speed and DualSense that was the big surprises.
If you show me PS5 and PS5 Pro vids running side by side I’d have to work to spot the difference. Can’t see the easy sell point, but it’s all years away.
We’re reaching the limits of human vision and biology to actually perceive the difference.
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