Castle Magus

"Lani, Jesse, and Stephan remember the days when five teenagers(?) with attitude were all we needed to solve the world's problems."

---

Lani says: "I know I'm a little older than you kids... I was a fresh-faced elementary schooler at the height, at the peak, of Power Rangers popularity."

I would have just finished my sophomore year in high school when this movie came out, and I would have just entered or been about to enter high school as a freshman when the show itself first came out in August 1993. It was a pretty damn huge deal at the time. That said, I only vaguely remember seeing the movie at some point, likely even in a theater, but I remember next to nothing about it now. (And I saw the 2017 one that Jesse mentioned, most definitely not in a theater, but I remember even less about that one.)

I did not go to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers live show. I was unaware until now that there even was a Power Rangers live show. (I did, however, go to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Coming Out of Their Shells Live Tour thing, when it hit Carowinds in 1990 or 1991 or whenever. And I had a cassette tape of the album, too, which I'm pretty sure I got at Pizza Hut. Yes, that was a real thing that exists.)

Anyway, as for the movie itself... yeah, this movie came after Austin St. John, Walter Jones, and (RIP) Thuy Trang had already left the show, after which I lost most of my interest for the whole thing. I never really got into even Zeo or Turbo (and I had no idea that Alien Rangers was even a thing that existed or if I did I had successfully blotted it from my memory until today), and I didn't watch anything of In Space and all the stuff that came after that.

"Hi. You may have noticed a new crop of influencers like The Nelk Boys and Bryce Hall taking over online spaces. Today we’re looking at who these people are and how MAGA influencers garnered so much... well, influence."

---

"The extremely partisan and vindictive crime president, looking to wet his thick beak as sloppily as possible, is now lording over every social media platform, which now happens to be one of the primary ways in which Americans get their information, the youth of which specifically following individual influencers, who may or may not be getting paid by political operatives working directly for that president to put out misinformation."

(My only minor quibble with that italicized quote from Cody Johnston there is that he used the world "misinformation" when he clearly should have used "disinformation.")

This is just dystopian shit. All of it.

It's frustrating and sad and horrible and disgusting that MAGA has been around long enough for there to be a "next generation" of anything related to it.

Also, I'd just like to state, yet again, that I loathe the entire concept of "influencers" in general. The only consolation for me is that I'd never heard of any of those "next generation" MAGA assholes, prior to this video. But then, there were a whole lot of mentions in this video of the current/old generation of MAGA assholes, too.

...if you ever run a news website or a video game blog or something like that, and I ever even once see you hold your content hostage behind a paywall, then just know that I'm going to go out of my way to make sure that I never see your website or blog show up for me again, whether that's in Google searches or in my news app or whatever. It's actually worse when you have it set up to let people read two or three articles/entries for free, before throwing up the paywall. ("FiRsT oNe'S fReE" says the skeevy drug dealer or the scummy casino barker.) Your content is not something I can't do without, so don't even try to act like it is. Your content is not that valuable to me.

(Then again, for the most recent site in question [which I won't even name here, so as to not give them even that much more traffic], I suppose I should have heeded the earlier red flag that was them trying to get me to sign up for a monthly or yearly subscription just because I happened to hit reply on one of the comments under one of their articles to see if I could make a comment without having to make an account [since some rare few websites still let you do that]. Merely having to sign up for something for free is bad enough, and I usually don't bother with even that much. Being faced with an option select for a $7-$99 monthly/$70-$999 yearly subscription is on a whole other level entirely[1] and is a "fuck right off" moment.)

Find less obnoxious, insufferable ways to make money.

[1] - And even for that link there, I had to replace the original one with an archive.is variant, because the original one was, yes, partially behind a paywall.

My first thought before I even started watching this was "all of them." And, of course, right at the 1:15 mark, Pat said "all of them," to which Woolie agreed.

So... yeah.

That said, when they start getting into specifics, it quickly shows how meaningless the terms "AAA" or "AA" or whatever truly are. Is Pokemon AAA or AA? Is Nintendo AAA just not as good as other companies' AAA? Is a really good "modern retro" "AA" indie game "better" or "worse" than a multi-million dollar, thousands of people "AAA" game? And if the "AA" game is unquestionably better and more fun to play and has more "soul" than the "AAA" game, then what do the labels even mean?

(Also, I keep hearing about this Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 game, and, indeed, I've had it on my wishlist since it first showed up in my discovery queue however long ago... and... when it doesn't cost $50-$60 USD, maybe I'll even buy it someday.)

Seems that Dumbshit Trump is not a fan of thinly veiled potential calls for assassination if they're aimed at him, rather than when he himself is making the same toward his political opponents. How hypocritical of him.

Also, whenever James Comey is mentioned in the news, I feel obligated to refer back to the True Pundit Hoax.

Anyway, in conclusion, to hell forever with Donald Trump, as usual. Or in other terms: 8647. ¬_¬

"Ubisoft has said that you do not own the games you buy, in response to a lawsuit. Also: The Netflix CEO said something ridiculous, but why?"

A post on WIL WHEATON dot NET.

---

"Wil Wheaton on His Star Trek Family and His New Podcast Storytime with Wil Wheaton"

"Hi everyone, happy Tuesday! I am so excited for this week’s episode. I’m talking to the one and only Wil Wheaton! You know Wil from his roles as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: Next Generation, Gordie in Stand By Me and his appearances on The Big Bang Theory. Wil is also a super-nerd and a prolific audiobook reader. He has a new podcast called Storytime with Wil Wheaton, where he reads a new short speculative fiction story each episode and I highly recommend it! We had such a lovely conversation— Wil is a deep thinker and one of the kindest people I know. I can’t wait for you to get to know him a little bit better! Stick around after the interview for the hindsight, where my producer Jeph and I talk about the episode, as well as some upcoming live podcast recordings, our new Patreon and oh yeah, time travel!"

---

Apparently the only thing you have to do to get me to watch an entire hour and a half episode of your podcast is simply to have Wil Wheaton on as the guest for that episode. Like so.

Also, it's kind of funny, because I'm sure most other geeknerds (or is the proper term "nerdgeeks"? *shrug*) like me would know Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica. Here's the thing, though... I have never seen anything of Battlestar Galactica, either the 2004 version or the original show or anything else, outside of maybe an occasional clip on Youtube or something that I don't even remember now. (I always tend to get it confused with Babylon 5, as well, which is another geeknerd show that starts with the letter "B" and of which I have yet to see a single episode. How far in the toilet is my geeknerd cred now?) Nor have I seen any of that other nerdgeek stuff like all that Star Wars stuff mentioned on her Wikipedia page there. What I have seen a fair bit of her in, though, is Longmire, because there is an over-the-air TV channel which I don't recall the name of right now that my sister watches, and it airs a metric assload of Longmire episodes, back to back, on at least a weekly if not daily basis, and I see bits and pieces of it whenever I happen to exit my room to go the kitchen or something (also stuff like Stargate SG-1 and The Closer/Major Crimes and Rizzoli & Isles and NCIS and whatever else that channel [those channels?] tend to air, but that's beside the point). Beyond that, I have no other experience with pretty much anything Katee Sackhoff has done, unfortunately. At least as of right now. So far. Yet.

Okay, so...

There's a fair bit of overlap here with what Wil said in the Mayim Bialik podcast and what he has said on his own blog, but there's a lot of stuff that's new, too. That's one of the cool things about Wil is that even if he's telling largely the same story as one he's told before, elsewhere, he's still able to put a new spin on it. It's not just the same thing, over and over.

At one point, early on, Wil says that if he could give up all of his acting success if it meant that he would instead have a normal childhood where he had parents who weren't terrible, he would do it in a heartbeat. However, later on, about halfway into the episode, when asked about if he could time travel and change something, would he do it, he says that if he could go back and change the bad things about his childhood, he would not do it, if it meant that it led to him never meeting Anne, his wife. It was an interesting contrast. His acting career he would sacrifice in a moment, if it meant he could instead have had a good childhood with loving parents, but not his wife and her kids that he later adopted as his own. By the way, his stories about his wife's children, separately, asking him to formally, officially adopt them when they were each 18 was very touching.

Oh, and the short story they were talking about is Wikihistory. I'm glad Wil mentioned it because it gave me an excuse to read it again (this will be the fourth of fifth time now). In fact, I literally paused the video, then went and read it again, before returning to the video. It's definitely as good as he says it is (though he did get some of the details about it wrong, i.e. there was no "baby Schlimmel" or whatever).

And the fish story is this one or one of several like it told by Michio Kaku.

Finally... I haven't gotten around to it as of yet, but I think I'm going to start actually making the time to go through It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton now. Perhaps even getting started right now, in fact.

"There's always going to be shitty people in the world, that's just how it is, but we can choose whether we're going to be one of them."

"They are not the same thing"

I have never once used Discord for anything, nor do I ever plan to start. The replacement of forums with Discord has made the Internet as a whole much less useful to me. Just yet another example of enshittification. And, again, Discord is nothing but just Johnny-come-lately IRC.

And, no, I seriously doubt that this will be the "one last time" that I rant about this. Fuck Discord. To hell with Discord. For me, "Discord" is either "like Q from Star Trek" or "that goddess from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" or... you know... the actual word. And the simple fact that one would name their communications platform after the concept of "disagreement" is just asinine, but also fitting, in this case.

(Please welcome the new "fuck discord" tag, because I knew I'd posted about this before.)