Chairslinger

It's good. I am about 4 or 5 hours in, I think. Already seems like an impressively large world.

30% chance the Senate will go D or the House will remain R. Which is almost exactly where 538 had Trump's chances on ED '16 Mostly Minecraft. I played a bit of Horizon ZD finally, but mostly Minecraft.

3 more hours of work, and then I am glued to a TV until we know the results. And if the results are so close we have to wait two weeks for California I might just put a bullet through my head.

Wanna hear something funny? The text editor this site runs now saves posts you write, but don't send. I wrote the following post around the time Houston acquired Melo and decided not to send it because I felt it was a little unfair to them, but it's been sitting in the text editor all that time, and it's looking pretty accurate.... They come off as one of those teams that gets chesty before they've ever actually won anything.

Sounds very Hercules TLJ/Xena/GOWish.

On a surface level, maybe? I have been passionate about political topics like gay rights and reproductive freedom since even before then. I certainly had positions on our actions after 9/11. Obama's election is when I started to seek out discussion about politics rather then just, say, click on a thread now and then if it was about gay marriage or climate change. I will say my interest wasn't only in Obama. I had long been opposed to Bush, so a big factor in my interest was also just seeing Bush to the door. Put it this way, I was against Bush for the war in Iraq, but I couldn't have told you a damn thing about his push to privatize Social Security at the time.

His election is a big factor in why I got interested in politics.

If things don't go belly up, and we win at least the House on Tuesday, Trump makes it damn hard not to be a sore winner. His obsession with winning being the only thing that matters makes it hard not to do a victory lap on the takeover being rooted in how many tens of millions of people Trump inspired to loath him with a fiery, burning passion ( @ort ).

For all we know, it goes down to his shoes.

I read most of the way through the Two Towers. I think it's fair to say you need to be familiar with the source material to make a judgement, and I generally lean towards the written works in my preferences, but I defy any fan to tell me what exactly in the last bit of the LotR's that is going to drastically change my comparison. Especially since, having a friend who is a big proponent of the written work and discussed this with him many times, I am well aware of the Scouring of the Shire which sounds like just about the most ridiculously anti-climatic, pace killing, unnecessary ending to a book I've ever heard. My opinion for Harry Potter is that, not that surprisingly, as the books "grew up" and became more complex and just plain longer the series basically crisscrossed. So the first two movies are better than the books, three and four are about equal, and then five, six, and seven the movies increasingly have trouble keeping up with the books.

Apparently the book was inspired by a road King lived by when Owen was young, and one day the scene from the book basically played out, only King managed to get to him in time. King at his best, when he is mixing the horror and tragedy of the supernatural with the very real horror and tragedy we all eventually go through in life.

That's useful

Legend trying to detect sarcasm.....

Quick, someone send up a SCOTUS Bat signal. Someone is daring to hold Trump accountable for shit he said.

Imagine Trump going through thousands of photos and deciding that is the one that was the most flattering.

One of the classic that doesn't get mentioned much nowadays. That time when Trump said he would order the military to target and kill the wives and children of our enemies specifically as a deterrent.

Gladiator 2: So Very Tired

I think I am in the minority that doesn't think Kubrick's Shining is better than the novel. They are very different, and the remake of it King did in the 90's that tracks much more to the original is easily worse than either imho, but I find them to be about equal in quality. The movie is very good with scares and suspense, but like most written works understanding the characters and motivations is better in the novel. The same could probably be said for The Dead Zone and Cujo, though those films aren't held in as high a regard as The Shining. And for my money, I would still put IT firmly above the new movie. I like the movie, but I consider the book to be one of King's best, and possibly my favorite standalone King book. He is at his best when he is using the blood and guts for a deeper story, and IT remains one of the best kids growing up stories I have ever read. It's hard not to relate to at least one of the 7 Losers in the story.

And I do.

Donald the Unpresidented is now telling us who is qualified? There aren't enough expletives to get through this fucking presidency

Well now I wanna switch teams.

Here I thought the story was over once the Roman Republic was restored to power and everyone lived happily ever after @SFLUFAN

The thing about JP is that the movie cut and rearranged things in all the right places to stay faithful to the source material, but also streamline it to near perfection. I know some fans who disagree with me, but having watched the movie first I found the book to feel extremely bumpy when it came to pacing compared to the movie. I would say LotR is similar, and agree the movies are better. While generally Stephen King's movie adaptations, even the good ones, trail behind the source material both Shawshanke Redemption and The Green Mile are substantially better than their novellas. Shawshanke in particular going from a lower mid-tier King short story to one of the best movies of all time imho