Suuuuure, just a quick little adjustment. Nothing more. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I can’t read any of the text, but the one on the left has the vibe of something that would get someone investigated for posting on the War Thunder forums to win an argument.

I’d go as far as to argue that running a nation has almost nothing in common with running a business.

A business literally exists to make a profit for its shareholders. The owners can try to do good things like pay high wages or give back to their community, but at the end of the day their goal is to make more money than they spend.

A government, on the other hand, should exist to protect and provide opportunities for its citizens to thrive. Generating a profit is largely at odds with that goal. People should have the same access to opportunities regardless of where in the country they live, and that’s going to sometimes mean that functions of the government are never profitable. That should be seen as okay, but people have been brainwashed to think that taxes are inherently bad, and that businesses are somehow naturally more efficient. I can say, as someone who has worked in business all his life, that that last bit is particularly a giant crock of shit. Businesses are no more naturally streamlined than any other organization. Hell, I’m currently personally leading a task force at my work to try to reduce all the egregious inefficiencies I’ve uncovered when trying to figure out why we’re not making nearly as much money as we should be.

The point is, providing government services doesn’t need to be “efficient”. If you can make that happen and save the taxpayers money, that’s great and you should do it. If that means letting any member of your society slip through the cracks, then efficiency be damned. The government shouldn’t be in the business of making money.

And, no, privatizing “inefficient” government services is never the answer. All you’re doing there is introducing new inefficiencies - the need for the business entity to make a profit, and the corners they’ll inevitably cut to make that happen.

Anyway, I hope I don’t come across as jumping on your comment. It sounds like I agree with you - just wanted to tack on this wall of thoughts.

God, this is so infuriatingly true. A few months ago I searched for info on types of spiders in my province, because I wanted to learn more about my many housemates. All of the top links were SEO blog spam that were clearly duplicate pages rebranded for different keywords (something that Google’s algorithm used to penalize but apparently no longer gives a shit about). I know this because, no, black widows are not fucking native to Manitoba, Canada.

Not to mention that goddamn annoying way of writing that SEO blog spam uses where they are so obviously reaching for long tail keywords. My job used to involve some of this stuff back when the search engines pretended to care about good content - when you were at least nominally rewarded with page rank for content that read like it was written by a person with a soul. Now it’s just a wasteland of mechanical prose. There’s still good stuff being said out there, but good like finding it with a search engine.

✓ Okay, boomer.

Absolute poetry:

I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.

I somehow missed that but you’re right. That’s so in character for him to do after being disappointed in his son.

A few assorted thoughts:

• I was not expecting a Will Ferrell cameo, but he was great as always. That’s the perfect sort of role for his comedy style.
• Also in things I didn’t expect to see: When Frenchie and Kimiko were standing outside that sauna door. I expected them to walk in on gay sex. What I didn’t expect was an ass-eating human centipede done by the same guy. It’s like they saw that similar scene in White Lotus and said, “You know what would make this better? If instead of two guys there were 6 and they were all the same guy. Also, let’s really let the scene simmer for a bit.” Never change, showrunners.
• I knew from the last episode that A-Train was going to get a redemption arc, but I didn’t expect it to start so soon in the season. I think he’ll have a few more twists on his path before the season is up.
• It’s also becoming more obvious that Ryan is going to turn on Homelander, but it’s almost seeming too obvious. I can still see him embracing the dark side, at least until the latter half of S05.
• The look on the little girl’s face after she was “saved” by Ryan yeeting the choreographer into the wall was priceless. That kid has a bright future in acting if she can already express that sort of incredulity at such a young age.
• Of course Homelander couldn’t keep from inserting himself into his son’s first save.
• Also, HL’s reaction to Ryan crying. Of course he’s so out of touch with humanity that he thought Ryan was upset at being upstaged rather than for killing someone.
• The fight scene at the end was great, especially the setup of a bunch of dick-swinging naked men barging into the celebration with guns. Also, when Firecracker stopped mid-fight to livestream her Jewish Illuminati conspiracy theories. What I hated about that fight was when they took cover behind an overturned table while taking fire from assault rifles. I know this is a show about superheroes so I can’t expect realism, but both people there were human and that table would do jack shit to stop those bullets. It’s a super minor criticism, but that just felt lazy in an otherwise great scene.
• I still have no clue what Sage is up to. She does seem to be seeding chaos in the ranks of the Seven, so maybe she is trying to take them down from the inside.

The beet juice is a nice touch - it really does give it more of a fishy look. Even the texture in the cut portion looks more like fish than regular ol’ tofu to me, so that’s impressive too.

That said, even a million years ago when I ate meat I hated fish, so I probably don’t know what I’m talking about. Still, I’d definitely eat that. Great job!

You’re reminding me that I’ll have to prioritize watching Gen V asap. I think I’ll catch up on the current episodes of this season of The Boys and then jump over to that while I wait for ep 5 to drop next week.

Either way, you bring up some great points and seem to have a better grasp on the lore of the show than I do. As I said in my comment, I spent half the episode trying to remember all the in-progress plot points from last season, but it’s starting to come back to me.

Throwing a dart at that poster and letting that determine your fate, right?

Speaking of changed appearances… Erin Moriarty. I literally don’t think I’d be able to recognize her if comparing S01 to S04.

I’m all for people doing what they want with their own body, but that sort of plastic surgery just really makes me sad. I wonder how much of that is caused by filters and social media in general ruining people’s perceptions of what is normal.

Like, I understand if people want surgery to correct a significant disfigurement or for gender-reassignment. I’m sure there are also countless people out there with minor plastic surgery who still look great. It’s when you hate how much you look to the point where you start to make yourself look unnatural that I get bummed out. I hope if that’s really caused by some form of body dysmorphia that she’s able to find peace. If I’m wrong and that’s just genuinely the look for her, then I suppose I’m happy for her. Again, I stand by the fact that how she looks is her choice, I just can’t help but worry when someone changes their physical appearance so drastically.

I’ve spent most of this episode trying to remember what happened with the story this far as it’s been a while since I watched S03. With that being said, here are my loose thoughts (which are mostly questions):

• Was it previously established that Starlight can no longer be tracked by Vought? I assume the CIA removed her tracker but don’t remember it happening.
• Was Victoria Neumann’s supe origin ever established? She seems like she’s a naturally-born supe but Hughie made a comment where he asked her if she had shot her daughter up with V, which to me implies that she’s on V herself.
• Speaking of Neumann - her Supe status isn’t known by Vought right?
• I’m interested to see where the storyline of Homelander’s kid goes. On most shows he’d realize the truth about his bio dad and turn against him. With this show, though, I can just as easily see him going full Sith.
• It felt inevitable that Homelander would escape justice for that murder. This show parallels modern-US politics pretty brazenly, and people like that constantly escape real justice in real life.
• “An eye for an eye might be in the Jew section of the Bible, but it’s still in the Bible.” Jesus, this show never fails with quotes like that. I can literally see that being said by a modern talking head on TV.
• I really missed the Ashley Barrett character (the redhead Vought exec). That actress is so great. Her facial expression when The Deep was about to go down on A-train was hilarious.
• I don’t understand why Sage would even consider joining the Seven. If she’s that smart I feel like she’d instantly know it’s bad news. Unless maybe she feels like she can take it down from the inside, but based on her actions this episode she seems like a true believer. *The scene where Homelander ordered the other Supes to beat those guys to death, A-Train hesitated and didn’t end up directly killing anyone himself: I suspect a redemption arc in his future. I don’t expect it until late in the season though.
• That plot point also seems to heavily parallel modern conservative politics. The unwashed masses are all just tools to them, to be used and disposed of as needed.

Overall I think it’s a strong start to the new season and I look forward to seeing how it develops. I understand it’ll end after season 5, so I expect things to progressively get crazier leading up to that.

Yup, but politicians are always trying to play the game. They probably have some internal metric causing them to believe that making a show of looking into this might win them a few voters while retaining their base. Maybe they’re right, but I still don’t like it. Either way they’ll have my vote as they’re the only non-Conservative party with even a remote possibility of winning my riding. (Plus I’ve sworn off the Liberals for a good while after their broken promise on electoral reform.)

Yeah, I’m sure I’ll eventually get over my disappointment at what the showrunners did to the original and will be in the right headspace to watch other GoT content, but not yet. I still can’t believe what they did to that formerly-beloved show. 😉

Anyway, I just saw your other comment. I’ll subscribe right away and will start the new season this week a so as to contribute to the discussion. Thanks for doing that!

I get this. I don’t even actively seek that stuff out, but in the interest of staying somewhat informed I follow a lot of news/politics communities here. Negative news obviously sells (in the form of receiving clicks) so a fair majority of my feed is made up of depressing info. I only read one or two actual articles a day, but the summary and/or comments are usually enough to bum me out.

Thankfully the rest of my feed is shitposts, memes, and cute animal pics so it keeps me from actively wanting to die.

Yeah, I would have just thought she was holding a flower or something.

Well if you do start one for The Boys I’ll prioritize watching the new season asap so I can contribute to the discussions. It looks like it’s already started last week, actually.

As for HotD, I can’t help ya there. After the last couple seasons of GoT I lost interest in that world. A shame, as I loved it while they still had books to follow.

It’s really not possible unless Lemmy gets a much larger community, but the thing I miss most about Reddit are episode discussions for TV shows. For almost any show, I could be pretty confident that I’d be able to find a post-watch episode discussion. Those are great for seeing how people felt about the episode or to learn things I may have overlooked.

I actually very recently tried it. I’m sure it’s great but something about the UI or maybe general paradigm switch versus apps like Notion really confused me. It looks great though, so I’m sure I’ll give it another go sometime when I have a bit more time to really learn it. Nonetheless, I appreciate the recommendation!