My high-school friend group adopted “it goes” from our French class (“Comment ça va?” “Ça va!”, roughly meaning “How goes it?” “It goes!” being the common neutral greeting taught in French classes) and I slightly resent it being described negatively here.

The context of those passages, as I recall, is basically that “Jesus is gonna come back any second now, so don’t bother with worldly concerns like marriage and making babies. Just devote your life to being a good Christian and leave the fornicating to the heathens, unless you absolutely can’t live without getting laid on the regular.” It’s hard to understate the degree to which the early church was basically a doomsday cult. They were certain that the Rapture was going to happen in their lifetimes, and that short time horizon had a big impact on how they thought their society should be organized.

I wonder if the lack of decisions in some of these cases may betray a three-way ideological split on the court that makes it impossible to write a true majority opinion?

Something like Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown Jackson off in one corner saying “actually we shouldn’t burn it all down for no reason,” Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barret in the other chanting “NO CHEVRON DEFERENCE! NO WOMEN’S RIGHTS! BURN IT DOWN, BURN IT DOWN, GIL-E-AD, GIL-E-AD!” while Roberts and Gorsuch are sitting in the middle asking both sides “won’t one of you just sign on to this opinion that only burns it down a little bit? We’d like to go home to our nice comfy lives as wealthy white men who aren’t affected by any of this, please.”

It’s the Chicago mob all over again!

Federal authorities raided a home belonging to Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao early Thursday as part of a California investigation that included a search of at least two other houses, officials said… Agents also carried out searches about three miles to the south at two homes owned by members of the politically influential Duong family that owns the recycling company Cal Waste Solutions, the Chronicle said. The firm has been investigated over campaign contributions to Thao and other elected city officials, the local news outlet Oaklandside reported in 2020.

This one isn’t all that far, geographically speaking from the megachurch down in Springfield that brings in tanks and armored vehicles for their conferences on “christian manhood” (pardon the reddit link…)

By sweeping low-population states that, by design, have more voting power in the Electoral College than is proportional to their size.

The American electoral system is turbofucked.

The average American house on a basement will have something like 40 m^3 of concrete in its foundation. If all of it could be utilized, that’s still ~12kWhr of storage capacity. Nothing to be sneezed at.

It’s French (on account of Exocet and Storm Shadow/SCALP both being French-made) and Exocet is saying “but what would you say to side-by-side with a friend?” To which Storm Shadow replies, “Ah, yes, I could do that.”

Yep, but it doesn’t change the fact that the most noteworthy targets of Exocets were British, with the missiles being launched by Argentinians.

Double funny that the Storm Shadow is part french, too…

Insert Legolas and Gimli meme here, except it’s an Argentinian Exocet and a British Storm Shadow.

Their numbers are declining, but it’s leaving primarily those who are most psychotically zealous in their commitment to fundamentalism and Christian Dominionism. Those few who don’t toe the line completely are either finding themselves pushed out of their communities, or their communities are having to make adaptations to allow mutually-incompatible views of theology to coexist, to at least temporarily.

So far a fair number have actually come out against the verdict, including Lindsay Graham… which makes me think there are a number of Republican legislators who own guns and enjoy partaking in a little nose candy from time to time, as well.

Different Vance. Cy Vance was the prosecutor who treated Epstein with kid gloves. J.D. Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy, who was briefly the darling of liberal media types for showing how the folks of Appalachia and the Rust Belt have been abandoned by those in power, before realizing he could do better for himself by gargling spraytan-orange mushroom dick and riding Trump’s coattails into right-wing demagoguery. He’s a Senator from Ohio now.

PT Cruiser people are weird.

The play-by-email mode was broken to the point of uselessness in Civ5 and I don’t think they fixed in it in 6 (you had to have an always-on Windows desktop system running the server, and because the game logic was integrated into the graphics engine you couldn’t run it headless, and then on top of that there was basically no working system to coordinate active DLCs between players so most of the time people couldn’t join even if you did get the damn thing running) so my friends and I tried once and gave up. I would love for 7 to have a robust PBEM system so that we can play together without needing to spend hours a week watching paint dry while everybody else plots their turns, but I’m not holding my breath.

The entire history of the nation of Israel is basically proving the axiom that “hurt people hurt people,” but on a geopolitical scale.

Former child prodigy with a Special Interest he immediately shares with anybody who takes a passing interest in him, prone to over explaining, so uncomfortable with emotionally charged situations he sends an astral projection to fill in for him… I personally don’t think it’s intended to be read that way, but I can see how some might choose to do so.

Gale is my least-favorite party member from a personality standpoint, so I asked my wife why she’s always romancing him in every playthrough. She said, “I dunno, why would I be attracted to an autistic-coded nerd who talks like he ate a thesaurus?” and I don’t know how to process that.

Somebody else posted the top frame a few days ago, and I finally got around to compositing all the pieces together into the glorious bottom frame. When I went back to the previous post I saw Kolanaki had suggested something similar in the comments, and felt it was appropriate to acknowledge that.