Zombie

no longer resolved never again to submit to the asymmetric (and therefore egregiously abused) power dynamic between airports/airlines and customers (…except, maybe, for one exception next year)

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Star Trek Brave New Worlds - oh dear… 3 years late, this finally hits UK ‘free to air’ 🎉 reviews were great: ‘true to TOS’, ‘original characters’, ‘best of the spin-offs…’ I was excited but three quarters thru S1E01 I’ve given up: the turgid dialogue is all plot, and worse the screenwriters feel they must explain the meaning of every ‘hip’ phrase one character says to another, where the meaning is obvious from context but it’s a ‘23rd century’ idiomatic arrangement of words that maybe viewers won’t understand because they’ve never heard that particular exact same arrangement of words before so it’s continual: Spock: plot Pike: plot plot Security Officer: invented idiom by ‘clever’ scriptwriter (meaning obvious ) +immediate explanation of idiom meaning… Nurse Chapel: more plot and then there’s the usual dull CGI-heavy visuals. TOS was shot on film, the restored BR discs (≈14.4 Mbps per show, much higher than streaming ≈5Mbps) are a pleasure to watch, bright colourful images, engaging characters and HUMOUR! All this was missing DNF’d

Distribution maps used to love these in school geography classes strangely, Mr Slidewell (or was it Glidewell? 🧐 ) never showed us these distributions… World favourite gay porn searches (Pornhub - 2024) US favourite searches

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022) UK readers please note: this movie is currently free to view until Friday (17 October) on Channel4. I cannot recommend it highly enough! Irish actor Daryl McCormack plays the eponymous 'Leo Grande' (his business name as a bisexual sex worker - the gay aspect is a key plot-line in the movie). Not only is he drop dead gorgeous (and, happily, on screen most of the time) the movie is a compelling, emotional and enjoyable watch throughout despite being, essentially, a filmed two scene two actor stage play (although I doubt the explicit full nude scenes could be performed live on stage…) During filming Daryl was 28 and Emma 62 so he could have been her grandson. The very idea of sex between these characters might put people off but the acting is so natural and convincing (Emma chose not to have an ‘Intimacy Co-ordinator’), the storyline (why and how) is simple but convincing, the script is so well written and witty, and the performances by both simply outstanding, that I cannot see any mature viewer being offended in any way. Watch it if you can - and unedited! (free on C4 until Friday)

UK Advertising Standards - only the best will do…

Brazilian jiu-jitsu ‘Today we're talking about three things really: three submissions, and those three submissions are the head arm choke, the triangle for mount, and the rear naked choke… I want to talk about details pertaining to leading up to the submission… then I want to talk about how to do the actual submission…’ The guy being dominated then yawns

some creatures should be restrained with maximum prejudice

what the penguin does to toddlers

this is a trope still makes me larf tho

seems your kids have a disturbing role model

Is there anyone that has every service? …in which case why don’t all platforms offer PPV (at a non-punitive rate ) to cater for the 99.99% that don’t? (OK, I invented that bogus stat but the point is fair I think )

You CAN dress like a dandy

try to forget about these nightmare dolls before I go to bed

don’t watch movies with dolls in them (see ‘Dolls are Evil’ thread which proves that dolls r evil and will kill you )

When civilisations ‘disappear’ (which they’ve all done so far) their ‘traces’ can also disappear surprisingly quickly

just emailed ‘admin’ about a cryptic screen message I’ve just had when trying to login: ”Misdirected Request The client needs a new connection for this request as the requested host name does not match the Server Name Indication (SNI) in use for this connection.” apparently a lot of ‘overseas’ websites hosting user content (GA stories) and social interactions (GA forums) are being forced to block UK access as from today (25/7/25) Fortunately I’ve now been able to login but I’m not sure if the above was a temporary glitch or a harbinger of what’s to come…

Ozzie’s final gig was just over 2 weeks ago, earlier this month, at the Aston Villa football ground, Birmingham the 40,000 tickets and livestream raised nearly $200m, a record for charity concerts good on you Ozzie and R.I.P.

sadly there’s nothing new about this tired old trope/cliche yes, these tragedies have happened and far too often down the decades, but this seemingly relentless obsession by writers / producers could be construed as borderline fetishism …and in these gruesomely depressing times I need me some uplifting entertainment!

Satnav - AI learning? my Sat nav has learned some illegal turns naughty satnav! *smack!*

no-one ever lost money ‘misunderestimating’ public taste (Bush/Mencken - kinda…)

Carlos Alcaraz if the 22yo Spaniard wins on Sunday, he will be the second youngest player in the Open Era to win three consecutive Wimbledon titles after Bjorn Borg tbh this is just a pathetic excuse to show some gratuitous shirtless pics of Carlos taken from today’s match when he beat Taylor Fritz

sorry, I assumed ‘2001: Space Odyssey’ was referring to the movie, which I’ve watched many many times (one of my all-time faves) but I never read the book version, nor these other books you just mentioned Clarke’s sexuality was I think well-known - indeed there was a Michael Jackson-type ‘scandal’ concerning the many boys in his life in Sri Lanka - so I’m not surprised that homosexuality would feature in his works. But, as a gay guy, I never once in my many viewings detected homosexual undercurrents in the 2001 movie - guess I was too fixated on Kubrick’s amazing (even today) visual images

finding gay subtexts anywhere / everywhere seems to be a staple of university ‘research papers’ https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/4234/1/4234.pdf but I guess academics are under the same pressures to ‘produce’ as the rest of us

I understand that the same was sadly true at this time in many (most?) states of the US (Bowers v Hardwick 1986) feel free to add as much further detail as you wish, and/or correct me if I’m wrong