Honestly, I’m more angry about the meme creator thinking that Super Mario Bros. was 1972.

That can’t be right. That feels like when Republicans say, “Democrat party,” instead of, “Democratic,” because they think it’s some big insult or something. (For the record, I’m sure you’re right, I just think it’s dumb.)

When I was in college, Canandian Geese were all over the park outside my apartment building. They never got out of the way, shit all over the grass, just made a mess of the place. One night, my neighbor came home a little tipsy, and when a goose got to close to him, he slapped it on the back. Not enough to injure it, but he definitely startled it. For the rest of the year, the geese cleared a path for him whenever he came through. I guess word got around in the goose community that he was not to be fucked with.

You haven’t seen the latest movie. There are apparently many tribes of Minions, including some that were in America in the late 20s to early 30s.

Yeah, probably, although I think anyone with a vague idea of an overarching plot would have made me happier.

TLJ was actually the most misogynistic of all of the Star Wars movies.

Curious to know why you feel that way. I’ve heard chuds complain that it was too feminist, but I’ve never heard anyone claim it was misogynistic.

Yeah after the big bad is killed, they fight some unnamed guards.

Yeah, I didn’t care. Snoke was a boring Palpatine knock-off (I mean, they literally retconned him to be his clone), and killing him off unceremoniously was the only interesting choice Johnson made that wasn’t undone by the end of the movie. And the guard fight is incredible. Aside from Darth Maul fight (which, admittedly, may be the best in the franchise), the fight scenes in the prequels have so many backflips and somersaults, overlaid with gratuitous CGI and green screen, that they felt like special effects instead of fight choreography. Fighting those 5 gaurds had more weight and higher stakes than Obi-Wan battling a CGI Grievous or jumping over green screen lava with anakin.

I mean, there is a lot of good stuff in there, and I genuinely love Rian Johnson. I think the Knives Out movies are the best thing to happen to the mystery genre in decades, and Poker Face is the second best. And honestly, most of my problems with TLJ are because of Johnson made interesting choices, which is better than Abrahams making a shot-for-shot remake of A New Hope or whatever the hell he was trying to do with Rise of Skywalker.

The Last Jedi sucks, but not for the reasons right-wing chuds complained about. The premise of the entire chase rests on a bunch of Macguffin’s (they can suddenly track ships through hyperspace, fuel is an issue for the first time ever, no one can escape except when they can), the Canto Bight sequence is pointless and contrived, the light-speed kamikaze blows a plot hole in basically every other movie, and Poe should have been executed for mutiny.

Structurally, I get what Johnson was doing; everyone complained that The Force Awakens was a beat for beat retelling of A New Hope, so he basically inverted the plot structure of The Empire Strikes Back. It’s a fun idea, but his desire to end on a Hoth sequence ruined what could have been a perfect ending. I was having problems with that movie, but after Snoke gets murdered, Rey and Ben have one of the best lightsaber fights in Star Wars history, and Ben asks her to join him, I was expecting the credits to roll, and I was ready to leave on one of the greatest cliffhangers in movie history. But then there’s another 30 minutes of movie, and while the Luke stuff is cool, it mostly just drags on.

It’s also clear that Johnson wasn’t just inverting plot structure, but Star Wars norms. Everything that is established is questioned and turned on it’s head. The problem is, by the end of the film, it’s all thrown out and the status quo is hastily reestablished with little justification. What’s the lesson from Canto Bight and DJ? “Rebellion? Empire? Two sides of the same coin for the weapons dealers. The real battle is between the haves and have-nots.” How does the movie end? “Get on the princess’ space ship, we’re not done fighting the Empire!” The entire Rey/Luke/Ben aspect of the film? “Light? Dark? Jedi? Sith? They’re just artificial constructs. Let them die. Burn the temple.” How does the movie end? “Don’t worry, Rey didn’t join the Dark Side and she’s got all the magic Jedi books!”

Anyway, there’s also a lot of stuff I like (the Rey/Luke scenes are excellent), and it’s bad in an interesting way, which makes it better than the rest of the trilogy by default. I guess this is more of a small essay than a hot take, but TL;DR: chuds think The Last Jedi sucks because of wokeness, but it actually suckes for lot of structural, thematic, and plot weaknesses.

“Stare at the sun.” -Walt Whitman

That’s a really good point. I bet a lot of that has to do with the original being a slasher flick rather than an action blockbuster. There’s some residual final-girl, “just because I survived doesn’t mean I’m not terrified,” energy to her character.

She was caught trying to blow up a computer factory, and then they found out she was running guns from Mexico with a boy she was raising to be the messiah. With the information they had, they made the right call.

Sounds like you’re killing it on the litter boxes. So, does this open floor plan allow for a cat to traverse the space without touching the ground? Having vertical pathways where your cats can make an exit without getting blocked on the ground is important for side-stepping conflict. I have a very patient cat and a surprisingly gentle toddler, and they get along very well, but he’s often too excitable and loud for her. When he’s in the dining room, blocking her path and getting rambunctious, she can avoid him by jumping on the dining room table, then to an island bar counter, then down to the kitchen counter and from there exit into one of the bedrooms. Similarly, in the living room, she makes use of the back of our L shaped couch to reach the two exits if she doesn’t feel like engaging with the toddler playing on the floor. Some cat shelving, or even just some strategically placed furniture, can give them an exit route (doorways are tough, but maybe a small end table they can jump up on or something? Difficult to say without walking through your house).

It sounds like you’ve got a lot of enrichment for the younger guy. The only thing I could possibly suggest would be adding more structure. You could try playing until he gets exhausted in the morning, then do his morning feeding, which would probably get him to burn some energy and do a big morning nap. Then do the same thing at night to get him to calm down for bed. For all I know you’re already doing this, but it’s all I can think to suggest. It definitely sounds like the younger guy is instigating out of boredom and the older guy is just is not having it.

So, first, drop the squirt bottle. It’ll break up the fights in the moment, but negative reinforcement won’t change the cats behavior long term; it will just make him see you as a threat.

Second, how many litter boxes do you have? Litter boxes are an important part of staking out their territory, and having to share one litter box can make them think they’re encroaching on each other’s territory. Experts recommend one more litter box than cats in the house, but one litter box for each, in different parts of house, should be the minimum.

Next, how much are you playing with the younger cat? If he’s stalking and instigating most the fights, he might just have play aggression that he’s trying to get out on the older cat, who might not have the patience for it. Try playing with the younger guy until he gets tired, at least once a day.

Finally, look around your house and try to eliminate the areas where the older guy might get trapped. Give him escape routes, make sure he has a shelf or a piece of furniture he can not only jump to, but make an escape from. If there isn’t enough vertical space, the younger guy is just going to run him down until he gets him cornered.

Good point, he promised to close it when he was campaigning, but he just couldn’t do it for some reason once he was in office.

Obama won overwhelmingly by campaigning as a progressive, then governed as a centrist, and 8 years later, voters abandoned the party. Somehow, the establishment’s takeaway from that was, “we need to be less progressive.”

Has another Democrat become nearly as relevant in that time? Was Haley Stevens pretending that Obama endorsed her just last month? Are you really saying thst the Democrats don’t desperately cling to Obama’s popularity, or that that doesn’t give him sway within the party?

And you’re not even getting into his foriegn policy or his continuation of the, “War on Terror.” Establishing the drone program as an unaccountable assassination tool of the Executive Branch? Collecting Americans metadata from tech companies without a warrent? Prosecuting leakers under the Espionage Act? You could credibly argue that he was further right than Bush on national security. Every time Trump subpoenas a journalist for their sources I think,.“Damn, I wish Obama hadn’t normalized this shit.”

He had enough power to clear the Democratic field for Biden in 2020.

Beyond that, this, “wildlife cam,” photo looks like it was taken from a phone held at face level.

That’s one perspective. I would argue that, given the ways in which the two parties have created election laws to protect their duopoly, third-party and independent candidates will rarely be viable. Instead of spending finite resources attempting to compete with the massive Democratic party machine in the general election, where a splitting of the liberal/leftist coalition could very possible (if not probably) result in a win for thr far-right, seizing the levers of power of said machine through primaries is not only safer, but more likely to succeed.