Oh, and his brilliant hack was flying first-class, then asking for Gatorade, then sneaking the Gatorade bottles into his carry-on and then getting more, rinsing and repeating. Yes man, you sure hustled the ever-living **** out of them.

Also apparently he was a poker player? He took vacations to fly down to play in the WSOP. When he took a new job and colleagues passed a goodbye letter around, I opened it up and wrote, "Just remember: only a shallow thinker slowplays every single he time he flops trips." Just that, and then I signed my name. I'd never played with him, but I had a read.

I feel the same way about 95% of the Yankee fans I'm surrounded by who can't name a player from the last decade besides A-Rod and Je-Tuh.

I solve this problem by not having any teams in any sport.

I'll root for teams to win specific games/championships and I have teams I hate, but I don't think there's a single team in any sport that I would classify as "my team".

Yeah, I know you've mentioned that before. I honestly can't get my mind around that. I don't even have a criticism of it as a matter of principle, but it's just hard to imagine that's as fun.

Grew up a Pats/Red Sox fan but a good 10-15 years before they were anything close to competitive, so I don't feel all that bad about (quietly) supporting them

Also liked the Eagles a bit because of Randall Cunningham & my family traveled down to Philly a few times a year to visit my favorite aunt & uncle - I was happy for them beating the Pats in the SB but moved on from having any emotional interest in them whatsoever once they finally won a big one

My alma mater is UMass - they shipped a I-AA football Championship in '98 and a BB Final Four in 96', but not much hope for them in either going forward (though they did win a National Championship in hockey a few years back)

So, White Lotus S2 brought it.

That was phenomenal. I've taking to describing it to people as sort of a wealthy version of Shameless.

Lol HBO Max. Think I mentioned this a few pages back that they're cutting back on production rather than increasing prices like most other streaming services. Now they're even cutting their own shows off the platform:

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/westw...eaving-hbo-max

Yeah, it’s all because of the WB merger. They also stripped a ton of the animation stuff and fired tons of creators.

It’s been bad news ever since they announced it. Mergers are never good for the consumer.

Definitely hate to see HBO Max trending down. It's been far and away the best streaming service out there, but those days may be numbered.

Cobra Kai seems to be losing steam for me, but it was pretty cool to hear Jericho’s AEW theme make an appearance in the latest season.

Slogged through Ms Marvel. I guess going in with the understanding that I'm not the demographic they're trying to hit here, but my compulsion for completeness demands I watch anyway, it's not the worst thing in the world. Though the only reward I ended up with for sticking it out was that..

Thor Love & Thunder

- It had almost a Rise of Skywalker feel where there was so much thrown at us without enough backstory. Specially Jane and Gorr. They really half-assed the Jane storyline.

- It tried to be far too cute. Not only were too many jokes falling flat with me, but some were even annoying and took me out of the plot. Taika needed someone to filter his ideas and tell him which ones suck. Probably also suffered from a lack of Tom Hiddleston.

- Did the entire soundtrack have to be Guns & Roses?

I ended up having an okay time with Thor L&T, but I've definitely got it as bottom-quartile MCU. Hopefully we're only about a month away from Wakanda Forever hitting D+. I might have even gone to the theater for that one if not for the 2:40 runtime.

It was disappointing because I'm generally higher on Thor movies than most. I knew it had issues going in, but didn't expect them to be so glaring. Also may have hurt my experience by reading the comic arc it's based on before hand.

Not saying I hated it, but I feel it's well below Taika's first effort. Natalie Portman just doesn't have the same comedic delivery or timing as Tom Hiddleston and that trade off really hurt the movie.

I do like their casing choice in the post-credit scene. Also just found out that the girl who plays Gorr's daughter is Chris Hemsworth's real life daughter. She'll probably end up with her on D+ show next.

I found the apparent future casting of Roy Kent as Hercules to be a little odd. I like him on Ted Lasso, and he's believable as a star soccer player, but Hercules? I don't know. He's just not very big, unless I'm misjudging.

Considering the odd comic book movie casting that's somehow worked in the past...

If they can slap Ruffalo's face on a Hulk, they can probably find a way to make it work.

Yeah, I didn't hate it, I just thought, "Really?" Happy to give it a chance, even though it seems different than Hulk since I can't imagine it will be CGI-based. I will say it feels like Thor has run his course as an MCU character, and the suggestion seems to be that we'll get more of him. Underwhelmed by that.

The Padme assassination plot in AotC is perplexing. Sure, the Trade Federation wants her dead, but they're merely pawns and Palpatine should want her alive because

A) She's the key to Anakin
B) She still believes him to be a staunch ally

Again, as they were in Phantom Menace, the Jedi seem extremely flippant about just sending Anakin off by himself to protect Padme when they know there's a contract out on her head and there are Sith running around. Can't they spare more than a padawan?

Watching the scene where Obi-Wan interrupts Yoda when he's instructing younglings, I now have to wonder who's in that class that wasn't even part of lore at the time: Ashoka? Caleb/Kanan? Reva (from Obi-Wan)?

I'm curious how much Jango knows. Does he actually think he's creating the army for the Jedi, who he appears to have quite the disdain for. And where did the Jedi get the authority to commission an army anyway?

In what's probably the most interesting scene in the movie, everything Dooku tells Obi-Wan is absolute truth.

First time I ever noticed Sly Moore in this movie, standing there next to Palpatine when he's granted "emergency powers". In fact, had never even heard her name before she gained some notoriety in more recent expanded universe material.

Early in the movie, Obi-Wan says that Anakin will be the death of him. Later in the movie, Anakin says that Obi-Wan is going to kill him.

During the arena scene, Dooku has this look on his face like, "I'm surrounded by idiots."

Jango seems more formidable than we've ever really seen Boba. He went toe to toe with Obi-Wan on Kamino and escaped and killed another Jedi in Geonosis before Mace Windu only really killed him because his jetpack was destroyed. When Boba picks up the helmet, is his father's head still in it?

Dooku pretends he knows nothing about the clone army. At the time, we couldn't be sure whether that was a lie or not. Now, we know for certain that he was the one who commissioned them.

The first time (of two or three times?) Anakin loses his arm/hand.

I remember seeing this in the theater at the time, everyone went nuts for Yoda in action for the first time. And then the laughter when he picked up the cane and started limping again.

The place Dooku returns to meet Sidious on Coruscant is the same exact place he met with Sidious in Tales of the Jedi, where he killed Yaddle. Did not remember that upon watching the latter short. The secret Sith hideout.

I recently read The Queen's Shadow (it's not great). Set six years prior to AotC. Padme was getting increasingly irritated with Palpatine, and he seemed to be getting alarmed by her increasingly close alignment with Bail Organa. Though they would keep up a surface-level positive relationship, seems a fair chance that he had grown distrustful of her.

Just because there’s not yet been a proper all-hands concession that Browns fans are huge bags of **** who nobody ever should have been sympathizing with for all these years.

A scenario 100% exists where, a decade from now, they finally break through and win the Super Bowl, and the usual “losing for a long time is truly the most noble act known to man” crowd will still line up to tearfully confess how happy they are for these poor embattled Browns fans.

With marginal expectations, I enjoyed Black Adam.



Too bad DC has already said they're going in a different direction going forward.

I was interested in watching that one and finally breaking my streak of never watching a Rock movie, but yeah the fact that it’s being swept away and the tepid reviews combine to make me fairly disinclined to bother.

I read the first High Republic book now (Light of the Jedi, by Charles Soule). Pretty good, would give it ~3.3/5. Strong world-building, some sequences were gripping, other sequences were boring. Was maybe a bit overly ambitious on the introduction of new characters, as there were a ****-ton of them and it became difficult to track it all at times; thankful for the Kindle X-ray feature. Most importantly, it made me optimistic that this whole series could be pretty cool, and I'm definitely glad to have the prereq done to read another Claudia Gray book.