Missed opportunity for a Saw film

Painted into what corner? Seven was always supposed to be the final season, and included a bunch of things that only made real sense big picture if you knew about the Buffy universe comics, like the scythe. The Season 8 etc. comics are so out there that they were never intended for actual production.

Season 6 was the real klunker because they had shifted from WB to UPN, so production after an epic season 5 had lots of new staff, so it ended up in a lot of uninspired drudgery, monster of the week blah, plus Buffy has to work now and that sucks worse because you can’t stake a mortgage and dust it.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Art Bell. His voice is just buttery silk, the content is batshit crazy, and it was always a late-night show.

It is, but that’s the workaround they went for, and it worked just fine in a legal sense. It was probably faster and less expensive than trying to engage in anything thats going to even risk involving a copyright attorney.

Not quite the same, but Total Annihilation and Beyond All Reason. It wasn’t abandonware, but more like after Total Annihilation hit success, rights were sold and resold and Atari as the final owner squandered every opportunity to do more with the engine and the franchise.

The tactics were essentially receating a better engine with Spring, as the sort of newly open source upgraded version of the engine the same people built 10 years earlier. Taylor Swift did the same thing.

You’re right, I don’t know what I was thinking. Other than “commies hate time zones.”

Same. Angola to Sweden - the variety of environments and food cultures are massive.

That was (edit:NOT) the USSR.

To clarify, nearly all of this food has already left the United States, except for 1 warehouse in Houston. It’s already been paid for, and as it sits, it costs money to store it.

This is like buying 3 dozen eggs from Whole Foods and setting them in the hot sun after you get home because you decided to punch yourself in the face until you passed out before putting them away.

It’s food purchased already from farmers. If it rots or not, it doesn’t affect Americans.

It does affect all the people who were already supposed to get it as food aid.

Y’all, look, the post WWII order has been wobbly since 2012-2014. 9/11 and the Patriot Act changed things in a way that were not compatible with that world. We lasted barely a decade before the wheels fell off.

We can pretty much all agree that things are broken, and these people ran, and won, on a platform of tearing it all down. And so they are.

Things ARE getting ugly for a lot of people already. Hundreds of thousands globally in 2 weeks.

The only way out is through, and it’s a decade+ recovery.

I mean, there’s real data to support this. If you don’t believe it that’s like me not believing that hurricanes exist just because I haven’t been through one.

I’ve spent a career in places with very little rule of law or effective governance.

The only thing that can give you a sliver of hope is to physically be close to a community that is tight-knit and competent homesteaders. This is African village rules. Force and money are all that matters. Life is cheap. Food is scarce and untrustworthy unless you farm it yourself. Cities are nightmares of abuse with pockets for the super-wealthy behind walls.

Real life examples like Lagos are hard to explain to Americans. Parable of the Sower gets close and is a book worth a read.

Oh, hey, guys let’s play a guessing game. Which developing African county has yet to approve Starlink for use while other countries are all about it.

Hmmmm…which one, which one…hmmm…

They care about the optics of halting obvious immediate lifesaving assistance because it makes them look like they’re making “responsible” decisions.

It’s hard not to get into the weeds of this because of how complex these contracts get.

Typically, a country asks the US for help with something like developing their agriculture sector, or e-governance, or dealing with a famine. USAID doesn’t do the work itself to limit government liability. So they put up a notice that says “we want proposals to do this job, in this place, and get these results. Don’t go over $XX”

Bids come in, and because these are programs in developing countries, it’s rare that the country had any organization capable of reliably taking on a $5 million contract with tons of legal and compliance obligations. So a lot of times US-based companies that specialize in this kind of work, staffed by people who don’t mind moving their family to Malawi or wherever of necessary. Many people, both contractors and USAID staff are killed, sometimes abducted and tortured, in the course of trying to deal with humanitarian crises in dangerous places.

Because local tallent IS a cruicial part of the way these programs work, the main contracter will hire local staff, and then because no one company can do everything, they also hire small local contractors to do singular tasks, like JUST community engagement about financial planning. So unless it’s a war zone (often even then), dozens, mayne even hundreds, of local jobs might come from one contract. This is a VERY reductive version of the process in general terms.

Meaning that during this aid “review” and dismantling, it’s likely that 100,000 people or more, mostly in poor counties, are suddenly out of work. It’s unlikely that Rubio will reinstate programs without a GOP Congressperson asking, or obvious “lives will be lost” support ends.

Sure, and if the BRICS countries offer free spaghetti dinners for residents, I’ll sprout wings and fly there. This is notoriously not going to happen.

If you poke around on sites like Nightcafe or AI image subreddits, there’s a lot of generic oil paintings, a lot of 1 or 2 subject matte paintings, and stuff that looks like the covers of bad fantasy novels.

Lol, do it, bitch. Bet you’ll chicken out of this one too.