2022 is gonna be the second best year EVER!
- New Zootopia TV series (and it damned well better be GOOD or there WILL be blood!)
- LD&R
- International travel should be open again; hello, Argentina, Tuscany and Lyon!
- I'm serious about the blood.

After seeing this floating around recently I decided to watch the series through with a mate. It's absolutely, wonderfully awful.

It's tone is absolutely all over the place where it's actually surprisingly hard hitting and progressive in the themes in some places and then suddently absolute nonsense musical in others. I highly recommend if you enjoy terrible things.

Here's the actual unemployment rate as measured by the Fed:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO

What do you notice on the right?

Slalom: a timed race (as on skis or in an automobile or kayak) over a winding or zigzag course past a series of flags or markers broadly : movement over a zigzag route.

Closed loop zigzag?

This "Pindrop" thing is new on his part, right? This feels like the first in a series, and I'm already pretty sold on it.

Many behind the scenes videos can be found here https://www.trollbridge.film/behind-the-scenes
*doublepromote a *quality film inspired by Terry Pratchett's series of Discworld *books

The Outland TIE fighter was first depicted in the mobile app Star Wars: Card Trader as part of the set Illustrated Outlaws released on October 4, 2019.[4] It appears in the final two episodes of the first season of The Mandalorian, a 2019 Disney+ television series.[2][3]

The ship was originally designed by Industrial Light & Magic concept artist Doug Chiang for the 2015 film Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens,[9] though it went unused in the film itself. Later, during the development of The Mandalorian, series creator Jon Favreau and his team saw Chiang's concept and decided to incorporate it into their project. To bring the vehicle to life, a physical prop of the ship was built on the show's set, whereas the TIE's folded wings were realized through computer-generated imagery.[10]

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Outland_TIE_fighter

I've been listening to this show for awhile and they recently did a good two part series on how otherwise nice normal seeming people became Nazis.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/

The ACA was passed on party lines, it was going to be screwed up because of that no matter what. What pisses me off about it is that instead of trying to come up with a better solution, the Democrats rammed that fucker through. I can only assume it is because for a brief period they had control of the legislative and executive branches all at the same time. So rather than take a chance to fix it, they figured if they were going to get anything they might as well get it in place.

Obama inherited the situation in the ME. Bush fucked up royally. Obama just took a bad situation and made it worse. Admittedly, there were other fingers in the pie also, but he is still culpable.

The rules for the drone war were decided by Obama's administration. Regardless of what Bush did before, that lays 100% on Obama and his team. Some good articles to read:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/president-obamas-weak-defense-of-his-record-on-drone-strikes/511454/

https://www.cnn.com/2012/09/05/opinion/bergen-obama-drone/index.html

https://www.propublica.org/series/drones

O! The horror...the entire series is overrun by non-stop Casio-SynthPop. Not one quiet moment.

The best passwords are a series of random words put together.

This makes a password not guessable by a human, too long to iterate over for a robot, while still being easy to remember.

There's something called Diceware which takes a list of thousands of random words and you're supposed to roll some dice to get a few words together:

https://diceware.dmuth.org/

That just generated for me this 6-word password (which I'm not going to use obviously):

IrateBarometerHeaderDeserveBackslidJustness

Yeah, anyone who hasn't watched this series needs to do so. Some of the best sci-fi I've seen lately, and such a wild variety. "Zima Blue" was probably my favorite. That series and the Oats Studios shorts give me hope that we could see some truly astounding sci-fi movies or shows in the next few years.

LD&R is an amazing series and I hope they make more. The story of the kitsune was amazing, as was the one about the Red Army battling demons. Reminds me of Heavy Metal.

This one had me legitimately frightened, that club owner is... something else. The whole series is a masterpiece, and Taji has perfected the art of awkward naivety.

How so? I've always found C# docs to be quite a bit better than the equivalent Sun/Oracle's Java docs. Language features like auto-property/fields, Lamda expressions, LINQ, etc have been sorely missed in Java (at least by me) until recently. Admittedly, the C# frameworks are a bit lacking compared to the Java ecosystem though. I will admit that I've had to get back into Java recently for my job and after starting to use IntelliJ, it's actually made Java mor enjoyable.

My programming started with BASIC on an IBM XT back in the 80s and various programming books, mainly just copying the programs as written then trying to modify them. This book in particular was pivotal for me as I loved the old Infocom text adventures of the time:

Write Your Own Adventure Programs For Your Microcomputer:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTYkFJbUswOHFQclE/view

(It looks like these books were released for free by Usborne: https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-coding-books/ ... what a nostalgia trip!)

In high-school I learned C and LISP for Autocad programming. I continued to learn about C (plus a little C++) and ASM thanks to John Carmack and DOOM/Quake. Wrote my own computer games (mainly RTS as the Command and Conquer series was big back then) ... nothing great but I thought they were cool.

Dabbled in Java a bit in college but ultimately shifted to C++ and C# after getting a consultancy job and that is what I continued with until recently. Now I'm back into Java and currently trying to catch up on all the front-end Javascript libraries now as well as tinkering with Perl, GO, and Objective-C.