You have to go very far left to reach people who are crazy or dangerous, but you barely need to even just lean to the right to reach the crazy, angry, hostile, conspiracy-theorist, gun-toting, murder-loving, religious zealots.

The left is bad, but they’re mostly just annoying with political-correctness and wokeness, but the right is outright dangerous.

The republican party is falling apart, the GOP is unraveling rapidly with a lot of crazy people. Trump (who is not even a republican) dealt it a death-blow and republicans don’t even realize it. 🤦

I’ve seen numerous reviews of Wonder Woman 1984 and while some people have addressed the plot holes and even gone questioned or even gone so far as express concern about the possession plot, I have not seen anybody point out that Diana/Wonder Woman RAPED a man (at least not outright, some people dance around it at most).

Diana uses the wishing-stone to wish for Steve to return, but instead of just showing up, his consciousness is brought back in the body of a random man who happens to be near by. People have complained that the movie elides over this and doesn’t address the host and who he is and whether he has a family who is looking for him or a job he’s going to lose for not showing up. These are valid points and make the movie absolutely disgusting that Diana and Steve don’t seem to care about this man who’s body they have stolen.

What I haven’t heard is people express a concern that instead of looking into situation and trying to find out about the man and save him, Diana and Steve just accepted the situation and stole his body for their own personal use, including sexual uses. The fact is that since that man was not in control of his body (the movie doesn’t bother to explain if he had died just before being possessed or if his consciousness subdued or conscious and watching the whole time but helpless to do anything), thus he was unable to consent to Diana having sex with his body. Diana raped that man.

Apparently, despite the #MeToo movement and people trying to raise awareness that men can be the victims of sexual assault too, and despite men coming forward, and despite Terry Crews’ impassioned plea to listen to men when they say they’ve been assaulted and to respect men rather than just assume they’re okay with being sexually assaulted because they’re men and men are supposedly always horny, SJWs seem more interested in pushing a female agenda (the Wonder Woman movies have been all about girl-power), and the dismissal of males (especially white ones), shines bright in this movie as a warning flare that social-justice is hypocritical at best, and dangerous at worst. This movie sends the message that it’s okay to use and abuse and rape white men because, hey, they’re white men who (as a monolith) have benefited long enough, so they deserve to be treated like garbage now, because apparently the way to improve the treatment of marginalized and oppressed people isn’t to stop that and treat them better, but to treat everybody badly (so that eventually they will get tired of it and rise up and lash out—see Rwanda—and keep the circle going).

The first Wonder Woman movie was terrible, absolutely abysmal, but while people kept lauding it as a feminist movie and it was directed by a woman, it was written by men. This movie doesn’t have that excuse; it was written by Patty Jenkins. The fact that she wrote it so that Diana uses a man’s body for her own sexual pleasure without his consent and without so much as a second thought, combined with the fact that Patty didn’t see the man as a person enough to even bother naming him (Kristoffer Polaha is credited as “Handsome Man”), pushes this movie so far past feminist that it wraps back around to being offensive and “problematic” at the other extreme. 🤦

YouTube

If you’ve watched YouTube in the past few years, you’ve probably seen a lot of YouTubers shilling VPNs as part of sponsorship deals. They read the talking points that the VPN has given them as part of the ad, which always, and prominently, includes bypassing geo-blocking and getting lower foreign prices as primary features.

Geo-fencing

The problem is that bypassing geo-blocking is almost always a violation of the terms of service of most sites and service that do geo-blocking and is usually grounds for suspension of your account.

There’s a reason that sites and services block content based on your location, and it isn’t always about tyranny like the Great Firewall of China. Sites like Hulu and Netflix have deals with studios for what they can offer to what regions, and they may not be licensed to provide somethings to some locations for various reasons. Moreover, they also have deals with advertisers—or more aptly, could not work out a deal with an advertisers—and thus cannot provide certain content or service to certain regions.

When you bypass geo-blocking, you are essentially both “stealing” content that cannot be provided to you for whatever reason, and also putting the site/service in jeopardy of being sued, so they usually punish it by suspending your account.

Some sites detect if you’re using a VPN and block you until you stop using it (like an anti-adblock, but for VPNs).

Foreign Pricing

The prices of products and services are tuned to different locations (or regions) according to various factors such as cost-of-living and the value of local currency. This is the main reason that DVD regions existed, so that movies could be sold for lower prices in areas where people were poorer. Likewise, things like Netflix and Steam games have higher or lower prices depending on what country you are in.

It’s always a violation of the terms for someone to pretend to be in a location where the prices are cheaper and is again stealing; it’s essentially like price-switching, swapping the price-tag of something in a store for one that’s cheaper (back in the days before UPCs).

Some sites even take specific steps to prevent people from changing their location without proof such as providing documentation like a photo of a bill addressed to you, or in the case of Steam, making a purchase with a credit-card that is tied to the location you purport to be in.

VPNs lie and/or are incompetent

Ostensibly, YouTubers don’t know or realize these problems or that they’re setting their viewers up to lose their accounts. (Though I doubt many of them would turn down the sponsorship or refuse to tout those problematic aspects of the services even if they did. ¬_¬)

However, I can’t fathom that VPNs do not know this since they make a point of highlighting it as a one of the two main features of their service, so the only conclusion is that they do not care. They only want to convince/trick people into buying the service and if you lose your account, then so what? the VPN got theirs. 🤷 😒

If the service is either so inept as to not know that bypassing geo-blocking will get you suspended, or they do know but don’t care about customers, then how safe can they be and how much can you trust them to provide the service they say and not keep logs and so on? 🤨

I went to Freshco today and couldn’t wait to get home, not because I wanted to finish the project I was working on, not to eat something, not to get out of the heat and have a shower, not for any other reason than to fill out the survey from the receipt, especially this question:

Given your score to the previous question [0/10], what DID YOU NOT APPRECIATE during your most recent visit to FreshCo?

Boy did I have a response:

The cashier was nosy, gave attitude and questioned my purchases and her manager LIED! 😒

I went to get a bunch of the hotdogs that were on sale, and QUADRUPLE-CHECKED that there was no limit. I checked the flyer, I checked the website, I checked the shelf were they were, and I checked the bunker where there were more of them. I checked FOUR TIMES and there was definitely, 100%, absolutely NO limit on the hotdogs. Secure in that knowledge, I got 20 packs so that I could have a family BBQ, and also have enough supply to stick to my low-carb diet for the next couple of months.

I took them to the register to check out, and before I had even finished unloading them from the bag onto the belt, the girl asked the girl at the next register if there was a limit. The other girl said there wasn’t, but the first one wasn’t satisfied that she couldn’t complain, so she picked up the phone and called her manager and asked him. There was a nearly 10-second delay while he thought about it, then she started counting and told him 20, then another 5-second delay before he said 12.

She told me there’s a limit of 12, to which I pointed out that there was no mention of it, and that you should let us know that beforehand. She replied that she just did, (I guess she ignored the part about saying it “beforehand” ¬_¬) and I responded with “well you should put a sign”, to which she replied “that’s not my section”. 🤦 When I said “you”, I OBVIOUSLY meant the store, not her personally. 🙄 She didn’t have any trace of an accent, so she can’t even claim that she’s not a native English speaker and didn’t understand. ¬_¬

It was none of her business if there was a limit or not, and even if there were, she’d have been told, and even if for some reason, she wasn’t, the computer would point it out, it doesn’t need her to handle it manually. But beyond her nosiness and ineptitude, beyond there being ABSOLUTELY NO mention of a limit anywhere when allegedly there was one, the worst part was that the manager LIED!

I know for a fact that he lied because for one thing, there a long delay after she asked if there was a limit. If there were a limit, he’d have responded right away because it’s literally his job to know these things, and it was the end of the first day of the sale, so it would have been fresh on his mind. But beyond all of that, it’s obvious that he lied and made up the limit on the spot by the fact that he asked her to count how many I had before he responded. Why the hell would he need to know how many I had before he can answer a simple question? 🤨 The answer is either “NO” or “12”. What bearing does how many I took have on the limit? 🤨 What, is the limit 4 if I get 5 but 7 if I get 10? 🙄 That makes NO SENSE AT ALL. It’s just pure and simple logic. HE LIED!

Because of all this, I was absolutely FUMING for the entire hour-long bus ride home. You should be ashamed that you employee people like that. 😒

Maybe this girl was new and thought that she could impress her boss and gun for a raise or promotion… by reducing sales. 🤨 Or maybe she’s just an idiot like some of the employees at different stores that my mother would occasionally come across to which she would always ask them “what do you care? is it your daddy’s store or something? 🙄” 👍😂 Of course, neither explanation excuses her manager. ¬_¬

I’m not usually vindictive and don’t usually hope bad things happen to people unless they’re absolutely horrible people who did horrendous things, but in this case, I can make an exception for the nosy bitch and her lying dick manager. This time, I actually do hope they get fired. 😒

(I like to think that she ended up having to drag the extra eight packs back to the fridge herself, but it’s more likely that she just left them sitting there in the heat next to the register until she got around to calling someone else to take them to the fridge. 😒)

Recently, RCMP offcier Col. Simon Seguin violently attacked and savaged first-nations chief Allan Adam. The incident was caught on the police-car dashcam. Some outlets only show the attack itself which makes it seem like Seguin unnecessarily assaulted Adam. However, the full 11-minute footage below does not absolve Seguin of culpability.

The longer footage does show Adam being upset and hostile and swearing. It even shows him lightly raising his arm to avoid getting a hand-cuff on it. What it doesn’t show is any sort of violence or threatening actions from Adam. The closest he ever came to aggression was to defend a woman that the other officer was manhandling next to the truck. Otherwise, Adam never became physical and never posed a threat. Moreover, the other officer, with the exposed sleeves was the one handling the situation and taking the hostility from Adam.

Seguin wasn’t even within the view of the dashcam until the other officer went to put cuffs on Adam, when less than one second after Adam slowly raised his arm to evade the cuff, Seguin suddenly rushed into the scene like a bolt of lightning, tackling Adam to the ground with a jump attack, pinning him hard, then punching him hard in the head, causing Adam’s head to smash against the asphalt and resulting in Adam’s face bleeding.

Never during the incident did Adam give any of the officers an excuse to get physically violent, let alone pummel him like that. It’s the job and duty of a police officer to try to deescalate situations and neutralize confrontations without violence as much as possible. Seguin did not do that. If anything, it’s almost certain that he was standing there just waiting for Adam to do anything to give him an excuse to jump in and physically attack him. When he saw Adam raise his arm, he figured that was a good opportunity to claim Adam was “resisting arrest” and he’d be justified in attacking him. Hence why Seguin was able to rush in and tackle him in less than a second after Adam raised his arm; Seguin was anxiously waiting for any excuse, ready to pounce like a cheetah. He wanted an excuse to get violent and assault him.

As mentioned, the other officer was the one handling the situation for the majority of the incident and he took it in stride, listening to Adam’s diatribe without ever getting violent. The closest he came to getting aggressive was when he pulled the woman away from the door of the truck. If Seguin hadn’t jumped in, I’m sure the other officer could have resolved the situation without violence.

It is possible to diffuse even extremely hostile situations without enmity. When confronted with hostile scammers, most scam-baiters respond with equal aggression. But one scam-baiter Alogical, managed to neutralize an extremely hostile and hateful scammer with a calm, accepting tone that resulted in the scammer actually apologizing and talking to her like a human. That video is a master-class in negation, mediation, and conflict-resolution, and she is just a normal citizen; what the hell is the excuse of a professional law-enforcement officer? 🤦

Dashcam footage of Allan Adam arrest:

Alogical diffuses hostile scammer:

(Alogical has deleted most of her older videos—possibly to avoid YouTube slaughtering her with TOS nags, including “IRS Scammer Madness – Part 1”. :-\ I have a copy of the video, but I’m not sure about uploading it.)

It’s no secret that there have been a lot of absolutely horrible things done by cops, soldiers, and prison-guards. Everything from violently arresting and killing black people (too many examples) to beating the crap out of a first-nations chief (Simon Seguin) to throwing puppies off of cliffs (David Motari) to raping children in front of their families and then burning the them alive (Steven D. Green) to making necklaces out of the ears of all their victims (Tiger Force).

The question is why are so many cops, soldiers, and guards so violent and evil? The thing is that this shouldn’t come as a surprise, it should be expected because there are mainly just two types of people who become cops or soldiers or guard:

• Decent people who want to help make the world a better place by stopping bad guys. (With a sub-type of people who want to get revenge on bad guys who did something to them or those they know.)
• Violent psychopaths who want to hurt and kill and figure that joining the force(s) is a legal way to do that.

This explains perfectly why a lot of cops, soldiers, and guards are okay, but some are sick freaks who do horrible things. Moreover, the proportion of dirty cops/soldiers/guards to good ones is much higher than the proportion of psychopaths in the general population because a lot of psychos self-select into the group of cops/soldiersguards. So it’s statistically sound, if hyperbolic, when people think that ACAB, because more of them are indeed bad than if people were randomly selected to be cops. Soldiers however seem to get a free-pass by society with all the “thank you for your service” patriotic propaganda that spread after 9/11. Citizens really got brain-washed to love the military after 9/11 compared to how they felt about it in the 70’s.

As long as there are borders, soldiers will be needed, but it’s conceivable that they could be defunct some day if the world could unite (which isn’t going to happen ¬_¬). However, even if the world did unite, as there are humans, police will still be necessary; abolishing them is absurd and could never work; humans are just terrible.

(This is a long one. Reserve your angry seething until the end, lest you look foolish for premature-commentulation.)

Justice for Floyd

First, let me preface this by saying that what happened to George Floyd was absolute garbage, with zero exception or justification (unless somehow, some sort of highly-unlikely magical evidence comes to light that throws new light on the situation, but I wouldn’t hold my breath—no pun intended, sometimes it’s exactly as it seems). Chauvin (a literal chauvinist) should be thrown in jail and kept in gen-pop for the Black Brotherhood to do its thing… (but of course, he’ll be kept in ad-seg for the duration of his stay ¬_¬).

Also, even though the expression ACAB is offensive because any sort of generalization is ignorant and it should be SCAB (which is just a better acronym) because some definitely are, it is quite frustrating to see so much footage of police abusing their power and doing absolutely horrible things in the riots. The looters aren’t the only ones who think it’s open season and all bets are off.

♪ “But You’re Not the Only One” ♪

That said, there is a frustrating problem with the Black Lives Matter movement. It is incredibly US-centric (with a little Canada and UK thrown in). Yes, racism in the US has to stop, but the BLM movement focuses only on black people in the West, but they are not the only ones affected by racism. Canada’s discussions and protests have also mentioned aboriginals, but the focus still stays on black lives. There are people being oppressed and killed because of racism and prejudice all around the world but not all of them are black or killed by police (in fact, few are). Even the Tutsi who are black weren’t killed by police, but regular Hutu citizens in the Rwandan genocide.

Here’s just a few current examples:

• Aboriginals/First-nations in Canada and Australia still being oppressed
• Kurds massacred by ISIL and oppressed by everybody
• Rohingya slaughtered by the Burmese government
• Muslims killed by Tibetan monks!
• Uyghurs being put into detention-centers (probably soon death-camps) by China
• Tanzanians killing albinos because of superstition and to make muti (traditional African “medicine”)

There are many less-current examples of oppression and murder of people because of their skin, religion, or other attributes, from the Holodomor and Holocaust to the many genocides, to Operation Blue Star which was done by Indira Gandhi who shares a name with the most famous non-violent protestor of all. 🤦

And then, there’s the literally countless animals that are murdered by humans all the time, but humans think they are “superior” to animals, so they don’t even count them. (The worst part is that in the same breath as humans try to justify killing animals due to their “superiority”, they’ll turn around an justify other bad behaviors by saying “animals do it; humans are just animals”. Hypocrisy is disgusting. 😒)

Quantity >>> Quality

To make things worse, despite how it may seem due to all the media coverage, black people are being oppressed and killed by police at a much lower rate than other minorities. (School-shootings seem to happen more often in the US than cops killing black people. 😕) Moreover, the immediacy is overstated, there are not thousands of black people being killed by police right this moment, it’s not as time-critical as it feels. I’ve seen some people throw around numbers like 1,200 black Americans shot by police since 2014, but most of those were regular encounters with suspects and armed criminals (how many such encounters were there with Mexicans or whites or others?); not all of them were encounters with unarmed, people who were already subdued, otherwise there would have been a lot more reports in the media. The list of ones that were “newsworthy” is much shorter…

…of course, any is too much. Yet, the truth is that there are only a few black people being killed by cops every now and then; maybe a few per year are killed in a way that is bad enough to make the news. Other minorities are being oppressed and killed by the hundreds, even thousands. Entire villages are wiped out, millions of people put into detention centers like it’s 1942 all over again.

Hashtags Matter

Addressing police violence towards black people in the West is like fixing a leak in a boat by throwing some water out with a cup. At best, it just slightly fixes the problem for a moment. The real fix is to plug the hole. The real fix is to work to make everyone more empathetic and compassionate towards all living things (including animals and plants). The real fix is to stop people from being harmful to others. This is why AllLivesMatter makes more sense; BlackLivesMatter feels offensively self-serving to other oppressed minorities (and anyone who knows about them). Yes, some people use ALM as a way of being racist, but screw them; who cares what they think? They can take their dog-whistle and shove it. If black people can reclaim the n-word, then non-racists can reclaim ALM to mean what it says on the tin. (That said, BlueLivesMatter and WhiteLivesMatter are definitely not going to win any favors despite the inexcusable 2016 attack on Dallas police.)

Of course, making humans stop being horrible is a long-term goal (and in all likelihood, impossible), so it does make sense to work towards a more immediate goal like trying to purge police-forces of aggressive bigots and prevent them from being hired in the future. The problem with that, is that this problem that is specific to black people in the West is getting all the attention and the people being oppressed in other parts of the world are being ignored and forgotten. So if anything, black Westerners are to other oppressed minorities as whites are to blacks. Therefore, ironically, they are benefiting from their privilege of being a Westerner. In other words, there are gradations of oppression and being a black Westerner is the “1%” of oppressed minorities. It is not okay to treat one group’s suffering as more important than another’s.

Bad Example

Another problem with BLM is that they keep mentioning Michael Brown in their lists of victims. Michael Brown was NOT a victim. An investigation was done, witnesses (including black ones) were questioned, evidence was examined, and in the end, it was concluded that Michael Brown was a violent criminal whose death was his own responsibility. His friend who initially gave reporters an account of the incident was discovered to be flat-out lying when it was revealed that he was a few blocks away at the time. Witnesses who were actually there explained how the cop did not just start shooting and that Brown was the one who initiated the incident. An old black man who witnessed the event even said that he was surprised by the cop’s self-control and that if he had been the cop, he would have shot Brown much sooner and more times. Stop including Michael Brown in your lists of black victims! There are (too) many examples of actual black victims of police, so use those, stop going back to the poisoned well of Ferguson. His family has my sympathies for their loss, you can’t control what your loved ones turn into—I’m reminded of a scene from I Saw the Devil (2010)—but I do not feel anything for Michael himself. Being a minority is a not get-out-of-jail-free card to do bad things with impunity. 😒 (When it happened, there were only two main photos of Michael Brown being circulated and he looked scary in both; they couldn’t even find a recent photo of him where he looked nice and innocent. ¬_¬)

Hiring: New Symbol

Another problem is that in 2016, Colin Kaepernick started a trend of kneeling as a symbol of solidarity towards black victims of racism, but this is no longer a good way to show solidarity because the aptly-named Chauvin “took a knee” on George Floyd’s neck, so its meaning has changed. :-\

The Purge: Real Life (2020)

Finally, during the protests, the concept of defunding, abolishing, or otherwise dismantling the police has gotten wrapped up as part of BLM. This notion is absurd, short-sighted, narrow-minded, and just plain idiotic. There are explanations like that most 911 calls are about mental-health problems or that activists can do a better job, or to use other types of professionals. 🙄 A psychiatrist is not going to find your kidnapped child, a civil-rights activist is not going to protect your family from gangs. If you get rid of the police, then it will be The Purge, that’s a money-back guarantee.

Just look at the protests themselves, they immediately turned into riots and looting. Apparently people learned nothing from Baltimore in 2015 and just did the same damned thing all over again. 🤦 How is a group of people stealing Louis Vuitton bags helping black people not get killed? How is trashing a neighborhood bodega stopping police from being racist? How is setting a building full of people on fire and then blocking the hydrants and firetrucks to prevent them from evacuating the building and putting out the fire doing anything other than murder‽

If there is one guarantee, it’s that humans cannot be trusted to do the right thing on their own. Just look at “Boaty McBoatface”. ¬_¬ As long as humans exist, law-enforcement will be required. That said, police equipment definitely should be demilitarized. It is very bad that local police have military-grade arms. Unfortunately, just taking away their guns and pointing at the police in the UK won’t work everywhere because criminals in some places are just so much more dangerous, that the police have to be more heavily armed and armored. Gangs, cartels, etc. are not going to be stopped with a baton. Nevertheless, local police definitely don’t need heavy (or any) deadly weapons; that’s why there are SWAT teams and soldiers around to handle those much-rarer cases of dangerous armed criminals.

“Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”

Some people argue that “defund the police” doesn’t mean to get rid of them completely, but rather to reduce their budgets and redistribute it to other sectors like social-services and community programs and resources.

First of all, if that’s the case, then stop using the term “defund”; it means to remove funds, and thus means to get rid of them completely. Use a proper, unambiguous term that doesn’t lead to confusion. Say what you mean and mean what you say. ¬_¬ Moreover, regardless of what a few people may or may not mean, the vast majority of people chanting or spray-painting “defund the police”, do in fact mean “defund” as a synonym for “abolish”.

As for the goal of redistributing money, there just isn’t enough money going to police-departments to make those things as effective as people would like. Yes, some police-departments have absurdly high budgets, but even if you take a big bite out of those, once you slice it up to all the places that people want to fund, there just isn’t enough to make it work. It wasn’t that long ago that people were complaining that the police are as under-funded as schools. The fact is, that you simply can’t eliminate law-enforcement; people will continue to do bad things regardless of how well you try to make life for everyone to prevent them resorting to crime because not everybody does crime as a reaction to poverty and bad circumstances.

Not holding my breath

In summary^‡, don’t be a butthole. If everyone could just live by that one rule, the world could be a better place. Is it really so much to ask, it’s not even asking to do something, rather to not do something, surely that’s easier? 🤨 🤷

Ray of hope

After all is said and (said and said and) done, there is one reason that #BLM is still good and useful despite it only (at least on the surface) catering to just one specific group. It stirs up discussion and demands for change (for the better). Once it does that, it can spread to other groups (as Canada has been doing by discussing first-nations peoples). It’s like Arab Spring for civil-rights; it starts with one, but spreads to others as well. It’s just important to make sure to keep all lives in mind and not forget that even if all prejudice is wiped out in the US, that doesn’t mean the problem is over.

Post-script

On a side note, something that’s always baffled me is why is it that whenever there’s an incident like these, the families never seem to be able to provide the media with a good photo of the victim, why do they always end up giving them an unflattering photo? It can’t be poverty because none of the people in question are so poor that they’re lives are living hells where they can’t muster a smile for a photo when a friend or family member takes your picture. I suppose the families might be rushed and don’t have time to go through photos to find a good one, or maybe they’re still too raw from grief to be able to stand looking at their lost loved one, but surely they have at least one person in their lives who can do it. :-\ It would definitely help if they could provide the media with a nice photo of the victim; it would generate a lot more outrage that the person was killed for no reason.

† Yes, the title is (partially) click-bait.
‡ I’ll update this post as necessary, as information is learned, as ideas change, and so on.

I did not grow up rich. My mother did the best she could (and she certainly did an amazing job), but despite that, we were never rich enough to just buy anything we wanted. Even as a child, I knew and understood that, so I always tried my best to avoid asking my mother for anything so that she wouldn’t feel bad if she couldn’t afford to get it for me. Moreover, I never really fretted too much because I was too busy with school and always just filed anything I wanted but couldn’t get at the time in the back of my mind to get in the future when things get better and we can afford it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t anticipate a few things that would throw a monkey-wrench in my plans.

For one thing, I didn’t account for the fact that many of those things I wanted, be they books or video-games, would get discontinued and would no longer be available. I would have to find used copies of them in the future. This isn’t too bad however, because the kinds of things I wanted didn’t really matter if they were new or used, and even better, used copies should be cheap.

Later on, when I started making some disposable income, I started trying to build my collection of books and games. I scoured used-bookstores, flea-markets, and bargain-bins for them. I collected a bunch of the books I wanted, and a lot of the video-games.

Then I discovered eBay, and my options for getting the old video-games increased drastically. I now had the chance to get a lot of those games I never had the opportunity to play in my youth, and for good prices.

Sadly, this only last a few years. While the prices of old, used games were low and reasonable and properly decent, once YouTube took off and everyone and their neighbor’s mother’s dog started making let’s-play videos of everything, the demand for games skyrocketed which in turn, caused sellers to get “clever” (read opportunistic) which pushed the prices through the roof.

Add to that eBay instituting the idiotic GSP which applies absurd “shipping” costs to everything coming out of the US (you can easily expect $20-$40 fees for even a <$2 item), and now it is completely impractical and not at all feasible to buy used video-games (especially from the US). Stupid YouTube and stupid let's-players have destroyed the used video-game market. For several years, I held out hope that young people (who did not actually grow up with the old games and only know them as "retro") would eschew buying actual physical old games and consoles and instead opt for digital copies or emulation, but that doesn't seem to have affected the prices. Like with most things, once the price goes up, it stays up forever and only goes higher, it never comes back down. 😒

News recently broke of Disney being investigated by the SEC for various bouts of financial fraud and crimes (they should also be charged with a wrongful-termination suit on top of that). But then immediately after that, news broke that Spider-man would be pulled from the MCU and suddenly everybody started talking about that and forgot about the SEC investigation. Gee, what a “coincidence” with the timing. 🙄

Shortly after the Spider-man news broke, more information came out (from Sony), saying that the reason Spider-man was pulled from the MCU was because Disney asked for too much from future movies. They were previously getting 5%, but now wanted 50%, so Sony had no choice but to say no.

It’s pretty obvious what’s going on. Disney purposely over-asked on Spider-man to force Sony’s hand and make them say no so that they would have to pull Spider-man from the MCU and make a big mess with that so that everybody focuses on and talks about the Spider-man debacle instead of the SEC investigation into their crimes. And it’s working. 🤦 The Spider-man news broke the same day as the SEC investigation and everybody switched to that.

This was clearly just a decoy to deflect attention from their crimes and keep Disney’s “family-friendly” image. ¬_¬ As soon as the SEC investigation is over, Disney will re-negotiate a real deal with Sony (or just drop the ask altogether, though considering how much Disney cares about money more than anything else in the world, they’ll probably use this opportunity to try to squeeze more out of Sony and up the ask anyway). Then, Spider-man will be back in the MCU in time for the next movie.

Oddly enough, this all worked out perfectly for Disney because the SEC began their investigation just after the last Spider-man movie came out, so it will still be a while before there will be another one, so Disney won’t lose much/any time with this fake news. The mouse wins again. 😒

Marvel often modifies the footage they show in trailers to mislead people. For example, they like to add or remove characters from scenes. They claim they do it to avoid spoilers or to make it more exciting or whatever. They think they’re being clever, but there is a much uglier word for it: misappropria-, I mean FRAUD.

People already find it extremely aggravating, even infuriating that trailers are misleading and make movies seem better than they are (*cough*Random Hearts*cough*), but it’s much worse than just being annoying, it’s illegal. There are truth-in-advertising or false-advertising laws that prohibit this behavior. Trailers are advertisements for a product like any other, and misrepresenting something they are trying to sell violates the law.

Movie trailers have gotten away with breaking the law for decades with impunity. This needs to stop. They should not be allowed to trick people into wasting their money. 😒