Frame 1 takes place while Riker is watching a hologram recreation of himself murdering a man in cold blood. Frame 2 takes place just after it’s suggested that he committed said murder to cover up his attempted rape of the victim’s wife.

and here I thought it was Dewey from Malcolm in the Middle

What do you mean? I was watching a documentary about one just last week.

Dick Dastardly. Admittedly, Snidely would’ve been better.

(And I’m gonna choose to ignore the very obvious indications that Dick Dastardly was just traced nearly 1:1 from that very picture on Wikipedia.)

Now that’s a cat that really was gone.

Well boy howdy, do I sure hope he gets to test that hypothetical assumption real soon.

Say what you will about participation awards, but at least their recipients actually participated in the activity in question. I don’t know what this is.

We really should, though. Dude needs a win.

This is the place that caught fire.

This is the place across the street.

I dunno, if I’m in my 70s making $240 a month and living in a shipping container that I don’t technically own while the guy across the street’s putting in skyscrapers, I might be inclined to call my situation comparatively not that great. I say that like that’s not better than my current retirement plan, but that’s beside the point.

I mean, this is obviously a senseless tragedy that’s going to make a lot of peoples’ already-bad situations even worse. Living in poverty in the middle of one of the wealthiest parts of the country is bad enough without having your entire life upended by a random disaster, especially when it was already about to be upended by a major redevelopment project.

Having said that?

ʜᴇʏ

SEXY LADY!

GIF Venti

See, that’s why I’m saying it’s gotta be “Chunky Gif.” .cyg.

Is the C a /s/ or a /k/? Or is it /tʃ/, like in “cello,” to match with “chunky?” Is the Y an /ɪ/, an /aɪ/, or an /i/? Is the G a /dʒ/ or a /ɡ/? Does the fact that it’s a pun on the peanut butter brand legitimize the /dʒ/ pronunciation, or does linguistic precedent show it’s obviously pronounced /sɪɡ/ like cygnus?

I would’ve gone with “Chunky GIF” myself

“Hello, I’m… fifty?!”

That’s a lot of yamok sauce…

Probably not, but given the choice (term used loosely) between “ignore it at best, get rid of it at worst” and “fire the journalists and replace them with state-funded sycophants”, the apathetic option suddenly seems more appealing. Obviously the preferred option is “stop letting the big companies eat all the smaller ones,” but I don’t see any formal crackdown on that any time soon, what with that slime mold and all.

Oh, make no mistake, it’s still a bad merger. It’s just that someone was going to buy Warner either way, and the main competing bid was from Paramount-Skydance with the express purpose of gutting CNN to appease the strange grayish-yellow slime mold that’s been growing in the White House, because the news won’t stop telling people how slimy it is. Which, of course, gives the adherents of the slime mold reason to try and turn public favor against Netflix’s acquisition. Or something along those lines, I’d be lying if I said I was all the way in the loop myself. Maybe there’s some other reason it’s propaganda, I don’t know. It does certainly seem to be echoing the same victim complex that cinemas have been playing up since COVID, but I’m not sure “theater propaganda” is really a thing.

I may be inclined to more sympathy had theaters and cable providers made any effort to stay competitive in the, what, 15 years since streaming started to take off? These guys are about to get hit by an oncoming train that they’ve been standing motionless in front of for a decade, have made no effort to save themselves - barring, perhaps, having Nicole Kidman politely ask the train to stop - and are now at the last possible minute begging the engineer to switch tracks, even though it would run over like a dozen other people in the process and, really, there’s no guarantee the train would actually be going fast enough to hurt them beyond the word of some people that have, again, been sitting in front of an oncoming train for 15 years, one of whom is the guy in the tophat and handlebar mustache that tied all those other people to the tracks in the first place. Sorry fellas, you woulda had my condolences six years ago but now you’re on your own. I’ll be over here in my much cheaper boat with a five-meter-high stack of DVDs, which in this metaphor represents a five-meter-high stack of DVDs.

Also, I can’t make this fit the train metaphor, hasn’t Netflix been doing more theatrical runs recently anyway? Like, as recently as last week? Am I just completely misremembering that one K-Pop movie having to add screenings because too many people bought tickets, drawing a bigger audience than the competing Disney and Dreamworks movies in the process? If anything, these guys have got to be salivating at the idea of being able to charge people $19.99 for one movie plus arbitrary processing fees and 30 minutes of unskippable preroll ads.

What can I say, I like me a big casserole.

Shame the nephews won’t be there to enjoy it…

Specifically, one where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato’s ripe.