Left Below

Also Aung San Suu Kyi and Ahmed Abiy - the award's fine for people who think peace and justice are reserved for some (ethnic Burmese civilians in Aung's case and the Eritreans because they hate the people I hate in Abiy's case).

Best way to lower the temperature is to go out and see how other people are reacting. There is frustration but no fear or rage, or jackboot thuggery that I can see yet.

Went walking around the White House around 1 PM just to take the temperature and let me tell you there was no sign at all of Trump's press conference one way or another. No extra cops, no protestors, oddly also no supporters (a topic for another time - I don't see MAGA anywhere now).

"The witch at the start of Beauty and the Beast should have given the castle to the villagers instead."

A Shiver cosplayer wearing a full mask of the character

A cosplayer done up to look like a Salmon Run player

Some Splatoon #otakon

Ikea Wizard cosplayer whose cape says "Hej!" and has a small Blahaj on his back.

Hej Blahaj! #otakon

Cosplayer of the titular character from Sakamoto Days pointing a gun at a Dante cosplayer pointing two guns in turn

Sakamoto vs Dante #otakon

But then here is the brass ring, serious kudos #otakon

A Nausicaa cosplayer with a to-scale Baby Ohmu prop

second-most-kickass cosplay I saw #otakon

Resident Evil Village figurine box, a 100 lb Alcina Dimitrescu statue for $2300

An acid test of how Down Bad are you for Lady Dimitrescu - a whole month's mortgage payment worth? #otakon

Val Halen and Major Glory cosplayers

The Justice Friends, minus the Infraggable Krunk #otakon

Four cosplayers as My Little Pony characters but bloodied, Rainbow Dash holds a severed head, Twilight has a big chainsaw

The beginning of Otakon 2025 photos

Friendship (during a zombie apocalypse) is magic #otakon

It's not even homophobia so much as it is "you are straight if you aren't my kind of Communist"

"welcome to the 2032 DNC - are you a jihadist, a drug rep, or a Brunchlord?"

That was indeed disturbing but it also wasn't intended to remove him from the Senate or anything like that.

Hell we had worse than this current admin with Whitewater.

Yes, the resounding success of Hogwarts Legacy along with the wall-eyed stares a lot of normies would give you if you mentioned JKR being bad says that a lot of this hasn't escaped containment yet.

If they have her on the press junket she's going to put her foot in it though.

But I have a pretty liberal definition of "dictator" where there's a lot of "flawed democracy" to sink through before I consider it Electoral Authoritarianism (for me it's only those countries that hold elections but end up with a freedom house score of 1-2 anyway)

Erdogan pushes the grey area more but fair enough elections are still held, guy's just very popular and has warped the field in his favor, but we aren't even at the "arrest your opponents on flimsy charges" stage, much as MAGA continues to grumble.

The New Atheists have been shit for over a decade when it became increasingly clear that they were just a cover for Islamophobia. I say this as a guy who's philosophically anti-theist while in practice tolerant of non-jerk religion.

aye, I've seen White Man's Burden interpreted as at least somewhat condemning of the arrogance that it would take to think that way.

meaning she believes it would violate ex post facto laws which is dumb as hell because the amendment could literally specify that it applies to existing justices and that's the final word.

wouldn't the evangelicals not want them to be real in that case

right, through the 90s Gotham or Marvel's NYC being hellholes wasn't a hard sell at all and if anything Metropolis was the weird one. But then as this century crawled on places like Gotham and Bludhaven stand out as hilariously dysfunctional.

if anything they could take a page from CW Arrow where Thomas wasn't evil per se but was colluding with other major families to keep things in stasis, Bruce is unable to better things by day so the Bat comes out at night. Either that or make the Waynes Very Old Money whose day is past.

It felt like a copout to the Reed Richards problem - not just why doesn't Wayne Enterprises save the city but like, why doesn't STAR Labs, etc. Hard to fathom Gotham being Like That in the wider world without somebody doing something bigger about it.

idea is they were descendants of human-angel hybrids right?

Wasn't that what Konoe wanted and was never seriously entertained by the US side?

Just re-read Bix's Hirohito biography and that was the impression I got.

more that any of them can *become* paper tigers because influence is both powerful and fragile.

"New Nakamia" is Open AI overrun with Kaizoku Fansubs diehards? The economy depends on the answer.

I need a suit like that.