From the very first DONG! it seems to a person who has seen a Top Gun that it's going to be pure Millenium Falconism from start to finish.  But maybe it's just the trailer?

My brother is sure that the entire movie (and also all of Cruise's crazy stunts up to this point) have been a ploy to get the Navy to give him a real fighter jet, so he could fly it into a volcano.  I guessing that doesn't happen though.

Was it weird for a pilot as young as Maverick to have seen any air to air combat at all when the first one came out in 1989. Interestingly, since he's still in the Navy (not being called up out of retirement or something) one can assume Maverick is a Veteran of not only the Gulf War, but also of the Global War on Terror?  But still, not many Navy air to air engagements in those conflicts either.  So Harris' character is talking about the F-5's he shot down in the end of the first movie. Weird line any way you slice it.

In 1989 the F-14 was barely 10 years old.  Today, it's retired (though strangely, one goes zooming into the distance in the final shot of the trailer), and the now ancient F/A-18 in all its variants hangs on because they're cheap, not because they're cool. (Don't get me wrong, I think they're very cool).  I'm betting Paramount thinks F/A-18s aren't cool enough, and they're hiding a big ole stealth space plane or some nonsense.

Good LORD.  That is some nightmare fuel.

Could it be done right somehow?

I wanna go, but like, I'm afraid of the cringe factor.  Can you rent it out to sulk in by yourself? :-P

Went to Scotland earlier this year and toured some distilleries. Best part of the tour was absolutely the hippie tour guide, but the distilleries were cool too. 

I had always assumed that "years" of scotch were like wine vintages, and that if you bought a Glen Goyne 15 in 2015 it would taste different to a bottle of Glen Goyne 15 you bought in 1990, and also, if you had bought both then opened both at the same time and sampled them they would not only taste different, but the 25 year old bottle from 1990 would taste "older".

That's apparently wrong, and those should both taste the same.  The years refer to the oldest stuff in the batch, but they customize each batch to taste the same, even if that means changing the blend ratios to achieve uniformity across time.

Anyway, learned something new. Also learned I don't like peated or smoked whiskey.  I thought it would be hard to decide, peat no peat, maybe I like it??... NOPE.

Ever tried Mellow Corn?

Buh.  I'm really done with the "X script made Y actor mentally ill" construction.  Teleplays are not mind pathogens.

I'd never seen anything other than promotional material for The Apprentice, and I feel like he popped up in a lot of Cracked.com articles looking like a melodramatic sleazy con man.  I was aware of his previous explorations of presidential ambitions.  I wrote him off 'cause he never declared for president.  I wrote off the tweets as old grandpa and the Internet.  It never occurred to me that he would come to dominate the platform - the most successful massmedia publishing system invented.

But, the second he declared (like he did), and went for the R nomination, I knew he would sweep the floor with the rest of them.  He kept saying all the quiet parts loud that all the others had spent their whole lives pretending wasn't a thing at all.  They never stood a chance.  Then in a general election, because of our binary choice, winner takes all system, he's gets to be a coin flip away from the white house.

After years of hacking the system to get their way, Rs got hacked by Trump using their own playbook.  That he ended up president is otherwise an accident.  He pretty clearly from the record never thought he would win. 

But he did, and he is who he is, and now we are where we are (and McConnell continues his own agenda unabated, as do the State Leges) and the thing that continues to baffle me day and night is that Twitter continues to publish his unhinged, unfiltered, often violent musings because... reasons?  If he was mailing this stuff to the NYT or WP they wouldn't just continue publishing them.  Why does Twitter not flex on this?  I really feel like they could get away with it.  Is Dorsey that much in his head about the freedom land utopia that he thinks he's brought everyone?

In any case, this is fascinating.  Very much calls to mind the conflagration that the popularization of newspapers caused at the founding of the republic.

He comes up behind her at the bar and touches her without asking, apparently giving her a headache, then follows her after she asks to be left alone. When she gets outside and is alone, he starts telling her that he knows personal things about her.

I'd be creeped out.

How could Nicodemus have shown us that line instead of telling it to us?

LOL.  Unintentional but true.  Nah, I mean, they sell Censorship as a Service, they're in bankruptcy proceedings, and they have endorsements from a bunch of people I don't trust.

Sigh.

The list just keeps getting longer.  I've been trying to start some kind of copypasta thing that I can refer to.

I guess the weird thing is that Trump/Brexit don't have very much to do with any of that.  Other than it's so disheartening to watch Him/It get to have the drivers seat on the news.  Also, CLIMATE CHANGE.

TKWWBK is a sequel to something?  Oh Fuck.  Yeah, the marketing failed pretty hard  for me.  I thought it was a Kid in King Arthurs Court reboot causewhynotrebooteverything.