We've had serious snow this past week, which has driven the cats more than a little crazy because the birds have concentrated their activity on the bushes behind the house. Jake and Jenny spend a crazy about of time looking out the window to see what's going on.

When they're not being entertained by their feathered nemeses out the window, they're inside pretending to be cold in the hopes that I'll turn the heat up...

Which is ridiculous since it's far from freezing and they have warming pads they can lay on. Which is Jake's favorite thing because he likes having a warm head. Most times he sleeps with his head up-side-down on the pad...

That he does this 23-1/2 hours a day would be concerning for a human, but is probably normal for a cat.

Well poop.

I'm used to it by now.

Today is my mom's birthday. Between this and Mother's Day, it's the worst two days of the year for me. Thankfully, my cats were being entitled little shits this morning, so I was well-distracted from thinking about what crap it is that mom would have turned 80 years old today had she not passed six years ago.

Something else that helped distract me from reality? The teaser trailer for Superman dropped today!

I just want the comic books.

I don't want some crappy dark "interpretation" of Superman. I just want comic book Superman on the big screen. There's so much amazing material to draw from. Take the best bits from all of the iterations. Give us All-Star Superman in an amazing story with plenty of action and some heart.

That's it. That's all I need.

All the comic-bookey stuff that makes the character so great is what the movie should be about. Like the first two Richard Donner Superman films managed to do.

But at this point with the mess that the "Snyderverse" became, I don't even care about the story so much as being able to geek out over having a movie that honors the source material and has cool stuff from the comics. But since it's James Gunn, I know we're getting both cool comic book stuff and a good story. I mean, he took frickin' Guardians of the Galaxy and made it compelling to all audiences! I have confidence he'll do the same with Superman.

I mean... just LOOK at what we're getting! Guy Gardner (complete with his horrible haircut)! Mr. Terrific! Hawkgirl! AND KRYPTO!?! ZOMG! That's just beyond my expectations...

Copyright ©2024 DC Comics / Warner Bros.

Copyright ©2024 DC Comics / Warner Bros.

Copyright ©2024 DC Comics / Warner Bros.

It's frickin' Krypto! He's got the cape and everything? Isn't that just the absolute best?

And is that Metamorpho in there too? Plus amazing action and a Lex Luthor that actually looks menacing? THIS IS ALL I EVER WANTED! No joke... the first three times I watched the trailer it was pretty hard to hold it together.

This is looking like the best Superman movie since Superman II from 1981. NINETEEN EIGHTY-ONE! Everything that followed was pretty much crap... including Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (with the exception of that ONE SCENE with Martha Kent waiting outside the hospital to find out if her son is dead in a crowd of people like she's nobody)... and most definitely the Zack Snyder crap which was gut-wrenchingly awful (and that really hurt because Henry Cavill was an amazing choice).

Bring on the Justice League! The REAL Justice League!

Well then. Didn't have a new Defunctland video on my Bingo card.

The channel used to get new episodes fairly regularly. Then the videos started getting more complex and in-depth, which meant that they started taking longer and longer for Kevin to produce. But quality takes time (I'm still amazed by the Disney Channel Theme video from a couple years ago)...

Spoiler Alert: This is only Part One! No idea how long we'll have to wait for Part Two (or how many parts there will be), but animatronics is a fascinating topic, and I'll take as many parts as we can get.

   
Well, today didn't go as planned. At all.

As I mentioned yesterday, a few flat earthers who were not afraid to risk being proven wrong were flown to Antarctica so they could see that the sun doesn't set but instead circles around you. After two days of the sun going around them, they were indeed proven wrong.

To the shock of absolutely nobody with an analytical thought in their head...

But, hey. Even if you don't trust those globist shills, you can totally trust me! I experienced polar day first-hand. Of course I wasn't as close to the South Pole as the team is, so the sun was lower on the horizon for me than it was for them... but I was in Antarctica and I did see the sun circle around me without fully setting. So, yeah. Welcome to nighttime in the Antarctic Circle (which is even more amazing when there's clouds out like this...

Photo by ME... TAKEN IN ANTARCTICA!

The views in Antarctica are incredible.

Though they're even prettier when the sky is clear...

Photo by ME... TAKEN IN ANTARCTICA!

There's one flerfer who said that the team wouldn't even be able to get to Antarctica because people with guns would stop them and keep them from approaching. To what end? No fucking clue. But they got called from Antarctica by MCToon to hilarious effect...

And... I'm dead.

But of course the diehard flerfers lose their dipshit cult following if they admit that all possible evidence tells us the earth is a globe, so now they're all coming up with every wacky excuse they can think of to explain why what people see is not what's really happening.

Christ.

I'd probably feel better about this shit if people could just admit that they don't know how anything works and are too lazy to learn about it. But nope! You've got a subset of humanity that would rather twist logic in a pretzel than admit they're just being ignorant.

Though the whole "flat earth" deal needs a hell of a lot more than a pretzel given how insane it is.

Don't go thinking that living on a fucking pancake excuses you from the bullets... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Anscestry! Can confirm. This is how I'm treated everywhere I go in the world where I can loudly announce that I am an American whose family was "originally from here"...

Accurate.

   
• Conspiracytime! Leave it to Big Tugg to crap all over some of the wackiest conspiracies running...

Don't even ask me how we got here.

   
• Flerfy Flerf! And speaking of wacky conspiracy bullshit, a bunch of flat earthers were invited to Antarctica to personally verify that the sun doesn't set in December because we're, in fact, on a fucking globe. Having been to Antarctica in the month of December, I can indeed verify that the sun does not set. BECAUSE WE'RE ON A FUCKING GLOBE. The flerfers fell over themselves to reject the invitation, but three of them actually went. You can track them and watch the videos right now! — As amusing as it is to ship dipshit flerfers to Antarctica, you could have saved the money had just had them replicate this experiment, which took a whole minute to perform... and is just as hilarious to watch...

Unreal how we had all this shit figured out before the birth of Christ, but here we are going backwards.

   
• Dooooon! Yikes. HBO Max... WTF happened? Dune Prophecy was going SO well, but last week we got a turd in the punchbowl? Nothing happened! Everything that was set up gets negated by Desmond pulling a Professor X in the most boring way possible. This episode could have been 10 minutes long! Could the characters BE any less compelling this week? Even Mother Superior was a snooze! =yawn= I made this graphic, but didn't post it because I thought we might be going through a calm-before-the-storm kinda situation...

But NOPE! This week's episode was also boring as fuck, providing a reveal as to the identity of Desmond Hart that was about the least-shocking "twist" in a show that I've ever seen. Who he was got telegraphed way in advance, and I cannot imagine anybody not seeing this coming from a mile away. Which is to say that even if to say they totally stick the landing, the show is going to be pretty meh to me.

   
• HIM! Honest to God I don't understand how A Flock Of Seagulls was relegated to one-hit-wonder status. Some of my favorite tracks came long after I Ran was released. And here they are, still killing it. This is a great throwback track...

Sure it's repetitive, but it's darn snappy.

   
• We Care! NEWSFLASH: Diabetic groom-to-be dies after taking cheaper insulin to pay for wedding — Fuck this fucking country's fucking inability to understand how our "health care" system doesn't care about anything but making insurance executives wealthy. We're literally killing ourselves rather than taking insurance out of the equation and just letting our money go towards care directly.

   
• Real Men Don't Eat the Shit! I don't have dairy in my house any more because I try to eat vegan at home and save dairy as a treat when I'm out, but this morning I had to bake a quiche, so I bought some eggs and milk on Friday (to go with the cheese I got on Thursday). While I went into the office I had a panic attack because I left my $7 carton of eggs on the front seat. Eggs seems like something that people would break into my car and steal! On the plus-side, the lady at the market opened the carton to check them all, then put a rubber band on them for safety ("They tend to hop out of the carton now that they're $7.00!")...

Fortunately... the eggs were still there when I got off work!

   
And now back to living on our globe earth, already in progress.

Cats have relatively short lives. And I am incredibly aware of this.

If I'm lucky, I've got another ten years with Jake and Jenny... and, if we're all lucky, they'll have the rest of their lives with me. And that's the thing. Because my cats have such limited time on this earth, I really don't deny them anything. If one of them wants to be petted, I will drop whatever I'm doing to pet them. I mean, I'm not going to make myself late for work or a dentist appointment or taking a cake out of the oven, but most anything else? Not as important as making sure their short time (not sleeping) is doing whatever makes them happy.

Such as attending a meeting on my crappy TV webcam and not caring that Jake is on my lap. Even when he's woken up when I have to talk...

Jenny, on the other hand, just runs away and hides.

Wish that was an option for me.

Today Giant Freakin' Robot released a video today titled How A 90s Sci-Fi Masterpiece Was Kneecapped By The Matrix and I immediately knew they were going to drag out Dark City because A) The plots of the movies have similarities, B) The Matrix came out just a year later, C) The Matrix shot on some of the same sets, and D) Because of A-C, a lot of people have lumped them together so they could comment on how The Matrix was so much more successful.

I remember when I saw Dark City very well. A friend and I were in Seattle for some kind of morning event and went over the night before. We wanted to kill time after dinner so we went to a theater nearby and just picked the most interesting movie. Which happened to be Dark City. We knew nothing about it and neither of us had even saw a trailer.

Needless to say, it was a mind-blowing experience.

This is one mind-blowing film.

So of course I had to watch it for the hundredth time tonight. Just as good as it ever was. That ending reveal they came up with is pretty epic.

And here's the video I was talking about...

I've heard more than a couple times over the decades that they were planning on a sequel or television series or something new to do with Dark City. The last time was back in 2021 when director Alex Proyas said a series was in development (and said he hopes that Kiefer Sutherland will return for it). Not sure where they can go with a sequel after what happened, but I'd absolutely tune in to find out!

Back when I was young, naive, and traveling the world, I spent my fair share of sleeping in stations, hostels, and on trains. It always seemed like such a waste to spend money on lodging because the more money I saved, the more I got to travel. Far better to spend my money on flights, transportation, museum fees, and food than "wasting" it on a hotel!

Then... as I entered my late 20's... I decided that globetrotting a little less so I could stay in a cheap hotel was a better way to travel. I got tired of having to carry a bike-lock to secure my backpack to my train seat or hostel bed so it wouldn't get stolen while I slept.

Then... somthing happened in my early-30's that changed everything. I started traveling regularly for work where I got to stay in nice hotels. Nothing crazy... not a room at the Ritz Carlton or anything... but nice hotels that were a big step up from the Motel 6 or Super 8 rooms I was used to.

It was very hard to stay at the Hilton for work then stay at an ultra-budget hotel for personal travel. And so I started adding vacation days to work trips so I could make my money go further and be able to afford nicer hotels. Have work in Germany? Add a cheap flight to Spain after my work is over! Far cheaper than flying to Spain on my own! Between work-work and charity-work, I was in Europe and Asia fairly often, so I got to see a lot of the world without having to foot the bill entirely by myself.

Thanks to the pandemic, my travel for work-work and charity-work abruptly came to a halt in January 2020 and never recovered. In the past five years I've taken exactly three trips requiring plane travel.

Next year I have two trips planned (so far), and that's what sent me down lodging memory lane.

But also got me to thinking...

If I were starting out traveling today, would I be sleeping in a bus station or checking into a hostel? Probably, I guess? I mean, people still do it (obviously), but it seems less safe than it was in the late 80's. Though I fully admit that this is likely more perceptual than anything else. My odds of getting assaulted in a bus station while sleeping may have been less back then, but it was never zero.

The issue that gives me pause on saying that now-a-days I would be staying in a hotel is the expense of it all.

Travel is so much more expensive than it used to be. And hotel rooms almost comically so.

If I were starting out with travel today on a starving post-college student budget, I wouldn't be able to afford to stay in a hotel. Heck, I can barely afford it now! I feel bad for young people in 2024... particularly young families... trying to afford a vacation. Just being able to afford a place to live, food to eat, and American "health" care takes all your money.