I pour whiskey at time-locked saloon in a pretty damn redneck, open carry state. I regularly have to, no fucking joke, tell people to check their iron at the bar. Mostly because we have some gaming in there and you can't be armed in what's technically a casino. I got more fastidious about that after one of them shot his wife in there a couple weeks ago. Until recently it seemed like every other damn conversation had to come around to Obama taking their fucking guns away.

Yet even among the kind of folk who openly joke about lynching the president (or the saloonkeeper; I love confronting them about speaking in metaphor when I have their gun behind the bar,) a fair number of them are vocally and violently fucking pissed at the tea party republicans right now. I've had to break up fights over this shit. I take that as a pretty useful public opinion poll.

White Kaneda Saves Neo New York.

I don't really think Gau's theme is incongruous with his character. I mean he's fucking weird and provides irritating comic relief so one might conceivably expect something offbeat and whacky, I guess. On the other hand, even in a game where pretty much everyone has a tragic backstory, "feral child abandoned in the wilderness by alcoholic father driven mad by grief over the death of his wife" is pretty damn sad. Or it would be if I didn't find both Gau and his mechanic annoying as fuck.

If you were carrying a whole bunch of your important organs in a long train behind your ass then yeah, you might just want to give all that shit a low profile.

There's one hiding inside you.

I'm just going to pretend this is a relevant metaphor for something.

Today, NASA announced that they were finally able to confirm that at some point last august Voyager I became the first man-made object to ever leave the bounds of our solar system.

Relevant XKCD

It's no great depression, but I would agree that things are the worst they've been economically in over half a century. Since the aftermath of the second world war, anyway. Especially in terms of individual buying power, wealth disparity, and the social safety net. Coming on the heels of a period of relative prosperity that occurred at a point in most of our lives where we were establishing our baseline for normal puts it into sharper relief.

I don't give a second thought to terrorism, other than the encroachments on civil liberties made in the name of fighting it.  You're several orders of magnitude more likely to be shot by a cop than killed by a terrorist, justifiably or otherwise, and with an extra zero or two tacked on depending on your ethnicity. Hell, you're far more likely to drown in the bathtub or be trampled by pigs. Sure, there's a case to be made for all the "living in the shadow of 911" noise, but it has more to do with the response than anything to do with actual terrorists.

Mostly I'm pissed that they're starting to call 9/11 Patriot's Day in some places. We already have one of those. It's in April and it's a fuck of a lot more relevant. Though arguably it did concern domestic terrorists, and has been a favorite day for it ever since. Which is why anyone working in a federal building is probably a bit jumpy on the 19th.

I guess the moral here is just don't make Final Fantasy sequels.

I like how her increasing insanity was directly proportional to her state of undress. By the end of the series (lol) I expected her to be completely nude and painting the walls with her shit. Hologram shit, I guess.