He used to be pretty active on reddit, and he was pretty fucking cool. If you didn't hassle him and just had a conversation like he wasn't famous, he was even cooler.
I don't think he's using much of anything social media related frequently any more though, not on an account connected to him in an obvious way for sure. Can't say I blame him.
Well, yeah, that's the point. I didn't bring Europe and Asia into it since the original thing was about the U.S., but it applies there too. It applies everywhere.
We aren't some magically unique group because of where we live. There's no inherent barrier between people just because someone got somewhere first.
I'm not saying that there's no point in borders, or that nations don't/can't have rules about such things.
I'm just saying that when it comes to the U.S. and the rhetoric around immigration and immigrants, there's a lot less differences between everyone over on these continents than differences.
Dude, bugger off with this shit
I never said that, and you know I never said it
Yeah, with the API removal, it's pretty much useless for kodi at all.
Hell, the native Americans are immigrants too, they're just the descendants of the first ones to get here.
I'm not saying this to detract from the point of the land being stolen by invaders from Europe, I'm saying it to point out that every nation in North, South, and Central America was populated by groups moving here looking for a good place to live. It's the single most fundamental fact of the continents that we are all, all linked by something; we're all one big, extended family.
Well, let's break it down.
First, he's been through the whole diagnostic process multiple times, with multiple doctors. This includes psychiatry and psychology, as well as neurology. No diagnoses of anything that would excuse petty thievery as something outside of his control.
Second, the first time I beat his ass was after roughly thirty years of bullshit. A little longer tbh, but still. We aren't talking a recent change here. We're talking a pretty damn full lifetime of fuckery. Support was shown through all of that. The dude would pilfer some shit in an obvious way, and I'd just take it back, tell him to cut his shit, and try and figure out what the living fuck had him doing it. Every time, over decades.
Seriously, support has a limit. Even if it was something like schizophrenia (and I don't know how that many damn doctors would miss something like that), it reaches a point of absurdity.
And, once someone tells you they're going to beat your ass if you come to their house again, and you go back, that's on you. The first one, if you choose to ignore the decades of fuckery, you can blame on me if you like. I could have just removed him from my home using less intense force, but it's still force, and he was going to gtfo one way or another. But that second one, nope, dude needed his ass beat.
Then, no injuries beyond bruising. I trained in martial arts for pretty much all of the nineties and into the naughties. No broken bones, no internal injuries, no joints damaged. Minimum amount of force to get the job done and make sure he knew I wasn't joking or fucking around. I didn't explicitly say that in the original comment, but the dude was saying he'd walk back to his car. And his mom picked him up, and he drove her car. Obviously, a very limited use of force if you're whacking someone's ass with a stick and they can still drive.
I mean, ffs, I can't even count the number of times I tried to talk to the dude and figure put wtf was in his head. Nothing but outright denial, the same as when he's standing there with a fucking hamburger in his pocket saying he doesn't know what I'm talking about.
Since that was what I said, just phrased differently, maybe you can see how it looks like you're trolling.
Maybe also notice that you're the only one that took it that way.
Disowned may not be the right word.
But Fucking Ryan is kind of the one member of the family that everyone dreads to some degree or another.
Notice I called him Fucking Ryan. This is what he is called by everyone that curses. Which, since the last person that didn't call him that died years ago, that's essentially nobody.
And both of his parents are alive. They don't call him that all the time, but they slip up sometimes.
So, we're not talking about him being totally cut off from everyone. He lives with his parents, and some of the family as a whole will put up with him. However, he is fully, strictly banned from my home on pain of having his ass beat again. That's again because when I told him that if he ever darkened my door again, I would beat his ass down the road, he didn't believe it and got his ass beat down the road.
So, going backwards from there.
He shows up after being warned never to come back or I would beat his ass down the road. He pulls into the driveway, gets out, and is coming up the steps when I make it out the door and start beating his ass. Now, I'm not speaking figuratively. I took my damn cane and was beating his actual ass with it, down the steps, down the walkway, and then down the road. Once he was down there and fell into the ditch, I told him to gtfo. He said he'd go back to his car in a minute, and I said "the fuck you will. Step in my yard and see if I don't beat your ass right back here."
He believed me. Asked me to call his mom to come get him. She drove his car, he drove hers. When I called her, she said something to the effect of "jesus, he didn't show up did he? How bad is he?" Not shocked I beat his ass, not upset I beat his ass, just disappointed she was going to have to pick him up, and wondering if he would need a doctor.
So, backtrack to why he was banned from my house. The straw that broke the camel's ass was him standing in my living room, doing a southern goodbye that was one sided. He picks up DVD I had sitting on the entertainment center and slides it into his pants. Right in front of me. I told him to put it back and gtfo. He asked what I was talking about. I pointed and said that fucking dvd you just put in your pants. He said he did no such thing.
I grabbed him by the arm and pulled the DVD that was still visibly poking out of his pants out and told him I was done with his bullshit, to leave and never come back.
He starts trying to talk his way out of it and picks the DVD up again. I tell him to put it down, or I was going to beat his ass.
He says "what DVD".
So I beat his ass. Popped him in the nose and then literally kicked his ass out the front door and down the steps. I told him if he ever came back, I would beat his ass down the road. I meant it more figurative, in that I would just whup him again until he left, but once he came back, I kinda wanted to make a point.
So, why did that merit assault and battery?
Wellllll, pull back to a long history of shit disappearing into his pants, pockets, or coat. Never anything huge or super valuable. Like, a fork. Or a post-it note pad. That kind of shit.
One time, we're having dinner. Hamburgers. My wife had never seen him go full fucktard before, she thought I was exaggerating.
He gets up, says he needs to use the bathroom. He picks up his burger and takes it with him.
He comes back out, and there's fucking ketchup and mustard on his left pocket. He starts making another burger. Now, I know Fucking Ryan. I know damn good and well he didn't eat the burger in the bathroom. He put it in his pocket. But I tell him, "dude, if you wanted a burger to take home, you didn't have to pocket it." Dude straight faced asks me what I'm talking about. I point at the juicy bulge in his jeans, and I'm not talking about his cock. I'm talking about the hamburger that's now dripping juice through the denim.
He then spends fifteen minutes playing dumb until I tell him to go the fuck home.
That's Fucking Ryan in a nutshell.
Like, years and years of that kind of thing.
Back in the late nineties, I go over to his place. Well, his parent's place. His bed is gone. There's just a mattress on the floor. I ask him what happened. He just says he ordered a new one. Knowing Fucking Ryan, on my way out after we fuck around gaming for a while, I ask his parents what the deal is. His dad starts saying they took the damn thing before Ryan's mom shushes him and says the posts were in the way and refusing to elaborate.
Just one of those Fucking Ryan things, right?
Well, a few weeks later, I'm at the hospital pulling a shift as a fill-in down in the er. Talking to some of the folks there, swapping war stories, I hear that some guy came in with anal injuries from having gotten stuck on the post of a bed.
Again, I know Fucking Ryan, so I know damn good and well it was him. Years later, his dad tells me the story of Fucking Ryan yelling for help and him having to figure out how to pull his adult kid off of a bedpost
So, you may be thinking that Fucking Ryan at that time must have been some teenage idiot. No. He's only a year younger than me, and I was creeping up on thirty. The hamburger thing? We were in our forties.
You may also be thinking, "Gee, this sounds like someone with some kind of serious neurological issue, maybe something like autism combined with other things." Nope. His parents spent a good bit of his teenage years and early twenties schlepping him for various tests and exams because he's always been a fucking twat. His IQ is well above normal, no autism, no obscure disorders, no brain abnormalities.
Nor is there any hint of abuse from his parents or anything like that.
Dude pulls down mid to high six figures, does freelance computer shit, like security, cryptography, that kind of thing, not just tech support.
He's just Fucking Ryan.
Oh! Back in the eighties! So, his mom is my grandmother's niece. My grandparents did really well for themselves overall. Had a decent sized house, a few acres of land, that kind of thing. One section, where my grandfather built us kids a treehouse, is basically a half acre of trees we called "the jungle". So, this was when I was maybe 14 or 15, during the summer.
All us kids were out running around and playing and such one Sunday. Ryan has disappeared. I go looking for him because I was the oldest kid, so it was in my head that I had to take care of everyone. I head towards the back of the jungle and there's Fucking Ryan fucking a tree. Not humping, not grinding. He's got his pants around his ankles, and his dick shoved into a hole in the tree, fucking it.
He later on, maybe a year or two after that, dug a hole in the ground and fucked that. How do I know? Because I'm the one he asked to put bandaids on his dick. I told him if he didn't tell me how it happened, I was telling his mom because I was worried someone had done it to him. I didn't believe him, because even though I had seen him fucking a tree, I didn't think anyone would fuck a hole in the ground.
Nope. He took me to the hole and there was jizz in it.
So, allll of that is what justified beating his ass twice.
Oh! And I fucking forgot!
After beating his ass the second time, dude calls me maybe six months later, asks if maybe we can go shooting over at our uncle's farm. I'm kinda dubious, but a bunch of us had been talking about a family get together and shooting session. So I call around see if he's welcome. Strangely, nobody objects.
So, we're all out there and he comes walking around the old barn. No gun, no ammo. Of course he wants to borrow something, and be provided ammo. But, hey, it's whatever, wouldn't be the first time his dad wouldn't let him borrow one of his guns for a family shoot.
I loan him my 22 rifle (ruger 10-22 for anyone that cares), load him up a few magazines, and fun is going to be had.
And it was, for a while. He's actually got a great sense of humor usually, and he's a good listener. However, he's also Fucking Ryan.
He pops off a few rounds at a target, misses, then swings around to crack a joke, while the rifle ends up pointing at multiple people, including me. And, as luck would have it, guess when his finger hit the trigger. If you guessed it was right as it was pointing at my leg, you win the prize.
Luckily, it just barely creased my leg. No damage to muscle at all. Hurt like a motherfucker, and I thought for a few minutes I was going to put a bullet in him, but my family includes a few smart folks, and they secured all the firearms well away from the angry, cursing dude with a bleeding leg and a ruined pair of pants. They were also smart enough to bustle him away and into his car and send him the fuck home, because shot leg or not I would have beat the fuck out of him if I'd seen him again.
So, yeah, Fucking Ryan.
It mostly holds up.
Some of the tropes it started seem less interesting than they were when it was on the air, but not too bad.
Some of the too glib slang usage is a bit more immersion breaking when binge watched, but I think that would be less intrusive for a new viewer compared to one of us old farts that were watching it over years.
There's high points and low points for sure, but getting any two fans to agree on which seasons/episodes were high or low is difficult lol. I'd say that it's pretty consistently good overall, with its worst episodes and arcs being better than anything else of the era. It's high points were and are amazing, even when I've seen them dozens of times.
The first season stayed closer to the vibe of the movie, which can be confusing to people that have heard about the series as a whole because the tone and style evolved massively during the second season. The movie, btw, is pretty damn awesome in its own way, but it's not the same character almost. The vampires are also a lot different.
I always tell anyone asking what you did that it's worth watching the first two seasons for sure. You kinda have to watch both because the changes by the end of the second season are more like what the rest is like, but you can't just jump into the second season and the characters/setting make sense.
But, if you aren't hooked by the second season, you'll never like the rest.
Are you fucking joking?
If that's really where you thought I was going with that, you're the racist.
If you're trying to troll, good job because now I think you're either a troll, a racist, or an idiot. I prefer to think you're a troll.
It's artificial boosting of the same bigotry that's been ongoing for generations. The new part switching the target.
See, there's been a very concerted effort to radicalize the right wing of the American populace by media oligarchs. It's part of an overall strategy going back to at least the post-nixon era.
Want to crush black people? Find a way to villainize them indirectly. "Inner city" crime. Step up arrests for things that are disproportionately a part of black people's lives. Spread drugs into the chaos brought about by destabilizing black communities to engender greater violence between gangs. And it worked. Look at how many black people are in jail compared to pretty much any other group.
Go back to Stonewall, when the biggest movements for gay rights got going hard, and remember that trans people were involved from the beginning, but didn't have a convenient label, they didn't have a way to be a distinct group. Gay rights efforts worked to some degree. Enough that the far right plans to use gay people as the enemy had to find another target the same way that they had to change targets from black people to Hispanic people in the form of "illegal aliens".
When your plan rests on fomenting anger, hate, and fear to stir up the lowest common denominator of a populace you have to have a target, ideally more than one since there's always going to be gaps where your desired audience will fall prey to the manipulation for one hate focus, but not another, like when you run into conservatives that aren't actually racist, but hate anyone in the LGBTQ+ umbrella because of religion, or sheer stupidity.
So, when gays weren't a useful target for hate any more because enough people knew gay people, and there were enough gay people of prominence to make it harder, why not switch to the next best thing? Trans people!
See, we had a major shift in awareness of trans issues back in the late nineties and early naughties. That's was followed by a large shift in trans people now having a serious chance at transitioning as medicine advanced, funding shifted, and there was just enough support that more people could transition and not be alone.
This meant that the assholes pushing their agenda to gain and maintain both wealth and power had a gift given to them. A new label to attack, using the exact same rhetoric they'd been using against gay people. "It's unnatural", "but what about the children?", along with the ability to use lingering misogyny via to attack trans women in specific since they are now women, but used to be men (in the rhetoric), so they must be groomers sneaking into bathrooms.
It's the exact same bullshit over again.
People have forgotten that the same methodology has been in place every time people in power needed to scare the populace enough to achieve a goal. Remember reefer madness? Before my time, but the entire thing was built in order to continue the oppression of black people, to keep them firmly under the boot.
Go back further, and it was the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, whatever group was "other" at the time.
But the modern version is so directly a rehash of the anti gay rhetoric that's not even fifty years in the past that I'm amazed it isn't glaringly obvious even to the people that have jumped on the bandwagon of both.
I've said it before, but people are stupid. They're easy to manipulate, easy to fool, and that's the majority. Even the ones that aren't easy to manipulate can still fall prey to it if they aren't paying attention. People are also lazy, and have little long term thinking ability, or attention spans. That's why we got zero lasting changes after George Floyd was murdered. Anyone that's made it this far, think for a second. How long did it take you to remember that name and what it means? Now, ask yourself how many people didn't remember at all.
That's why trans hate is working. People suck. The vast majority are easy to control, and will believe anything fed to them with the right language behind it. It just so happens that while all of the distractions being used to build up the hate also created a smoke screen to hide gerrymandering, which ends up with more and more control over what language is being used everywhere.
So, here we are with a manufactured, strawman enemy being propped up as the target and then painted with the word "trans". None of the bullshit used to build up the hate is true, it isn't accurate, and most of the people behind the hate actually know it's bullshit, but they aren't allowed to hate the blacks and the gays out loud any more. They can't just scream the n word or call people faggots at whim the way they used to.
So, now they've got trans people to hate. And they want that hate because it means they don't have to look at themselves, their own lives and choices. They don't have to stop and think that maybe everything they've built their identity around is empty, so they scream about "wokeness" and "transgenderism" as code words.
There's no serious, legitimate arguments against trans people being allowed to have the full protection of the law, to have full medical access, to have whatever gender they want on their driver's license. There's just the bullshit excuses to have someone to hate. There's not even a good argument about bathrooms, they're all built on bullshit too, and that's the one that's the low hanging fruit because it seems reasonable to people that aren't buying all the bullshit immediately, but aren't quite bright enough to think it through all the way on their own. Which, again, that's the majority, stupid people too drowned in lies and manipulation to bother thinking.
So, Don, if you've gotten this far, I know I went wide of what you asked, but it really is all related. It all comes down to the same thing in different faces over time.
For anyone else, I know this got a little ranty in parts. I know it is long enough to look a little crazed. IDGAF. This shit is patently obvious, it's not even a secret. The people that have been running the right wing of things for my entire lifetime and before have outright and publicly talked about it. One part of it, the "southern strategy" they brag about. It's infuriating, so I get ranty.
Well, at the time the main complaint people had was more about him being shoehorned into things in a way that didn't make sense combined with him being "superkid".
But yeah, I always thought the character was more of a positive than a negative, even when he was badly written. If nothing else, it gave younger viewers/fans a bit of a viewpoint character that was pretty rare in sci-fi that wasn't kid oriented to begin with.
Plus, Wheaton did damn fine job considering the scripts were sometimes not really good dialogue for him. Stilted, a bit too "I'm an adult trying to write a teenager, but can't actually remember what it was like"; and often not really about his character as much as they needed someone to do the things he was doing, and Wesley's turn came up. Hell, if you factor in the shit the guy was going through at home, he was amazing.