What a month

 For starters, Russia, Israel, and Hamas, kindly fuck off, keep on fucking off... you know the drill by now.

You know, I remember a time when I'd hear some government pronouncement or other, and, at worst, my reaction would be "well, I don't like it, but I can see what they're trying to handle."  These days, it seems like every time I hear something, it elicits a "fuck off" or "fuck you" reflexive response, and that's just plain not healthy.  But what else am I supposed to say, when the Supreme Court says racial profiling is OK when ICE does it, Congress is delaying swearing in a newly-elected member for nakedly partisan (Epstein files) reasons, and the President and his team are a non-stop shit show?

Of course, that's all the expected fun of the current (hopefully to continue without shenanigans) election cycle.  Then, you get wildcards like the Charlie Kirk killing coming into play to add spice to everything.  For anybody blissfully unaware, Mr. Kirk was a rabble-rouser whose shtick was going to college campuses to try and get people to "prove him wrong" on topics of his choosing, where he came prepared with cherry-picked data and a willingness to say pretty much anything to defend his chosen ground.  Because of that, he's got a wealth of quotes about things like (to paraphrase) empathy being a made-up term that does damage, and gun deaths being an acceptable cost for the Second Amendment.  That alone makes me feel justified in finding it fitting that he died from a gunshot at a rally he was holding while trying to shape a gun-violence argument in terms of gang violence.  Frankly, for all it came at the hands of a gent of questionable stability, the fact that he won't get to profit from the world he was trying to create pleases me greatly.

Naturally, that's not how Mr. Kirk's allies see things.  Rather, he gets called a hero and a martyr, while bringing up a shadowy "them" as being responsible, with revenge needing to be taken - and that's just from the President and his team!  No surprise then that when the late-night comedians started weighing in, Trump's head of the FCC decided to take the opportunity to try and force one off the air, in this case Jimmy Kimmel.  A couple of the larger station-owners (Sinclair and Nexstar) played along, performatively scheduling a Kirk memorial in place of Kimmel's ABC show, and Disney got the message, "indefinitely suspending" the show.

Amazingly, given this timeline, people at large decided this was a step too far, and responded by canceling their Disney+ memberships.  Long story short, Disney relented, the station owners relented, the FCC head is making noises about how he really wasn't trying to censor anybody, and Disney's shareholders are now demanding info on how Disney's actions were in their best interest, which is all lovely to see.  As for me, I don't own Disney stock and didn't have Disney+ to cancel, so it's purely spectator sport for now.  Of course, if Nexstar's attempted acquisition of Tegna (which owns my local CBS affiliate) goes through, I'll have to delete those channels from my over-the-air channel list, but that's about it.

Whew.  Well, that's enough about the shit state of the real world, how about a game? I've been tooling around in No Man's Sky, but I decided to give Visions of Mana a shot, since it came onto Game Pass.  I like what I've played so far, although the background theme of "villages cheerfully offering up sacrifices to keep things stable" is more than a little jarring - I really want to see how things play out there.  Well, that, and getting a cat-folk party member that's not a cat-girl (with all the baggage that comes with that) is kind of entertaining, although seeing him triple-wield daggers by involving his tail is a bit over the top, really.