#PAX east 2019

[asongoftearsandfandoms]

My new solution to everything.

[m-jay-gee]

its available now ! i know it's kinda late to the game but yk here it is

how has no one put bdg's perfect pokérap on spotify as a podcast yet. guys come on. you're slacking.

[yourfaveisafearavatar]

Kevin Punt from The Perfect PokéRap | Unraveled LIVE at PAX East 2019 is an Avatar of the Desolation

[clockworkdragonffxiv]

Man, fuck cancer.

I lost one of my players to it last week. I met Jacquie through our City of Heroes supergroup where she was Luna Red in 2008 and in 2010 we heard the CoH devs were doing a thing at PAX East in Boston. "Hey, I'm from Boston!" so myself, Jacquie and Stan met up at the Hub to see it. We met up for the next few PAX Easts, even after CoH died.

Stan was the one who ended up introducing Jacquie to Mike, at a Transformers convention of all things. They got married a few years later, and she eventually became a special education teacher focusing on music. Through her, Mike eventually decided to quit his job in sales and become a social worker.

When the Pandemic hit, I hadn't really talked much to Stan or Jacquie in a few years. We were still friends, just, y'know, busy. But we were all locked inside in April 2019 with nothing better to do, so fuck it, let's play D&D.

For nearly four years Jacquie, Mike, Stan, Katie, and Will met every week over Discord for more of my rambling story from level 3 to level 17 as they battled murder hornets, robot revolutionaries, an overlord of death (they were piloting a 10,000 year old colossus), the Jabberwock, conversed with a giant spider, talked the robot revolutionary to change sides, threw a concert alongside a shapeshifting bard-assassin warforged who always greeted Jacquie's bard with "HEY GIRLFRIEND! :D" and turned into a giant eagle to bypass my plans on at least three occasions.

During 2020-2021 we found out Jacquie had cancer. Lymphoma. They did a hard reboot on her immune system using hard radiation and stem cells that sounded like something out of science fiction. We thought she had it beat.

Last fall, it came back. Hard. She fought it with everything she had, and Mike - a kind and sensitive man who had fallen for this vivacious, warm-hearted woman - was with her the whole time.

We lost Jacquie on Friday. She was 39 years old. I'm still processing it.

There's plenty more I could say, but it's not important.

I miss my friend.

[kinogane]

I don’t consider myself even Gundam-adjacent but in light of recent developments, this Austin Walker clip from Giant Bomb’s PAX East 2019 panel has been bouncing around in my head, so

[mariacallous]

Training for recruits in Israel’s elite Sayeret Matkal army unit—which counts Israel’s current prime minister among its veterans—includes a series of long-range, solo navigation exercises. But it’s been 50 years since Benjamin Netanyahu retired from active duty in that storied IDF reconnaissance unit, and his compass must be malfunctioning. As he plots a course toward formalizing ties between his country and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu appears lost hopelessly in his own backyard. While he dreams of regional peace, his ruling coalition is gearing up to undermine his plans.

A Saudi-Israeli deal is the grand prize of contemporary Middle East diplomacy. Biden administration officials have been shuttling doggedly between Riyadh and Jerusalem to negotiate a bargain—in which the United States would play an integral role—that would bring obvious benefits to all three nations.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would stand to pocket items on his “shopping list”—which includes a security pact with the United States and possession of a civilian nuclear capacity—and the incidental rehabilitation of his image, which took a major hit after the U.S. intelligence community determined that he “approved an operation” that resulted in the brutal killing of a Washington Post columnist in 2018.

For Netanyahu, an agreement with Saudi Arabia would be a tipping point that helps unlock the potential of economic and diplomatic horizons from Africa to Asia that were previously out of Israel’s reach. He could also burnish his credentials as a statesman at a time when attention is focused instead on his government’s controversial plans for Israel’s judiciary.

U.S. President Joe Biden would garner an important foreign policy win, catalyzing further integration in that region and, perhaps more critically, scoring a victory for Pax Americana against expanding Chinese influence in the Arabian Peninsula. Enlisting OPEC to offset skyrocketing energy prices would be an additional bonus. (He could apply the additional ballast to his struggling reelection campaign.)

But despite its elegance on paper, obstacles to an Israeli-Saudi accord abound. Creative solutions are being floated to address some of these sticking points. “Secret technological ways” may be employed to ensure that any authorized Saudi nuclear program cannot be redirected for military purposes. It’s being suggested as well that Netanyahu could intercede with friendly Republican lawmakers to assist the White House in obtaining the two-thirds Senate majority which would be necessary to conclude a defense treaty with Saudi Arabia. These fixes won’t be enough to get across the finish line, alas, even if the arrangement is mutually advantageous.

Success will require each of the parties to do their own heavy lifting. Biden will have to bestow his ultimate blessing upon the very Saudi regime to which he pledged, during the presidential debates in 2019, not to “sell more weapons to them,” but rather to “make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.” The crown prince will be granting bona fide recognition to Israel, a country which doesn’t even appear by name on the Kingdom’s official maps. Israel will not get a free lunch.

The Biden administration has made it clear that Israel will be expected to contribute “significant deliverables to the Palestinians” in exchange for normalized relations with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, whose then-crown prince and later king, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, authored the original Saudi initiative for peace with Israel in 2002, are not about to forfeit their preeminence on the Palestinian issue to the United Arab Emirates, which styled its signing of the Abraham Accords as a quid pro quo for Israel consenting to halt “further Israeli annexation of Palestinian territories.” Concessions to the Palestinians, who have long demanded independent statehood, will be equally pivotal for the sake of harnessing support among a wary Democratic caucus for any acquiescence to Saudi demands.

This latter message was certainly reinforced when Biden met Netanyahu on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Sept. 20. Biden, per the White House readout of that encounter, “called on all parties to fulfill their commitments made during meetings held earlier this year in Aqaba, Jordan, and Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to include refraining from further unilateral measures.”

(The original Aqaba Communique from Feb. 26, 2023 stipulated “an Israeli commitment to stop discussion of any new settlement units for 4 months and to stop authorization of any outposts for 6 months.” A defiant Netanyahu responded swiftly that “building and authorization in Judea and Samaria will continue according to the original planning and building schedule, with no change.”)

The problem—with which Riyadh has just come to terms evidently—is that Netanyahu has no latitude to satisfy the minimum requirements for discernible movement vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Notwithstanding his insistence that “the mainstream policies [of the government] are decided by me,” the facts suggest otherwise.

Last week, Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu’s hardline finance minister whose Religious Zionism Party holds seven of the seats in Netanyahu’s narrow 64-56 Knesset majority, reprised his refrain that rapprochement with Saudi Arabia does “not involve the Arabs of Judea and Samaria who have nothing to do with the process.” (That’s his way of saying that the fate of Palestinians in the West Bank lies outside the scope of these conversations with Saudi Arabia and the United States.).

Smotrich has blocked the fulfillment of multiple Israeli commitments to ease economic restrictions on the Palestinian Authority. His outcry, joined by other members of the coalition, against an ostensible transfer of weapons to Palestinian forces—which Netanyahu branded immediately as fake news, and pinned on a decision of then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz in 2022—sent the prime minister scrambling to order a review of “all the decisions made by the previous government regarding the Palestinian Authority, with the aim of tightening supervision.” Smotrich has wielded his concurrent appointment as a minister in Israel’s Ministry of Defense to initiate a settlement boom and preclude any possibility of tangible compromise with the Palestinians.

No magical sequencing that postpones compromises with the Palestinians can extract Netanyahu from this ideological impasse. The contours of what, according to Israeli media, Saudi Arabia is proposing for the Palestinians—an interim arrangement that involves elements such as a cessation halt of settlement construction, the transfer of certain areas under full Israeli control (Area C) to Palestinian jurisdiction (Area A), acknowledgement of a Palestinian right to establish a capital in East Jerusalem and the reopening of a separate U.S. consulate to the Palestinians in that city—are a nonstarter for Smotrich’s constituency. From Smotrich’s perspective, Israeli concessions need to be confined exclusively to the economic realm, without ceding an inch of territory.

Netanyahu’s present cabinet and an historic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia are simply incapable of coexisting. Smotrich, who banished the Israeli right to opposition in 2021, when he refused to countenance the participation of Mansour Abbas’ United Arab List in a Netanyahu coalition—and drove Abbas into the waiting arms of Netanyahu nemeses Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid—has already demonstrated that the prospect of marching into the political wilderness does not frighten him.

And with no apparent volunteers to replace Smotrich and his allies around the campfire, Netanyahu—unless he’s inclined to attempt a legacy play that rests upon the outside backing of the opposition and a rapid collapse of his rule—is unlikely to reach his destination anytime soon.

“Every day we get closer” to normalization with Israel, Mohammed bin Salman told Fox News in an interview that was broadcast after the Netanyahu-Biden meeting. The positive trajectory of Saudi-Israeli relations is arguably inevitable, but an actual agreement will likely remain elusive for the foreseeable future—and might not even happen on Netanyahu’s watch.

[back-and-totheleft]

"The United States does not care about Ukraine"

When Oliver Stone presented his autobiography in 2020, he admitted that if he hadn't directed a conventional film since 2012 it was because "he wasn't inspired" and he didn't feel "the necessary fire" inside him . Maybe that's why his latest documentary is a return to the subject he touched on three decades ago in JFK: the assassination of John Kennedy. JFK Revisited, which Stone presented this Monday at the BCN Film Fest, resumes the investigation based on the analysis of official documents declassified in recent years and once again dismantles the Warren Commission report. It is a more thorough compilation than the 1991 film, even too much, and with little news of interest about the case beyond documenting that there were two other conspiracies to assassinate the president weeks before the mass murder. The conclusions, of course, are the same: the magic bullet theory is ridiculous, the FBI and CIA conspired to cover up the assassination, and the history of the United States would have been much better had they not removed Kennedy.

"JFK was the last truly popular president, I'm sure he would have won the 1964 election," defends Stone. "Since his death, no one has had the ability to change things or the courage to challenge the CIA, which controls foreign policy." 

For the director of Platoon, Kennedy was "a warrior of peace" who warned about the danger of having "a pax Americana imposed by force of arms, which is exactly what we have now." Kennedy's goal, says Stone, was not to encourage American imperialism: “He was Irish and his family had fought against the English, he knew the history of Ireland from top to bottom. He had good relations with Nasser's Egypt and the Middle East and wanted to invest in South America, not the military. Kennedy had been in the military and therefore knew how the influence and the military budget had grown and the danger that this entailed." The filmmaker, in fact, puts NATO as an example of a "completely superfluous" organization. And he adds: "If you think that being part of NATO provides security to Spain, you are crazy."

A "reasonable and rational" man

Stone insists that his main interest is not politics ("I make movies, I'm a director, the thing is, politics is good material for drama," he says), but just go through the list of politicians that he has portrayed from fiction or documentary throughout his career: Nixon, Castro, George W. Bush, Hugo Chávez. The last was Vladimir Putin, whom he interviewed in 2017 in a documentary series that offers a friendly and positive profile of the Russian president. He hasn't spoken to him in three years, but he says he doesn't think he's changed "or lost his mind." "He is a reasonable and rational man who thinks before he speaks, like a chess player. Putin is a good son of Russia who works in the interest of his people. He comes from the lower class and grew up a patriot, not a KGB agent. 

The director also does not hesitate to comment on Marine Le Pen the day after the far-right's best results in a French election. "They love to say that he is from the extreme right, but I don't know if he is," he says. "Some of the things he says are common sense, like questioning the role of NATO in the European Union. Before, the old Europe did not stand firm and always marched under the orders of the United States." For Stone, Le Pen is just "shaking things up" and he doesn't think it's bad. "Doing this is extreme right-wing, they say. But I'm on the left and I'm in favor of immigrants. So these labels no longer work."

"The United States does not care about Ukraine"

In line with his support for Putin, Oliver Stone produced the documentary Ukraine on Fire in 2019 , which analyzes the country's history from a point of view that coincides with the pro-Russian narrative and attributes the 2014 revolution to the interference of the United States. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he says, has not changed his mind about the conflict between the two countries. "In Ukraine there is a long history of anti-Russian sentiment and discrimination against the ethnic Russian population," he says. "This has been the basis of the country's policy since the 2014 coup that forced out President Yanukovych with the support of the United States, which has spent a lot of money in Ukraine to destabilize Russia. The United States does not care about Ukraine or the death of Ukrainians."

Stone, in fact, gets fired up at mentioning the war crimes allegations against Russia's actions in Ukraine. "It's typical Western propaganda," he assures. "What is the point of talking about war crimes? It's a war, that's what happens in wars. But saying it's Russia's policy is the stupidest thing I've ever heard." The director recalls the accusations against Saddam Hussein ("We turned him into a monster comparable to Hitler") and points to China as the next target of the United States. "For a while we were fine with them, but now they are our enemies and we accuse them of genocide, like in Russia, but things are not that simple. Our strategy is to point at others and shout loudly 'War crimes!', but in this way, we are perverting the purpose of the Nuremberg trials." Interestingly, the only question Stone has refused to answer during the meeting with the press was about Will Smith's slap to Chris Rock at the Oscars. "I always have problems if I say things without thinking them through," he explained.

-Xavi Serra interviews Oliver Stone for ARA, Apr 25 2022 [x] Translated from Catalan

[saintcheryl]

also every time ive been in possession of a PAX convention badge it has coincided with a trip to the hospital. east 2019? couldn’t go cuz i was psych hospitalized. east 2020? went and then was psych hospitalized again days later. west 2023? worked it and then had to go to urgent care for covid

if it happens a fourth time it’ll be really funny

i avoided covid for three years. but it finally got me

[rapid-artwork]

How can I find joy, without my tangly boy?

Why catch them all if you can’t keep the ones that you love?

For the love of god please watch Unraveled.

~Rip Terry The Tangela~

[saipng]

i’m SCREAMING

[kasper-the-ghost]

I met Sean! Excuse me while I freak!

[bristlee1]

Hidden in plain sight

PAX East 2019, Jacksepticeye Panel

[anticoffeebeans]

March 30, 2019

One year ago today😭

[relatablephotosofbdg]

Justice for Terry

[oli-smiles-sometimes]

I really had to draw our hug to really implant it into my memory. It's true what they say though, Sean's hugs really do feel like home and he doesn't stop hugging you until you let go. Hes one of the sweetest people in the world and I can't wait to see him again, whenever that may be.

Click for better quality!!

[aw-hyeon]

[28/3/19]

What a wonderful first day at PAX!! :D

Thank you @therealjacksepticeye for being so incredibly nice as always and it was lovely to meet you for the first time @pixlpit!!

Also thank you Arin for liking my shirt. I love it even more now <3