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"I can't believe you're all mine! 😃"

"Uh, what? 🤨"

"You and me, for all time! 🤩"

"Ugh. 😑"

"I'm never ever EVER gonna be alone again! 😁"

"...Oh boy. 😟"

"The dream team, you and me! ☺️"

"For all eternity? 😨"

"For all ETERNITY! 🥳"

—The Ghost and Molly McGee (2021–23)

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Hop Pop says eat the rich

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Having never considered the concept of a highschool retelling of the Odyssey until that one post mentioned them in passing, I'd like to give my own pitch: the Odyssey meets Back to the Future meets whodunnit.

Odysseus is the central figure of the story, of course. He is also one of those high school protagonists who is inexplicably surrounded by half a dozen girls, because emphasizing that aspect of the Odyssey is funny to me. There's Penelope, his actual girlfriend; popular girl Circe; poor little rich girl Calypso; freshman Nausicaa; and Athena, who is older and solidly in bro territory with Odysseus, but still adds to the overall effect of him being surrounded by girls. (Is she a goddess? Idk. Probably she has some other kind of power, like riches or genius or both.)

The cast is rounded out by some of his Odyssey crewmen, maybe a few Iliad Greeks, and Telemachus, a new kid at their school who quickly becomes friends with Odysseus. For about half the story, things focus on slice of life, Odysseus's schemes, and the students' various personal problems. Incidents from the Odyssey are nodded toward, but not directly retold.

Then you get the Back to the Future part with the reveal that Telemachus has traveled back in time twenty years, with the help of future Athena, to solve the extremely cold case of his dad's disappearance by investigating his high school life.

Future Athena was only able to discover that someone from his high school circle was involved; in their time, there were just too many roadblocks set up between her and the truth. And she can't get inside access to those events as her adult self. So it's up to Telemachus to get to know his past parents, investigate their friends, and chase down the clues to discovering where his father's been all his life.

...While hopefully not raising the suspicions of his teenaged, but still infamously clever, parents in the process of this totally straightforward and not at all emotionally taxing mission.

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HOBBES vs. TIGGER cage match TO THE DEATH say goodbye to your childhood because ONE! WILL!! DIE!!!!

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I'm going to just copy the whole damn thing below so people know that these efforts are happening:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Biden administration officials are working against the clock doling out billions in grants and taking other steps to try to preserve at least some of the outgoing president’s legacy before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.

“Let’s make every day count,” President Joe Biden said in an address to the nation last week after Vice President Kamala Harris conceded defeat to Trump in the presidential race.

Trump has pledged to rescind unspent funds in Biden’s landmark climate and health care law and stop clean-energy development projects.

“There’s only one administration at a time,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told reporters at a news conference Thursday. “That’s true now, and it will also be true after January 20th. Our responsibility is to make good use of the funds that Congress has authorized for us and that we’re responsible for assigning and disbursing throughout the last three years.”

But Trump will control more than the purse strings come January. His administration also can propose new regulations to undo some of what the Biden administration did through the rule-making process.

Here are some of the moves the Biden administration is taking now:

Getting infrastructure spending out the door

Biden administration officials hope that projects funded under the $1 trillion infrastructure law and $375 billion climate law will endure beyond Biden’s term and are working to ensure that money from the landmark measures continues to flow.

On Friday, Buttigieg announced over $3.4 billion in grants for projects designed to improve passenger rail service, help U.S. ports, reduce highway deaths and support domestic manufacturing of sustainable transportation materials.

”We are investing in better transportation systems that touch every corner of the country and in the workers who will manufacture materials and build projects,″ he said. “Communities are going to see safer commutes, cleaner air and stronger supply chains that we all count on.″

Speeding up environmental goals

Announcements of major environmental grants and project approvals have sped up in recent months in what White House officials describe as “sprinting to the finish” of Biden’s four-year term.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently set a nationwide deadline for removal of lead pipes and announced nearly $3 billion to help local water systems comply. The agency also announced that oil and gas companies for the first time will have to pay a federal fee if they emit dangerous methane above certain levels.

The Energy Department, meanwhile, announced a $544 million loan to a Michigan company to expand manufacturing of high-quality silicon carbide wafers for electric vehicles. The loan is one of 28 deals totaling $37 billion granted under a clean-energy loan program that was revived and expanded under Biden.

“There is a new urgency to get it all done. We’re seeing explosions of money going out the door,” said Melinda Pierce, legislative director of the Sierra Club. Biden and his allies ”really want to finish the job they started.”

Ukraine aid

Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters this week that Biden wants to “spend down the authority that Congress has allocated and authorized before he leaves office. So we’re going to work very hard to make sure that happens.”

The Biden administration would have to rush $7.1 billion in weapons — $4.3 billion from the 2024 supplemental and $2.8 billion that is still on the books in savings due to the Pentagon recalculating the value of systems sent — from the Pentagon’s stockpiles in order to spend all of those funds obligated before Trump is sworn in.

There’s also another $2.2 billion available to put weapons systems on long-term contracts. However, recent aid packages have been much smaller in size, around $200 million to $300 million each.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said the funds are already obligated, which should make them harder to take back because the incoming administration would have to reverse that.

Pressure to quickly confirm judicial picks

Another priority for the White House is getting Senate confirmation of as many federal judges as possible before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

The Senate this week voted 51-44 to confirm former prosecutor April Perry as a U.S. District Court judge in northern Illinois. More than a dozen pending judicial nominees have advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee; eight judicial nominations are awaiting committee votes and six are waiting for committee hearings.

Trump has urged Republicans to oppose efforts to confirm judicial nominees. “No Judges should be approved during this period of time because the Democrats are looking to ram through their Judges as the Republicans fight over Leadership,” he wrote on social media site X on Nov. 10, before congressional Republicans chose their new leaders.

Student loan forgiveness

The Education Department has been hurrying to finalize a new federal rule that would cancel student loans for people who face financial hardship. The proposal — one of Biden’s only student loan plans that hasn’t been halted by federal courts — is in a public comment period scheduled to end Dec. 2.

After that, the department would have a narrow window to finalize the rule and begin carrying it out, a process that usually takes months. Like Biden’s other efforts, it would almost certainly face a legal challenge.

Additionally, the Biden administration has room to speed up student loan cancellation for people who were already promised relief because they were cheated by their colleges, said Aaron Ament, an Education Department official for the Obama administration and president of the National Student Legal Defense Network.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona could decide that case and others rather than hand them off to the Trump administration, which is expected to be far friendlier to for-profit colleges. “It’s a no-brainer,” Ament said. “There’s a good number of cases that have been sitting on Cardona’s desk. It’s hard to imagine that those would just be left untouched.”

Trump has not yet said what he would do on student loan forgiveness. However, he and Republicans have criticized Biden’s efforts.

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giovanni

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Top 5 women?

bro i can't even top one woman ha ha h[two drums and a cymbal fall from the ceiling killing me instantly

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Garruk: People really will look at a forest with its balanced ecosystem, its incredible animals and its amazing plants and decide to make artifacts.

Vivien, conspicuously hiding her magical artifact bow: Yeah, disgraceful really.

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If you’re pining you need to stop and pick a different tree. You know, spruce it up a little

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turlte

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the lesson I'm taking away from this election is not that the Democrats need to become more left wing or more right wing but moreso that they need to find a way to cater their rhetoric towards people who genuinly have no idea what is going on. the target audience for every speech and political appearance should be someone who doesn't know what the three branches of government are because they were drawing a Cool S during high school civics

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Gav’s Tavern Hi, I hope you like this. It is different from what I usually do. Also it was a lot of work.

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It seems like there’s this cycle of republicans making the economy bad and then people get tired of the republicans and elect a democrat and the democrat inherits a bad economy and then they sort of fix it somewhat and then people are like hey the economy is bad it was better during the Republican administration and then they elect a Republican who inherits a better economy from the democrat while he’s trashing it and then people are like hey he’s trashing the economy and then they elect a democrat who inherits a bad economy and fixes it somewhat and then people are like hey the economy was better when there was a Republican and then they elect a Republican who trashes the sort of better economy he inherited from the democrat and so on and so forth like forever I guess

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Hi Mark,

I've been playing Magic: The Gathering since NEO came out, a lot of Standard/Limited on Arena, and a lot of Commander in paper, with an occasional draft here and there.

I've noticed that while playing Magic, you often have to make decisions that are:

important (as in, your choice has big impact)

hard (finding and making the correct choice is not trivial)

often impossible to know if it was the right decision, even afterwards (e.g. drafting this and not that could have saved me, or not?)

sometimes still losing badly even after making each decision correctly

I've noticed that having the practive of making these decisions while playing Magic, at naturally very low stakes, has helped me immensely in approaching similar situations and decisions in life.

Essentially, playing Magic has helped me to become a better, more confident person. Thank you!

Happy to hear Magic taught you life skills. : )