Eldest & I watched "Hostiles" with Christian Bale.
Bonne nuit à vous aussi.

You can call me any dayum time you feel like it Zee.
You know where the number is (in French, of course).

This OldCoot has a predilection for Whites from the near banks of the Rhine.
Niersteiner & Oppenheimer (Rheinhessans) are high priority.
Some Badens & I once had 9 bottles of a "perfect" 1989 Binger, but they all drunk-ed up now.
Toss in a few of the occasional Mosel or Nahe for when a girl needs something a little bit lighter and less sweet, to avoid that dreaded bloat at certain times.


The only thing that came out of the Alsace that I liked was Fischer LaBelle, a dark beer that was brewed more like wine than a typical dark lager or stout.
Fin du Monde (roughly translated means "End of the World") out of a little brewery in Quebec - you might have heard of Unibrow - is possibly the best Dark Beer on the planet, triple fermented in the Belgian Monk style.

Come to think on it, I sure do know a lot about booze for a guy who rarely consumes.

Oh great, THAT will REALLY draw in the hunni-bunnis.


"Wanting"?
What, wanting to send me gift cards and money orders?


The only good thing for FishingMan is that it's mid-week & not a weekend.
Might get lucky and make bail by Friday - or some day ending in "y" anyways.

Luckily, the few sweeties worth a dayum know about my dual citizenship & won't disappear just because FishingMan got tossed in the gulag for a few days.
There are actually three of me in there but I gave up on the other two.
One of them didn't even get onto the board, got scooped up so fast it never had a chance to write a profile or run a search even.

Banning accounts is a game as old as forums.
I've been able to stay ahead of any such actions in the past on other forums with the use of VPNs, alternate emails, and shifts in syntax & grammar to conceal my true identity - but it just isn't worth the bother here since 99% of the action is only scammer accounts anyway.

Back in the early 2000s, before they shut the whole thing down at the end of the decade, I used to work as a volunteer in Yahoo Chat Help:1 & Yahoo Chat Help:2.
Stephanie Bergman, who was Yahoo's administrator over all of the chat rooms, got us volunteers involved in a game amongst ourselves whereby we would create new identities that had to at least hint at who we really were.

By my count I had some 330+ separate accounts on Yahoo Chat, most of them a twist on either IdioT_SavanT_i4 or Anonymouse_I_Dentity.
xxxxi4_1, xxxxi4_2, xxxxi4_3, pumpkineateri4, vampirei4, frankeni4, santai4, etc. etc. etc.
There was an endless supply of Yahoo emails available & everyone always got "dressed-up" (changed IDs) for holidays.

What it did was keep us recognized by other help volunteers trying to serve users with problems, while escaping "booters" who might have objected to our work developing "booter-proof" chat clients with 3rd party developers & tried to knock us off chat entirely.

That was some of my best times on the interweebz, often going for 30-40 consecutive hours straight laughing, chatting with dear friends all over the globe, and fixing problems with user's chat client operation (even telling people how to fix unrelated stuff, like a dead burner on a smooth-top stove or how to change the brakes on their 1985 Mustang).
I learned a lot about a lot of things from some super-intelligent peeps there.

Don't really consume alcohol other than to taste it occasionally.
German whites in my cellar back to the early 2000s.
Auslese goes really well with lobster & tenderloin, walleye, & New England clam chowder.
Got any flower, maybe a gummy?

It's legal for you, I still live in a 1930s prohibition state.
For a supposedly progressive state Wisconsin is remarkably resistant to change on that particular vice.

She's the smart one.
She took the vaccine & escaped this lunacy.

I've known a couple dozen vets over the years.
Some fought, some just served, but to a man (or a couple of women too) they have something in common with my youngest, who was in the Naval Reserve.
They don't want to talk about it.
Go to extraordinary lengths to avoid doing so.

My best and only remaining besty male friend served on the A-Gang aboard the USS Frederick LST hull# 1184 during the evacuation of Saigon in 1975.
Over more than 5 decades that's still about all I know about his 4 years afloat, other than his A-Gang used to sell access to unlimited-length hot showers under the cooling outflow from the water desalination plant - a very high demand item on a tank landing transport in the South China Sea.

Reject any who ask you to move to WazzApp, Telegrift, or googlychat right off the bat.

Insist on a real voice phone call.

If they can't talk to you how are you supposed to have a relationship?
Sit on the couch or in a restaurant & text each other?

So far, out of about 200, I've had 3 call me - THREE! - and all three had foreign accents & such poor English you could cut them with a dull butter knife.
At least they sounded female.
You have no idea if some "Nigerian Prince" immigrant dude in an Albanian slavery call-center is really behind a text message or not.

OOPS!
Mah bad.
The family was camping for the weekend at Shell Lake (incredibly clear waters in those days), which is about 5 or 6 miles south of Spooner.
I honestly have no idea why Cameron popped into my head.

Having grown up in the north woods I know better than most how far it is between Cameron & Spooner but when yer brain is farting ya don't really recognize it at the time.

Started walking late in the afternoon & got back around 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM.

I had a summer camp romance with a pretty young lady from Spooner (a very long time ago).
Andrea Thompson I think her name was, but I'm no longer clear on whether that was her last name.
She wore the cutest sparkles face makeup & was built like every young man's dream date.

Later that fall I walked all the way from Cameron to Spooner on a Friday night (froze mah arse off too) attempting to look her up again.
No joy, then I had to walk all the way back to Cameron again.
There's chasing tail and then there's chasing yer own tail.
I summed it up as the latter.

Heheee, I had something of a habit years ago on a debate forum, of letting others dig their own holes.
So much easier if all you have to do is kick the dirt in on top of them after they get in over their heads.

In the words of George C. Scott as Patten, isn't the point making the OTHER guy die for his country, not you?

That's the writer in me, Zee.
Never was a day 1 word would suffice when I could write an entire novelette in an afternoon.
I did a lot of sports (NFL-Packers, mostly) writing for 25 years, covering everything from the draft, free agency, pre-game & post-game dissections, to filling requests from fans of other teams to get my opinion on one thing or another about their team or players.

I built a pretty substantial reputation in those circles as someone who could write objectively and without fan bias in my opinions.
All told I posted over 33,000 articles and more than 4 million words on NFL football from 2001-2025.

I've contributed Guest columns to the local rag from time to time as well.
Been friends with an editor emeritus of the Cap Times since the 90s.

Knowledge is power.
While my profile is a long read, no woman capable of doing so should waste her time on me if what I describe myself as doesn't meet her desires.
Problem is, hardly any of them bother even looking at it, let alone attempting to read it.
Most of 'em can't even be bothered to fill out their own profiles, f/f/s.


Makes it a little easier to separate the wheat from the chaff anyhow.
If they can't be arsed enough to find out something about me before sending me emails asking me to jump onto Wazzapp or googlychat, then they aren't serious enough to be a potential companion anyway.
Ain't no shortage of 'em trying, on this site, though.

Well, Zee, I tol' ya that durned AI-bot would get me again.
Free for ONE DAYUM DAY & poof! FishingMan is locked up yet again!

He's gunna spend more time in lockups than Nelson Mandela.
W/T/F is wrong with that pac-man munching tool?
I couldn't have possibly done anything wrong, I didn't have enough time to.

The only thing in common is it seems to happen right after posting in the Community threads.
Somebody in here dislikes my politics, perhaps, & files bogus reports on me?
As long as I stick to hustling the chickadees it seems to be fine.

Never wrestle with fools.
They have more experience at it than you, TxsGal3333

Not going back three YEARS to read what peeps were thinking back then.

So today's 2¢ worth is I'm thinkin' there's a couple of very enticing personalities from here that I've been communicating with lately (them bein' hot ain't an issue either) and I'm wishing I could have just one of them to hold, hug, & talk endlessly with.
I'm lonesome.

Of course all of that is just a general euphemism for the fact that I'd REALLY like somebody to "get busy" with as well - but I'd settle for just the hold/hug/talkin' parts if they'd otherwise take one look at me and have to excuse themselves to hit the head...and then duck out the back door.

They found out I am now here.
Completely shattered their confidence.
How can they call themselves "fun" when measured against ME!

Ebbil geneyus Zee strikes again.

Dem po' Frenchies, they dun stand a chance agin The Hurricane from the North.

Whew!
In order to avoid another negligent 2¢ worth comment I actually speed-read all 45 pages here.

Kreist, ye ken ye watch too much TV & movies when you can honestly say you've seen almost every series and movie put forth so far & this thread only goes back to 2018.

At 70+ I have the opposite kind of memory problem most older folks suffer from - I can't forget.
I still remember YUGE swaths of the 1st SCI-Fi book I ever read, in the 6th grade (Starman's Son: 2250 AD by Andre Norton).
Forget trying to get me to watch a movie or TV show less than 20-30 years old, I can practically lip-sync the dialogue from end-to-end.
(A wee bit of exaggeration, but not much of one.)

SparklingCrystal, I think I've sussed out what grabs you favorably, so what I'm going to do is toss some stuff at you that might pry you loose a bit more from your "preferred" consumption.
I agree with plenty you do like, though having seen practically anything worth watching produced on 3 continents and some from S.America & Asia too, I find almost all of it tiresome recycling of shows that have already been done (something Hollyweird seems especially hooked on, re-booting movies for the 3rd, 4th, or even 5th time - like Dracula, A Star is Born, etc.)
I ABSOLUTELY agree, "Dracula Untold" was the best version of Bram Stoker's tragedy ever made.

I also agree in general that BBC/UK police procedural shows are far superior to American-made crap.
(Line of Duty, Luther with Idris Elba, DCI Banks, Ripper Street, Unforgotten-has Nikola Walker EVER done less than stellar in ANY role she's inhabited?, Tom Burke's "C.B. Strike", & looking forward to more of D.I. Ray.)
If it's a UK procedural, it's somewhere on my 24TBs of hard-drive storage (7x4TB in a PC tower).

I believe the reason is not better scripts, it's the fact that English/UK/Irish actors tend to walk the boards long before they ever do a TV series & have earned/learned to project "Presence" in their roles - and in general shorter "series" runs of 4-6 episodes per issue, which allows tighter focus on the case at hand & avoids 16 episodes of drift from "fillers" until they get the baddies.

igotthegirth was also correct (5 times) about "Hell on Wheels" being A-1+ fare, particularly in the Westerns/Civil War era genre.
SF doesn't get any better than the "Battlestar Galactica" reboot with Eddy Olmos.
Throw in "Babylon 5" & "Crusade" for good measure.
Straczynski has crafted a 123 eps.+6 movies feast running over 5-years in 2 separate but intertwined series.
A galaxy-&-time-spanning political extravaganza covering millennia of wars & a veritable UN of Aliens.

Horror is something I gather really isn't your cuppa but I believe I can actually change your opinion in a limited fashion.
Eldest & I have taken to watching a number of "Nazombie" flicks (WWII movies with zombi-fied Nazis).
Start with the 3-part series of "Outpost" movies;
•Outpost (2008)
•Outpost: Black Sun (2012)
•Outpost: Rise Of The Spetnaz (2013)
Then move on to the Dead Snow series;
•Dead Snow (2009)
•Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014)
If those five movies don't have you howling with laughter while also actually tense with a bit of dread, you are a lost cause.

Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr, Iain Glen, James Purefoy, & a host of A-List appearances across the franchise keep it fresh & spice up what would normally be just zombie comic book fare in the "Resident Evil" movie series.

For good measure throw in a small Michael Mann film HE would rather forget but I found to be one of my favorite movies of all time, in ANY genre.
•The Keep (1983)
The Keep is very hard to find but www2.putlocker.digital does have it in 360 & 480p (check the gear wheel for settings).

I also did not "See" (see wot I dun dere?) anyone mention "Black Sails" (8+3x10 eps.)
John Malkovich's 1-off 9 ep. season, "Crossbones", is a nice companion piece to "Black Sails".
Zack McGowan does for 18th century piracy what Anson Mount does for the 19th century transcontinental railroad era ("Hell on Wheels").

Rob Roy is a better Scottish movie than Braveheart, even though the latter stole all the awards.

A particular favorite of mine was the 5-year run of "Person of Interest" starring Jim Caviezel ("Outlander" [2008]) & Michael Emerson ("Lost").
Something about it reminded me a bit of "The Pretender" series which ran 4 seasons in the late '90s - stoic ledes by Weiss & Caviezel I suppose.

"The Man in the High Castle" (4x10 eps.) is a brain stretcher alt-history/multiverse series based on a P.K. Dick novelette that might not really fit you, but it's worth a look-see (see wot I dun dere -AGAIN?)

There's been a ga-jillion Star Wars TV spinoffs but "The Mandalorian" (4x8 eps.) is by far the best of them.
The Book of Boba Fett (7 eps.) is a companion piece prelude but not strictly necessary.

As for a few movies I specialize in uncovering but which few people ever "see" (did it again LOL) - I guarantee they are worth the watch;
•"Quigley Down Under" (Tom Selleck)
•"The Grey Zone" (concentration camp)
•"Rabbit-Proof Fence" (trackers chase abo escapees from a Native resettlement camp across OZ for 1,600 km - true story)

Two unusual detective flicks with Jean Reno ("The Professional" aka: "Léon:The Professional") in the lede.
•"The Crimson Rivers" (FR-2000)
•"Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse" (FR-2004)
There is a 4x8=32 eps. spinoff TV series, "The Crimson Rivers" (2018-2022), but Reno plays no part in it.

My wife had a few favorites as well, though she was inclined to romantic movies & B&W films AND had what we laughingly referred to as "Video Voodoo", whereby every unknown VHS movie she picked out at the rental store was HORRIBLE! (mostly).
She did know good acting, good scripts, & good directors, better than anyone else I've ever met though.

She watched good movies over & over, which for me would be cruel & unusual punishment.
•"The Good Earth" (1937-Paul Muni)
•"The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946-returning WWII vets)
•"The Helen Morgan Story" (1957-Paul Newman)
•"Spender in the Grass" (1961-though she detested Warren Batty, she loved this movie & "Bonnie and Clyde" [1967])

She was a bootlegging gangsters aficionado & also cultivated more mental ephemera about that era than anyone else I ever met and which helped me immensely in my research into Organized Crime's reach into the NFL (fully half the Owners are mafia/criminal underworld-adjacent if not outright involved, like the SF DeBartelo family, the NYG Maras & PIT Rooneys) - but I digress.


Finally, I remember you saying something about not reading books.
Is there anyone who doesn't like "The Age of Sail" genre?
For those who do AND hold Sci-Fi to no longer be "low-brow" entertainment, I present to you a pair of authors who combine the both of them with great storytelling;
•David Drake: the Republic of Cinnabar Navy (RCN) series which is currently 13 volumes and won't be more as Drake passed in 2023.
•David Weber: the Honor Harrington universe with 16 main-line books & 28 (& counting) splinter volumes about service in the Royal Manticoran Navy or being allies/enemies with Manticore.

I swear to you, both series will have you itching for more once you let yourself immerse in those worlds & start running a sync-ed movie of the adventures in your mind.
I have already seen the movies, at least how I would direct, cut, & edit them, were I to be tasked with turning them into films.
Oddly enough, I really admired what I thought I knew about Weber from his prodigious 100+ books output, but after watching the horseshight he spouts on his FaceBook account these past couple of years, I find myself in the awkward position of still loving the crimes while simultaneously very much not-loving the criminal.

Sorry if that was a long read but I tried to edit in sufficient breaks to get you through it without ending up with "Lazy Eye" & "Cross-Eyed" afflictions.

Taking applications for sugarmomma
(Send résumé, including bank routing & account #s with mother's maiden name, SSA #, brokerage account #s, and drivers license or photo ID.)

(Gives Zee the "side-eye" & asks if the daily fix was as good for her as it was for me? )

AI Overview
China's extensive AI-enabled surveillance network is officially known as "Skynet" (天网, Tiānwǎng), which uses facial recognition and connects surveillance cameras across provinces to monitor public spaces
. Launched around 2015, this system is primarily used by public security organs to identify individuals, crack down on crime, and assist in Operation Sky Net, which apprehends suspected economic fugitives.

Google it.
www.google.com/search?q=china+names+defense+AI+"skynet"