The Goat Pen

I don't have a problem with Jimmy Fallon showing up as a suprise guest at the Parkland graduation

but lets call it what it is - he decided to go the safe funny route like his predecessors hosting the Tonight Show and at first it paid off until about 3 months into Trump's presidency and then Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel started eating into his ratings because they were anti-Trump.

So Fallon sees his opportunity to get edgy and capture viewers.

the thing is, there has been a shift in the last couple of months where everyone clearly has Trump fatigue and they are tired of so much of their news/entertainment evening being devoted to hearing about Trump. If anything, if Fallon would have stayed true to his vision, he'd probably gain a significant percentage of viewers.

Kimmel has realized this, in part because he took heat for it and in part because no one forgets the man-show - which was a blatant appeal to the Trump base now.

Colbert is locked in - he landed the gig he has having a liberal slant and its all he's got. He has a ceiling that he can't go past.

On a similar I've made the decision to be a cord cutter. I'm at a point where I'm comfortable enough with IPTV , Kodi and I just bought a DVR to capture streaming output - all that combined with Spectrum raising my cable bill $40 in $20 increments the last 2 months. I'm paying $74 a month for the basic package, and 2 DVRs (because they don't offer a single whole house one like Time Warner used to). They offer 130+ channel but what they don't tell you is that 1/3 of them are duplicated. I sat down one day and counted the unique channels they offer and it was 83 - and that included the Jesus stuff and all the shopping channels.

I'm going high speed internet, Hulu, Netflix and Set TV for as long as that lasts. The only downside is that I'll probably miss a few college basketball and football games if I don't stay on top of the DVR which is doesn't use a guide.

The Supreme Court just seems to duck out on any major defining responsibility - as if their rulings are tied to whether it needs to abide or not conflict with the current trending mood of the country.

That isn't their job. Their job is apply law as the constitution dictates, and they have been, IMO, missing on this for decades


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The Supreme Court on Monday handed a narrow victory to a Christian baker from Colorado who refused for religious reasons to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

The justices, in a 7-2 decision, faulted the Colorado Civil Rights Commission's handling of the claims brought against Jack Phillips, saying it had showed a hostility to religion. In doing so, the commission violated his religious rights under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

But the court did not issue a definitive ruling on the circumstances under which people can seek exemptions from anti-discrimination laws based on their religious views.

The commission had said Phillips violated the Colorado anti-discrimination law that bars businesses from refusing service based on race, sex, marital status or sexual orientation by rebuffing gay couple David Mullins and Charlie Craig in 2012.

Two of the court's four liberals, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, joined the five conservative justices in the ruling authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy.

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why didn't they issue a definitive ruling? multiple reasons I assume, none of them for the positive of this country. This idea that whatever issues we have, that we have to deal with them on a circumstantial basis, and no blanket ruling from the highest level. They refuse to hear cases that may be divided by geographic or demographic areas of the country.

is not even if the ruling is what I want or not - I'm just tired of the supreme court always dipping a toe in the water and being politically driven on their decisions.

Essentially they are saying in this case the baker was justified - but we aren't going to say religion is always justified - so create more cases, fill up the court with litigation and we'll continue to keep on in this indefinite limbo of nuancing constitutional rights taking priority over the other depending on who is running the country.

Guns, religion, gay rights, abortion - its like modern medicine, they don't cure stuff anymore, they just treat it.

I'm probably going to cut way down on the number of channels in my package as soon as I can. I cant avoid paying for basic cable as it's paid for the whole building through HOA fees. How do you use Kodi? I put it on my raspberry pi (which is basically a retro gaming system), but I've basically never touched it or even looked into what can be done with it. It's just an interface right, where does the content come from?

aTm wrote:I'm probably going to cut way down on the number of channels in my package as soon as I can. I cant avoid paying for basic cable as it's paid for the whole building through HOA fees. How do you use Kodi? I put it on my raspberry pi (which is basically a retro gaming system), but I've basically never touched it or even looked into what can be done with it. It's just an interface right, where does the content come from?

several different ways - but it can be daunting unless someone keeps up with it for you.

I am finding more stuff outside of Kodi. I'd start with a website called Troypoint.com - its a little disjointed in the sense but he cranks out videos on how to setup stuff in Kodi and on your device. He mostly focuses on firesticks but there isn't really anything special about a fire stick once you realize its just a droid streaming device

Another site the guys at work use is this

http://www.wirelesshack.org/top-best-wo ... d-ons.html

The challenge with Kodi is alot of the stuff doesn't have a very long shelf life. Its best for watching entire seasons of TV shows - several apps for that.

I have a 4tb hard drive hanging off my router, and I use Samba (FTP or whatever) to access it movies thru it for Kodi. I have collected about 1600 movies over the past couple of years and Kodi keeps a library for them (think Plex but better interface) with built in player.

How much data do you expect to be using monthly?

So basically its more like an interface to access and play your own saved content, which you can acquire through various means?

Out of curiosity, how is the library management for that, especially with the movie files? Does Kodi have a scraper to grab meta data for all those movies and make it look good, or does it just display the file names?

"The landscape and polls don't indicate any massive shift in the Senate or House in the midterms. "

I was just going on historic results in the midterms:

"It's only twice, 1934 and 2002, that the president's party actually gained in both the House and the Senate.... In midterms since 1862, the president's party has averaged losses of about 32 seats in the House and more than two seats in the Senate."

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter ... rm-electi/

The article does point out that it's not always a complete beatdown for the Prez's party in the midterms (and offers examples), but the fact that the average is 32 seats in the House means that it's often way worse that that. The fact that so many repubs aren't even running for reelection this year is a pretty good indication of how they feel about their chances. I'm sure some of them aren't running for other reasons, but many of them are probably just thinking they don't have a very good chance of winning. Maybe they're wrong about that, but for whatever reason, they're not running...

Thank you, SCOTUS, for saying the Freedom of Religion still exists in the US. It's sad that the 1A has become so unpopular to about half the country, but I'll take it.

Come on Kennedy, retire already. You too, Ginsburg. Time to spend more time with your families.

aTm wrote:Out of curiosity, how is the library management for that, especially with the movie files? Does Kodi have a scraper to grab meta data for all those movies and make it look good, or does it just display the file names?

yes, it has a scraper and it looks great - multiple ways to view with movie summary, you can filter by Genre, year, actor, etc

data for me is unlimited thru Spectrum so I can't really tell you. I've never had the need to monitor it.

I'm not sure if alot of people have their own content, I think its intent was to be a common interface for like sites like putlocker, IPTV creators , PPV hackers- basically any "renegade" streamers out there but for me, just having my own content and sharing it with friends/family is why I use Kodi.

another thing that is cool is you can localize your content, so I have a bunch of UK basketball games, so I created .inf files for each one with a year, and so I have UK basketball games setup like a TV series with season and "episode" so its mixed in with the TV shows, I can chose a year (season) and a game that season (episode).

I also did that for porn that I downloaded by type - Season 1 is Lesbian, Season 2 is bondage, Season 3 is lesbian, Season 4 is lesbian, you get the idea.

I think pretty much everybody has 1TB soft caps (pay extra if you go over) now around here.

eCat wrote:I also did that for porn that I downloaded by type - Season 1 is Lesbian, Season 2 is bondage, Season 3 is lesbian, Season 4 is lesbian, you get the idea.

LOL. Nice.

over the weekend I was looking at film genres - and I'd heard of film-noir before but I never really looked into it, so I read up on it, looked at what was considered the best movies of that Genre, then downloaded about 40 of them.

Even doing that, my kids watching netflix and hulu non stop and playing video games, I'd be stunned if I used 1TB in a month or anywhere close to it.

I had a recent brush with the (previously unknown) 1TB cap for two months straight due to extenuating circumstances that have since been fixed, but my normal usage is more like 150-200 GB.

American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Louise Melling, who represents Mullins and Craig, said the high court made it clear that businesses open to the public must serve everyone. "The court reversed the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision based on concerns unique to the case but reaffirmed its longstanding rule that states can prevent the harms of discrimination in the marketplace, including against LGBT people," Melling added.

"unique"

It's like that old saw, "no need to make a federal case about it." Seems the parties could have saved themselves some time and energy. The baker could've just made them a shitty cake...but I guess that wouldn't have been the Christian thing to do. Better to hector them about their lifestyle while refusing the job. WWJD? Well, He wouldn't serve a couple of queers, bygod.

Anywho, the SCOTUS didn't declare a shift in discrimination rules, harking back to old Justice Potter's line about pornography - "I'll know it when I see it."

bluetick wrote:Seems the parties could have saved themselves some time and energy.

Yeah, I'm sure they wandered into that one bakery, the one that also refuses to bake stuff for Halloweeen, etc by accident out of all the shops in Denver, CO.

I'll defer to your expertise in the matter, aTm. I had no idea the bakery was an infamous Halloween-denier. Must've been a big deal in a burg like Denver, CO.

bluetick wrote:I'll defer to your expertise in the matter, aTm.

Wise.

"looked at what was considered the best movies of that Genre, then downloaded about 40 of them."

Too many really good classic noirs to list, but I'd start with Double Indemnity. The dialogue is classic. A good somewhat recent (i.e., shows tit) noir is This World then the Fireworks, if you can find it. If you're already a Coen Bros. fan, check out Blood Simple, one of their first efforts and a nice homage to the genre. Likewise their later movie (filmed in black and white for added effect) The Man Who Wasn't There...

yea that seems to be a ton of great movies I've missed over the years and I am excited about it. Alot of Orson Welles stuff out there. I mean I've heard of the Asphalt Jungle, Strangers on a Train, The Big Sleep, even L.A. Confidential fits well, but I"m actually excited about all the movies I've stumbled upon from searching this particular category - good movies, alot of them with actors that didn't hit it big.