Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

Let’s finish the job.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

People are complicated. Love is not.

Second rate reporter says what?

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

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91Comments

  3. 3.

    Thoughtful Today

    re: site redesign

    1) I turned off javascript so that the “BACK” button would work again.

    2) “Trackbacks & Pingbacks”, underneath the “Leave a Reply” field, would make the last comment easier to read.

    3) The title of the post preceding the name of the website would help keep track of open tabs.

    All the different Balloon Juice post’s tabs are titled: [Ballo…] [Ballo…], the title first would make this post: [The W…], the previous post would be: [Last…]. Easier to keep track of open tabs.

    If anyone feels the same, mention it. If there’s somewhere else this should be posted, tell me (I may repost this).

  6. 6.

    The Other Chuck

    Been updating the More Better Balloon Juice stylesheet, and I think I’ve got things de-cluttered pretty well now. There’s going to be a javascript version of it sometime, but I’m waiting for the new comment system to land to see if it’s even needed. Now it removes the entire “recent posts” section, since that’s all on the front page anyway, as well as the giant preview box on the left which usually just shows up as a pencil icon anyway. Doesn’t remove any ads, since that wouldn’t be nice to Cole — use an adblocker if you want that.

    Anyway, let’s see if a single link will still land me in moderation hell: http://userstyles.org/styles/120500/more-better-balloon-juice

  7. 7.

    Tommy

    Well today is the day I wait for all year. Some years more than others. This is one of those years it is the “game.” Maybe the “game” of the year in college football like it was a few years ago when it was #1 vs. #2. My LSU Tigers vs. Bama. #2 vs. #4. I think it is safe to say we have the best player in the nation in Leonard Fournette. Almost an average of 200 yards per game rushing. But what will make it very interesting, Bama has the best run defense in the nation.

    As ESPN and the SEC Network have said it will actually come down to QB play and neither of us have a very good QB. Brandon Harris is average at best, although mobile with a rocket arm. But in one game this year it only completed three, no that isn’t a typo, three passes. Attempted like five passes. Only upside, not a single interception and he doesn’t turn over the ball.

    This is sad because it might be argued as a whole, LSU has the best group of WR in the nation. Insiders say Harris can throw, but we’re not “letting him lose” to wait to this part of the schedule where the rest of our games are against top 20 teams. Don’t want to give away this part of our offense. Not sure I believe that, but I guess we will see in a few hours.

  8. 8.

    The Other Chuck

    Been updating the More Better Balloon Juice stylesheet, and I think I’ve got things de-cluttered pretty well now. There’s going to be a javascript version of it sometime, but I’m waiting for the new comment system to land to see if it’s even needed. Now it removes the entire “recent posts” section, since that’s all on the front page anyway, as well as the giant preview box on the left which usually just shows up as a pencil icon anyway. Doesn’t remove any ads, since that wouldn’t be nice to Cole — use an adblocker if you want that.

    And looks like posting a single link still throws me in moderation. FYWP. Just go to userstyles dot org and search for “More Better Balloon Juice”. Did I mention FYWP?

  11. 11.

    benw

    Tech doesn’t play until next Thursday and the Chargers are on MNF so I have that rare fall weekend completely free of rooting interests.

    GO HOME TEAM! POUND THOSE RIVALS!

  15. 15.

    Amir Khalid

    For fans of the round football, Chelsea FC are 0-1 down at Stoke City. Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho, he of the tantrums, is absent; he was banned for swearing at match officials in a previous match. Mourinho’s conduct on the touchline has been appalling this season — he’s been fined nearly 150,000 pounds so far, and driven the first-team doctor out of her job — but there hasn’t been a peep of protest out of the club owner, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. Anyone else would surely have been sacked by now.

  21. 21.

    beltane

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): Thanks for that information. I posted some links in the thread below and was trying to figure out why I was put in moderation. Now I know not to take it personally.

  26. 26.

    Mike J

    @The Other Chuck:

    Doesn’t remove any ads, since that wouldn’t be nice to Cole — use an adblocker if you want that.

    Didja hear about the Economist? They use an anti adblocker service. The service got hacked, malware got installed on the computers of site visitors, even if they didn’t use an adblocker.

  27. 27.

    sharl

    @beltane: Hmm, that must be a platform-dependent issue(?). I’m on a PC (laptop) running Win7, and using Firefox v42, and have been using links* in comments here this morning with no problem, with adherence to the 3-link limit of course (*manually html-composed, which is a necessity for the time being).

  31. 31.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @The Other Chuck: Can you remove/fix the jquery command(?) to get to the anchor links to revive the back button? A not large avian suggested that’s what killed its functionality.
    The same source noted the swooping scroll to a replied comment is a jquery effect but did not indicate if it’s the same one that assassinated backspace.

    Can we lose:

    Want to join the discussion?
    Feel free to contribute!

    The way we lost categories before the post (thank you to all the g*ds and saints of all religions for that)

    Is there a way to remove the transition effect of the total gray screen when a commenter replies or moves to an adjacent post with the handy new arrows?

    Will trade recipes/photos/small quantities of currency.

  32. 32.

    The Other Chuck

    @Steeplejack: Nice, thanks for the feedback. As you can see from the CSS in BBJ and MBBJ, I don’t touch the fonts in any way whatsoever. I suppose it’s entirely possible that the CSS or Stylish itself tickled some sort of browser bug, and if the plugin is misbehaving, that sounds even more like the culprit.

    Any tweaks you’ve made that you want to share? Rather than spam BJ with code (which would most certainly get mangled), maybe leave a comment on userstyles.

  34. 34.

    Mike J

    @The Other Chuck: They typically only work if you’re allowing arbitrary strangers on the internet to run code on your computer via javascript. If that’s the case, you already functionally have a virus.

  36. 36.

    Steeplejack

    Just got home a little while ago from a long dim sum lunch at one of my favorite Chinese restaurants. Now teetering between turning on the TV or lapsing into a rainy afternoon nap with the housecat. Turned over a big chunk of paid work (grant application reviews) to a longtime friend and colleague at lunch, also wallowed in shop talk and review of current political scene. A great weekend already!

  39. 39.

    Corner Stone

    @Steeplejack:

    a long dim sum lunch

    Man, after the Brazilian/Fogo talk yesterday and now the dim sum today I think I am putting on weight just by reading this borked blog.

  40. 40.

    Steeplejack

    @The Other Chuck:

    After I reinstall Stylish and get things set up again, I’ll see if there’s anything worth passing on. I think I changed the body font to Georgia and fiddled with the line spacing a bit—nothing radical, just readable. Seems like I made one other change, but I can’t remember what it is now. I’ll let you know after I check.

  41. 41.

    RSA

    More stuff to fix:

    Consistency: Find a post on the front page with an image, like the previous post titled “The Way You Glance at Me, Indifferently”. (Ignore the distracting mouse-over effect on the image.) Click on the post to get to its own page. The image goes away; you have to click on the black pencil icon to see it. Now click on one of the tags; you’ll see the post, without the image and without the pencil icon. It’s a good idea, all else being equal, to show the same information to users who might be getting to it by different paths.

    The text link “Blog – Latest News” at the top of each page probably isn’t needed, and for what it’s worth, I’ve never really thought about the front page as “latest news”.

    Notice the the text items “OUR MOST RECENT POSTS”, “College Football Open Thread”, “SEARCH BALLOON JUICE”, “Contact Us” and a lot of others? They’re all the same font and the same color, the traditional color of hyperlinks. There’s no Web convention that says blue all-caps text doesn’t do anything when you click on it; it’s a misleading design choice.

    I’ve already mentioned the sparseness of the front page, with a few post titles and a fragment of one post’s text, and other stuff. It probably would have been helpful to have a sticky post in which people could make comments and suggestions about the redesign, with some indication about what would be done.

  42. 42.

    The Other Chuck

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I’m going to wait til the shiny new comment system lands before I address things like the back button brokenness. I can’t really do much about JS with CSS alone (there’s pseudo-element hacks but I think browsers may stop such shenanigans). Basically, til I go writing a JS version of BBJ — which will probably happen eventually — I can only deal with the way things look, not behave.

    I think the grey screen (which you get when you load any page on the site, not just via the arrows) is only fixable on the FYWP side, because it’s gone by the time any userscript can start tinkering with the page.

    Cleaning up the reply text spam should at least be doable :)

  43. 43.

    Steeplejack

    @Corner Stone:

    The dim sum was the first break in my Boo Radley shut-in lifestyle in practically a week!

    I do want to hear what Randy P (?) thinks about Fogo de Chão. I’ve been jonesin’ for Chima since yesterday. That’s closer for me (out by Tysons Corner).

  44. 44.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @The Other Chuck: I haven’t tried your script yet, so I don’t know if you’ve already addressed this. I don’t know if the New Comments Engine will fix it either, but …

    On many ~ one line comments, the “Reply” button is very close to the ending word. If an embedded link is near the end of the comment, the hot areas for the two links (the user supplied link and the Reply link) seem to overlap making it hard to grab the user’s link.

    A little more line-space after the comment and before the Reply button would help that.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  46. 46.

    Gin & Tonic

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): The way we lost categories before the post

    I don’t know about you, but I’m still seeing categories twice: once on the line with the author’s name and the time/date of the post, like Tommy wants, then again at the bottom of the post, like everybody else wants.

  47. 47.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Gin & Tonic: Did you use More Better Balloon Juice script in Stylish – (courtesy of The Other Chuck)? That’s what fixed it for me.

  48. 48.

    J R in WV

    Whooo Mountaineers! Finally!! We won one !!

    Actually, I’m a Marshall U grad, but Mom and Dad had us going to the Pitt games when I was a little boy, and everyone but me went to WVU in my family. So I root for both teams, mostly, and stay calm when they play each other, which is rare.

    I was worried that we wouldn’t beat any Big 12/10 teams. Ever. This year…

    I hope they win 2 or 3 more, so they can get a bowl, and a bowl better than the Pinstripe Bowl, or whatever.

    Dad used to take us all the the bowl games as a Xmas present. Big fun, even if you lose. New Years Eve in New Orleans, a big party even if you lose.

  49. 49.

    RSA

    @RSA: Oops, I should have been much clearer that all of what I wrote was addressed to Tommy (in part because some of it is about first impressions rather than longer-term use), and not to The Other Chuck. (Chuck, you’ve done great work, thanks.)

  53. 53.

    The Other Chuck

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: With MBBJ, the reply button only shows up when you hover the cursor over a comment. It might bleed into the text a little bit then, but it’s only going to show up when you’re about to reply anyway. Strangely enough, this even works on mobile if you tap a comment (assuming you can dig up a mobile browser that works with Stylish — I think Firefox does).

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I added (with some more specificity) that rule to nuke the annoying text, as well as generally prettifying the comment area. Go ahead and update to see it. If the yellow textarea really causes homicidal stabbies, I can get rid of it — I just personally find focus colors handy if I’m clicking around sloppily with a trackpad.

  57. 57.

    Steeplejack

    @The Other Chuck:

    Well, this is embarrassing. I can’t seem to find the version of the BBJ stylesheet that I edited way back when. I may have overwritten it a week or two ago when I was flailing around trying to get Stylish working and (I think) I downloaded BBJ again. Is a backup copy automatically made when you edit or reinstall? And, if so, what would be the file name?

    Anyway, I just installed MBBJ and like it. Thanks! I did comment out (for now) the bit that moves the time stamp up next to the commenter’s name, because there are certain commenters whose long-ass names overwrite it, and I click on the time-stamp link a lot to bring the current comment up to the top of my screen. (I know you can click “through” someone’s nym, but if their nym is itself a hyperlink it gets messy.) Plus I tweaked and tweaked and could never get it on exactly the same horizontal line as the nym.

    Seem to remember that previously I lightened up your background blue to make alternating comments a little less contrast-y, and maybe I changed the font in the comment-creation box to be Courier, because I always find that better for spotting typos. I know that at some point I was seeing Courier in that box.

    Gonna have to refresh my memory on how to do that, and change the comment body copy to something with serifs, but Stylish and MBBJ seem to be working as intended. In retrospect, I think something—who knows what—just nuked my font change, so I did a lot of sawdust-sawing for nothing. As usual with computers. But this has motivated me to charge back into the fray and fix it again.

  58. 58.

    JPL

    OT… This does not belong in such an important thread, but The Guardian has an article about Ben Carson. Click of the section about Ben’s homage to himself. After seeing the pictures, I looked up the word humility, just in case, I had forgotten what it meant. lol
    I’d link to the article but we know that doesn’t work.

  59. 59.

    Steeplejack

    @Steeplejack:

    WTF? FYWP let me edit my comment, but then there was no Save button to actually, you know, save it.

    Anyway, my ETA was that something you (TOC) did at the top of each post seems to have removed the time of the post from just before the date. I think that’s an essential piece of information. Or maybe something else changed it, now that the blog is mutating evolving on a daily basis.

  60. 60.

    The Other Chuck

    @Steeplejack: Only backups I know of would be those you make of your browser profile dir. In Firefox, you can search the profile dir for .css files; on Chrome I think it’s in some opaque blob. For me, my backup copy is whatever’s on the userstyles site.

    I don’t really see a clean solution to the date link for people with ridiculously huge names, other than cutting off the name. Maybe tab through the links, which of course presumes the site hasn’t hijacked the tab key (ahem). Maybe something I could manage with BBJ-JS.

  61. 61.

    Steeplejack

    @The Other Chuck:

    No, not asking for a fix. I’m okay with the time stamp being just below the nym. There are a surprisingly large number of commenters here whose nyms encroach!

    No big deal on the lost draft of BBJ. I’m already starting to remember most of what I need to do, and I think I cribbed a couple of bits from another stylesheet, so I can look those up again.

  62. 62.

    The Other Chuck

    @Steeplejack: While the date is in a nicely selectable html time tag, the time itself is just scattered in with the rest of the text along with “This post is in” before the categories. No way to target text nodes with plain CSS, so getting the exact time back means getting that stupid filler text back too. More incentive to move the whole shebang to JS I guess.

  65. 65.

    The Other Chuck

    @Steeplejack: The missing time is actually a problem with MBBJ, or more like a tradeoff. As for fixing the blog, in the words of Werner Von Braun: “Not my department.”

    Pretty much every FYWP site makes me want to fix something.

  66. 66.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @bk: Last I saw of him, he was downloading the 6000 page TPP from a server in New Zealand, IIRC. He may still be busy with it.

    ;-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  67. 67.

    raven

    Nice day between the hedges. I was with 7 Italian soil science profs who had never seen a college football game. A but before kickoff two fighters did a fly over, there were numerous vets tribute since vest day is coming up and the dude from the Brave sang God Bless America. Most of the visitors were puzzled by all that but one guy said, “we could use some of that in Italy!” They were fun folks and I think they had a good time.

  70. 70.

    raven

    @NotMax: We were talking about that after the game. What you posted is about the NFL but I bet there is hanky panky with something of the scale we saw today. I took a 15 minute ride in a Cobra that normally cost $500 because of the fuel. I can’t imagine what the 2 fighters cost.

  71. 71.

    Steeplejack

    @The Other Chuck:

    I had to disable MBBJ for the time being. When I try to edit a comment I have written, there are no Save or Cancel buttons available on the edit screen. When I disable MBBJ they come back again. Will fiddle to see if making the comment-edit box smaller helps.

  79. 79.

    The Other Chuck

    @Satby: If you follow the link (search userstyles.org for “More Better Balloon Juice”, because FYWP) then it’ll give you instructions on how to install. The short of it is, install an extension called Stylish, then it’s one button.

  81. 81.

    Steeplejack

    @Satby:

    What OS/platform? Windows, Mac, iPad, Android tablet, phone? It makes a difference.

    The particular add-on we have been talking about here is Stylish, which is available for Chrome on a Mac or Windows machine. I don’t know about tablets or phones. I use Firefox, so I will defer to The Other Chuck or someone else who uses Stylish with Chrome. Informational page here.

    If you install Stylish, then you want to go to TOC’s page for the More Better Balloon Juice stylesheet.

    Please note that, if you install MBBJ, it has a few problems. One that I have identified is that if you try to edit a comment that you have previously entered it will let you go to the comment-edit box but won’t let you save the edited comment. I have informed TOC about this (or at least left him a comment here).

    ETA: And I see that he has fixed this.

  82. 82.

    The Other Chuck

    @Steeplejack: Thanks for the extra info … I guess either the mods are really on the ball tonight or the link problem has been fixed. Strangely, the resized textbox did fine for me in the edit popup, but I’m not exactly testing a bevy of screen resolutions and font sizes. And most browsers these days give you a resize handle for textareas anyway.

  83. 83.

    Steeplejack

    @The Other Chuck:

    I’m handcoding the links.

    And, no, the comment-edit box didn’t have resizing controls, at least for me (Firefox/Win10). I have a small notebook with a 1366 x 768 screen, and sometimes it is a lot wide-screenier than a larger (physically) monitor.

  89. 89.

    Tommy

    @raven: I got a huge thing of red beans. My dad hates text messages but then uses them all the time for this day. It is about time for LSU vs. Bama. I got flags outside of my house flying. LSU. Oh this, not a home game but this:

    https://youtu.be/yqKthXGYAOQ

    It is a game …

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