Sony Pictures Television has released new photos from S.W.A.T. Exiles, offering a glimpse at Shemar Moore back in tactical gear as Daniel 'Hondo' Harrelson.
February 18th, 2026 12:56 pm - March Meta Matters Challenge 2026 Returning!
March 1 is just weeks away, so that means the kickoff to this year's March Meta Matters Challenge will be taking place soon! The challenge involves locating and copying over meta you've created to a second site in order to ensure its preservation, plus there will be some prompts for creating new meta.
Picture it: Los Angeles in 1985. I’d moved there two years earlier to make it as a model, but all I had to show for it was a couple of car shows, one page of a local JCPenney circular, and a weekly “session” at Chateau Marmont with a freaky rich dude who I can’t say more about because of the NDA.
So when I met this guy with the most perfect curly mullet who promised me a little pink house in one of the flyover states, it sounded pretty good. Forty years later, I’m still not even sure what state we’re living in, but I do know that I hate this goddamn place with the fire of a thousand California suns.
When we first moved here, it was fine. It was the Reagan ’80s, a time of flag-waving and parades and scantily clad women cheerleading in MTV videos for no particular reason. Men who had never even watered a houseplant wore Future Farmers of America jackets—the heartland was just that cool. We got married and bought a little yellow house, marveling at how much more expensive it would have been in LA, and my husband promised he’d paint it pink. Four decades later, and this split-level ranch is still the color of morning urine.
Maybe I could have tolerated the location if our relationship was great, but once the first bloom of romance wore off, he started talking about wanting it to hurt so good. That’s really not my thing. Then our money ran out, and we had trouble finding work—because, my husband said, there was little opportunity. So why did he take me to this fucking place if he knew that the town had not had decent-paying jobs since the days when the Coke bottled there contained actual cocaine?
When my husband told me he didn’t have a plan, that he just wanted to “R.O.C.K. in the USA,” I took a panicked job at the Tastee-Freez. Teenagers sneered at me as I served them their chili dogs. Did I occasionally spit in the relish? You betcha. Ain’t that America?
I’m no longer working in the fast-food industry, but the indignities continue: Five nights a week, I dress up like the fucking St. Pauli girl for my job as a waitress at the Schnitzelhaus. Everyone is German in this part of the country, and I’m pretty sure at least half of them are Nazis. They’ve been surprisingly open about it since the last election.
The final straw came for me after a very long Beers and Brats shift, when a table full of gray-goateed dudes told me they couldn’t wait until women lost the right to vote. After I rolled my eyes, they said not to fight authority because authority always wins. Later, when the head asshole said he thought his sauerkraut looked a little green, I just smiled.
I went home to face yet another lonely ol’ night with my husband, only to learn that he had lost my entire month’s tips in a poker game. As I started to lay into him, he waved me off.
“Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plow,” he muttered cryptically as he headed to the bathroom.
“Put the fucking fan on in there,” I called over my shoulder. There I was, standing in the living room in my tight-fitting Schnitzelhaus dirndl, smelling like Germanic meats and despair, and it hit me: Dying here doesn’t sound like all that much fun.
So I told my husband I was going out to pick up some smokes, threw a hastily packed bag in the cab of his Chevy Silverado, and headed west. I feel a little bad for ditching him, but I need a lover who won’t drive me crazy. And as it turns out, I am a girl who knows the meaning of “Hey, hit the highway.”
As most of you know, I live on a rural road where Internet options are limited. More than 20 years ago, DSL became available where I live, which meant that I could ditch the satellite internet of the early 2000s, which topped out at something like 1.5mbps and rarely achieved that, and which went out entirely if it rained, for a line that had a, for me, blisteringly fast 6mbps speed.
That was the speed it stayed at for most of the next twenty years, until my provider, rather grudgingly, increased the speed to 40mbps — not fast, but certainly faster — and there it stayed. Over time the DSL service stopped being as reliable, rarely actually got up to 40mbps, and, actually started going out when it rained, like the satellite internet of old, but without the excuse of being, you know, in space and blocked by clouds.
A few months back I went ahead and ordered 5G internet service from Verizon, because it was faster and doesn’t have usage caps, which had been a stumbling block for 5G service previously. It’s not top of the line, relative to other services that are available elsewhere — usually 120+mbps, where the church’s service is at 300+mbps, and Athena’s in town Internet is fiber and clocks in at 2gbps — but it’s fast enough for what I use the internet for, and to steam high-definition movies and TV. I held on to the DSL since then to make sure I was happy with the new service, because that seemed a sensible thing to do.
No more. The 5G wireless works flawlessly and has for months, and the time has come. After 20+ years, I have officially cancelled my DSL line. A big day in the technology life of the Scalzi Compound. I thank the DSL for its service, but its watch has now ended. We all most move on, ceaselessly, into the future, where I can download stuff faster.
I’m still keeping my landline, however, to which the DSL was attached. Call me old-fashioned.
Former United States Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has been quite vocal about her views over the past few months, both during and after her time in office. While she primarily adopted an “America first” stance throughout her tenure, her focus shifted towards criticising Donald Trump towards the end and afterwards, particularly regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case, where she experienced significant disagreement with him.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is still holding grudges against United States President Donald Trump, even after stepping back from her role, and rightly so. The sheer number of controversial actions Don the Con has taken during just one year of his presidency is mind-boggling, and not in a good way. That being said, although his policies may have adversely affected many Americans, on a personal level, he has also impacted his former friend, Marjorie Taylor Greene. In a recently released no-holds-barred interview, she expressed her true feelings about Trump, including the hurt she felt after being called a “traitor”, which created numerous challenges for her and her family.
Actor Shia LaBeouf has once again found himself in legal hot water. In the early hours of Tuesday, February 17th, LaBeouf was arrested after an altercation that occurred outside of a bar in New Orleans’ French Quarter.
Photos shared by Page Six show LaBeouf in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, before the incident in question took place. According to statements from the New Orleans Police Department, LaBeouf was seen becoming “increasingly aggressive”, and repeatedly punched a staff member when they attempted to make him leave the establishment. He then returned to the location “acting even more aggressive,” punching a second victim in the nose and having to be held down until the authorities arrived.
Strange interactions at the checkout counter are nothing new. But one woman’s recent trip to Walmart has ignited a conversation about “male-centered” behavior. Her experience trying to checkout period panties proves some women still haven’t moved past the outdated stigma surrounding feminine hygiene.
TikTok creator Kiara (@kiarajaxn) recently shared a storytime that has reached over 163,000 viewers. She details an encounter where a cashier allegedly tried to use a box of period underwear to cause a public scene.
A video from user @theunobsolete is going viral on social media for all the right reasons. The woman featured in it is basically listing all the ways her previous workplace humiliated her before replacing her with a 25-year-old for a position she was qualified for. What’s more? They even asked her to train her replacement and weren’t even open to compensating her for her labour.
Nowadays, it is not just Gen Z who are protesting in their workplaces, refusing to tolerate ill behaviour, it’s people from other age groups as well. Take TikTok user @theunobsolete, for instance. Despite not belonging to the group that is popularly known to protest, she is raising her voice against the injustice she encountered in her workplace and is raising her voice against it while also creating awareness about an existing problem that is seldom discussed.
As millennials and Gen Z populate the parenting market, every brand is trying to vibe with them using edgy humor. But the popular baby brand Frida may have taken the joke too far. TikTok creator @thedoreseyss is going viral after posting a video from a Walmart aisle that highlights the controversial packaging of Frida Baby products.
The video, which has amassed 7.8 million views, serves as a massive shock for parents who bought Frida baby products. Much like the creator, they are realizing they may have been too exhausted to notice the fine print. The creator expressed her outrage, stating that she threw out her existing products after realizing what was written on them. As she put it, “Frida has lost me as a consumer.”
February 18th, 2026 01:16 pm - downloading AO3 works with comments included?
Does anyone know if anyone's created a third-party tool to download a work from AO3 with comments included? I'd love to be able to, like, d/l my own works but with the comments in a readable format,
I saw this on Reddit, but I don't know how to run it (I am not tech-savvy at all, like if you tell me what to paste into the command line I can do it but you need to hold my hand).
I tried to see if this tool could do it, but I can't get it to open (even after telling my Mac's security to let me go ahead and open it, it just bounces in the dock and disappears).
Calibre's batch-download stuff downloads files the way AO3 permits: just the work, no comments.
Idris Elba's breakout TV role came with an audition twist. Oddly enough, his ability to convincingly play an American changed the course of his career.
Yet another attempt by ICE to buy a giant empty warehouse that it can turn into a deportation prison fell through Monday, when the owners of a million-square-foot warehouse in Hutchins, Texas, announced they wouldn’t sell the building after all. A protest that had been planned ahead of a city council meeting turned into a celebration instead.
Hutchins is a city of about 8,000 people south of Dallas; if the deal had gone through, the deportation prison could have held 10,000 prisoners. Monday, Majestic Realty, the California company that owns the warehouse, said in a statement it had been contacted about the building, but that it “has not and will not enter into any agreement for the purchase or lease of any building” to DHS for use as a prison.
Hooray for that, but here’s a chilling little detail in KDFW’s report, and it’s so goddamn typical of how Trump’s ethnic cleansing program operates half in secret. The company’s statement that it had rejected the sale “marked the first public confirmation that DHS had expressed interest in the property.” Until Monday, there had only been rumors and media reports based on document leaks, such as a December Washington Post story (gift link) on ICE’s plan to go on a warehouse-buying binge.
Hutchins Mayor Mario Vasquez said at a city council meeting earlier this month that he hadn’t been contacted by the federal government, and that no building permits, applications, or other paperwork had been filed. After all, DHS wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise when trucks show up and start converting a warehouse into a prison to house more than the existing population. Why would the ICEstapo bother communicating with the locals, or applying in advance for water and sewage and roads to service the new larger city inside the city?
It’s not much of a secret police if people know what you’re up to, after all.
Wonkette has been expecting something like this since Reagan, really. Please become a paid subscriber if you can!
If You Give A Fascist $42 Billion …
Despite the partial shutdown of DHS funding as Democrats try to force changes to the deportation agenda, the agency is still flush with cash thanks to the $42 billion earmarked for concentration camps in last summer’s Big Ugly Bill. In fact, nearly all of that new money will be going into ICE’s warehouse gulag archipelago. Documents obtained by the Washington Post (another gift link) show the total cost of purchasing buildings and retrofitting them as prisons is $38 billion, before cost overruns. (For a sense of scale, the Post notes that’s more than the total annual spending of 22 states combined.)
Why yes, ICE will be farming out the operation of the people warehouses to private prison companies. But even as those companies want a place at the money trough, some are already warning that the logistics of turning a giant warehouse into a prison are, ahem, challenging. George Zoley, founder and chair of private prison giant Geo Group, said on an earnings call with investors last week that of course it wants to support ICE’s planned warehouse prisons, but said the project will be “more complicated than you may think.”
Geo Group once converted a warehouse into a holding center for 500 people about 30 years ago — nothing like the enormous size of the facilities being proposed now, Zoley said. “The operational implications of how you manage such a facility, particularly a large-scale facility, is going to be concerning,” Zoley said.
Then again, doing a half-assed job that puts detainees’ health and lives at risk is already cooked into the Trump plan, because the prisons won’t contain people, they’ll hold “ILLEGALS.” That includes those here legally until Trump changed their status with a pen, so any suffering that results will be the victims’ fault, just part of their punishment for coming to America at all.
Hell No, Not Here, Not Anywhere
But while the project is monstrous, residents in cities where ICE wants to try warehouse prisons have been fighting to block them, and in many cases, they’ve won — even in states where Donald Trump won in 2024. Here are just a few:
After huge protests in Oklahoma City, the owners of a warehouse there decided not to sell a warehouse there to ICE, and Republican Mayor David Holt applauded the move.
In red, red Utah, the government of Salt Lake City is nonetheless Democratic, and Mayor Erin Mendenhall warned the owner of a warehouse that ICE’s plans to convert it into a prison would likely violate city code, as well as put a huge strain on the city’s water and sewer systems. There too, the owners of the warehouse said they had no intention of selling or leasing the building to DHS.
After federal officials toured a large warehouse in Kansas City, Missouri, the city council passed a moratorium on construction of any non-municipal detention facilities in the city until January 15, 2031. The owners of the warehouse initially said they had a “fiduciary duty” to consider an offer that had already been made on the building, but last week issued a statement that they’re “not actively engaged” with any prospective buyer for the property. The company also grumped that it normally wouldn’t comment on “potential transactions,” and that “baseless speculation, inaccurate narratives and serious threats toward our leadership, our employees and our families have prompted us to issue this statement.”
The same day as the company said it wasn’t going to sell the facility, an as-yet unidentified woman tried to set fire to the warehouse by spraying what looks like lighter fluid on it, but it quickly burned out without doing any damage or injuring anyone. No arrests have yet been made. Please do not do arsons, folks. We like firefighters, who are far more valuable to America (and far more likely to be hurt in a building fire) than ICE goons or anyone in the Trump administration.
If you want to stay on top of the evolving state of ICE’s warehouse-prison program, we recommend checking out Project Salt Box, which has a map of the ongoing fights over proposed warehouse purchases (nine), the sales that have been canceled (also nine!), and those that have been bought (10). The site also estimates the economic hit that municipalities will take when a commercial warehouse, which would normally be a source of tax revenue, is acquired by the federal government, removing it from the tax base.
Evil AND Incompetent
Continuing another theme that permeates every part of the second Trump term, ICE’s warehouses-to-concentration camps program is also incredibly sloppy and hastily thrown together. Consider the proposed ICE facility in Merrimack, New Hampshire, which would convert a warehouse into a relatively small “processing site” that would house between 400 and 600 people grabbed by ICE before sending them on to one of the bigger warehouses, or directly to deportation.
As Project Salt Box points out, even leaving aside that obvious copy-paste error, there are all sorts of problems with the “analysis,” which also estimates there’ll be millions of dollars in sales and income tax from the prison, even though New Hampshire doesn’t have either form of tax. It also inflates the potential job gains by “counting theoretical grocery clerks and gas station attendants as positions ‘supported’ by the project.”
DHS later sniffed that it was silly to make a fuss over a “single” error and posted a “corrected” version that removed “Oklahoma” — but left in the big revenue from taxes that in New Hampshire’s case it has not got.
The “corrected” document still claims that “approximately $10.7 million in local, state and federal tax revenue would be generated by annual operations, including sales tax and income tax.” Hey, maybe they mean in Merrimack, Oklahoma.
The estimate does acknowledge that the state would lose its property tax revenue — $281,765 for 2025 — if the building shifts to federal control, but projects a big boost of $410,123 a year in city and township taxes. Of course, that would only be generated if the 162 expected workers actually live in the community.
Needless to say, ICE insists that its numbers are based on “detailed data on New Hampshire’s economy,” despite the inclusion of estimated revenue streams the state entirely lacks.
But don’t worry. If any of the estimates are a little off, they can easily be fixed with a Sharpie. ICE’s plan to spend $38 billion on warehouse prisons in the next six months is sure to be a huge success, and if Tricia McLaughlin wasn’t leaving DHS, we’re sure she’d mercilessly mock you if you suggest otherwise.
Besides, by the time ProPublica or some other investigative journos find out where all the money ended up, a year from now, many of the principals will have relocated to countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the US.
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After scoring one of history’s most-watched Super Bowl halftime shows, Benito “Bad Bunny” Martínez Ocasio is ready to get back in front of cameras to lead the upcoming historical epic Porto Rico, which marks rapper René “Residente” Pérez Joglar’s directorial debut. The cinematic love letter to Puerto Rico boasts a stellar cast, with Edward Norton (Fight Club, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, American History X), Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Captain Fantastic), and Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men,Dune: Part Two, The Little Mermaid) joining Bad Bunny for his first leading role.
What could Porto Rico be about?
In addition to making his feature directorial debut with Porto Rico, Residente co-wrote the screenplay with Oscar-winning writer Alexander Dinelaris (Birdman). According to Deadline‘s exclusive report, Porto Rico is “a historical drama based on the life of Puerto Rican revolutionary José Maldonado Román, known as Águila Blanca (White Eagle), set on the island in the late 19th century. Maldonado Román fought against colonialism by leading a gang of ex-convicts to vindicate Puerto Rico as it sought its identity as a country.”
Deadline notes that Porto Rico’s story could change as production nears. Still, the project “blends historical scope with a visceral, lyrical approach and a gripping narrative inspired by true events.”
“I have dreamed of making a film about my country since I was a child. Puerto Rico’s true history has always been surrounded by controversy,” Residente said. “This film is a reaffirmation of who we are — told with the intensity and honesty that our history deserves.”
Norton expresses excitement to be a part of Porto Rico
“This film sits in a tradition of films we deeply love, from The Godfather to Gangs of New York, that both thrill us with visceral drama and iconic characters and eras while also forcing us to face up to the shadow story under the American narrative of idealism,” said Norton, who, in addition to Mortensen, is fluent in Spanish. “Everybody knows what a poet of language and rhythm René is. Now they’re going to see what a visual visionary he is as well. And bringing him and Bad Bunny together to tell the true story of Puerto Rico’s roots is going to be like a flame finding the stick of dynamite that’s been waiting for it.”
Nothing but love for Puerto Rico
Porto Rico sounds awesome. I love Puerto Rico. I’ve been to the Caribbean archipelago twice, once when I was fourteen, and then again in my early 30s. It’s a beautiful territory with gorgeous beaches, exotic cuisine, and lovely, friendly people. I would go back in a heartbeat. I like the passion I’m hearing from Residente and the rest of the team for Porto Rico, and I look forward to seeing what they bring to the table to help celebrate a place with such rich history.
TVLine has your exclusive first look at Friday's Drag Race, in which RuPaul introduces a third iteration of Snatch Game - and one queen is *not* excited.
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