Ahh, you're right. That makes more sense. :)

I thought the nurse would say the patient's line. Like he's a common enemy in a game, full of loot to drop when killed.

My thought was more along the lines of Russian propaganda needing to keep up the general narrative that Russia is not fighting a "fair" fight with Ukraine. They are fighting against the entire western world.

When the war drags on, and Russia keeps having setbacks, they will say it is because they are fighting the West.

If they really were fighting against all of NATO (they would be crushed), and were doing as well as they are now, that would be impressive instead of pathetic.

And if Putin ever is actually forced into peace talks where Russia gets less than they have been demanding, it is important for the Russian public to believe that this is a war Russia was fighting against the entire world, for their survival. Not a war against their much smaller neighbor in an attempt to expand borders.

He goes about it in a dumb way, but I do get the general idea of what he is doing... The theory being that he does not need to communicate things directly to media requests, because he can address them directly to the public through social media.

And whenever I read articles about some controversial thing around a company it either ends with "we have reached out but not heard back", or some canned response, clearly carefully crafted by the PR department. They typically do not add much of value.

I suppose it worked well enough for Tesla, and so he wants to apply it here. But Twitter is a different beast from Tesla, I'm not so sure he'll be happy with the results in the long term. He losses that buffer. That carefully crafted message that would get tacked on to every news article about the current controversy. Maybe he thinks those articles will instead include a tweet by him on whatever it is, but he is constantly putting his foot in his mouth.

Anyways, I guess I think it's a pretty bad move for him to make, but I do not think it is one that's going to harm the public in any way. PR is literally only there so the company can put out their version of the story. It never really gives any insight, just a spin.

Our next news story: "Google returns search results claiming the world is flat!"

I'm not familiar with this show, so I can't speak to its quality (I tried to watch some of it several years ago and quickly moved on).

But that aside... Of course Netflix is going to renew a dozen shows with tiny budgets before they renew a single show with a huge budget. That's not a cynical take it's just reality. The higher your budget, the better you have to perform. In Netflix HQ they were not deciding between keeping "Somebody Feed Phil" and "1899".

"1899" cost over $60 million. "Somebody Feed Phil" is 90% Phil's salary and I doubt the guy worth hundreds of millions is asking for all that much to be paid to eat and travel. Not to mention it was a show he ran on PBS originally, then went to pitch to Netflix after it got canceled. I doubt he is asking for much more than a PBS-sized salary. He is basically retired and enjoys this.

Maybe I should give it another try.

I'm not here to dump on the guy, but I did try watching it once years ago, and found him pretty annoying. And at the time I think I was not a fan of how it was structured? But I might be misremembering that.

In theory I'm the target audience. I like food shows. Competition, travel, documentary, instructional, comedy. But for whatever the reasons were, I dropped this one very quickly.

It lasting this long makes me think that maybe I missed something? Or maybe people are tuning in for different reasons than motivate me. If the draw is just "hanging out with friendly Phil", it may just not be made for me.

That's exactly what this is.

You've invested time or money into something, there's no sign of it paying off in any way, but you should continue on anyways because otherwise you are wasting the resources you've put in. And maybe, despite all indications, you just need to invest a little bit more for it to all pay off.

It applies as well to a gambler sitting at a slot machine, or buying lotto tickets as anything else.

Not that it would really work in the comic... but it seems like it could be improved if it was made clear that the guy on the bottom had been gradually finding more and more diamonds as he went, just not the jackpot he was hoping for.

Then maybe the message could be to not lose hope if you are showing improvement, just not at the pace you hoped for.