Arafael's Sacrificial Lamb

1977: Star Wars is released, featuring, of course, Darth Vader

(Pictured: Darth Vader)

1984: Director Todd Durham releases his Star Wars parody movie, Hyperspace, featuring Darth Vader inspired villain Lord Buckethead.

(Pictured: Hyperspace poster featuring two Jawa-esque aliens flying through space in a shopping trolley.)

1987: Hyperspace is released on video in the UK, under the new title Gremloids.

(Pictured: Gremloids cover in the style of the original Star Wars poster, featuring Lord Buckethead.)

To promote the film, Mike Lee, the owner of the distributing company, ran for parliament as Lord Buckethead. He ran in Margaret Thatcher's constituency, Finchley, in order to get on TV. Lord Buckethead was representing the Gremloids party.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead on TV with Margaret Thatcher.)

1992: Gremloids is re-released. Lord Buckethead rides again, this time against prime minister John Major in Huntingdon. (Here's a fun fact about Huntingdon: I was born there! :D) 87/92 Buckethead seems to have leaned pretty hard into the space supervillain thing, with campaign promises including 'demolish Birmingham to build a spaceport'.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead on TV with John Major. Other notable candidates include Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party.)

2017: comedian Jon Harvey, having recently watched Gremloids and learned of Lord Buckethead's candidacy for parliament, decides it's a great bit. He runs against Theresa May in Maidenhead. 2017 Buckethead seems to have a wackier and also more political approach, with campaign promises ranging from nonsense like 'nationalise Adele' to gesturing at actually sensible policies with stuff like 'lower the voting age to 16 and restrict voting after age 80'.

He also made an appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. As with his previous incarnation, he was a member of the Gremloids party.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead dabbing on stage with Theresa May.)

2018: Director Todd Durham asserts his legal ownership of Lord Buckethead. Jon Harvey opted not to go to court over Buckethead and handed over the reins. Todd Durham extended an invitation to anyone who wanted to be the 'authorised' Lord Buckethead.

(Pictured: the new Lord Buckethead.)

2019: Lord Buckethead, now played by journalist David Hughes, stood against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. He ran for the Monster Raving Loony Party, the UK's pre-existing gag candidate party. He ran with a similarly silly manifesto as the 2017 incarnation, but with a bit less of a political edge. His promises included 'All doorways to be increased by 1 foot (30 cm) in height' and 'Nigel Farage to be sold for parts'.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead and Count Binface square up.)

Meanwhile, Jon Harvey in his new persona Count Binface, also ran against Boris Johnson. Buckethead and Binface face off! Binface ran as an independent with a manifesto once again blending silly and semi-serious promises such as 'nationalising model railways' and 'giving £1 trillion a week to the NHS'. This was also I believe the debut of his promise to 'move the hand dryer in the men's toilet at Uxbridge's Crown and Treaty pub to a more sensible position'.

(Pictured: Count Binface presenting the offending hand dryer, inconveniently close to both the sink and the urinals.)

He has a point.

2021: Count Binface runs for the position of Mayor of London for the first time, with promises such as 'London to join the European Union'. He notably finished ahead of far right party UKIP.

2023: Count Binface runs in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election following Boris Johnson's resignation. He once again gets more votes than UKIP.

May 2024: Count Binface once again runs to be Mayor of London, debuting his now iconic 'build at least one affordable house' promise. Notably, he finished ahead of far right party Britain First.

(Pictured: Count Binface with Rishi Sunak. Also pictured: Monster Raving Loony Party candidate Sir Archibald Stanton with a ventriloquist's dummy.)

July 2024: Count Binface stands in the general election, running in Richmond and Northallerton against prime minister Rishi Sunak. He debuts his promise to cap the price of 99p flakes at 99p. This is his most successful election to date with 308 votes.

(Pictured: Count Binface with Andy Burnham. Also pictured: independent candidate Robert Pownell, dressed as a fox for his own reasons.)

June 2026: Count Binface stands in the Makerfield by-election against Andy Burnham, (recently) former Mayor of Manchester running for parliament with the intention of standing in the Labour Party leadership contest.

(Pictured: Count Binface on BBC's Newsnight.)

Let’s all remember that the man , and others like him wake up every day and decide they’re going to harm your friends , your family , innocents who have no way to defend themselves against the power they all wield . And they gladly do so to get a little more powerful than the day before

They don’t get to expect humanity when they’ve spent their miserable lives depriving us of our own

Renegade Legends: Side Jobs, Page 47

Let's be honest, most of us would respond the same way in Emi's shoes.

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There are 760,000 Australians on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the system that - if they feel like it and your personalised plan says you get to have it - provides funding for everything from personal hygiene care to support workers to therapies to assistive technology. It's already very hard for disabled people to get on the NDIS, regardless of your disability. It's near impossible to access most support and equipment without being on the NDIS. And the government has announced that they want that number to drop to 600,000 in four years. 160,000 of us cut off the Scheme - and countless more denied access. This will cause deaths. People will die and people will suffer because there is no safety net. The NDIS is the only option for most of us. Even private health insurance doesn't cover most of these things. Nobody will swoop in to save us.

The bill wants to give the (non disabled!) NDIS minister basically unlimited power to cut our funding. They're already planning what they'd do with that power. What rights they'll strip from us. What dignity and freedom they'll remove to make their budget look better.

The bill wants to force people to try every treatment out there before they're allowed to be on the NDIS. Including if the treatment is literally impossible to access. There’s a lot of us living in regional areas or out bush who can't just pop to the capital cities for specialists. This will especially hurt disabled First Nations people in regional and remote communities, who already experience limited access to healthcare. Oh, and it includes chemical restraint, too. The government has directly refused to exclude chemical restraint from the required process, calling it "trialling medication".

If you're australian and worried, the ABC did a good breakdown of the proposed changes.

I know australia stuff doesn't really pop up on the radar on this site, but I want everyone to know what's going on. What we're fighting for here. Your australian disabled friends might be NDIS participants fearing for their life, rights, and freedom. They might not be a participant and afraid these changes mean they never will have access. We deserve better. The government built a system with no backup plan, and now they want hundreds of thousands of disabled people to pay the price for their bad planning.

I am a raccoon biologist and one of the few people in the state allowed to take in captive bred raccoons that had been possessed illegally. The raccoon in the photos is Moonshine, but she is currently at the animal sanctuary where I work as I had been quarantining multiple new intakes from an abuse case. I still have two males (Rum Tum Tugger and Electra) left in my home enclosure as we are getting them neutered and then hopefully sending them to an AZA accredited zoo.

My handwriting is the same style as the teacher’s who I had when I was nine. I’m now twenty one and he’s been dead eight years but my i’s still curve the same way as his.

I watched the last season of a TV show recently but I started it with my friend in high school. We haven’t spoken in four years.

I make lentil soup through the recipe my gran gave me.

I curl my hair the way my best friend showed me.

I learned to love books because my father loved them first.

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TRAP CARD ACTIVATED

No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.

This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".

This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.

But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.

As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.

I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.

It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.

It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.

But I could not learn to read.