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Don Hertzfeldt, in addition to having a difficult name to spell right on the first time, is a singular talent in the world of animation. By which I mean there is nobody in animation quite like him. I know when I first saw Rejected, the best known Don Hertzfeldt short film. I was in a large canvas army tent a a scout camp. We called the tent The Moose. I don’t know why we called it that. But if you were part of the youth staff at this camp (I was) you spent what precious little downtime you had in The Moose. The Moose was our refuge, it was one of the few places with electricity, which we siphoned off from the meeting hall and kitchen (which it was behind) and we the staff were allowed to have all the sorts of contraband that wasn’t allowed in the rest of the camp, things like cokes and a DVD player. Interestingly, The Moose was the first place I ever saw the movie Bring it On, as well. But that’s unsupervised teenagers for you. We were still boy scouts, so the most risqué thing we could make ourselves watch was a PG-13 cheerleading movie, but it still felt transgressive. That’s why I still say “there must be some clovers in the atmosphere” anytime someone else says “It’s cold in here.” Where was I? The Moose. In the year 2002 (or maybe 3) youtube did not exist. The internet was around, and maybe you would hang around on AIM in the evenings, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that always lived in your pocket like it is now. Search engines didn’t exist or were terrible for actually finding things (we’ve gotten back to that for some reason). So most of the cool things that were on the internet were passed around from person to person “You’ve got to see this!” If you had a fancy enough computer you could burn a CD with some of the cool stuff ou downloaded and a friend could play it on their computer. Mostly this was music we downloaded off napster, but there were other things too. I know we didn’t have wifi in The Moose, so somebody probably had a low res burned CD or DVD that contained a bootleg of Rejected, Don Hertzfedlt’s movie on it. Rejected is a very good short film, i think that needs to be said up from (or 6 paragraphs in, whatever). Honestly, if you haven’t seen it, you probably should. It’s on YouTube now in glorious 1080p. The short film presents  to us as a collection of rejected animated ads for The Family Learning Channel  and then Johnson & Mills products, neither of which exist. The ads, such as they are, are nonsensical, and there’s not any question as to why they were rejected in this fictional situation. The shorts became more surreal and violent as the creator has a complete breakdown, with the cartoons completely breaking their own reality as the paper they are animated on crumples and fills with holes and eventually is completely destroyed with a silent scream. The first, and probably best known(?) clip in the short film is a character standing and holding a very large spoon next to a much smaller bowl of something. He complains that his spoon is too big, repeatedly. Then an anthropomorphic banana walks in and declares that it is a banana. It’s a funny bit of lol-random humor. And its the only thing it feels like the early internet remembered from the whole film. The two characters juxtaposed became one of the earliest memes, or shibboleths, of internet culture. Arguably a lot of the whole early internet humor landscape was birthed from the proliferation of that image. If you wanted to be edgy you also included the little fluffy creature screaming about a bleeding anus. But the short film isn’t about being funny, it’s about failure. it’s right there in the title. Of course the rejected ads aren’t very good at what they’re supposed to be doing, but that’s because they’re meant to show the tension between creativity and commerce. This animator can only get work shilling for corporations, and any attempt to express themselves honestly or try new things, is stamped down or rejected until the artist is completely destroyed. I like to think that if the early internet had paid more attention to the anti-capitalist message that the movie was actually trying to convey the first two decades of the 21st century might have gone at least a little differently. I think there’s a reason Don Hertzfeldt’s later works didn’t get nearly as popular, despite being better in most ways than Rejected. And that reason is that he leaned more into the darkness of the stories he was telling than the “random” humor. It’s not that his animated films stopped being funny, but the humor becomes more inextricable from the story he’s telling. The problem (not that it’s really a problem) is that the little clips in Rejected were to easy to divorce from the context in which they originally appeared. It wasn’t a funny joke, it was a funny joke meant to reflect the larger situation. Hertzfeld is still out there making cartoons. He has created a few feature-length productions, all still animated one frame at a time by one single animator, Don Hertzfeldt. I personally think It’s Such a Beautiful Day is his masterpiece, but World of Tomorrow Parts 1-3 are an impressive trilogy of shorts exploring identity and purpose, all through the lens of science fiction and it’s very clear that Hertzfeldt is continuing to push himself creatively. If you liked rejected, please seek out one of his later works if only to see where he’s gone since then. You could do a lot worse than The Meaning of Life or World of Tomorrow Part 1, both of which he's put on youtube for free. Or you can turn into a real sicko like me and buy all of his films on blu-ray from his website. 

I was at the beach all week, I turned of social media, didn't look at the news, and just read books, looked at the water, ate seafood, and watched Baywatch. I did however keep track of the things I would have tooted if I was using social media this week. so, here are some Toots From The Beach. They have a combination DVD/VHS player here, but not a single DVD or VHS tape to be found.  Baywatch the “complete” blu ray series doesn’t actually include the last 2 seasons (Hawaii) and those haven’t been released on physical media at all.  241 episodes of Baywatch, and the first one I randomly find playing on tubi is one I’ve seen before.  Getting my plex server accessible outside my home network is so very cool again.  Because one came up for cheap on eBay, I finally bought a copy of the last published edition of VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever. So soon I will shelve that alongside the 2 Leonard Maltin movie guides, building my own pre-2021 movie reference shelf in my hypothetical library.  Feeling kind of sore after swimming in the ocean yesterday, I don’t use those muscles enough.  Probably not going to, but I’m tempted to run by a pawn shop and see how many vhs tapes I can buy for $20 to leave behind with this VCR.  I think this episode of Baywatch might be Point Break? Sand dollars at this store are a buck fifty. Inflation is hitting everywhere.  In a real failure for accessibility, the Pitch Perfect captions include [singing], [singing continues] [vacalozing] and [pop song mashup playing] instead of the actual lyrics of songs.  It’s not that the bathroom is particularly small, but I have banged my head on the towel rack multiple times  Baywatch is the only show where every episode is “very special” Watching Galaxy Quest and the streaming version has restored the 3 different aspect ratios, one of my first and most favorite aspect ratio experiences 

Programming note: I’m at the beach this week, so don’t expect much from me next week.  I’m a linux user, but I try pretty hard to not be a Linux Guy. The kind of guy who espouses how great linux is at every opportunity. The guy that looks down on people who use other operating systems. The kind of Guy who says “I use linux” in the same way some people used to say “I don’t have a TV.” But I do use linux. I’ve been using it in some form or fashion most days for going on four years (maybe, I could probably check my newsletter archives and see if I talked about it there). But this week I had a linux problem. I have a KVM switch that i use to switch my monitor, mouse and keyboard (among a couple other periferials) between my work laptop (which runs windows) to my home computer that runs linux. For the whole time I’ve used linus I’ve used the Pop!_OS distribution, which was designed to be very gaming friendly. and it was! But in a recent update System76, who make Pop!_OS decided to launch their new desktop environment on the world. It’s called COSMIC (I don’t know if the all caps is necessary, but System 76 is weird about punctuation and capitalization) and its… not very good. Technically it’s still in open beta, which is sometimes code for “It doesn’t work very well” but it’s also the default when you install or upgrade. So I upgraded and gave it a shot. To be clear, A Desktop Environment is the thing you see on you computer screen, it’s not quite the same thing as the operation system, which is the software running in the background to make everything else work. Linux is the Kernel, or core of the operating system, the distribution, or distro, is the particular flavor of the software onto of the kernel, that defines how things work and the desktop environment is how it displays everything. Since one of the core concepts behind open source tools in general, and linux in particular, is customization, you aren’t limited to the default desktop environment that comes with your distribution. Lots of people like to try out different ones trying to find the specific environment that they like. And if they’re turbo dorks, to go a step further and customize the desktop environment even further.  So I updated to COSMIC on Pop!_OS, even if I had some reservations. and what I found wasn’t great. Things mostly worked, but that “mostly” was actually less than it was previously. The real kicker came when I was using my KVM switch to jump between my work computer and my gaming computer at the end of my work day. I pushed the button and… nothing. Previously it was a quick change, I could log into my computer and get a quick round of Splay the Spire 2 in after work. But now, the computer really struggled. It showed me a blank screen, and in my troubleshooting, I was able to get it to start working again by power cycling my monitors. Not an ideal solution, but at least it was something.  But then even that stopped working after a week or so. I finally had to force power cycle the whole computer but when I did that something went wrong (no idea what specifically) and my boot drive stopped working. I could boot the computer, but the encryption tool couldn’t see the hard drive to decrypt and load the OS and my stuff. I did a fair amount of searching for answers on reddit and the System76 support page, but none of the solutions provided cleared the issue. I eventually managed to boot into the computer through a live flash drive, where I could identify and temporarily decrypt the boot drive, but that still didn’t let me boot from that drive when I needed to. this took place over a few days, and eventually I had resigned myself to losing the data on the computer. Thankfully there wasn’t much of value. My games are all re-downloadable and most of them store save information in the cloud so after redownloading I can jump right back in. And by booting in with the flash drive, I could copy anything irreplaceable onto another computer over the network. This mostly consisted of cat pictures and recordings of my podcast.  I had also decided at this point, that since I had to start over, I might as well do so with a new operation system. Pop!_os had lost my trust and I had been thinking about switching anyway. This was as good an opportunity as I was going to get. I weighed my options, watched some youtube videos and eventually settled on Bazzite, because like Pop!_OS, it was designed to be easy for me, and despite being a linux user, I actually do like when things are easy sometimes.  So I installed Bazzite and, at least 3 days in, things are pretty good! I got lucky in that my second drive was still fully accessible (guess that wasn’t encrypted) and so roughly half of my library was already waiting for me when I booted up. Still had to download a few things, mostly the games that are up for the Best Game Hugo Award, because I want to put a little time into each one before voting. 

Here’s something I’m almost definitely not going to do: Start printing my own blu-rays. I have a running list of tv shows that have never had a physical media release. A bunch of shows are on the list! Over 2 dozen at last count. Some of them are obscure/never quite successful enough to get a home media release (Abby’s, Roc, Bunheads, What Just Happened?‽ with Fred Savage) and some are streaming-only show that were made in the last 10 years or so when all the streamers decided they want you to pay them every time you watch a show and so never released them in any other format (Russian Doll, How to With John Wilson) or somehow a combination of both (We Are Lady Parts, Reservation Dogs). All of these shows I would pay money for if I could have physical copy to sit on my shelves. I would also then, of course, rip them to my plex server so I could watch them more continently. Yes, I am aware of the irony.  But a thought occurred to me this week. I have a blu ray drive. I mostly use it to rip movies and shows, but it has burning capability. Many of the shows on the list are available for “Purchase” on digital storefronts. I put purchase in scare quotes there because as the EULA states (and the courts have confirmed) you aren’t actually buying a thing. Instead you are entering into a licensing agreement where the company who owns the rights to the movie will allow you to access it (usually via streaming, occasionally via downloading) for as long as their good will allows. You don’t own it, you paid for indefinite access, and the company has the right to turn off that access at any point eat their sole discretion. You know what they can’t take back? The DVD on my shelf. Which is why, with very few exceptions, I don’t “buy” movies or shows on those platforms. I got burned on one of my very first purchases, where the company revoked my access to a season of a show that they didn’t want me to have anymore and I’ve been incredibly unwilling ever since. And if I do “buy” a movie or show that way, I do so knowing full well that it’s only temporary access that I paid for. I don’t have any illusions about that. Back to my thought. I have a blu ray burning drive, and you can buy burnable blu rays. You can even buy ones with printable labels, either with a specific disk printing machine or desktop inkjet printers that have a disc printing attachment. and DVD cases can be bought in the same store that burnable disks are available for purchase. So theoretically, I could buy the shows digitally and then make my own physical copies. Now of course to do that, I would need to find a way to circumvent the DRM that is obviously going to be on those video files, and as previously discussed, I wouldn’t actually be buying them, as I am well aware. So really what this whole thing boils down to is piracy with more steps. Which is why I’m almost definitely not going to do it. Probably. I don’t have room for the printer for one thing. One show I don’t need to print my own DVDs for is Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place, a sitcom from the late 90s/early 00s about well.. two guys, a girl and a pizza place. It was one of the dozen or shows that came out after the success of Friends, being a sitcom focused on a group of young attractive people in a city. There were a bunch of these and I watched many of them, despite never being a big fan of Friends. Many of them tried to have a unique twist, or a catchy name (rarely both). There was It’s Like, You Know… (punctuation included) which was “Friends Crossed with Seinfeld, but in LA and Jennifer Gray plays herself” or Zoe, Duncan, Jack and Jane which was “Friends, but they’re even younger, and Selma Blair plays Zoe” and, later came what was the true successor to Friends, in my opinion, How I Met Your Mother which took the light serialization of Friends (“we were on a break,” the apartment swap, etc) and dialed it up to maximum. It was still an episodic show, but there were ongoing storylines, and an overarching narrative, even if they were making a lot of it up as they went. They didn’t quite stick the landing, but for most of the run it was really good.  But we were talking about a Pizza Place. One of the Two Guys was Ryan Reynolds, and I’d argue this show is what helped him move towards being a household name. The other Guy and Girl aren’t as famous, but you’ve probably seen the Girl if you watched Monk, where she played Natalie, Monk’s second assistant. The Pizza Place in Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place is where the two guys worked, at least in the first two seasons. In the first season their manager and one customer were mainline cast members but they got cut for season two (wisely). Season two also introduced two more regulars in the form of love interests for some of the characters, and that’s when the show really hit its stride. One of those love interests? A pre-Rookie, pre-Castle, pre-Firefly Nathan Fillion. Nathan Fillion will always be “That Guy from Two Guys A Girl and a Pizza Place” first, and all those other roles second or lower. I feel like the 2000s were the last gasp of the multi-cam sitcom, where even though Two and a Half Men and Big Bang theory made it to 2015 and 2019 respectively, Bo the started in the 00s and I don’t know if we will ever have a multi-cam show last as long as either of those again. They all got beaten out by single camera shows like The Office, Arrested Development and Malcolm in the Middle. But that’s probably a newsletter for a different day.  While Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place doesn’t doesn’t hit quite the level of serialization as How I Met Your Mother,  it’s at least Friends-level. There are ongoing plots, and relationships grow and change, even if most episodes are still pretty self contained. I watched most of the episodes when they originally aired, but couldn’t tell you specific plots of any specific one because it was so long ago, although I do remember the bigger narrative arcs. But that’s changing as I’m more than half way through the second season. And now when I watch an episode it feels like a 50/50 chance if I’m going to remember the episode or not. It’s a really weird experience to watch something and remember it as it happens. I can tell what the punchlines are going to be in advance, but typically only 30 seconds in advance at most. It’s like experiencing a 22 minute long session of deja vu, only not as disorienting as the sounds. Now if only someone will release both seasons of It’s Like, You Know… on DVD before I have to take matters into my own hands. 

I’m taking a mini vacation this weekend, so posting from my phone. There was an arc in Nancy (the comic) a couple weeks ago where Sluggo found a cat. It was very cute. https://www.gocomics.com/nancy/2026/04/24 Try to do something that makes you happy every day this week.  There’s a tradition of sorts on Big Brother where after contestants cast their live votes to evict, they shout out messages to friends and loved ones who are watching live back at home. It’s one of the places where they know they will be seen live, so what they say will make it to air. If I were ever on Big Brother(not very likely), instead of shouting out people, I would instead shout out portions of soliloquies from Shakespeare. This idea is very funny to me and probably very few other people. 

It was Earth Day this week. That’s the sort of day that I both like for existing and laugh about the commodification of. "Today is the day we care about earth. The rest of the days are for doing whatever." Obviously that’s not the point, but the earth is in trouble and making a day about it feels like a marketing stunt made up by companies who want to act like they’re doing the right thing without actually making significant meaningful changes.  I got a little nostalgic this week. Thinking back on the person I was 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. Hank Green likes to point out that the person he was no longer exists, so he doesn’t try to do things in service of a person who isn’t around anymore. But I think That idea only goes so far. We do lots of things to commemorate the ones we’ve lost and I don’t see why that has to stop just because the person who is gone is our past self. For the most part I like who I used to be. And for the most part I like who I am now. But I do wonder if the person I used to be would like me. My opinions and worldview and priorities have changed a lot in that time, but it was always a gradual transition. If you were to plop (for example) College Freshman Kevin down in front of me, I don’t think he and I would see eye to eye on a lot of things.  But there has to be some continuity of self doesn’t there? I am who I am because of who I was. I made decisions without knowing the eventual outcome. I’m only as rational as I can be in the given moment, but that guy I used to be made the choices that put me here. It’s his fault, both for the bad things and just as much for the good. I can legitimately trace back where I am both emotionally and where I am physically located to decisions made either by me or those around me as early as 3rd grade.  In third grade my mom got laid off from her job as a software engineer (we called them computer programmers back in the day). She decided not to go back to work, which made it possible for us to decide to homeschool when I was in sixth grade and my needs were not being effectively met by the public school I was attending. Spending more time at home because of homeschooling, meant that I could more easily participate in my local community theater. I grew up in that theater, for certain values of growing up. I worked on lights and sound and built sets and occasionally acted. That exposed me to the idea of being involved in the theater full time, which led me to picking a college to attend where I could do that. Even though I went to college to be an engineer, I learned that wasn’t for me and I switched to Theater. I know I picked a school where I could change majors, even though I didn’t admit it to myself at the time, it absolutely factored into the decision of where to go. Because I was in the theater program, I met a grad student who said she really liked the playwriting professor at Miami University, not to mention that my favorite theater history professor knew the theatre faculty chair there. I moved to Ohio where I met my eventual partner in the same program. She eventually graduated and moved to Texas for her PHD. While we lived in Austin I got a job at the Apple Store (because of a guy I met in college!) which eventually became a trainer position, which eventually lead to my being able to eta more prestigious training job at another company who eventually laid me off. If I hadn’t gotten laid off when I did, I wouldn’t’ have gotten the job I have now, which lets me work remote which facilitated a move to The Woods where I live now, and we are in the earliest stages of building a house.  Which means there’s a guy outside walking around with a stick and a GPS tracker while I write this because my mom got laid off when I was in third grade.  But I could do a different path entirely though my personal history and still end up with a guy walking around with a stick and a gps tracker. It’s very easy to chart a path and assign cause & effect when looking back through time. It’s much harder on the other hand to predict what choices we make now will end up being responsible for in 10 or 20 years time. I don’t talk about my job much, but I work in an industry and at a company that significantly changes people’s lives. I cant talk about what my company does it in a public forum for regulatory reasons (really) but I have a small hand in changing the lives and futures of literally thousands of people on a regular basis (typically for the better, I hope). They will never know who I am, and I will never know where they end up or how things are different because of what I do behind a computer screen. It’s impossible to know.  But that’s always true. One of the lessons of the TV show The Good Place is that everything is too complicated. there’s only so much we can control and the outcomes of our choices are mostly invisible to us. I think that’s one reason multiverse stories have been popular. We like to think about the could-have-beens, the small things that could have been big things, and change our lives in completely unpredictable lives. What if you could see how those choices panned out differently? Wouldn’t it be cool to know? So yeah, I do think I owe something to the past version of me who made the choices that, intentionally or not, put me where I am today. I owe him my thanks. I don’t love every choice he made, and I can’t make all of his dreams come true. But I can remember who he was. And I can also owe thanks to everyone else who mad their own little decisions that lead to this present moment. The entire world is an unknowable tapestry of accidental causes and unpredictable effects. We just have to do the best with where we find ourselves now, and hope the small choices we make benefit the world writ large. 

Sometimes I'm nostalgic for a time that didn't exist. But that doesn't mean we can't still make the future better. I picked up some overpriced (thanks AI Bubble) hard drives and am in the process of moving my plex server to them. At my current rate of expansion, I should probably be good for another 10 years. I'd like to think it's an interesting process, but mostly it consists of me watching progress bars. Folding Ideas is a youtube channel I like. It's a media criticism channel, mostly. Except you probably know it because of Line Goes Up, the documentary about NFTs that kind of killed NFTs. He posted a new video this weekend called Why Was I Invited to Mr. Beast's Studio. It starts off with that relatively simple question, why was Dan Olson of Folding ideas invited to visit the studios of Mr. Beast's Beast Games season 2? but it's not content to stop there, or let it be a studio tour vlog. It becomes a dissection of Mr. Beast as a company, saying things that I've kind of thought about before but taking them to the inevitable conclusion. Plus its funny. I've watched maybe 3 Mr. Beast videos in my life and Nothing about them has made me the least bit interested in watching more. That's all I've got in me today. Go outside. Pay attention to the weather.

Before the format change, I used to do a weekly Stuff I’m consuming segment in this newsletter. Stuff I’m reading/watching/eating/playing etc. so I figured why not do a whole issue of the newsletter with multiple categories as an occasional thing. Stuff I’m reading: I’ve always got a few different books going. On my phone I’ve been downloading Mickey Haller (AKA The Lincoln Lawyer) books as they become available in Libby. This means I’m. It really reading them in order but they’re mostly standalone and the continuity that does exist isn’t very important. I do really love a courtroom drama and these novels scratch that itch pretty well. I'm also making my way through Laserblasted, by Micael W Lewis, which is an audacious piece of novel-length anti-fan-fiction that tries to turn the well despised (by everyone but Leonard Maltin) science fiction film about a teen in the desert with a raygun into something actually awesome. I'm not sure he fully succeeds, but its fun to see him trying. In the audiobook space I’ve made my way through one and a half Dungeon Crawler Carl books. This series just got picked up for a TV adaptation so if you haven’t heard of it previously you probably will soon. It’s about a guy and his ex girlfriend’s cat getting forced into a deadly stakes planet-wide reality TV show after an alien race kills almost everyone on Earth. The whole thing is formatted like a video game and they’re surprisingly funny for such a dark premise. The series has eight books so far and while I was reluctant to start I have enjoyed them. They’re not earth shattering literature but they accomplish what they set out to do very well. I’m about half way through Kate Beaton’s graphic novel memoir Ducks about her time working in the Canadian oil sands to pay off student debt for two years. It’s a slice of life drama, but also about the alienation of being forced into life as a cog in a very big machine. Stuff I’m eating: I made some Cincinnati style chili this week and it was a pretty wild experience. I have previously found complex recipes for making it from scratch, but for an even more authentic experience I used a packet of pre-made commercial mix. After making it (I.e. mixing the packet together with water, some tomato paste and a pound of ground beef) and simmering for an hour I topped some hotdogs with it and it took me all the way back to the two years I lived in Ohio as a grad student. Also: every time I bring this up I have to clarify that Cincinnati style chili isn’t actually chili like your thinking of other than it’s heavily spiced and contains ground beef. It’s an entirely different flavor profile, but once you accept that, it’s pretty tasty. I certainly enjoyed it. Stuff I’m playing: The Slay the Spire 2 early access started about a month ago and I already have about 36 hours of playtime logged. Which feels about right. I’ll often play a single run before work in the morning. The first Slay The Spire game was arguably the impetus for the recent boom in rogue like deck building games, and so the possibility of a sequel was pretty exciting. Being in early access there are going to be lots of updates and changes over the next few years, but it already is quite playable and a good refinement of what the first game did well. I got to play Netrunner in human meat space this week, which I haven’t done in a long time. It’s a very fun 2-player asymmetric game where one side is an evil corporation an the other is a hacker trying to prevent the company from having success in its goals. The game has been maintained by a group of fans after being abandoned by its original publisher. Which means it’s totally free to play. I downloaded and printed out the cards I was using this week and I can do the same for any expansions I want to try in future games. Stuff I’m watching: I’m watching a log of TV as usual. There are so many shows. There’s The Pitt, Abbott Elementary, The Comeback, the Scrubs revival, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, Ghosts, Matlock, Taskmaster, Very Important People, Jet Lag: The Game, and Kamen Rider Zeztz. And those are just the shows currently airing. I have also discovered (10 years after stating a plex server) that my plex server has a button that will play a random episode of anything in my TV library. Which has been incredibly liberating. For a little while I had ErsatzTV up and running, which is a very cool program that allows you to program your own TV channels with media you own, and then brows a digital channel guide like it’s the 20th century. It was a very good way to pull back on decision paralysis with only 10-15 channels to pick and no control of what was showing when I started watching, I could just toon and see what was playing. And I did that for a whole! But like TV of yore, if you didn’t started watching the second a program started you just had to go with it. Or you could go launch the episode in the plex server, but then why bother with the faux TV at all? What I decided I really wanted was no choice at all, and with the shuffle button I get just that. I push the button, spin the metaphorical wheel and watch what plays. Now there are shows where this works better than others, anything that’s too heavily serialized could feel weird dropping into the middle of for a single random episode but this has been less of a problem for me. I think there’s two reasons, first, most TV on my server isn’t too heavily serialized. I tend to like TV shows where the creators understand and take advantage of the episode as a unit of storytelling. Second, most of the serialized show I own, I have already watched so it’s more like revisiting an old memory rather than risking spoiling some major twist. And even in those rare occasions where it’s otherwise, good TV shows tell you enough of what’s going on for you to follow them. TV used to always exist like this. You tuned in and watched that episode, if it was in syndication there wasn’t even an expectation that you had seen every single thing that had happened before, and the writers know this and dealt with it appropriately. It’s not like every episode is a bunch of exposition dumps, but if you pay attention you get what you need. So what has popped up on plex shuffle? A bunch of great stuff! I’ve gotten random episodes of Law & Order, Star Trek and The Big Bang Theory, recaps of which I’ll mostly skip other than to note the most heavily serialized of those is The Bog Bang Theory, but even dropping into random late season episodes was fine. I got a mid-season 1 episode of The Sopranos, episode 11 specifically. And The Sopranos is one of those shows that revolutionized TV storytelling, with its anti-hero and long ongoing stories, but this episode was just fine by itself. Tony learns a member of his crew might be a snitch and has to deal with it. The whole episode was great, paranoid storytelling. Do I know what came before or after? No! Because I’ve never actually watched The Sopranos all the way through. But I had no trouble following the action. Good TV is good TV. Some cartoons crossed my path and those were fun and nostalgic. I got an episode of Invader Zim where he was kidnapped by aliens even more incompetent than he was, some Ninja Turtles where they have to work with a retired superhero to fight Shredder, and an episode of the Clerks animated series which remains better than its 6 episode run would have you believe. I watched one of the very last episodes of Smallville, season 10 episode 19 (of 21) and even three episodes from the end of the series I was able to follow along just fine. Like The Sopranos, I never finished watching Smallville but I was able to pick up seasons on DVD piecemeal over the years so I own it all now. And maybe now I’ll go watch some more! The shuffle button also pushed me to try another show that has long been on my TBW stack, Stargate Atlantis. After a random episode where I had enough fun, I decided to go back and watch from the start. There’s someone about that 2000s era of sci-fi shows that just hits right for me. The third episode is even (sort of) an homage to the movie Apollo 13 and you know I’m not immune to moon propaganda. Stuff I’m listening: On April 14 They Might Be Giants’ latest album The World is to Dig hits streaming services, but if you’re cool you can buy the digital download for nine bucks which comes out to fifty cents per song. A great deal. I’ve only listened through it once in its entirely, and that’s hardly enough to make a confident review. But I think I can easily say that it’s the sort of thing you are likely to enjoy if you are likely to enjoy albums by They Might Be Giants. And I do. Stuff I'm looking at: This picture of an eclipse taken during the Artemis II mission. I could stare at this for hours. YOU can look at the full resolution version here https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e009301/art002e009301~orig.jpg

I am not immune to moon propaganda I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. I loved (and love) the movie Apollo 13, as well as the documentary For All Mankind (not to be confused with the AppleTV alternate history series of the same name, which is good but not great). I grew up watching Star Trek and still watch Star Trek. I love the idea of going to space. It’s the sort of thing that represents the best that humanity can be. Nobody can go to space alone. The only way to do it is through enormous effort and collaboration. From the deep understanding of math and physics and astronomy to give us the understanding that it’s even possible to the technicians and mechanics and other employees making the machines that send us to space to everyone involved in day to day operations of every part of space travel. I watched the Artemis II mission launch on Wednesday evening. I watched as four people (along with the help of so many more) sat on top of a rocket getting ready to go farther away from earth than any human ever has. The first four people to go beyond low earth orbit since the 1970s when the Apollo program ended. I cried watching the rocket. I expected to, and I did. Space travel is humanity doing the impossible. We do not belong in space. There is nothing about it (or the moon) that is even a little bit hospitable to human life. It almost seems purpose built to kill us, and that’s putting aside how hard it is to even get there. I don’t really know if we need to go back to the moon. I’m pretty sure there aren’t a bunch of secrets that can only be uncovered by being physically present there instead of sending robots and rovers. I know for a fact one of the most ridiculous things that will be happening on an upcoming moon mission is that spare compute time on the lunar rover will be used to calculate pi in an incredibly silly way. I know this, because I helped pay for the project. I even have a mission patch. And the calculation we come up with will be less accurate than what we already f know pi to be! That’s not the important thing though. There will be real science happening on the moon missions. I know that. But. But. I cannot cheer for humanity going back to the moon and not think about all of the other, very possible things we should and could also be doing. Putting humans on the moon is impossible. Curing Tuberculosis is possible, we have a cure, and have since the 1950s but it’s still the world’s deadliest communicable disease. Solving homelessness is possible, there are more empty housing units in the country on a given day than there are homeless people.  Solving world starvation is possible, take 10% of Elon Musk’s wealth. So even as I cheer the Artemis Program I still think about all the other places we can be putting the immense power and strength humanity has as a society if we just choose to do so. I don’t even think there is a contradiction here. Going to the moon proves we can do impossible things, even things that don’t need to be done, when there is the will and the attention to do so. Of course, the Artemis program is also having its funding cut by the current administration. The SLS (Space Launch System) has been flagged for termination in recent budgets, and that’s shows to me how fickle and fragile this whole enterprise is. The original Apollo missions stopped (in part) due to lack of attention and it’s entirely possible that Artemis could hit that apathy even quicker. What I’d really like to see is even more international cooperation, we already have the European Space Agency who provided the European Service Module which is a critical component of the Orion spacecraft. Getting more countries on-board could absolutely help balance out some of the inconsistencies caused by the whims of a single state executive. Space travel shouldn't be a nationalistic endeavor (frankly nothing should be) it should be something we do because we can only do it through cooperation. And because Victor Glover, the pilot on the Artemis 2 mission, who is about a day away from being the farthest away from earth that any other human has ever been, listens to it every monday morning, here's a link to Whitey on the Moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

Its hard to come up with something to write about here every week. One of the big things that can make it easier, however, is if I put some thought into it over the course of the week, rather than just sitting down at the computer and letting my thoughts spill out freeform on Sunday morning. I'm sorry in advance, but this is the latter kind. It's the end of March, which means I did the thing where I remembered I started this newsletter back in march of 2018, but not the specific date so I have to go look up the original send date for the first one was March 11, 2018. Eight years? That can't be right. But it is. I also took this opportunity to make an offline archive of all the newsletters I sent in 2025, so I have them for posterity. As a result of doing that I can also say I wrote about sixty thousand words last year, which also feels incorrect.  But the trick is to just keep putting the words down, and eventually they add up. There are wild turkeys outside my office window this morning. The onomotopia of "gobble" really does a great job of conveying how they sound. There was a Criterion Collection flash Sale this week, where all in-stock discs were 50% off for 24 hours. I must have put in my order quickly enough that I was near the top of the send list because I got my movies yesterday.  As I almost alwasy do, I used a randomizer to pick a movie from the collection and buy it without necessarily knowing anything about it. This time the randomizer landed on Spine #100 The Beastie Boys Music Video Anthology. The Beastie Boys were a rather popular rap trio (and a DJ) that are popular enough I don't feel lke I need to introduce them here. But they were in that prime era of the 90s when music videos were a huge deal. The first 18 of their music videos are collected on 2 discs. But what's even cooler is that each video comes with multiple alternate versions of the songs, including remixes and acapella versions. And even cooler than that is each video comes with alternate angles as well. One of the cool things that DVDs can do, but was never really taken advantage of even int heir heyday was alternate video and audio tracks. Because of the way the discs were (and are) made, you can seamlessly switch between different angles or audio tracks while watching. The most common use for this is commentary tracks on movies, which have sadly fallen a bit out of fashion except for the hardcroe movie nerds like myself. I watched a nearly 3 hour long movie with it's directors commentary track this week and it gave me an even deeper understanding and enjoyment of the movie which I already liked. The Movie was Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy which is a dramatization of the original production of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado, a comic opera set in feudal Japan that, as Mike Leigh puts it, is as Japanese as steak and kidney pie. It's a good movie, check it out. But back to the Beastie Boys. The Beastie Boys Video Anthology takes advantage of the technical options that a DVD provides, the intention is that you can pick a version (storyboard, alternate angles, etc) of a music video and an audio track from the multiple versions of the song and watch them however you want, even switching between them as you go. This is very cool, and such an underutilized feature of DVDs as a medium. What's funny, is it was so underutilized, that the remote on my DVD player doesn't have an easy way to switch between them. My very first DVD player had an "Angle" button on it right next tot he "Audio" button because the expectation was that all DVDs would be using this feature in the future. but almost none of them do, so it has been depreciated to save money on an extra button I guess. But hopefully I can still manage to figure it out. Worst case, the disc lets you preset a combination and watch them that way. Two other movies I picked up were Basquiat and Nightmare Alley (2021) the first is an unconventional biopic about a painter in the 90s played by Geoffery Wright and the second is Guiellermo del Toro's remake of the older movie with the same name, about a carnival conman. What's important to note abotu both is that they are presented in both their original color forms, but also with Black & White re-gradings. Which means I am now very close to having a complete collection of all the movies with a black and white regrade of an originally color release. I have 18 movies that fit this definition, and I think there are (at most) 3 more in the wild. For the record, the ones I have, in the rough order I acquired them: The Mist Johnny Mnemonic Logan Parasite Mad Max Fury Road Texasville Godzilla Minus One Doctor X Hush Mother Shin Godzilla Sympathy for Lady Vengeance Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Film Head of the Family Hideous Nickelodeon Basquiat Nightmare Alley You will note that Zack Snyder's Justice League is not on that list, and that is because there has never been a physical release fo the black and white version (Justice is Grey) so I will not be including it.  The last 3 are relatively unknown, and as such I'm keeping a lid on their names for the time being. I have it on good authority that one of them only had 75 blu-rays ever printed of the movie, which is ridiculous. What's more ridiculous is that I may be able to get my hands one of them, but it's far from guaranteed at this point. Frankly the one that only ever had a region B Japanese DVD release will be easier to get. I am possibly the only person in the world attempting to accomplish this task, and that makes it all the more exciting. 

First, a weather report:  It's a weird week to be a person who was once a huge fan of the works of Joss Whedon. The Buffy reboot pilot got scrapped, Firefly announced they're doing an animated series with the original voice cast (neither of which include Joss Whedon's involvement) and Nicholas Brendon, the actor who played Xander on Buffy the Vapire Slayer died at 54 years old, at least in part to a congenital heart defect. I wasn't really following any of these things closely, but I'm pretty sure we don't need a Firefly reboot, but it was sure a lot of news to happen in a short period of time an a specific subject. Oh, and David Boreanaz is filming a pilot for a reboot of The Rockford Files. I hope that goes well. I like the Rockford Files. I think I'm going to make some shortbread today.  When I was in undergrad, I spent a semester as a student teacher, teaching theater (my specialty) to a group of high school students not that much younger than me.  I did my best to create an air of authority, using a metal attaché case instead of a backpack for my supplies, wearing a suit jacket and a tie most days. I even cut my hair short, something I was always loath to do (and still am, I like being a long haired hippie freak).  The Texas public school system has a unique institution calle the University Interscolastic League or UIL. UIL handles state wide athletic, academic, musical and artistic competitions for all the schools in the state. The state football competition? UIL. Going to a marching band competition? UIL sets the rules and is the governing body. Speech, debate, literary criticism, or calculator skills which is one I just learned about when looking up their events? UIL. Theater? UIL. The fact that the same governing body behind Texas high school football also runs a statewide theater competition is pretty funny to me. But the upside of that is that it means almost every public school in Texas has some form of theater program. This mattered more when I was thinking about becoming a theater teacher, but I still think it’s good that there is that much access for those students to the performing arts. The downside of this is that the creation of theater started to be treated like a sport. There’s one theatrical competition category and it’s One-Act Play. And because they’ve turned creative expression into a competition there’s a bunch of rules that go along with it. The easiest of these to grasp is the time limit. One act plays must be one-act long, but nobody agrees on how long an act should be. Aristotle in his literal book about theater said that a play should be as long as it needs to be and no longer. But that’s not very helpful. Never fear, the University Interscholastic League has the answer. One act is not longer than 40 minutes exactly.  In UIL if your play goes over 40 minutes by even one second, you are disqualified. And that 40 minutes starts the moment the lights come up or the first sound is heard. Before that you have 7 minutes to put up your entire set.  Oh yeah, because this is a standardized competition, each theater team has the exact same 28 piece combination of flats, platforms stairs and pylons to work with in constructing the set. Each one painted in glorious neutral gray. So when your school team is traveling to a local competition you don’t have to bring a whole set, just tubs full of stage dressing and props and costumes.  The whole thing is pretty weird. Because of the 40 minute time limit schools most commonly do extremely cut down scripts of longer plays. It’s not that there aren’t great one-act plays out there but there are more full-length ones too. So UIL One-Act competition is a great way to see good plays cut down to the bones.  In my semester as a student teacher, I saw a production of the musical Pippin that had all the songs cut, for example. I do not recommend Pippin without the songs.   I do acknowledge that creative limitations can inspire interesting and unpredictable solutions,  yet the strict adherence to rules creates a sense of fear more than it does one of inspiration based on my limited experience with the program.  Students are terrified of going over the time limit. The most common sound in the auditorium during a competition is the collection beeps at the start of every play when each stage manager in the audience clicks the start button on their stopwatch to confirm the play don’t run long.  And the best plays can and do get disqualified because of length. It happened to one of the best plays I saw when I was participating as a student teacher. And the response to it happening was one of devastation for everyone. My class wasn’t excited that they might movie forward on a technicality because another play went 15 seconds too long, they knew that could have been them and they felt terrible for the disqualified team.  Because “don’t go over 40 minutes” seems easy enough, except theater is a living breathing artform, and when taking an extra beat of reaction or accidentally including a line you rehearsed with for weeks but cut at the last minute for the sake of time could cost you everything, it’s not exactly an environment conducive to outstanding theater. Plus, the actors can’t see the time clock! So they only have their best guess as to if they are running fast or slow.  The official clock is the one held by the single judge of the competition. Did I mention the contests have a single judge? Not even a panel of 3? So if that single judge doesn’t like a choice in your play, that is too bad! Maybe she thinks Oscar Wilde plays simply cannot be effective without large bustles on all the women. Put aside  that you didn’t have the money for bustles or that you might not be doing a period accurate production to begin with. The judge’s ruling is final.  So between the strict rules and arbitrary nature of Judges’ decisions the best play does not always win. Which I guess could be a good thing if you are trying to instill in your students the idea that life is unfair, or that people will be put in power over you and make decisions you have to just sit back and accept without question. So maybe that is working.  But all of that is to say I remember going to one of the first tier UIL one-act competitions and seeing an absolutely amazing production of Lorca’s play Blood Wedding.  This production rejected the Unit Set entirely, no grey flats for them. Instead the entire cast became the set. They stood as walls staring at the actions of he actors, judging and always watching, or they scattered to become the trees in the forest. There were no entrances or exits, just moments where a cast member stopped bing scenery and became part of the scene. And the rest of the movement was ritualized as well. It was a really cool idea and served to story well. I don’t think they made it to finals. I guess their judge liked walls. 

ibraries. They’re cool aren’t they? I remember when I was a preteen, my library re-organized its catalog and created a new “Young adult” section. It has books directed at me specifically, and a dedicated space to read them in cool futuristic looking chairs. It was wonderful. I spent unknown hours there, browsing the shelves, reading books, just existing. It was a place made for me and I loved spending time there. I don’t remember every book I ever read. I probably don’t really remember most of the books I read. But I remembered one book I discovered on a shelf in that hideaway for teens and future teens. The only problem was I didn’t remember the name.  As I understand it, human memory isn’t a file cabinet, or a library, where everything is neatly stored on shelves, field away for later use. Memory is an active process. We remember things by remembering them. Every time you recall a memory your brain is recreating that memory. Like recording the same episode of TV show on a video tape over and over again. Sometimes the copy isn’t perfect., but the old version is gone so you can’t tell the difference. This is also the reason for things like the Mandela Effect, where people remember things differently than they actually are. Some common examples are people remembering Nelson Mandel dying in prison (hence the name), the  name of the bear family books being Berenstein instead of Berenstain, what Uncle Sam’s hat looks like, what company makes Stove Top brand Stuffing, or even a movie starring Sinbad where he played a genie. These are not facts that the brain recalls often, and when we do the copy of the memory can get easily written incorrectly. This is just how brains work and is not actually evidence that you slipped into an alternate dimension. Sorry. I have a confession to make. If you’ve spent any time in my proximity over the course of your life, you likely have heard of my desire to open a food truck that sells day-old pizza. The confession is this: I did not invent this idea from whole cloth. I adapted it from a concept that I first read about in this book. I’ve always felt a little bad about sharing the idea (which I think is a great one) without being able to name the source. But “I read it in a book I read 25 years ago that I can’t remember the name of” felt like a good enough excuse. I have that excuse no longer. Like a rock falling out of the sky the name of the book fell directly into my head one day this week. I couldn’t believe it. How had I discovered that random string of words amongst all the other overwritten video tape of my brain? I don’t know, brains are weird I guess. The name of the book: Harry Newberry and the Raiders of the Red Drink. With that name I was able to finally find it again, and the author Mel Gilden. I wasted zero time in hunting down a used copy and ordering it online. It’s been out of print for who knows how long, but a copy of it will soon adorn my shelves. Turns out the book is almost as old as me, being originally written in 1989, so when I came across a copy at my local library it was hardly brand new. I’ve only ever known it as a used book, so that seems a fitting way to have a copy anyway. I did seek out the author and he’s still around too! Not writing as much, but it turns out in addition to writing fiction for young adults, he has a few Star Trek novels to his name and on top of that he wrote for children’s cartoons when I was a children. His IMDB page lists shows I remember like Cenutrions, Heathcliff, Fraggle Rock, Phantom 2040 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, MASK and The Mask (two different shows, but I watched them both). What a wonderful surprise to learn his work was all over my childhood. I also discovered his website, which gives off delightful early 2000s vibes.  The copyright logo on the bottom says 2017, so it was updated at least that recently (not that 9 years ago is that recent. I even found his email address in a contact link. What else was I supposed to do? So I emailed him. Just a short little note to tel him I fondly remembered his book and to thank him for writing. The beat part! He got back to me! He sent a short response saying how rare it is to hear things like that. So I got to make both my day and his by remembering the name of his book.  I might have to go find some others of his too. 

The time change happened again.  They stole an hour from us. Let’s make them give it back. With interest. It als always makes me want to go watch the movie Timecrimes again. It’s on HBO Max and Kanopy.  Outside of that, there’s another movie coming out with variable aspect ratios. This is becoming a minor trend in big budget movies, with the goal, I assume, of driving more people to the theater who otherwise wouldn’t go and doing so with formats that cost more per ticket.  The first time it happened that I noticed was Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s most recent big giant movie. Oppenheimer was filmed on 70mm imax which means it’s very big film. And very big film means a cleaner picture, with potentially more detail. Which isn’t a bad thing!  Putting aside the absolute ridiculous (and to my mind, thoroughly debunked by Steve Yedlin) idea that film is somehow inherently superior to digital when it comes to capturing light for a movie, a larger format is nice, but it also means relatively few people will get to see the movie that way. There are only a handful of movie theaters in the world that can show a typical 70mm film print, because there just aren’t projectors for it. And that’s before you add in the imax of it all. IMAX is a “tall screen” format, meaning the picture is a lot closer to square than the more typical letterbox rectangle. And there are only about 40 movie theaters worldwide that can show this aspect ratio correctly. And only 10(!) that do it with film instead of digital projections. So unless you are an absolute film sicko, you probably watched Oppenheimer wrong.  This was then followed by Sinners, a very good movie, which not only shot on imax 70mm but also on a different format with a very wide aspect ratio (ultrapanavision) and then switched between them at key moments. This makes for a really cool experience watching the movie because it feels like the whole world opens up when the picture gets bigger. But. We still have the problem where only a small handful of movie theaters can show the movie “as intended”. Ryan Coogler, the director put out an explainer video about all this, and fully seems to useratand that most people won’t be able to see the movie this way, which is nice. He at least put some effort into making the movie work in all the different formats, which isn’t something I ever felt we got with Chris Nolan and his film absolutism.  But now a new challenger appears! Maggie Gyllenhall in her second directorial outing gives us The Bride! (exclamation point included in the title) which not only features the imax 70mm format, nor just swapping between 2 aspect ratios, but goes one step further to actually have 3 different ratios. https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/the-bride-imax-making-of-maggie-gyllenhaal-1235182881/ Which, sure, whatever. It’s still only going to be accessible to a small number of people and imax theaters are so rare it mostly feels like marketing  trying to foster FOMO in audiences. If you’re not near an IMAX screen are you going to drive hours to go see this reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein? I’m not.  But on the flip side both Oppenheimer and Sinners were huge successes and Sinners grabbed more oscar nominations than any other movie. So what do I know? I know most Oscar voters probably aren’t watching their screeners on giant imax screens at least.  Anyway, I hope the movie is good, even if I’m going to watch it wrong. But first I have to get back to playing Slay The Spire 2 badly. 

Things are looking pretty bad out there. I don't have any avice for dealing with The Horrors you don't already know. Put down the phone you don't have to know everything immediately. Try to find a way to make the world a better place to live for someone. Here's some things I enjoyed his week: Hank Green is starting a cult for the weirdest fish. The band Gorillaz has a new music video short/film thing that is very pretty. I went to my local library and found a copy of Ducks by Kate Beaton in the Friends of the Library book sale. It's a graphic novel memoir by the creator of Hark, A Vagrant, and I had borrowed it from the library but didn't get around to reading it before I had to return it. Now, three dollars later, I have my one copy. Our neighbors brought over a couple hot meals and a bunch of cookies. A wild turkey jumped on our roof and sat outside my second story office window for a little while. I helped my neighbor move some big heavy boxes. I keep watching episodes of Chõjin Sentai Jetman on Tubi. It''s a Japanese superhero show from the same series that Power rangers would eventually take all of it's action footage from, but it this series came out a year or two before Power Rangers, so it's fun to imagine the world where this got used instead. Instead of dinosaurs, all the "rangers" are bird themed. They Might be Giants release a new song called Wu-Tang

Last September, the arms on my office chair started failing. The cushions were cracking, they wouldn’t adjust, just old. I started shopping for replacements, and someone on Reddit suggested calling the manufacturer about a warranty replacement.  I figured it was a long shot because the chair about 5 years old. But I called Staples (where I bought it) and they looked up the purchase. I was 5 months out of warranty, but the helpful person said they could order replacements anyway as a courtesy. Cool! I gave them my address, they gave me an order number I forgot to write down, and then I promptly forgot about it (thanks, brain). About a month ago I remembered, after one of the chair arms was even worse (I had been keeping them together with duct tape.) the new arms had never showed up, but now I was even further outside the warranty and don’t have the replacement order number so I shrugged and moved on with my life.  Last Friday, I get an ominous “your order is being shipped” email from fedex. No information about what the order is, and it doesn’t align with anything I bought recently (I had all of those tracked). FedEx promised it would get there tomorrow, then end of day, then today kept getting pushed back as it had a hard time finding me (not unusual, I live in The Woods).  Today, I check the tracking and it is marked “delivered - left in the mailroom.”now you might not know this, but The Woods don’t have a mailroom. But some neighbors have a package box, so delivery drivers don’t have to make it up the murder roads around us. Maybe it’s there.  Nope. Turns out “the mailroom” means wrapped in a trash bag next to the mailbox. Which I have to drive to. Courteous, I guess.  I drag the box back and no surprise to you, since you read the start of the post, it’s the replacement arms I ordered back in September. Only 5 months later than expected. Cool.  Well that’s mostly true. Also in the box is a packing slip. But the packing slip is for someone else’s order, a set of five casters for an office chair. The same kind of chair? I don’t know. But the address for this packing slip is somewhere in New England. Which is decidedly not anywhere near where I live. I hope they ended up getting their casters. Then I had to figure out how to attach them.  There were no instructions, so it was mostly a case of looking at how the existing arms were attached and trying to replicate that again. Each one was held on with a trio of bolts. I was kind of hoping for screws, because I know where a screwdriver is. But bolts was unexpected. Each bolt also had a hexagonal dimple in the top for a hex key, but all my ikea hex keys seem to have disappeared. While the most reasonable thing would have been to go looking for a socket set, or at least a wrench, I did the third or fourth most reasonable thing. I remembered that my pocket knife, which I mostly keep in my desk, so maybe it should be called a desk knife, was marketed as a multitool in the way that so many cheap folding knives are. There is a 3 inch ruler on one side, the push handle thing on the back can technically be a screwdriver, there’s a backwards facing blade for opening letters or whatever, and most importantly there’s a set of holes in the handle to serve as the illusion of a set of hexagonal wrenches.  I don’t always do things the easiest way. I flipped the chair over and positioned it on a table so I could easily access the bolts on one side of the chair. Then I meticulously, also clumsily, used the hexagonal hole on the handle of the knife to unscrew each bolt. Don’t worry, the blade was closed, so the chance of cutting myself was very low. It probably would have been much easier to go find a real tool, but on the other hand, I was much more likely to finish if I did it right away. Any obstacle could kill all momentum.  So I did it the harder way, and it still worked! I’m typing this from the same chair with new arms! Also, in a weird bit of synchronicity I was watching Merrily We Roll Along, the proshot of the recent broadway revival with Johnathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe. Which mirrors the day I was hand sewing a patch onto the seat of the same chair while watching the recent west end revival of Next to Normal. I guess proshot musicals are my chair fixing soundtrack. 

I know I’m a nerd, but I have been reminded of the joy of physical reference works. I don’t know why specifically, but I had a sudden memory of the Video Hound Golden Movie Retriever a couple weeks ago. The Video Hound Golden Movie Retriever (VHGMR, pronounced V’Gamer, according to the rules I just made up) was a phone book* sized volume containing little capsule reviews of every movie.** like a phone book, you could think of a movie, flip through the pages where as many movies as they could possibly fit in the book were listed and find the move, who directed it, the year it came out, the names of the man actors and a little one to three sentence review of the movie to give a brief idea of what to expect.  *a phone book was a physical directory of names and phone numbers, delivered to your house. It contained almost all residential phone numbers in a given area, and if you wanted to be kept out of it you had to pay extra to the phone company. Otherwise people who knew your name could look it up, guess which of the 2 dozen Ana Ng’s you might be, then call the number they found.  **not every movie, but close I had a copy of the VHGMR from roughly the mid to late 90s. If I had to guess I would probably say 1997, but I cannot confirm that. Before the internet, and especially before the Internet Movie Database, this was the best way to have a little information on a lot of movies all in one place. I fondly remember flipping through the very fragile thin pages looking up movies I had heard of or just watched and seeing what the guide thought of them. At the time I didn’t have a full understanding of the work that would go into making something like this, let alone update it every year and publish a new edition. I just thought it was a cool way to store objective information about movies.  Once I had that memory I knew I wanted to own a copy again. So I did what I always do when these impulses strike me: I went to eBay. I was surprised to see that there were copies for sale from years as recent as 2018. Surely they went out of production before then? The whole world was online by 2018, right? But I did some digging and the last edition was published in 2021! Niche nerds being who they are, a 2021 edition seems nearly impossible to get ahold of now. Everyone who is dorky enough to want one probably isn’t willing to sell it on the open market for cheap. They are now collectibles and that changes the value proposition dramatically.  But I was willing to moderate my scope a bit. In researching the last VHGMR I learned that it was actually the last of the big movie reference guides to still be putting out new editions when it shut down after 2021. There were other ones, like the Blockbuster movie guide or Halliwell’s guide or the other one I remembered specifically, Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide.  I know who Leonard Maltin is because of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Well that and Gremlins 2. Maltin was a pretty established name in the movie critic game, and getting his own annual book was certainly evidence of that. But I remember the episode of MST3k, where they had an extended riff on how the movie of the week, Laserblast had been given a 2.5 star rating (out of 4!) by Maltin. Let me tell you, Laserblast is not a 2.5 out of 4 movie.  So since a final edition of the VHGMR wasn’t going to come up to market any time soon at a reasonable price, I figured picking up the last Maltin Movie Guide would be a nice consolation. At some point in the decades long production of this annual volume the publisher, in order to save space, made Maltin jettison a lot of movies that were older than roughly 1960. Some of the biggest, most familiar names were still kept (Citizen Kane, 12 Angry Men, etc) but the rest were kicked to make room for newer movies. Maltin convinced the publisher to also put out Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide for all these pre ‘60s cast offs. I was able to get a copy of both the classic guide and the last annual guide (2015) for a pretty reasonable price off eBay. Well I bought them off eBay, but it turns out they were actually sold by ThriftBooks through eBay, so next time I might just start there.  Getting the books in my hands has been great. The first thing I looked up was Laserblast, of course, just to confirm the 2.5 rating. The guide uses a slightly atypical rating standard. The highest rating is 4 stars (instead of the much more common these days 5) but the lowest rating is 1.5. Below that and it just gets labeled BOMB. So with half star ratings, we end up with effectively 7 steps: BOMB 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 And based on my initial scans through the book these fall on a pretty strict bell curve distribution. 2.5 is probably the most common rating, followed by 2 and 3. BOMB and 4 stars are very rare. Based on what research I have done, somewhere around only 400 of the 16000 movies reviewed get a 4-star rating from Maltin. Roughly 2.5% of the total. The 2 books have spent the week on my desk and when I get the idea, I’ll pick one up and look for a movie. Sometimes I’m searching for something specific and sometimes I just flip aimlessly to see what I can find. I have really loved the joy of discovery that comes from sing unexpected movies next to the ones I’m looking up, or stopping because my eye caught on one while I was searching for another. In my wanderings I have also discovered that Maltin has some pretty atypical tastes. In addition to giving Laserblast a middle of the road 2.5 stars, that puts it above some modern films considered outright classics like Hot Fuzz, which got 2 stars and Maltin called “a protracted, disappointing spoof of crime/buddy movies” or  Christopher Nolans’s Memento which barely escaped BOMB status  by getting by 1.5 stars.  I appreciate that Leonard Maltin is just one dude giving his honest opinions of movies. His tastes are not my tastes, even if there is overlap. I also fully understand that he is rating movies on their own terms, rather than trying to “objectively” compare every movie to every other movie. He (probably) wasn’t thinking about Lasetblast while giving Memento 1.5 stars.  But the wild swindle away from the expected do make me wonder, what is he rating these movies against? Is it anything? The front matter of the edition I have does not provide much clarity, beyond explaining the Bomb to 4 star system. It does have an entire page listing the aspect ratios of every mentioned format, so you can be confident in knowing Techniscope is 2.35:1.  So if you want to understand the ratings, I think you have to do it via inference. Read a bunch of ratings, watch the movies (not necessarily in that order) and start to see how your opinion matches or varies from the ones in the book.  To be clear, I wouldn’t want even a reference book like this to be the “objective” ratings of anything. It’s an impossible task and one that would cheapen the act of experiencing the art for yourself. I’m no saint either, when it comes to my own rating systems. When I put a ranking on a movie on Letterboxd, I would like to think I have some internal metric or rubric that I am always consistently applying to movies, but that’s not happening. I tend to ask some of the same questions: Did I like it? Did the movie accomplish what it set out to be? But there’s no perfect answers to that question and nothing’s get heavily skewed based on vibes. And that fine, good even! Art happens not on the page, or the screen, but rather when the audience reacts to it, when they have a possibly indescribable connection and reaction to the mind of another person or people through time. So maybe putting a star rating on anything is a fruitless endeavor. But also, Laserblast is not a 2.5 star movie. Two things can be true. 

Programming note: I'm looking for another host for this newsletter. Again. This time I'm not doing it because the service is shutting down, but rather because the owner of the website has announced he's switched to mostly vibe coding any and all updates. I think my general opposition to using spicy autocomplete (aka LLMs or Generative "AI") has been pretty well documented at this point (feel free to ask me if you're unfamiliar) but I'm not moving from a strictly moral stance. No, there's a very clear history of vibe coded apps being full of security holes, ones that are particularly hard to notice or patch. So switching to this mode of running the website means its only a matter of time before something breaks irreparably.  Migration might take a little while as I want to find a suitable place to go. Ideally I'd self host, but that's a much larger burden.  Anyway, onto the newsletter! Is the olympics again. This year is a winter olympics year, which means I get to watch curling again. I fully admit I’m a casual curling fan at best. But I am still a fan. Every four years I get to put on the matches in whatever city the olympics are happening and get my fill.  This yea, the Mixed Doubles curling even started even before the Ionic Ceremony, by a full 2 days. The matches have been scheduled pretty poorly for me, starting most days at 4am my local time. This has been a little easier to stomach since I have also been suffering from an unknown medical malady since late december that cause me abdominal pain that prevents me room effectively sleeping through the night. I haven’t had an unbroken night of sleep for over month now. But the bright side is that a few times, My body has woken me up at 4am, just in time to catch a match. I do have a peacock subscription, which means I can catch replays (and I’m doing hat now) if I do manage to sleep through the match if my abdominal pain peaked at an inopportune time.  Generally speaking, I’m farm from a fan of the USA in most respects. But There’s so much sport happening during the olympics that it’s hard to keep up with more than one or two countries at a time, so I have mostly been paying attention to the US matches.  In these mixed doubles matches, the athletes are wearing cavalier microphones, which means in addition to watching them perform, we also get to hear them as they talk to one another and strategize. Like any sport there’s a lot of jargon, so it’s nicely supplemented by the commentators who can hear what they’re saying as well and explain it to the uninformed viewer. It’s pretty clear that the commentators know a lot of people might be turning into this match as their first ever exposure to curling (it’s a not something like speed skating, where you can tell who is winning and the format is pretty straightforward (the one in front wins). Curling has a lot of strategy to it, as each time a shoe is thrown the following team has to adjust and react to new new board state. The game takes place in a series of ends” similar to innings in baseball. Each end has the athletes alternate throwing a set number of stones down the ice. In Mixed Doubles, that number is five stones each. One player throws the first and last stone, while the other throws the middle three. Only one team scores points each end, and they do that by having stones closer to the center of the target (called the house) you get one point for every stone between the center and your opponent’s closest stone. Tis means goin glass is an advantageous position, and the last throw is always given to the team who did not score in the last End. And if you can manage to score without that last throw it’s called a steal and puts you into an even more advantageous position.  Mixed Doubles is a more dynamic version of the sport compared to Team Curling, with fewer stones each end, and only two players per team. This means usually the person throwing the stone is also the one sweeping, so they have to pop up after launching it and sweep the ice to influence the positioning and movement of the stone as well. In team curling, there is one person to throw, tow to sweep and one to call (they’re the one yelling about things like “Hard” and “Lines’s good” and CURL!” Players rotate through those positions in the team sport, but only in mixed doubles are team mates taking on double duty with each throw.  I’ll be honest, I started watching curling as a bit of a joke, but like so many jokes if you do it long enough, it just becomes a thing you like. Maybe I’ll try Ski Mountaineering this year, it’s the first time appearing in a winter olympics and it seems a little silly too.

Im away from my computer unexpectedly this weekend, so you’re getting whatever I can manage to put out from my phone. So if there’s an above average number of typos (or below average, I guess) that’s why. The month of January 2026 managed to fly by while also feeling a thousand years long. There’s a classic horse_ebooks post that goes “everything happens so much” and it really felt true this month. It was my birthday month, and I successfully completed another trip around the star called sol. So that’s nice. I had set an unofficial goal for the year of 2026 to rewatch more movies. In 2025 my watch:rewatch ratio was about 9:1, meaning I watched 9 new movies for every 1 movie I rewatched. Nothing wrong with watching new movies, to be clear,  it one of the reasons I collect DVDs is because unlike havi by the option to watch things again whenever I want. So divided I wanted to increase the percentage of movies I rewatched this year. I had a rough goal in mind, roughly doubling the number of rewatches. Where as 10% of my movies logged were rewatches in 2025, I figured I could get that to 20% easily enough. I still want to get my backlog down, (I bought more box sets, whoops) so that’s a continuing priority, but I also want to take the time to spend with movies I already know I like. January 2026 just ended, so what a time to check in on that goal. How am I doing so far? Well I ended January at 44%, over double my original goal. I probably won’t keep it that high, but who knows. I did end up watching the same movie three times in January, which is a bit of an outlier. I watched Drawing Flies for the first time early in January, then turned around and watched it two more times. In my defense rounds two and three were with the different commentaries by the cast and directors of the movie. Drawing Flies is a weird movie. It’s one of the small handful of movies that were put out by View Askew productions that wasn’t written and directed by Kevin Smith. Smith, an independent film maker to this day, started View Askew for his own movies, starting with Clerks, the low budget black and white movie he made for twenty five thousand dollars of credit card debt in 1994. Clerks got picked up by Miramax and became a minor hit. Since. 1994 View Askew has put out 15 narrative feature films (plus some documentaries) and and eleven of those are Kevin Smith Movies. That is to say he wrote, directed and edited them. The remaining four are unusual outliers. Kevin remains pretty humble about his filmmaking talents, and like to talk up the fact that if he can make a movie, anyone can make a movie. And for a while in the 90s he put his money where his mouth is. I’m just speculating about the reasons, but in the 90s Kevin Smith took his modest financial success with Clerks (and later Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma) and paid it forward by giving his friends enough money to make their own weird little indie movies. And the movies are pretty weird from what I know about them. There’s Big Helium Dog, a meta sketch comedy about making a movie called Big Helium Dog, A Better Place, a high school set drama about violence in schools that came out 2 years before Columbine, and Vulgar, a very dark comedy about sexual assault and revenge and a clown. None of these movies was particularly successful commercially. Kevin Smith was the executive producer on them (meaning he paid the bills) and they were all written and directed by his friends from New Jersey. I think they weren’t successful, because despite his name and financial backing, none of the feel like “Kevin Smith Films” which makes sense, because they’re not. But since Kevin Smith’s name is the reason any body paid attention in the first place, it probably came as quite a shock. But the first non-Kevin Smith View Askew film iprobably suffered the most for not being a Kevin Smith movie. This is a little film called Drawing Flies. Hey, we made it back around! Drawing Flies is a movie written and directed by Matt Gissing and Malcolm Ingram. Unlike the rest of the View Askew non-smith canon, these guys aren’t friends of Kevin Smith from New Jersey, they’re Canadians. Ingram met Smith on the set of Mallrats, where he was reporting for Film Threat, a movie news/review website. Smith and Ingram became friends and Smith gave Ingram $40k to make his movie with Gissing. Drawing Flies can’t help but be compared to Clerks, in addition to being backed by Smith, it stars Jason Lee, who Smith basically discovered for Mallrats, follows a group of 20-something slackers and was shot using the same type of camera and film stock as Clerks.  Despite the similar aesthetics, Drawing Flies is a less straightforward film than Clerks. Clerks is about a day in the life of a couple continence store clerks. They get up to hijinks, talk about pop culture and which girl to date. I love the movie but it’s not trying to say much of anything.  Drawing Flies is much more pointed, although that’s not immediately obvious.  The film starts with five slackers applying for and getting turned down for unemployment. They’re out of money but the last thing they want to do is get a job or ask their parents. It’s got a not insignificant amount of “edgy 90s humor” too, mostly centered around how funny it was considered to call people gay.  (Spoilers for Drawing Flies ahead, but it’s the sort of movie you can’t talk about without spoiling) Donner, played by Jason Lee suggests they drive and then hike out to his uncle’s cabin. They can hang out for a while and decide wha to do. The rest of the movie is them camping and traveling in the woods, as Donner acts weirder and weirder, eventually revealing to the rest of the group that he’s not taking them to a cabin, but rather trying to meet up with Sasquatch.  The rest of the cast does not take this information kindly and one by one they all decide to head back to civilization, leaving Donner to his madness. It’s kind of a bleak film as I’m describing it! Our last shot of Jason Lee before his friends abandon him is Lee sitting bare chested nestled into the roots of a very large tree covered in mud. But he’s at peace, he knows his friends won’t stay with him, even as he knows he’s right.  Some indeterminate time later a couple of the friends meet up at a party. They catch up over small talk, but neither has heard from or seen Donner since they were all last together. Pretty bleak. Until we get a monologue in Donner’s voice much like the film began with as he is revealed to be sitting at a campfire, now clean and dressed, as a group of bigfoots sit with him and listen.  Taken in isolation it’s kind of a silly movie. Low budget, but also strangely structured. A lot of the forward momentum happens off screen. Plus, due to budget constraints a lot of the movie is shot in these wide masters where the camera just rolls on all five characters through a whole scene. They didn’t have enough film for coverage, so they just did it in big one shots.  But I can’t really watch it in isolation because I also know the greater filmography of Malcolm Ingram, one of the writer/directors on the film. After this, he made another road comedy with a bigger budget and cast (think Jake Busey, Breckin Meyer and Denise Richards) and by all accounts it was even less successful commercially.  But after that Malcom Ingram switched to Documentaries. His first was a movie called Small Town Gay Bar, about a gay bar in a small town, then he made Bear Nation about the “bear” community, aka large hairy gay guys, then he made Continental, a doc about the continental bath house in NYC, a hub of gay community in the 60s and 70s pre AIDS, then there was Out To Win, about queer athletes in pro sports, the Southern Pride, about queer communities in the deep south in 2016. Are you seeing a pattern here? Sometime between 1996 when Drawing Flies was made and 2006 when Small Town Gay Bar was released, Malcolm Ingram came out as gay and focused on telling the stories of gay communities. He has mad a couple non-queer documentaries, but that’s clearly his area of passion.  So when when I watch this movie, Drawing Flies, about a man keeping a secret from his closest friends, for fear of abandonment, then being abandoned by said friends for what he knows to be true, then it turns out he’s right and finds happiness with a new community anyway? Well that feels like a queer story even before you know who the director is or the above average amount of homophobia or a male character experimenting with makeup.  And the thing that really bugs me? Is I don’t see anyone else who is talking about this movie looking at it through this queer lens. I feel like I’m chasing my own Bigfoot here, and nobody else can see the signs. Like the movie isn’t a masterpiece of filmmaking, but that doesn’t mean we can’t look at it with an eye towards themes and nobody seems to be doing that! So I watched it again, with the directors’ commentary. The commentary isn’t much to write home about, recorded in 2002, Malcolm and Matthew are clearly a little bitter about their lack of success. They know it’s a rough picture, but they put a lot of work into it and are proud of how it came out. There’s absolutely no mention of any queer subtext, but I’m pretty sure that’s because Ingram still wasn’t out in 2002 (as far as I can tell).  And then I watched it again, with the cast & crew commentary. This one had producers Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier, four of the five main cast and both directors. This one had even less insight into the themes of the movie, with lots of jokes and them trying to have a fun time talking about what it was like to make. One thing that was consistent between both commentaries was  Ingram stating that his interpretation of the ending (Donner at the campfire) was that he was dead, but that they left it ambiguous.  I’m probably not the best guy to talk about this stuff, as a straight guy I don’t have any lived experience, and my days of studying queer theory directly are way back in grad school. But if nobody else is going to say it, I might as well. This interpretation isn’t going to make the admittedly flawed movie into a better one, but just because a movie’s reach exceeds its grasp, we can still appreciate it for what it was trying to do.  I also dont want to put too much directorial intent on this reading. I don’t know what Malcolm Ingram was thinking at the time (because he hasn’t said as far as I can tell) and I don’t know what influence is co-writer and co-director had on the narrative either. But directorial intent is just one part of examining a film. Or any piece of art. I remember when there were people passing around websites (I also remember websites) theorizing that The Matrix was a trans allegory. A lot of people dismissed the idea, wrote it off as reading too much into a movie, but also a few years later, first one then both of the Wachowski’s came out as trans themselves and people were a lot more willing to accept that interpretation. I think it would still be a valid reading of The Matrix either way. And I think Drawing Flies is a movie that makes a lot more sense when viewed through a queer lens.  Now that Malcolm Ingram has embraced his sexuality and been telling stories of his communities, I wonder if he still thinks Donner is dead at the end of this movie. Either way, I hope he’s happy now that he found his sasquatches. 

Hope you're doing ok, if you are in the part of the US that got hit by this severe winter storm. I know I am.  I’ve been thinking about attention for a while now. John and Hank Green, the vlogbrothers (among other things) have talked about how social media is a driver of attention. The algorithms are deciding what to show you and the things that get more attention get shown to more people. So we have to be very careful about what we give our attention to. Because where we point that spotlight of attention matters.  Hank Green in particular mentioned that the big innovation in vertical video platforms like tiktok isn’t that they’re vertical, but that they take away more choice than ever before. You don’t decide what the next video is going to be. The app decides and all you get for choice as a viewer is do I stay on this video or pull the slot machine arm for the next one? And clearly it’s working.  Tiktok finally got sold to a US Company, ar at least the US operations part did. Because we don’t care if a company harvests everything about you as long as that company is on our shores (see also: Facebook, google). And they really are harvesting everything. A recent change to the tiktok terms of service this week updated to include things like “your racial or ethnic origin, national origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnosis, sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information.” And while on the one hand, I know all corporate social media tracks those things, it always feels particularly icky to see it laid out in plain text.  But I don’t use TikTok so I’m coming this as an observer. I like having more control over my attention. Not absolute control, mind you, I’m still distracted by metaphorical shiny objects, like so many others. But I try to be mindful of when and how I’m giving that control away.  So this week, ask yourself:  “when is my attention being diverted?”  “Who wants me to see this and why?”  “Can I put my attention somewhere else?” “Do I want to?” I’ll try to do the same. 

Alrighty, we’re a couple weeks into the year. Let’s talk about goals. 
 I set some goals last year, and I did not meet many of them. But it’s not all bad, because I tried. Sometimes I wonder if the winter months are the wrong time to set goals, and that maybe things go better re: the new year in the southern hemisphere, where January 1 is a time of brightness and heat instead of cold and dark. But I’m probably romanticizing it all. It’s never a bad time to look at your goals and see what worked and what didn’t. I think I first learned about the SMART goals acronym in the year 2000. By some metrics, that was a while ago now. But I still see people talking about SMART Goals. The actual meaning of the acronym isn’t as important as the fact that it spells out “smart” and that makes people feel intelligent for using/talking about them. (let’s put aside that intelligence as a concept is pretty broken and has historically been used to further marginalize others, we don’t have time for that now). If they were called FOOLS Goals people would probably hold them in lower regard. F - Focused; goals should be narrowly defined. If you set your goals too broadly you’l just end up tuning around trying a bunch of different things and be slow to make progress. O - Optimized; goals should focus on the biggest impact; where can a small change make a big difference? O - Ordered; Goals should be broken down into a series of accomplishable steps, one after another. With only one thing to focus on at a time you don’t get distracted.  L - Length; you should decide how long is reasonable to accomplish the goal. Having an expected length can let you easily check in on if yyou are proceeding at the correct pace. S - Succeed-able; How do you know if you accomplished your goal or not? Is there a point when it can be finished, if not it’s not a goal, but rather a behavior or practice. Focus on success and failure instead of more ambiguous metrics. Is that better than a SMART Goal? I don’t know, but it’s not significantly worse to my eyes. And considering I made it up at 5AM while still kind of asleep I think it proves my point that what works the acronym spells out is probably more important than the content itself.  I’ve set SMART goals before on different projects and things in my life, and I cannot point to a time where making sure that I got all five parts of the goal written down were instrumental in me accomplishing the goal. Some of the goals that I have set for myself and then successfully achieved were pretty vague to begin with. Many of the more structured goals I have set have felt restrictive and in those cases I feel like that becomes a reason for me to quit, or at least modify them mid way through. But hey, if SMART goals have revolutionized your life, that’s great. I’ve been talks about them for more than 25 years now and I can’t say the concept has ever really helped me accomplish anything. Use the tools that work for you. Do I have any goals for the upcoming year? Not really. I have some thing I’d like to try, and I hope my focus on them lasts long enough for me to make some significant progress. But I also know my interests and attention wander pretty easily. So outside of the big things like “Stay employed, don’t die, bathe regularly” I’m going to instead try to pick some directions to go. I’ll follow my interests and see where they lead me. Here are some examples. Digital sovereignty - That sounds a lot more regal that I mean it to. But after some shenanigans with my managed hosting provider last year, where I had to scramble to make sure my social media server continued to exist (thanks Riley, for your help!), I want to keep exploring self-hosting. I want to control my data and in some cases I mean that very literally. I want a server in my living room (or wherever) that I can touch directly. Where I can plug in a keyboard and mouse and make the computer do the things I want it to, and nobody else has any control over it. And if it can be accessible via the public internet, that’s even cooler. Fun side note: When I first tried to post this, the website I host my newsletter on was broken. If you’re reading this it got fixed, but I think self-hosting my newsletter might be my next project.  Reading - after a few years of bouncing off books over and over again, I’ve food myself reading more in the last few months and I’m going to try to keep enjoying that. It started with a reread of Anathem, which held up about as well as it did on my first read through back when it was published (cool ideas, wandering plot, shrug of an ending).  I’ve since made it through the latest Murderbot book, and devoured the first 60% of the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book in like a week. Whatever mental blocks I had up around reading seem to be falling away and I hope I can keep that momentum up for a little while. Watching - I keep buying things to watch! My Backlog still sits at around 168 movies, but I’ve also had a lot of luck in (re)watching TV shows I like. In particular I’ve had fun watching One Season Weirdos, those shows that had an interesting premise, but got cancelled after not finding a huge audience. I fully admit to having a broad definition of show that fit the category, because I included the First season of Glee (the only season I acknowledge) Power Rangers RPM (it’s a one and done story, like all the later seasons of Power Rangers) and Season 4 of House (It’s like a standalone season, with a complete arc, something the rest of the show never really matched). But I am also planning to include more obvious examples like Tremors: The TV Series, Cop Rock, Wonderfalls, Other Space,  Kingdom Hospital, and others as I think of them. Having a single season of a show to watch is nice because it gives me a manageable scope and a default to put on when I catch myself flipping between all the available options. 

While I'm not technically on vacation anymore, I didn't write anything of value this week, so I think its time for a Comics Page. First Up: Nancy - Nancy is a comic hat has been running for a very long time. So long that it has had 7 different authors since it originally started 87 years ago, or closer to 100 if you count tie time it was a different comic under a different name. On January first a new artist and writer, Caroline Cash, took over, making them the 7th to do so. Gag-a-day strips are hard, and I like that different people have been given the opportunity to take over and put their distinct spin on it. I think they're pretty good, and it's also fun to read the comments under theist one complaining the last artist was better (which also happened when that artist took over back in 2018). Dinosaur Comics - The latest one introduces the phrase Federal Puppy Depository, and that's a nice thing to think about. Heathcliff - trying to explain Heathcliff is like trying to explain something that is very hard to understand because it doesn't make sense. I like it though. Wondermark -  doesn't update all too often these dyads, but it's still a delight when it does.  Have a great week, read some comics. 

I’m on vacation, here’s some pictures of pets. None of them are mine but they’re all good buddies. 

It’s the last one of these for the year. Can you believe I started this back in 2018? Seems like quite the accomplishment. I’m going to take next week off, nd possibly the week after that depending on how I feel. But I’m sure you’ll get by without me. Last year I set a goal for myself to get my “owned but unwatched” pie of movies down somewhat. I would like to say I accomplished that task, so let’s do some math.  I started with about 160 movies in the list at the start of the year. And my letterbox long indicates that I watched 130 movies that I own. But not all of those were first time watches, because I rewatch movies too, so 26 of those were rewatches. If you’re doing the math along at home, you can probably tell that the list of “owned but unwatched” movies has now been lowered to 164. Wait, that can’t be right? It can, because I didn’t stop acquiring movies either. The biggest culprits were some box sets. I picked up the complete Abbot and Costello Universal Pictures box set, so that’s about 30 movies right there. And the Jacques Tati Criterion box set had 6 features, plus a bunch of short films. There was the Wallace and Gromit set, the Golden Age of Television set, and the Wallace Shawn/Andre Gregory set. All told, I ended up adding about 100 movie to my collection. It wasn’t really on purpose. and I keep telling myself I’ll buy fewer, but when a good enough deal comes along I have a hard time saying no. There’s always next year. Even though it isn’t quite the end of the year, I strongly suspect nothing I will watch in the next few days will break my top 10, so what not share my top 10 new movies I watched this year? That is new to me, some of these have been around for a long time, but I only saw them for the first time in 2025. I’ve been struggling with this list, in part because I decided to rank every single movie I watched this year, which was frankly a terrible idea. But I did it. Technically I did it three ties and I wasn’t happy with any of the outcomes, so I used the info from all three rankings, averaged together and then freely moved things around based on vibes. I’d an impossible task and I made it more impossible. But let's get on with the list. 1. Ex Libris: The New York Public Library - I watched this on January 2. DO you know how hard it has been to find a better movie this year? I kept saying, sure ly something will beat this out in the list, but nothing really topped it. Frederick Wiseman is an amazing documentarian, and this might be my favorite of his works I have ever seen. A three hour long documentary set entirely within the branches of the New York Public Library. Wiseman’s signature style is that he doesn’t use narration or interviews. He just shoots what I presume to be thousands of hours of footage and lets the narrative emerge in the juxtaposition of scenes as he edits them together. I love libraries and if anyone ever asks me why, i could point to this movie. Libraries serve everyone in the community, beyond just lending books, they are a place of  building community and other services. Even at three hours, this was captivating and feels like just the tip of the iceberg, 2. The Thing - John Carpenter’s frozen horror of paranoia. This is one of those movies that always sliced the reaction of “You haven’t seen the Thing?” and I hadn’t. But even coming to it as hyped as it was, I still think this isa nearly perfect movie. the sort of movie that will ave you looking at everything a little differently for the next couple days after watching it, because your fight or flight reflex has been flipped so hard. 3. One Cut of the Dead - I went into this knowing almost nothing about it. The premise is “what if they made a one-take, no cut zombie movie? Which is an amazing premise, but it actually goes beyond that in ways that I don’t want to spoil. It’s kind of a hard movie to track down, never having hit any streaming services. I managed to get a copy from, where else, my local library. 4. Wake up Dead Man - Right at the end of the year we got the latest Benoit Blanc movie. Due to marketing people not trusting audiences, these get subtitled “a knives out mystery” but I think that really is a terrible name. The franchise (if we have to call it that) is based around Benoit Blanc, the detective. Knives Out was the first mystery, but calling every subsequent movie that comes out a knives out movie is like calling evrery Sherlock Holmes movie “a study in scarlet movie.” But I’ll get off my soapbox. Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig team up again for a trilling gothic mystery set in and around an upstate New York church that is in decline. Something I love about these movies is how the play around with structure, but in a way that never feels flashy or in your face. This one is probably the most subtle about its narrative trickery, but it’s only subtle in so much as it tells you exactly what it’s doing while getting you to forget it told you. This isn’t favorite of the Benoit Blanc moves so far. Oh and also it’s absolutely gorgeous, the way they use light is almost unmatched. 5. Elevator to the Gallows - I mostly know Louis Malle as a director through My Dinner With Andre, a movie about two dudes talking in a restaurant. It’s a great movie, but it’s hardly a complicated picture. So imagine my surprise when I picked up his first feature and it’s a tightly plotted new wave thriller. The movie starts with a crime. The sort of crime that opens an episode of Columbia, meticulously planned and well executed. Except something goes wrong. The rest of the movie follows the outcome of that little mistake. It never quite goes where unexpected, and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. 6. Taxi - Jafar Panahi makes a movie from inside a taxi cab. After Jafar Panahi was banned by his country from making movies, he made This is Not a Film, entirely within his own apartment, documenting his thoughts and what it felt like to be barred from the thing that gave him purpose. Then he got back to making movies, even while banned. Taxi takes place inside a cab that Pahani drives around Tehran. A move that takes place in close to real time and was shot illegally, as we meet people, become briefly a part of their lives and then they exit. Pahani plays himself, and the line between reality and fiction is deliberately blurred. It doesn’t quite reach the highs of last year’s number one on this list (No Bears) but it’s still a stellar picture. 7. The Wooster Group presents Hamlet - this is technically just called Hamlet, but I watched over a dozen movies called Hamlet (or something close) this year. The Wooster Group is an experimental theater group that has been around since the 70s. They do weird and unexpected things with theater. This particular production is of Hamlet, but specifically it is a live recreation of Hamlet from the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, more commonly known as Richard Burton’s Hamlet. Richard Burton’s Hanlet was performed on broadway in 1964 and filmed in front of a live audience from 17!different cameras it could also been shown in theaters. The Wooster Group’s Hamlet recreates that production live on stage as the filmed version plays. It gets a little more complicated than that, but you get the gist. This Hamlet manages to be my favorite of the year (maybe not the best, but still my favorite) and it does so in part by over-fixating on the text and production and performances of Burton’s Hamlet. Sometimes it feels like versions of Hamlet jettison the text, or treat it as an obstacle to overcome, but here Wooster takes a literalist approach so serious that it turns the play almost inside out. A joy to behold. 8. Kidz Klub - This is a video collage by the group known as Everything is Terrible. They take old movies and re-cut them together into a deliberately overwhelming sensorial experience. Often there’s a theme to the movies they make and this one is all about the children. Kids media is weird, maybe the weirdest kind of media we have. And EiT takes that weirdness that simmers below the surface and through chaotic juxtaposition brings it to the surface. I don’t know if I can easily recommend watching this one, but I loved the ride. 9. In Jackson Heights - Frederick Wiseman’s second appearance on this list. In Jackson Heights takes place in the titular New York neighborhood, in Wiseman’s signature style. This one surprised me by having more of a direct narrative through line than some of the other movies I’ve seen of his. We get recurring locations and people seeing events unfold over time. Where Ex Libris feels like a celebration of community when it comes together to raise everyone up, this feels like a look at how we have actually achieved that yet. We spend a lot of time in a center for recent immigrants and heard their stories of hardship was pretty difficult. There’s also a running thread about gentrification and another about aging, that aren’t quite as strong, but the whole thing leaves you asking lots of good questions about who we are and who we want to be. 10. The Meaning of Life - Don Hertzfelt will always be known by most people who know his work as the “my spoon is too big” guy. He made a silly but impressive cartoon called Rejected and it feels like everything he has made since the has been at least a little bit in conversation with how he feels about that. This short film interrogates the meaning of life, and the futility of asking the wrong questions. A cacophony of voices and images, hand drawn and evolving and not a bad way to spend 12 minutes. You can find the rest of the movies I watched for the first time this year here, ranked as best as I could. 

My Christmas media project this year has been watching Muppet Christmas specials. I  did some digging and there are more than I expected, as long as we’re willing to include a rather open definition of “muppet movie” which I am. Before this year, I can say I’ve seen four Muppet Christmas movies, There’s Muppet Family Christmas, Emmet tOtter’s Jug Band Christmas and, of course, the all time great Muppet Christmas Carol. I also watched John Denver and The Muppets:  A Christmas Together for the first time last year. But there’s somewhere int he neighborhood of 30 Muppet-adjacent, Christmas-adjacent specials, and once I discovered that I knew I had some homework to do.  I haven’t watched all of them but I have added an even dozen to the list of Muppet Christmas specials which I have seen. So what do we do when we watch a bunch of stuff in a category? We rank them! Here’s the list, from best to worst, because you knew where aren’t going to be any surprises at the top.  1. The Muppet Christmas Carol - This is the movie I have watched more times than any other. That’s not hyperbole. Long time readers will remember I watched it 25 days in a row leading up to Christmas a few years ago. That’s on top of all the other times I have watched it in my life. A stone cold classic, and the best presentation of Dickens’ novel that I have ever seen. I even wrote a video essay about it because of How much I live this movie. Michael Cane is a perfect scrooge and he just happens to live in a world populated almost exclusively by muppets. This is also easily Gonzo’s best showing in a muppet movie, and since he’s my favorite muppet, I like it all the more. 2. Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas - Another holiday staple. No classic muppet characters in this (Unless you count the Kermit framing device they added in later releases) but just a delightful heartfelt story told with whimsy and love. And Muppets. I haven’t watched this one nearly as often, but it will usually get at least one annual viewing, if I have anything to say about it. It’s also the rare Holiday special that remembers that this time of year can be a little bit sad, and that’s OK too.  3. A Muppet Family Christmas - This one is newer to my rotation. but only because I didn’t know it existed until a few years ago. I wish I had discovered it earlier. It’s the only one of these specials to include all three branches of the Henson Puppet Family Tree. We’ve got the classic Muppets (original flavor?) with Kermit, Fozzie, Gonzo and the rest, but also the Sesame Street Muppets anthem Fraggles from Fraggle Rock all show up too. Truly a Muppet family reunion. They sing sweet songs, have good jokes and remind us that the most important part of the holidays is being around people you love.  4. Elmo and Mark Rober's Merry Giftmas - I’m frankly shocked the one ended up as high as it did. I though I was guy who couldn’t stand Elmo, so the though of pairing him up with a YouTube of all people seemed like recite for disaster. But it turns out this is great. Giftmas on sesame street is a holiday they celebrate before Christmas where you give a hand made gift to someone else. It’s all about the joy of giving, rather than receiving. And the majority of the special is different denizens of The Street working on their gifts, But they learn along the way that failure is an important part of any process. And that Failure shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing. There’s even a song calle Failure is Awesome. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.  5. The Bells of Fraggle Rock - I’m probably least familiar with Fraggle Rock, of the Muppet productions. I went into this having seen maybe a couple episodes, but not having a deep affection for the show. This is technically just another episode of Fraggle Rock, but it’s very clearly a Christmas Special, except the Fragged don’t celebrate Christmas. But they do have their own celebrations and this episode is about one of their most important traditions, that of ringing bells when the Rock gets coldest, so it will not stop moving. It’s all a little metaphorical, but one of the Fraggles doesn’t want to do tradition for traditions sake and tries to find the truth behind the tradition, rather than relying on the stories they have been told. He does learn the truth, but (Unsurpsiingly) it’s not quite what he expected. This one is a pretty simple story, but told with nuance and care. I really enjoyed it.  6. The Great Santa Claus Switch - Before the Muppets were The Muppets they were just any of the puppets that came out of Jim Henson’s company. This was originally presented as an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, but it’s an hour long story about an evil wizard taking the place of Santa Claus so he can break into everyone’s home and steal whatever he wants. Both Santa and the Wizard are played by Art Carney, which makes the switch a lot easier. This one is just simple fun. You know where most of the story is probably going to go, but along the way there are plenty of gags and that early Henson chaos that made the Original Muppet Show so much fun. Heartily recommended. 7. Christmas Eve on Sesame Street - Before Elmo was the star of Sesame Street, that distinction probably went to Big Bird. After spending the opening watching the Muppets on Ice (Bert, Ernie, Oscar, The Count, Bg Bird and Cookie Monster all go ice skating) we get the heart of the story which is Big Bird being worried that Santa won’t be able to get down all those chimneys because how how small some of them are. There’s also a riff on The Gift of the Magi with Bert and Ernie, which ends the only way it can (happily). This is more of an ensemble piece than being any one thing, and it’s nice to spend some time on Sesame Street. 8. Sesame Street: Elmo Saves Christmas - I think I was dreading this one more than Elmo & Mark Rober even. But it turned out pretty good! Elmo wishes every day could be Christmas and then has to learn what that would really be like. It doesn’t do the time-loop thing, but rather the calendar moves forward ad it just happens that every day everyone has to celebrate Christmas. The saddest part is Big Bird waiting for Snuffy to come home, because he went to spend Christmas with his granny, but will come back the day after Christmas, which never comes. A little predictable, but the songs are fun. Plus there’s a very good gag when Bert and Ernie watch It’s a Wonderful Life 9. A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa - I tried watching this when it originally came out, but I think I never finished it. Due to shennanigans, the Muppets have to deliver some letters directly to Santa at the North Pole, so the movie is their travel woes getting there. This one has songs by Paul Williams which are always welcome. The other celebrity cameos that happen are used sparingly, so we really get to focus on the story. This is probably the tipping point on the list. From here on, you can watch if you want, but I don’t think you’ll be missing much if you skip them.  10. John Denver and The Muppets: A Christmas Together - In this one Miss Piggy and John Denver have an affair. 11. Keep Christmas With you - This was the Annual Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert with special guests Santino Fontana and The Muppet From Sesame Street. So it’s mostly a choral/orchestra performance but the muppets and Santino Fontana (Who I also enjoy) showing up for some bits and songs. The highlights are Big Bird conducting the orchestra (briefly) and Count Von Count singing the Twelve Days of Christmas with extreme gusto.  12. Mr Willowby's Christmas Tree - Robert Downy jr has had an interesting career. Before crashing out with drugs, and his eventual recovery, he starred in this as Mr. Willowby a man who loves Christmas trees. And the rest of Christmas too, but especially the Tree. He’s actually not the protagonist here, however, as we’re really following a family of mice as they attempt to get the perfect Christmas tree. Along the way we see other people getting their Christmas trees, including Stockard Channing and Leslie Nielsen (who fall a little it in love) and some bears and Owls too. The whole thing is a little slight, but at least it’s not actively bad. And I’m pretty sure RDJ was high while filming.  13. It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie - This is the closest we get to The Muppets It’s a Wonderful Life. Kermit is sad because a greedy capitalist (Joan Cusack) bough the theater and is going to convert it to a nightclub and angel (David Arquette) convinces god (Whoopi Goldberg) to let him try to cheer Kermit up. He does this of course by that now classic trick of showing Kermit what the world would be like if he had never been born. This one feels little overstuffed. Too many famous faces, trying a little too hard to shoehorn the plot into the shape it needs to be, and the “Never been born” segment doesn’t work nearly as well as it should” We do get gonzo singing a mournful song, which I’m always here for.  14. Lady Gaga & The Muppets Holiday Spectacular - This is a Lady Gaga performance first and a muppet special in a distant second. It’s all songs from Artpop, which was maybe Gaga’s first flop album. There’s a lot of padding between songs where the muppets just do direct addresses to the camera talking about the holidays. Kristen Bell is here, and only interacts with Muppets. Piggy gets mad when she thinks Kermit is cheating on her with Gaga (which might be happening) despite her earlier dalliances with John Denver. Gaga and Joseph Gordon-Levitt sing a gender swapped Baby its Cold Outside, but do it so fast it feels like they don’t want to sing it any more than you want to hear it. And we get Kermit singing a duet with Gaga where he gets to belt out a commonly accepted slur for Romani people. So that’s disappointing.   15. The First Snow of Fraggle Rock - Everything I loved about Bells of Fraggle Rock is absent in this special, made literally decades later. It feels like a lot of the care is missing; We also get our protagonist Fraggle singing a song with Lele Pons (who I’m bing told is famous) where she explains him the message of the movie, instead of letting him learn it naturally (which Bells did). just blah. 16. The Bob Hope All Star Christmas Comedy Special - Oof, this one is rough. Maybe if you’re a long time fan of Bob Hope you might enjoy this. It’s plays like the worst version of all the classic late night comedy tropes. I’d mostly bob Hope telling baffling jokes. They’re baffling because they’re full of hyper-topical references that need a book of explanations behind each one. Mark Hamill shows up for a couple of bits, neither one particularly funny, including the laziest, hackiest, Star Wars parody ever made up to that point (this came out in 1977). Olivia Newton-John and Perry Como are in  it and I’m not sure any of them have even read a synopsis of what Star Wars is. Perry Como’s character is named Luke Sleepwalker, and he sleepwalks, so that’s the level of humor we’re at. The Muppets are in it for about 2 minutes and they’re not even that good. We do get am excruciatingly long sequence where the members of the College Football 1977 All-Star team come on one by one, state their name, college and position, before Bob Hope makes a hacky joke about them and we move on to the next one. It almost rises to the level of absurdist humor, but that’s not what they were going for.  So there's some moppet christmas movies for you to watch. Hope you enjoy!

This week's newsletter comes to you in three parts. Part 1: You should probably be watching Pluribus. Vince Gilligan, the guy behind Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad has a new show out. It's called Pluribus and it stars Reah Seehorn as one of the last humans left after an alien invasion (of sorts). But despite being an ostensibly science fictional premise, the majority og the show is realtily grounded. I've seen others call it a Robinson Caruso style story about one person all alone trying to survive. IT is that, although not in quite the same way. What it really feels like (to me) is the opposite of so much streaming TV nowadays. There was a (possibly apocryphal) story that was going around, where a netflix studio executive though more characters should be saying what they're doing all the time. If someone is making spaghetti, they should say "I'm making spaghetti." The goal being to keep "viewers" who only had the show on in the background while doing other things informed of what's happening. They wanted netflix to be the background noise of our lives. In Pluribus, almost nobody says what they're doing a any point in time. Seehorn's character Claire is always doing something, but huge swaths of the show are almost entirely dialogue free. Carol is mostly alone so we have to watch what she does to figure it out for ourselves. It's a show that demands your attention rather than one that asks nothing more than to be noise in your life. Part 2: Speaking of attention, I love movie theaters. The popcorn and big coke and pickle are all great parts of the experience, but there's something magical about being in a dark room with a bunch of strangers experiencing the same movie at the same time. I like being forced to point my attention in one direction for a few hours and keep it there. Movie theaters are great. Which is why it's a real shame that the companies that make movies are trying to destroy them. Not literally. Netflix isn't coming to your local megaplex with a sledgehammer or wrecking ball. At least not yet, anyway. But everything that most movie studios are doing certainly feels specifically designed to make theaters fail. I think this is the natural outcome of how they work, however. In 1948 the Supreme Court of the US decided United States vs Paramount Pictures inc. which did a lot of things, the most relevant one being the breakup of the studio system, and in particular forcing the studios to give up ownership of movie theaters. This lead to independent movie theaters, and then later, movie theater chains. But those chains aren't owned by the studios. So if a studio wants a movie shown in theaters they have to split the ticket price with the theater where the ticket was sold. This seems reasonable to reasonable people. Both are required for the experience (theaters need movies to show and movies need to be shown) so both should profit from the money made. But corporations are not fond of sharing. That's how the vertically integrated system came to be in the first place. They wanted to own every penny made by their movies and I think they ahve been resenting that governemnt forced profit share since 1948. Sure once home media existed in the 1980s and later, movie studios could release direct to consumers for home viewing, but direct-to-video was such a pejorative even then. everybody new that for the real movies you had to go to a movie theater. So studios made due. When they could, they shortened theatrical windows. And when they thought they could get away with it, they released movies in as few theaters as they could get away with  Netflix wanted the prestige of awards, so they would release movies in the minimum required theaters (Usually in LA and New York) for the minimum length of time (usually two weeks) to be eligible for the Oscars or Golden Globes and then release it on netflix for everyone else. Direct-to-streaming wasn't quite as gross to the general public as direct-to-video, and hey if you want to watch the latest Benoit Blan mystery, it's your only chance anyway.  2020 and the pandemic further emboldened studios, since everybody was staying home, they got rid of theatrical releases entirely. This was viewed as an opportunity to prove that theaters (and their pesky share of the profits) are entirely unnecessary. And it worked. Streamers and studios got bigger, theaters struggled and people watched big tentpole movies from their couches. I wanted to see Wake up Dead Man in Theaters, but to do so I would have to drive at least 2 hours to the nearest town with a theater showing it. So I watched it at home. Its still really good, but I wish I had seen it in theaters with a crowd of people.  I don't really have a solution to this. If we had antitrust regulations worth a damn, we could split the production from the exhibition again. Force netflix to be a studio or a streamer, but not both. But that's not really likely, given that netflix is poised to take over one of their only remaining rivals and buy out Warner Brothers Discover (Unless paramount can bet them, but a slightly different giant media company buying warner brothers is the same problem with a different label slapped on it. ) Whoever buys WB, we'll have one less major studio, less competition, less reason to put movies in theaters and the only people who benefit will be the ones with more of your money in their pocket as they further jack up the prices for the services they monopolized. It's not like you will be able to go to the theater instead. Part 3: I think self-hosting anything you can is one way to fight back. It's not the only way, and it's not a solution in and of itself. But being able to take control, to decide where your money goes, to own your own media, these are all things that these mega corporations hate. They want you helpless and paying rent forever.  I've said before that I own my own social media. And that's mostly true! I pay $5 a month for storage and network access on a hosting platform, but I control nearly everything about it. Except. My hosting platform is shutting down at the beginning of the year. They won't let me pay $5 a month to keep going. But I can keep all my data and there are other places I can take it and migrate my entire social media footprint to. This is a good thing. I'll be doing that today. At some point this afternoon https://Social.catastrophic.horse will go down and I'll backup all the data and send it to a new hosting provider. They'll get it up and running again, hopefully, and by Monday afternoon the website should be up again.  I could solve some of this myself by running the server on my home network, on a computer I directly control, and maybe one day I'll do that. But even if I did that, I don't own the networks and internet infrastructure that the information would cross over and through. So I'm always going to be a little beholden to someone else, some company, and I don't know enough about computers to take on the responsibility of doing it myself, when I can pay a reasonable amount to outsource some of that work.   It's entirely possible that some of that will fail and I'll have to find another solution. Or maybe I'll walk way from social media entirely (I won't do that). But it's a further reminder that everything we make, everything we have, is only for now. 

This week a lot of people are getting their Spotify Wrapped, AKA the thing where the company takes all of it's data about you and repackages it i n a cutesy way to minimize how much they know about you. Also don't think about the fact that 2025 isn't over yet, so they don't even have all the data yet. Letterboxd at least does the courtesy of waiting untl the year is over for their recap. I don't get a spotify wrapped, because I don't use Spotify. I'd like to say it's a moral stand, because Spotify doesn't actually pay artists anything approaching the amount of money they make for the platform, or because they platform people like Joe Rogan, which are both very good reasons to not use Spotify. But the biggest reason is that I don't listen to that much music. So I don't have any streaming music platforms. Sometimes I'll throw a music video up on youtube, but in the rare cases where I'm listening to music with any regularity, I do it by listening to MP3s that I have saved to my computer, or have transferred to my phone. But I still find and enjoy new music occasionally! I'll occasionally grab something on Bandcamp during Bandcamp Friday (when all of Bandcamp's fees are waived and they give that money to the artists on top of their regular cut). But I do listen to some music! Here's the stuff that I acquired in 2025, in roughly reverse chronological order. Klingon Pop Warrior - Warrior Woman Did you know that many of your favorite pop songs were originally written in Klingon? Well Klingon Pop Warrior is out here spreading the word. You know I love a commitment to the bit and this is a good bit. There's not much more to it that what it sounds like. She sings pop songs in Klingon. This her first release includes hits like bangwI' wa'logh HIqIpqa' (Baby, One More Time) and yIbuSQo' (Let It Go) the latter of which is recognized as an official translation by Disney. So that's something. Sure it's all kind of a joke but it's also both very funny and sincere. They Might Be Giants - Flood Live in America They Might Be Giants might be the most prolific band I know. They're always either touring or in the studio or sometimes both. And they've been doing that for longer than I have been alive. For that last couple of years they have been doing shows including the entirety of their album Flood, but since they're showmen, they don't just get on stage and play the songs. They like to mix things up and play around with some of their most well known numbers. I think the biggest example of this that I can point to is the song stelluB in which they learned how to play one of their songs backwards (including the lyrics) and they perform it that way on stage. They perform the song live, record that, they reverse it and play the video they just recorded backwards to prove that the song still sounds like the original version. Laser The Boy - A Shark Ate My Penis Laser Webber used to be in a band called The Doubleclicks. In this band he and his sibling wrote funny and heartflet songs about nerdy things like comic books and suerheroes and robots and love. Then the band broke up and Laser realized and finally accepted he was a manwho had been pretending to be a woman his while life. A Shark Ate My Penis is a stage show he wrote about coming to terms with the fact that he's trans and what that means. It's also a look at other trans men from history, because it turns out that being trans isn't new. The show is heartfelt and funny and he released all the songs in it as al album of the same name. I feel like trans men got overlooked a lot in the current political climate so it's kind of cool to see a show all about one. Ookla the Mok - Folk Song Army Men Ookla the Mok was the first band that I discovered for myself. I had other great bands thrust upon me, but this one was all mine. And it kind of remains that, as I know maybe one other person who has even heard of them without me recommending them. They write songs about nerdy things like comic books and love (sensing a pattern in my musical tastes?). They also wrote an entire rock opera concept album about monkeys going to space. They're not quite as prolific as they were in the 2000s but that's OK. One member of the band had a stroke a few years ago and so his recovery took priority. But this year they put a new EP which was a pleasant surprise. The title track is a cover of a Tom Lehrer song, but instead of being a jaunty little piano ditty (as most of Lehrer's songs are) they perform it the eternal genre of Ska. Ookla the Mok isn't a ska band by trade, but they manage well enough. Tom Lehrer - His entire discography Speaking of: A few years ago Tom Lehrer released all of his music into the public domain. This was awesome. Lehrer was a mathematician who in the 1950s and 60s had a brief period of writing funny songs. You may have heard some of them, such as Poisoning Pigeons in the Park or New Math. Or maybe you haven't. Surprisingly a lot of songs he wrote are still very funny and more than a few of them are still relevant (sadly). I knew he had released his songs to the public domain, but I didn't bother grabbing them until his death earlier this year.  Looking back on these albums from the year, I really do seem to have a particular type of music, don't I? Anyway, if any of these seem cool, click the link. You can stream most of them for free (not TMBG) on bandcamp and if you really like them you can pay a few bucks to own them too. So it's like spotify, but slightly less evil.

In its sixteen seasons, Bob’s Burgers has put out 11 Thanksgiving episodes. If you aren’t familiar with Bob’s Burgers, it’s a fun animate d sitcom about a family that owns a struggling restaurant  Almost every episode also comes with its own original song that if it doesn’t happen in the episode itself, will at least show up in the credits, making the whole thing stealth musical to boot. I like Bob’s Burgers a lot, and although I don’t keep up with it regularly as much as I used to, I’m glad it’s still out there chugging along. This Thanksgiving, for a challenge, I decided to watch all 11 thanksgiving episodes. This was made easier because Hulu had a playlist already made called Bobsgiving for me. ANd because what’s. marathon without a ranked list, I have now ranked all 11 episodes from worst to first, with bonus pointes added to everything for the quality of the songs that appear in the episode. If a song only shows up in the credits, it’s going to be rated worse than if there’s a song in the show itself, those are the rules I made up. A song-less episode could still rank high if the rest of the episode is good enough, but a better song will push a good episode even further up. So from worst worst to first, here we go. 11. Now We’re Not Cooking with Gas This isn’t a terrible episode, but we’ve got high standards. Bob gets a rare heritage turkey from a specialty farm, but can’t cook it because the gas is out. So he gets increasingly desperate to cook the turkey in increasingly silly ways. Culminating in him sitting in the rain with a makeshift campfire and burning his socks. I see this one working more in theory than practice. In most of the Thanksgiving episodes Bob cares too much about the holiday, but he cares more about his family and so ends up putting aside his desires for theirs. Here, the majority of the episode is Bob failing to do that. It feels out of character. The joke of Riverbrook Lake Farms being the supplier of the heritage turkey did consistently make me laugh though. It’s just a good funny name. There’s a song, but I had to go look it up because i couldn’t remember it at all. so not doin any favors for this ranking. 10. Putts-giving This honestly feels like we’re running out of ideas. The family has to use a coupon for mini golf that happens to expire on Thanksgiving. There’s a schism between Tina and the other kids because she feels like she has to appear mature and obedient while trying to ask permission to attend a party. But Gene and Louise would much rather have more fun being chaos gremlins. It mostly resolves how you expect. In the b-story Linda becomes obsessed with getting another hole-in-one. Nothing special. This is the last episode to be released as a “Thanksgiving episode” before the show stopped doing them all together. And it’s barely a Thanksgiving episode at all. Yes it takes place on the day, but the conflicts are all things that could have happened any other time. There are rumors that the show stopped doing Thanksgiving episodes after this one because there was pressure from the studio (Allegedly thanksgiving episodes don’t perform well outside the US) but I could see them just wanting to give it a rest after this barrel scraping episode. It gets a little bonus for having a song in the episode proper, before the credits, but that’s really what’s keeping it out of the bottom. 9. I Bob Your Pardon The kids uncover a conspiracy! The town’s turkey pardoning ceremony turns out to be a sham when they discover the pardoned turkey is still going to be sent to the slaughterhouse. A chase ensues! I think this one is as low as it is because it relies on guest stars. We get multiple new characters and I did it really care about them. Turkey pardoning is weird, and I appreciate that this show knows that. Te song is pretty bland. mostly repeating “Saving the bird” and “Keeping our word” over and over again. 8. Thanks-hoarders This is another episode that, like Putts-giving feels only incidentally about Thanksgiving. The family has to help their friend Teddy host Thanksgiving for his family, and in the process discover he is a hoarder. Like any sitcoms do with most complex psychological issues, they over simplify it and come to a relatively pat solution in 22 minutes. Which is fine! But I didn’t laugh much, rather I just felt kind of sad for Teddy. The song isn’t even about Thanksgiving, but rather that Teddy likes to collect and fix broken things. It’s kind of catchy, but that is all it has going for it. 7. Dawn of the Peck So everything here on is a certified banger. I want that to be clear. Because Dawn of the Peck being number seven on the list mostly goes to show how good the rest of these episodes are. A turkey trot goes wrong and hundreds (or thousands?) of birds are let loose in the amusement park and the rest of the town and a mild zombie apocalypse happens, but with turkeys. A turkey-pocalypse. Meanwhile Bob gets day drunk as his family abandons him yet again and has a good time by himself. This is a very funny episode, and the eventual conclusion is perfect. It still ranks relatively low because there is not an original song at all! But we do get to listen to some Donna Summer so that’s an acceptable replacement. 6.Stuck in the Kitchen With You A later period episode that manages to bring new ideas to the table as well as work with existing relationships. The family visits a retirement home and Bob ends up having to cook dinner for everyone. Things get of hand and Bob’s control in the kitchen is off-putting to Louise, who starts off willing to help, but eventually gets run out by bob’s pursuit of perfection. It handles some of the same ideas in Not Cooking With Gas, but in a better way. Bob can’t get over his excitement to see how Louise feels and he has to work to repair that relationship. The b-plot is about the other kids trying to recreate the thanksgiving parade when the TV stops working, and has a lot of very funny moments. Plus it’s the source of the in-episode song, a “Broadway medley” that lists everything the kids know about broadway (not much), and there’s a different end-credits song where Loused becomes the super hero Captain Casserole, fighting evil with a kitchen torch. Good stuff. 5. Gale Making Bob-Sled Bob has to go pick up Aunt Gale, because her ankle is twisted, but his car gets snowed in so he has to drag her back home on makeshift sled. It’s mostly a two hander between Bob and Gale, who really nail that sibling-in-law weirdness. You have to like each other, even as you don’t really understand the quirks that the other one has. There’s a lot of good bits in here, mostly about how Gale does everything, cat in a box, salad bowl, stuff like that. The song, Thanksgiving For Everybody, is short but sweet one basically three lines that make up a joke. Plus we get Bob in-episode scat singing to attract a cat down from somewhere up high. Lots of fun! 4. Diarrhea of a Poopy Kid This one is a bit of a departure. The closest comparison is to something like the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror or Futurama’s Anthology of Interest. Gene has the stomach flu so cannot participate in thanksgiving. His family takes pity on him and expresses it through telling him stories where the villains are food. What this means is we the audience get 3 fun and punny parodies of action movies. We get a new version of The Predator (the Breadator) Air Force One (Pear Force One) and Armageddon (Parmageddon). They’re all a little bit silly, but I enjoyed the diversion. Plus the song, Turkey I Need You is a banger, originally sung by Gene in the bathroom and reprised over the credits. 3. An Indecent Thanksgiving Proposal We’re in all time classic space now. The Belcher’s Landlord Mr. Fischoeder wants to hire the belcher family (minus Bob) to pretend to be his fairly so he can woo a former flame who loves being the “Other woman” breaking up families. It is a silly premise but it only gets sillier from here. Bob gets hired as Mr. Fischoeder’s chef and keeps trying to get his family back while also drinking too much absinthe and making dinner. Linda gets way too into character and comes up with a song for her character to sing. This is the perfect integration of song and episode as Lind breaks into the song multiple times and we get a full reprise over the credits. Its not a good song, but it really does feel like a song that Linda wrote and rehearsed for the perfect thanksgiving moment. I love it. 2. The Quirk-ducers A thanksgiving episode that focuses more on the kids. There’s a sub-plot where Linda gets too attached to a potato that looks like her grandfather, but the meat of the story (Pun intended) is the kids trying to put on a Thanksgiving play so bad that they have to cancel it and send everybody home early for a half day. This means we got both a parody of Mel Brooks’ Producers but also an abridged set of songs written by Tina based on her erotic turkey fiction that is also lightly based on he own life. The play also features exploding giblets on the audience which is such a perfect plan that absolutely nothing could go wrong. A-Plus songs, A-Plus jokes, almost nothing could beat this one for me. 1. Turkey in a Can This is the episode that always comes to mind with Bobs Burgers Thanksgiving episodes. Te premise is simple enough. Someone put Bob’s turkey in the toilet. And then it happens again. The mystery of the toilet turkey and Bob’s increasingly frantic ways of dealing with it are a perfect escalation. It’s never not funny. Plus the song matches the show in structure, starting out funny and getting increasingly funnier over its short runtime. A perfect episode. 

I fixed a thing this week. My office chair has gotten a little worn over the last 5 years of ownership. It’s a good chair, although quite creaky. Sturdy but it makes noises tat can be heard outside. The seat in particular is quite worn, not surprising since the seat is the primary part of most chairs. It’s a cloth covered foam seat, you generally know the kind. ne particular spot has worn through the cloth, mostly because of how I sit. the foam has been wearing through too. So I figured I could fix it. I took a pair of worn out pants, and cut out one of the pockets. And after only a couple hours of looking for it off and on, I was able to locate the spool of black thread I have used to fix other items of clothing in the past (mostly splitting seams or small holes). Then I went to town sewing the pocket/patch onto the chair seat. I don’t really know how to sew, but I know that if you apply enough thread and don’t really care how it looks, you can do a decent enough job. Which is what I did. The final results aren’t great, but it works well enough. I hope. While I as sewing, but also just more generally this week, I was watching some stuff on PBS. A couple different youtubers I follow did videos related to public media, and John Oliver had a segment about it too, on last week’s Last Week Tonight. You know PBS is pretty great, right? I watched some episodes of Antiques Roadshow, which is always fun. Each segment is structured like a little history sketch, you get some cool info about a piece of history, and then you get the punchline: how much the thing might be worth. No matter what number comes up, it’s always a little bit surprising, and a perfect piece of punctuation to move onto thee next item. I also watched a couple episodes of Great Performances. If you’re a theater geek like me, Great Performances is a wonderful series that gives you access to see some absolutely, well, great performances. Often times if you live in The Woods like I do, there isn’t much of a chance to see broadway quality theater. We have some local theaters and they do good work that I like watching, but the big names and big shows aren’t coming around very often. For example, this year in New York City the Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in the Park was Twelfth Night with an absolutely stacked cast, it was full of names you probably know like Sandra Oh, Peter Dinklage, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Lupita Nyong’o. Twelfth Night is probably in my top 5 Shakespeare’ so I would love to be able to see it. And since it was recorded and released on Great Performances, I can! The actual production didn’t live up to my expectations, I have some quibbles about the directorial and design choices being made but It’s cool that I even get to have those opinions because I got to see the play. I also queued up the latest West End production of Next To Normal, a pulitzer prize winning musical about a family dealing with severe mental illness. I remember when the original broadway production won the Tony for best musical and I’ve heard the original broadway soundtrack, but now I can watch the show come to life. Thanks, PBS. I did have to make a donation to my local PBS Station in order to watch the latter show, though. But I was happy to do it. aA lot of stuff on PBS.org is completely free to watch, but some of it gets moved behind the PBS Passport paywall, which requires a $5 monthly donation (or more, if you’re feeling generous) to unlock. But since that money goes directly back to our local PBS station rather than some billionaire’s pocket, it’s a payment I’m happy to make. If this sounds like public media propaganda, that’s because it probably is. You should watch more public media. Unless you’re not part of the public, I guess. If you'd like some more here's the John Oliver segment and a video ranking PBS Kids Shows by an adult. 

f you were to ask me if I gave a favorite cinematographer, I’d probably say, no I’m not enough of a film dork to have a favorite. But if I thought about it a little longer, I’d probably say, “wait no. Steve Yedlin” I first discovered the work of Steve Yedlin in college. Something was making the rounds about “film vs digital” again and this time it was a video by some guy. In this video, only available through website, he presents self-shot footage of the same scenes side by side, one shot on film and one shot digitally. They were exactly the same, because he had to shoot each one twice, but they were as close as he could make them. It wasn’t particularly interesting footage, clearly shot in and around his house, and you figured he was the guy in the footage as well as the camera operator (I still don’t know if that’s actually the case, but I believe it) In the video he deliberately doesn’t tell you which side is digital and which one was shot on film.  He also makes it clear that he occasionally switches which which one is shown first or second or on each side, between shots. He does this because the goal is to make it clear how alike they are. It’s very difficult to notice any differences between the two images in terms of the sorts of things we film dorks tend to say are baked into the different formats. The colors are almost identical, the “grain” seems the same, I honestly cannot tell the difference between the two. His larger point is that recording format is not, and should not be the deciding factor in how your movie looks. He demonstrates this rather well, in my opinion, and goes on to talk about how there is always a physical phenomenon (light hitting a recording medium) that can be studied and understood. A creator should be the one to define how their movie looks and anyone pushing only one way to accomplish that is probably selling you something. I've thought about that short video a lot in the intervening years. Most often when some director or other talks about how they only shoot on film, for reasons. I was only after many more years that I realized the guy who made that video was actually a well regarded professional cinematographer who was probably pointing his argument directly at those directors. If you;ve even seen a movie directed by Rian Johnson, you've seen Steve Yedlin's work. Brick, The Brothers Bloom, Looper, The Last Jedi, Knives Out and Glass Onion all had Steve Yedlin behind the lens. And say what you will about those movies (I like to love all of them) I think it's undeniable that they look good. As Yedlin's profile has risen (for a cinematographer, he's not exactly a household name) I have seen him continue to talk about how shooting a movie is physics and math, and limiting yourself by what you think the specific "feel" of a format has takes away creative control undet the illusion of giving it back. I saw an interview (I can't find it now) how parts of Last Jedi were filmed on film and parts were digital and how nobody can tell because of his work. This is a man who understands things it feels like nobody else does when it comes to how a movie looks. He's fine with shooting your movie how you want, be it film or digital, but he wants you to have control over it and make the artistic decisions you want. So that 8 minute video I watched a long time ago had a profound impact on my approach to understanding how movies work. To my wonderful surprise, when i was telling someone else about it (it comes up in conversation with me more often than it does other people) and I was pulling up the link to share, I discovered that he's done it again, but more. This year, he released a recorded version of a presentation he's given at least twice to industry leaders (Roger Deakins, for example, is in the audience). IN this two hour and sixteen minute long presentation, called Debunking HDR he once again does a side by side deep dive between two popular standards. Instead of film vs digital, he's now talking about High Dynamic Range versus Standard Dynamic Range.  The video is pretty dry, and very academic. He spends his setup time explaining the literal mechanics of how color is displayed, and how the two different standards display that information. His biggest point is that HDR and SDR are different ways of measuring and encoding the same thing. He says it's the difference between measuring in meters and feet. One is not better than the other and if you know math, you can easily change between them, but using meters or feet does not change how big your living room is.  He demonstrates this by showing various frames from his movies back to back (side by side in real life) where the same frame is encoded in HDR and SDR. They are identical. Not that they look the same, but that the light emitted from the display is identical becuase he is using each standard to display the image identically. He's showig the same image in meters and feet, but the image doesn't change. He literally pulls up the standards that define these two different "formats" at one point, which I think almost nobody else does. He read the freaking manual. The information has been there the whole time.  He goes on to demonstrate that HDR has exactly one feature that is can do natively that SDR cannot replicate. He demonstrates that feature (super bright highlights) and then goes on to show how, with some extra work, you can in fact accomplish that with some tweaking to SDR.  The last half of the presentation is him working through a bunch of marketing claims that are often made about HDR and demonstrating them to be either false or a misunderstanding of the technology. I'm not goign to cover all the arguments, because Steve does it better and understands it more deeply. Like with his film vs digital video, his goal is one of putting the control back in the artists hands. Letting them be the final arbiter of how their movie looks and not a format dictating how it should look.  If you care about how a movie looks, or if you've ever complained that a movie didn't get an "HDR Release" then I think you owe it to yourself to make the time to watch the video. The real audience is people who make movies, but people who like watching movies can get a lot out of understanding how they are made. Anyway, like the film vs digital video, I'm sorry in advance for bringing this up every chance I can for the next ten years. 

Here's a collection of bits and bobs. I'm making another batch of soap. Like always, I made some slight changes to the process (It's an experiment) and I may have botched the whole thing. I'll probably know better in about 24 hours.  I watched all that remains of this film from 1923 called Regeneration. I originally had 6 parts, but all that's left is the 2nd one and it is badly damaged. What's left is about 11 minutes long. There's pirates and that's about it. But it makes me think a lot about the literal mountains of film from that era and even earlier that have been lost forever. And when I think about that, I think about how ephemeral everything that humanity makes is. It's not that we shouldn't be making things, but it's good to have a sense of scale. There's a really good chapter in Ryan North's science-based instruction manual How To Take Over The World about the difficulty of creating a message that will last into the future. I'm reading another humors/educational instruction manual right now, by Recreational Mathematician Toby Hendy called A Guide To Making Friends in the Fourth Dimension, and unlike Mat Parker's Book Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension it's is actually a guide for thinking about the fourth spacial dimension, if it were something we could explore. It's kind of weird I own two books with similar names by recreational mathematicians. Except it's not weird at all that I own them). The book is self published by Toby and only available through her directly, at her website. It's a gorgeous book, full of full-color illustrations that really bring these concepts to life. Another math-adjacent thing I watched this week was Secret Base's series on Scorigami. (first part here) Scorigami is what it's called when an NFL game ends in a score that has never happened before in the history of the sport. Sports in general don;t really interest me, but if Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein make a series I am going to be much more interested. Their work on the Complete History of the Seattle Mariners and the Story of Dave Steib are some of the best sports documentary work I have ever seen. And while the Scoragami series does not reach those heights, it's still a very good watch. Lots of math, but presented in an easy enough way to follow and you don't really have to care about sports to enjoy them. I know I don't. I've been thinking about the inevitable end of the Streaming Era. I don;t think it'll ever go away, but I do think It's becoming more and more like cable each year, where you pay too much for nothing you own and you're miserable about it. Veronica Explains did a video about how she completely cut out cable, I mean streaming, and is much happier about it. And I read a couple of really good blog posts by Andrew Roach on getting away from paid services, and becoming your own streaming service. Both of which I have done at least some of. ANd while I didn't do it because of those stories, it did make me feel a little more justified in buying a whole bunch of DVDs in the last month. 

Do people know about the John Munchiverse? I made an offhand comment online this week about the Munchiverse, and how I think it would be fun to have a channel on my ErsatzTV system showing episodes from all the shows where John Munch appeared.  But I took it as given that people would know who I was talking about when I mentioned Detective Munch. Well I think of him as Detective Munch, but it turns out at some point he earned his Sergeant stripes, so I guess he's technically Sergeant Munch now. But that;s not important. From 1996 to 2016, so thirty years, John Munch was a character played by Richard Belzer on a variety of TV shows. HE started off as a main character on Homicide: Life on the Street, which is a show that would last for seven years and redefined what a cop show could be. It showed the detectives who worked homicide not as upstanding guardians of justice, but as the complex people they actually were. It also was one of the earlier shows to focus on serialized stories over multiple episodes, or even entire season long stories. If you go back and watch it now, (and you probably should) it'll probably seem pretty dated at spots, but it was a big deal to do what it was doing at that time. It started a few months before NYPD Blue, another show that would push the police procedural boundaries and pave the way for the shows that would come later like The Shield and The Wire.  The Wire was another show created by the same guy who originally created Homicide: Life on the Streets, David Simon. Simon started life as a reporter, working the crime beat for the Baltimore Sun. He would eventually turn his reporting into a book and would then adapt that book into the TV Show Homicide. But We're getting off track. In the show Homicide, many of the characters were loosely based on people in Simon's book, and thus real people. One of those characters was John Munch. ABUt John munch was such a great character that he survived the end of Homicide. He retired from Baltimore and moved to New York where he got another job as a cop, the sort of thing that mostly happens on TV Shows. The show in question Was Law & Order Special Victims Unit. He was a main character on that show for an additional fifteen years before retiring again.  Because Law & Order crosses over with the other shows in the franchise with some regularity (and Homicide Life on the Street did a couple Law & order crossovers even before that) Munch eventually ended up appearing in 3 of the 6ish different Law & order Shows. (he never showed up on LA, or Criminal Intent, or UK, or the shows that came later like Organized Crime). Not content to show up on only law & order shows, the detective made a cameo on a few other shows too, often on different networks. He made an appearance in an episode of The Wire (as I mentioned, it was also created by David Simon) and The X-Files and Arrested Development and even animated and puppet appearances on American Dad and Sesame Street respectively. He's been on a lot of shows. As I said in a previous newsletter, I built a law & order channel, which currently has the original 20 seasons of the Mothership show, plus a smattering of Criminal Intent and SVU seasons. I picked up the complete series of Homicide Life on the Street a couple weeks ago, and it seemed remiss to not include those too. I already own The wire, the X Files and Arrested development on DVD, so it was easy enough to throw those into the rotation too. So now my Law & Order channel has been renamed The Munchiverse. I still need to pick up the rest of the L&O spinoff seasons I don't have, but those have been on the long list for a long time, so I'll get them eventually. The only thimg I'm missing (if I limit myself to live action) is a short lived series called The Beat that aired on UPN and was cancelled before the first season even aired. It never got an official DVD release, but maybe I can convince the universe to make that happen. It's one DVD set, how much could it cost to manufacure, ten dollars?

I haven't talked about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in a while on here. I stopped doing the Song of the Week not because I ran out of songs, but more because it started to feel perfunctory. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend feels like a show from the before times. I watch a lot of older television. My mother outlaw is often surprised when I mention i enjoy watching The Rockford Files or shows of a similar vintage. But those shows are from long enough ago that they feel like they come from outside of time. but there is media that is from my specific past that feels both more immediate and farther away. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is one of those shows. Emily St. James wrote a piece about how there was a moment in the 2000s where the story that the united states promises itself seemed to have already come true. That wasn't really true then and it's not really true now. What has changed is how we (for a given value of 'we") see it. The problems are not new, but they are more blatantly obvious than they have been, assuming you were sheltered enough to have never seen them first hand. I think in a lot of ways you can bookend this moment with two musicals, Avenue Q and Hamilton. But I was talking about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend CXG (I get tired of typing out the whole thing) is a show that is much narrower in scope than either Hamilton or Avenue Q, but they're all musicals so there's some shared DNA. But where Avenue Q and Hamilton use the trappings of other formats (puppet show and hip-hop biography respectively) to create what seems like a subversive critique or at least satire  of society, both end up re-entrenching particular aspects of that US story. The presentation is doing the subverting, but the message is perhaps a little too pat.  CXG, in part because it gets to be a TV show instead of a single 2-3 hours long Broadway musical, does almost the opposite. It starts of with a premise that feels familiar, a woman makes the "Crazy" decision to move across the country to California because she runs into her summer-camp boyfriend in a particularly low moment. But over four seasons of the show we learn the situation is a lot more nuanced than that. And even as the show reaches it's natural conclusion there's not a lot in the way of resolution. Things are not wrapped up neat and tidy. It's a song deliberately left unfinished because that's what life is.  OK, I've convinced myself the show might be more relevant than I originally thought. I should probably watch it again. Sure would be nice if there was a blu-ray release of the entire show. Since it's not currently streaming anywhere.  When I sat down to write this I wanted to talk about the butter ads that appear in the show a couple times, but I didn't get there. Anyway, it's got some of the most non-sequiter butter advertisements, on of which is actually plot relevant. Here's the 4 slogans for butter, yes butter, that appear in the show: • When was the last time you were truly happy? • Your future is in your hands...And on the edge of your knife... • Are you making healthy choices? • Butter can’t save you now And for old time's sake, this week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is: The Darkness

IF you follow my social media account (and no worries if you don't) you have probable seen me tooting about ErsatzTV this week. It's been the project that has taken up the most of my brainspace.  I learned about ErsatzTV specifically because a youtube video about it got removed, by youtube. Now for a number of reasons, youtube isn't always forthcoming about why a certain video gets removed. The biggest reason is that if they were very explicit about specific rules, then people would do everything they can to be following the letter of the law, while trying to get around it in spirit. This is a pretty common moderation problem on any platform of significant size or reach. In my opinion it's another reason why small self-hosted or community-hosted but interoperable social media networks are a better idea than one singualr silo with a million users and an always overworked moderaton team. Smaller instances are easier to moderate and easier to have firm and understandable rules on.   I heard about ErsatzTV because a couple other youtubers were talking bout how this particular video got removed, in the normal youtube way of not explaining why or offering any steps to mitigate the issue. What's funnier, is that these two youtubers, in half a second of search found other videos on the exact same topic. They weren't really talking about what the tool does or how it works (maybe to avoid getting their video removed?) but I did the same search and found how to use ErsatzTV.  ErsatzTV is, as the name implies, a way of replicating the TV experience of yore. Nowadays everythign is streaming on demand, and unless you're watching something like Pluto (and I like Pluto) the idea of channel surfing, or flipping, is completely gone. You pick what you want to watch next and then you watch it. Some of that choice is often heavoly influenced by an algorithm these days, but unless you're on tiktok you are still picking what to watch next.  Back in the days of cable, you picked what to watch by flipping through channels to see what was on, or stopping on the TV Guide channel as it scrolled through a schedule showing everything that was airing, as well as what was coming up. Ersatz TV attempts to replicate that experience but with your own media.  Assuming you are like me and have studiously digitized your entire physical media collection, you can use a tool like ErsatzTV to convert that collection of media files into a bunch of programmed streaming channels based on your own preferences. The specifics of how it all works is better left up to an instructional video (which this is not) but you can schedule shows to air at certain times of days, like a real TV network, or just have some group of shows or movies playing on an endless shuffle. It's a great way to reduce decision paralisys from "What do I watch from these hundereds of shows and movies?," to "What do I want to watch from what's on right now?" Once I got the software up and running, it's integrated with my plex server, so I can sit on the couch and flip through the guide to see what's on. I've only built out 4 channels so far, but I want to work on some others.  The four I have so far are: Criterion Channel (Kevin's Version) Law & Order MiSTRaxx Star Trek The simplest channels are the ones I built first. First up was The Criterion Channel (Kevin's Version). The Criterion Channel Streaming service has a 24/7 stream of movies playing and you can just flip it on and watch something. It's great, and the reason I finally subscribed to the channel. But I've got my own rather extensive collection of movies from the Criterion Collection, and since they were already tagged as such in my plex server, I could set up a channel that just shuffles through all of them, so I can do the same thing, and watch a movie that I already own from the collection.  The Law & Order channel was equally easy to set up, I have all of Law & Order (the original series) on DVD so I could just play those on a shuffled loop forever, and it does. I added some complexity because I also have a few seasons each of Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit, so I did some tweaking and now those are mixed in as well. Recuse are you really recreating the cable experience if you can't find law & order playing somewhere at all hours of the day? Now that I knew how to create channels shuffling through multiple shows, I was ready to set up the MiSTRaxx channel. Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a great show, lasting 13 seasons, but it also spawned a bunch of spinn off media like Cinematic Titanic, The Film Crew, Rifftrax, and The Mads are Back, all of which are variations on "telling jokes over cheesy movies." While I don't have a complete collection of everything they've put out (there's a lot) I do have a bunch of it from all the different shows. And it's one of those categories that always feels a little tricky to decide what to watch, because there's just so much of it. But now I don;t have to! if I want something cheesy and funny, I can just let the schedule decide for me. The Star Trek channel works much the same way. Although this is one I really need to put some more effort into. I've been slack in my collecting and i only own The Next Generation and Lower Decks on DVD. I actually picked up Deep Space Nine used on Ebay last week, but I haven't finished the process of digitizing it yet for my plex server. It really behooves me to pick up the other series on disc, includeing Voyager, The Original Series, and yes, even Enterprise. I should also probably pick up the new era shows too. Discovery and Picard are ended, so if I spot the complete series on the cheap I'll grab them, and Prodigy is a very well made star trek show that is IMO overlooked because it was made for Nickelodeon. So even though the channel is up and running, I still have some work to do to get it into the shape I want it.  I do have some plans for future channels, but they're going to take more work, either in collecting the media in the first place, or doing some manual scheduling instead of my current practice of "Shuffle everything let randomness sort it out." Channels I want to make include:  1960s & Earlier - Like my version of the Criterion Channel, I want to have a channel showing all my movies I own from the 1960s or earlier. This one is harder to build because I have to manually create the list of movies, sorting by date isn't currently an option.  A Cartoon Network - I have fewer cartoons than I expected. I have about a dozen seasons of the Simpsons, the complete Batman Animated series, and the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and a few other individual seasons of shows, but it turns out this is a pretty big gap in my collection. I could spin up a channel with what I have, and probably will, but it's another space I want to grow my collection. Murder & Mystery - What it says on the tin, mystery shows. I alrady have Columbo, the Rockford files and Miami Vice, but I think I need to add at least Murder, Shw Wrote and Magnum PI to feel like I've got a handle on the genre. I'd also throw some newer shows in like Poker Face and Veronica Mars, both of which I already own.  Blue Skies - The USA Blue Sky period had a lot of great shows that exemplify the cable TV aesthetic and ethos to me. I want to included shows like Burn Notice (owned) and Psych and Monk (Not owned) but also adjacent shows from other networks like Warehouse 13, Eureka, and the Stargate Franchise. One Season Wonders & Weirdos - This would be a home for the orphans in my collection. Shows that were cancelled too soon, or even if they managed to get a few seasons feel like they have been forgotten in the grander narrative. I've got shows like Wonderfalls, Boomtown, The Class, Cop Rock, The Middle Man, Kingdom Hospital, Sports Night, Clerks, and Ninja Turtles The Next Mutation. Bonus points for you if you actually remember any of these shows. I'd recommend all of them. Except Ninja Turtles The Next Mutation. It's pretty bad.   Nostalgia Bait - This is the one that's going to take the most work, because I want to build out an actual schedule. The plan is to start it with an afternoon block, but I'd like to eventuall expand it to a full day of programming. The idea is to replicate the TV schedule of my memory. Not anything that actually existed, but what my brain thinks TV was like. So we'll have Saturday morning cartoons of course, but also a weekday afternoon schedule that starts at 3PM with back to back episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (because I Started watching them ins syndication) and a double shot of The Simpsons (same reason) the eveneing slots are a little open, but after nine, we get Nick at Night, which is to day sitcoms from the past. And the past of my childhood, not the current block of Nick At Night shows which includes Spongebob Squarepants, Friends, Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory. All of which should be considered too new to appear in my block of "classic sitcoms". After than I'll probably throw in a couple general purpose movie channels, but much more granular than that and I'm getting back to the point where I should just manually pick what to watch. 

Last week, I said I'd talk about video games this week, so here's that. One of the sillier games I’ve played recently was Q-Up which is a little hard to describe. It bills itself as “the future of esports,” but the “esport” in the middle of e erything is a literal coin flip. You queue up for a match, get randomly assigned a side and watch a coin flip 3-5 times. Each success or failure increases our decreases your “Q ratgin” which determines which players you are matched agains in future matches. The idea is to create the first “Perfectly” fair esport, where you always have a 50% chance of winning, and are perfectly matched against other players who also have a 50% chance of winning. Because it’s a coin flip.  But the game (which only has a demo out, the full game is “coming soon” is being developed by Everybody House Games, who II mostly know for Universal Paperclips, an idle/clicker game where you are a rogue algorithm who eventually turns all of reality into paperclips. They’ve also created a party game where you try to trick your smart speaker (think Amazon Echo or Google Home) to say certain words without saying the word yourself, and they created Babble Royale a Battle Royale game like PubG or Fortnight, but crossed with Scarable, which works far better than a game with that premise should. So my suspicions are that Q-Up has a little more going under the hood. My suspicions were given evidence when the in-game email client started sending me new messages after every match including a stealth employment contract, and a chose-able path adventure. Plus the more matches I played, the more “skills” I unlocked which gave my player avatar special abilities that drastically improved my ability to succeed in Q-up matches, even if I failed the coin flip.  There’s a lot going on under the hood, but in 90 minutes of play I managed to hit the demo-cap and was told I’d have to wait for more. I’m not even fully sure it’s multi-player, or if that’s just another ruse. I saw some of the same player names pop up in matches, and if I’m honest, they all seemed a little too normal. The game itself seems to exist outside the game, and I love games like that.  But the Demo is out there on Steam if you want to check it out it even runs on my 10+ year off Mac, so that’s something.  ------- A buddy of mine and I get together online every week to play co-op video games. We started with Divinity Original Sin 2, but have also finished Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate, Orcs Must Die 2, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, We Were Here (The first one, not the whole series) and are about to start making our way through the campaigns in Halo: The Master Chief Collection.  Recently we both picked up a Humble Bundle of Lego games, the keystone of which was Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. This is the latest in a long series of video game adaptations of lego versions of popular movies. The original Lego Star Wars was a really fun game, combining simple puzzles, collect-a-thons and strong humor poking fun at the movie it was adapting. IT spawned dozens of other Lego games, including multiple in the Marvel and DC Comics universe, Indiana Jones tie-ins, The Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, and even the Lego Ninjago Movie! (I don’t know what the Lego Ninjago movie is). The games are all silly fun, and great hangout games, because from the very beginning they had co-op play. You could sit on the couch and your friend or sibling or spouse could grab the player 2 controller and drop right into playing alongside you. So you could both punch Jawas or Nazis or Dinosaurs.  This week we tried to boot up Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, or as I’m going to abbreviate it Lest Wath Sky Sag.  The first tie we boot up a game always has a little bit of finagling. This is just part and parcel for playing games on computers in my experience. It’s exacerbated by the fact that we have different operating systems (I’m on linux he’s on windows) and any-online play is a little finicky to begin with. This time we were both stymied by controller issues. We have both used controllers successfully in our online games (TMNT: Splintered Fate was entirely played with controllers) and our different setups meant we probably weren’t having the same problems. He started installing new drivers and  started plugging and unplugging things into various USB ports. Eventually we got everything working only to discover: Lest Wath Sky Sag doesn’t support online co-op. In fact none of the Lego Movie Games support online Co-op play. It’s a couch co-op only series, and always has been. It’s the 2020s and neither of us ever considered that a game wouldn’t support online co-op out of the box, so this was quite a shock.  We briefly tried Remote Play Together, but it was janky at best and unusable at worst. So we switched back to Orcs Must Die 3, which is our default backup game. We played a couple levels and had just nailed the pathing on n a big challenging level when Steam’s online systems seems to shut down completely. So we called it a night and now we’re downloading the Halo games. ------- I made the [mistake/wise choice] of finally downloading Slay the Spire to my phone this week. It's a game I've been playing since I dunno, 2019? The mechanics are that nice combination of complex and solvable. It's a rogue-like deckbuilder which basically means every time you play you start over from scratch (that's the roguelike) and you play through collecting a set of cards that help you accomplish your goals (that's the deckbuilder). With the sheer amount of time I have put into the game, I can basicaly play it without thinking, as long as I'm doing the easier difficulty levels (which aren't easy, but not nearly as hard as it can get). It's the sort of game I can play when I need to keep my hands busy while doing something else with my brain.  I've tried other games like it, and enjoyed many of them, but there's something about Slay the Spire that keep scratching a familiar itch in my brain. I don;t even know if I play it for enjoyment anymore, or if I'm just doing it because I can go through the motions with relative ease.  The best thing I can say about it is it's a really good one of these kinds of games, if ou like these kinds of games.

Grief is a funny thing. It never hits you quite the way you expect. Or at leas that’s been my experience. We’re just about a year out from the Hurricane. Things are normal. Except that they aren’t normal. They weren’t normal then and they’re not normal now. I wrote a disaster log during the 19 days that we were without power after the storm. I shared some of it back then, but I haven’t really revisited it since then.  But that means I can open the document up and see that on October 1 2025, exactly one year ago from when I’m writing this, Amy took Felicity, our cat, in the truck down the one dirt road that could get out of the neighborhood since the bridge had washed away. Amy and her dad took Felicity to see if they could find a vet willing to look at her. They weren’t successful. Nobody was open. So I said goodby to my cat without know if I’d see her again.  It was still a few weeks until she would actually pass away. Now it’s been almost a year, but I still sometimes expect to catch her in the corner of my eye, or accidentally kick her in the dark walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night. It’s not all the time, but it is some of the time.  A year ago we were trying to calculate how much gas we had in the tank to run the generator, so we could figure out how long it would run.  A year ago friends were texting (or trying to text) from unbelievable far away trying to see if they could help.  Amy and I didn’t want to be in town for the anniversary. Lots of places were doing memorials, or remembrances, and we weren’t really interested in that We memorialize in our own way, and doing it publicly was not in the cards. We left town, to the other side of the mountains and to a little cabin in the woods. We sat in a hot tub and watched bad movies on Tubi and visited kitschy tourist attractions like Paula Deen’s Lumberjack Feud Supper Show.  On Friday, one year to the day after Hurricane Helene made landfall, we learned a friend of ours died a few days after a sudden medical event. The details aren’t important, or mine to share. Eating a meatball sandwich moments after learning a friend died feels a little weird, but the food was already on the table. I lost a friend who I had spoken to almost every week for the past 5 years, and I ate a meatball sandwich in response.  Sometimes grief feels like nothing. Sometimes it’s the silliest things that set you off. I missed Pizzamass last year, the silly event where Hank and John Green, the VlogBrothers, make a video back and forth every day for 2 weeks and sell silly perch and give all the proceeds to charity. It’s a little thing that makes me smile. It brings me joy. I knew I missed it last year, but it wasn’t until; this year, when I started watching Pizzamass 2025 that the grief of missing it hit me. I sat on the couch and I cried watching youtube videos. I cried for Pizzamass 2024 and my cat and the town I’ve come to call home and my friend. But grief is a funny thing sometimes. A year and 2 weeks ago, we were talking to a builder and probably 2 weeks from signing a contract to build our home. Now, one year and one hurricane later, we’re talking to a different builder about building our home. Grief happens not just because the past is gone, but because so many imagined futures have been cut off. “things will be different,” Grief says “and you had no say in the matter.” I don’t really have a way to end this. I’m doing fine, thanks for asking. What’s the point of having a Secret Public journal if you can’t let loose some times? Maybe next week I’ll talk about video games. 

I’m on vacation this weekend, try to make the world a better place for someone this week.  Kevin

Programming Note: Going to be on Vacation next Sunday, but after. that I'll probably regale you with tales of kitschy tourist stuff I saw. I've always been vaguely aware of Kamen Rider as a franchise. I knew it was a Japanese show kind of like Super Sentai, which was the original basis for, and provider of action scenes to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (end every subsequent power rangers series). But Kamen Rider's US Adaptations never had the same crossover audience in the US and failed, at least by TV metrics, and were cancelled quickly. Kamen Rider is actually older than Super Sentai, starting a few years earlier than Super Sentai's premier in 1975. Yes, both shows were started in the 70s and are still going to day. That's Dick Wolf levels of franchise longevity. All I know about Kamen Rider is that it translates to Masked Rider and is about a superhero who wears a mask and rides a motorcycle. Each season is a new storyline and that makes it very easy to jump in ans watch whenever. Except that getting it in the US has always been a little tricky unless one was willing to sail the high seas and rely on fan produced subtitles. Eventually they would release the seasons on physical media (Yay!) but if you wanted to dip into a season it was a bit harder. Shout Studios, who put out fine products like the Mystery Science Theater 3000 collections, also hold the US rights to the show and stream episodes from the over 50 year backlog of episodes, which is cool. A new season of Kamen rider started a couple weeks ago and the cool thing is that for the first time, they're simulcasting episodes in a bunch of countries outside of Japan. But it really is a broadcast to some extent. The episodes stream on youtube (and maybe twitch) at the same time and they aren't saved as videos-on-demand for later. They do re-stream them throughout the week so you can catch up if you missed it. Heck, one of the first three episodes might be streaming right now if you check out the youtube channel.  This season is about a young adult who lucid dreams and fights monsters as a secret agent in his dreams. Except it turns out that those dreams are real and if he doesn't win, bad things will happen in the waking world. I've watched the first 2 episodes and tried to stay up to watch the third last night, but because it's in a Saturday morning cartoon timeslot in Japan, tat means it premiers at 10:30PM my time and I got sleepy and missed the episode 3 premier. I'll probably manage to catch it in a replay though. It's kind of fun to have appointment level TV here in the far flung future of 2025, so I"m going to try to stay up on the series as it runs. 

I got my covid booster this weekend, along with my regular flu shot. It was a relatively painless experience, the hardest part was the waiting. I can’t help but think about the contrast in the experience from the first time getting one to now. The first COVID shots felt like a miracle of science and human ingenuity. There was this massive problem, and so much of our scientific and medicinal apparatuses were turned toward solving it. There were the massive vaccination sites where people were lined up by the thousands to get the jab and hundreds of volunteers were helping to make that happen.  Now, I spent about 30 minutes waiting for an appointment I made at a Minute Clinic inside a CVS for one clearly overworked Nurse Practitioner to give out as many shots as he can and compete the resulting paperwork. There were about dozen people waiting and 4 chairs in the little area, and we all got excited when the door opened again and we hoped our name would be called. But the shots were acquired, even if it wasn’t as glamorous.  And now, we have an administration (full of people who could easily claim credit for the success of the initial vaccine) who is doing everything they can to downplay that success, and to push people out of even having the option to receive the vaccine.  We’re in an ambiguous place right now with the rollout. The recommendations (and guidelines)  are subject to change, but more open to access than I feared. Thinks like mental health conditions (broadly defined) being a current or former smoker (remember when you tried a cigarette in college?) or being physically inactive (do you work a desk job?) are all “high risk conditions” alongside the more predictable and expected ones. When getting my shot the NP asked if I had any medical conditions, and I mentioned my depression. I”m not sure if it was specifically a screening question or just a standard medical intake, but that was really the only question I was asked at all other than “Which arm?”  If you think you can get the vaccine, I encourage you to try. Vaccines work best in situations where everybody has them. The more people who get one the more protected the members of your community who can’t will be. Get it for yourself, and get it for everyone else.  ------------------ People are Mad on the Internet For the last few months, there has been an ongoing storyline in a comic I read where two characters who are in relationships have been cheating on those relationships with each other. It’s something that ha been building in the comic since the very beginning (15 years!) but the characters only realized their attraction to each other very recently.  The comments are full of people who are mad about this storyline because Cheating in a Relationship is Bad and these characters should face consequences for their Bad Behavior. Of course there are also fans who are enjoying the high drama of it all. But the story moves slowly (the last few months in the comic have only covered a day or so) so every drip of an update is full of people re-hashing the same arguments over and over again. They have even come up with two nicknames for the different groups of people so there’s an easy shorthand to figure out which side of this arbitrary divide someone is on. Or to accuse someone of being on.  Some people are (apparently) mad enough that they have stopped reading, but then they’re also not commenting anymore either. Everyone who takes the trouble to check the comic every day, and type out a comment or response to a comment must care at least a little bit. It matters to them.  You can say “the comic is showing the immature actions of immature people,” or “they’re fictional characters, there’s no deeper message” or “You can’t just have people in your comic say bad things are bad” or “depiction does not equal endorsement.” but none of those invalidate the way people feel when reading the comic.  Stories matter, I’m never going to argue otherwise, and how a story is told the way it is constructed from pacing to the events to, yes, consequences, reinforce or counter other stories The tone matters because it shapes how people see the world. That’s just as true in fictional narratives as much as it is in the news or social media we consume. You can call the Transformers movies silly popcorn flicks, but they put a lot of effort into making the US Military seem strong and cool. You can watch Memories of a Murder and see a tense murder mystery, but the director is working very hard to show how the only tool the cops know how to use is violence.  Meaning is created through audience interpretation, alongside authorial intent. They’re both part of the equation. So people being mad about the way in which two fictional teens realize they’re in lesbians with eachother is a fair critique. Not just because of the piece itself, but also because of the life experiences those readers bring to the table, because of how this story reflects and refracts and exists next to other stories.  None of the reactions to the comic are right or wrong, it’s just a comic, but both sides are making each other Mad on the Internet.  A week or so ago SciShow made a video about knitting. Sci Show makes videos about a lot of things. It’s a science education show created by Hank Green, noted YouTuber and Science Guy.  SciShow makes lots of videos. They have a writing staff and a production staff and Hank Green has said in various places that he’s mostly a talking head on the show. He shows up to the studio, records his lines and that’s about it. But he remains the face of the show in a lot of ways.  SciShow videos tend to be well researched, and easy to understand. They put a lot of work into creating short explainers on complex topics. heck, their parent company is called Complexly, because they understand the world is complicated and we should see it though that lens. I like their views. I watch a lot (but far from all) of them when they hit my feeds.  I watched the video about knitting. It was fine. The premise of the video is “Knitting is pretty cool, here’s some of the science behind it.” It was a surface level introduction to the topic with a brief mention of the long history of knitting, its ability to make complex patterns, and some potential forward-looking scientific applications.  I watched the video, said, “yeah, that’s pretty neat” then moved on with my life. There were some things that I know, some things that I didn’t and some things that felt over simplified to me, but that’s not unusual for a short video on a complex topic.  For what it’s worth, I know how to knit. Well I did at one pint in time. I haven’t picked up needles and yarn in a few years, so would probably have to re-learn the muscle memory. But my hobby is collecting hobbies, so I am not A Knitter, capital A capital K.  The Knitters who do claim the capital letter sure are mad about the video though. They have several problems I’ve seen pointed to, and the biggest one is the tone. There are a couple factual errors or oversimplifications, think like calling yarn string, or describing knitting as a series of knots. But those pale in comparison to the complaints about the “general vibe” of the video which they are reading as mysogynistic, demeaning, and minimizing the importance of the fiber arts to all of human history. 
 The thing is: they’re not wrong on the merits. I agree with their critiques. The video assumes the audience will be dismissive of knitting, even as it tries to show them why they shouldn’t be. Is knitting a series of knots? To the layperson, absolutely, but does that mean they should have use the term? Probably not. There is a benefit to being precise in ones language and that applies especially in cases of simplifying complex topics.  But they’re so mad about it. They’re so mad about it that their reactions made me mad. I’ll admit to having something of a parasocial relationship with Hank Green. I’m a fan of his work, and watch most of his videos. I know he didn’t write the script for this video, nor did he do the research, nor did he likely have any editorial control over the words he said, other than in the broadest sort of “Guy who founded the company but doesn’t actively create the content” sort of way. But He’s the face of the video and he’s the one who said the words, so he’s the one everybody is yelling at.  Once could argue, and I might just do so, that because the biggest issue The Knitters have is with the tone that they are actively participating in the time honored internet tradition of Tone Policing. “It’s not what you said but how you said it.” or “It’s not what you said, but it’s who said it.”  Why are they so angry, I asked myself. But I know why. Knitting is looked down upon by a lot of people. Maybe looked down upon ins’t even the right word. ignored, brushed aside as a hubby unworthy of notice. Not something that is so important to the tapestry of history of human society and civilization. I’m sure everyone who is mad about this video is mad not just because this video came across as dismissive, but because they and their hobby have been wrongly dismissed and ignored and minimized countless times by countless people who look and sound a lot like Hank Green.  Does the level of the backlash (that I’ve seen) match the level of the mistake? I don’t think so. But the response to the video isn’t just about the video. It’s about a lot of things and it culminated at the video. The video is where a portion of the internet directed their attention and along with attention comes vitriol.  I saw someone say, in the backlash to the backlash, that this feels like a coordinated attack on a science communicator, because there’s so much of it saying the same things. But that’s how the internet works. It’s a variation of the Main Character on Twitter problem. It doesn’t take a coordinated conspiracy (although those do happen) to make something like this happen, it’s just the internet is a complex social structure that seems designed (intentionally or otherwise) to amplify the loudest, to enrage the angriest, and to vilify the visible. Attention is the currency of the internet and nothing drives attention like conflict. SO I should probably take the long proffered advice and turn my attention elsewhere. What do I find myself doing about it? I find myself writing in my secret public journal about how the Knitters are Right but their tone is wrong. I’m tone policing the tone police. And I don’t like how that makes me feel any more than I like how I feel reading their (again, correct) complaints and critiques. It makes me uncomfortable. And I have to deal with that. I can’t make them stop. I’m not even sure I want them to stop. I don’t want to be uncomfortable, but that’s not really the biggest issue here.  “I want people to stop yelling” isn’t a helpful criticism when some of the people are yelling because they are being hurt and others are yelling because they want to hurt others. The yelling isn’t really the core problem. I know that. But I do want people to stop yelling. So I guess I’ll have to live with that contradiction.  Some people are mad on the internet, we should be asking why, and not all answers are the same.  People are mad on the internet, but they’re mad in real life too. They’re real people and the things they feel are real.  People are mad, but I can’t stop that. Sometimes I am mad too. What do we do with the mad that we feel?

It's September! And it has been for a week! I know a lot of people celebrate September as the moment when Fall finally begins falling. Things start cooling off, the leaves change (if you're in the norther hemisphere at least), Spooky season is that much closer, The Pumpkin Spice lattes begin to bloom. It's a great toime for all. But I love September because it's the month of the Modular Film Festival. IF you've been reading for a while you might remember me talking about this before, but I'm going to do it again. In September of 2022the administrator of Laserdisc.party, a movies themed mastodon instance, launched a month long project he called the Modular Film Festival. The original idea was to give a series of prompts  and people could pick movies that fit those prompts and watch them. Giving anyone who wanted to participate the power of setting their own film festival program.  I joined in, despite not being a member of Laserdisk.party (I was on a diference Mastodon instance, and have now moved onto my own self-hosted GoToSocial server, but they all can talk to each other) and I had an absolute blast. I didn't watch everything, btu that was never really the point. The point was it was fun to discover new movies with other peopel and talk about them online. I also felt like I was part of something cool.  Derek later said he only expected the even to be a one-and done, but lots of people clamored for another one the next September. So i reached out and asked if he would mind if I took the project over and he was fine with it. ANd thus I became the official administrator of the Modular Film Festival for the last three years. I have a lot of fun thinking of new prompts, writing potential ideas down all year. I Released the list a little earlier than planned this year (back in July) because I didn't want to futz with it anymore and locking it down gave me a real sense of satisfaction.  So it's been out there for a while, but we're a week into September now, so people are actually watching the movies which is the real fun.  Below is the original description and the list of prompts. All you have to do to participate is pick a prompt and watch a movie that fits. Or do what some people do and just make a list! Modular Film Festival 2025 Originally started by Derek G. Continued (with new prompts) by me.  September 1-30, 2025 Festival season. I’ve never been to a film festival, but I like the idea of stumbling across movies you might not otherwise see, accidentally juxtaposed with one another by virtue of screening in the same place at roughly the same time. This list of prompts is meant to help you replicate that experience. While there are 30 prompts and 30 days in September, do not feel obligated to see everything, or do one a day, or even watch them in this order. Treat it like a festival programming schedule where you sample new things or see what strikes your fancy. the joy is in the discovery. Or watch one movie, in order, every day of the month. There are no rules and I’m not a cop.  1. A movie that nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Television Movie (You can pick a miniseries if you want to make me sad) 2. A French New Wave Movie 3. A movie that seems fake on Tubi 4. God forbid women have hobbies 5. A movie at least 100 years old 6. A Wallace Shawn movie 7. A movie Roger Ebert gave one star or less 8. A movie shot in Luxembourg 9. A movie in the Kentucky Laserdisc Preservation Society archive 10. A movie that’s been in your watchlist too long 11. Shot on 16mm (not a complete list) 12. A movie never released on Blu Ray 13. A movie directed by an LGBTQ+ filmmaker 14. A movie directed by an Indigenous filmmaker 15. A movie directed by a non-white non-male-identifying person 16. A movie from South America 17. A director’s least popular feature-length movie 18. Watched by JFK at the White House 19. A movie you haven’t seen with over 1 million views on letterboxd 20. Musical not in English 21. A movie directed by an Iranian director 22. A Hamlet 23. A movie screened at the 2022 Milwaukee Film Festival 24. A documentary about a niche interest or subculture 25. A movie 85 minutes long or less 26. Silent film (no audible dialogue) from after 1927 27. A Western 28. A movie with practical monsters or creatures 29. A movie based on a comic but not a superhero movie 30. The last (or latest) film in a franchise Bonus/Swap: A movie from a previous year's Modular Film Festival you didn't watch yet

I’m kid of on vacation this weekend. Here’s some comix! Wednesday’s Heathcliff Wondermark has jokes about memory Do Dinosaurs know about Mega Man? Did you know the Nic Cage/Meg Ryan romance movie City of Angels was a remake of a Wim Wenders movie called Wings of Desire? In both cases an angel falls in love with a mortal woman and contemplates giving up immortality for her. I haven’t seen City of Angels, but Wings of Desire is quite good, it also has Peter Falk in a minor role, which is always fun to see. The only thing I know about City of Angels is that it has the song Iris by Goo Goo Dolls on the soundtrack. It’s a song I know deep in my bones from being a teen in the 2000s but didn’t know was technically from a movie until recently, let alone this particular movie. Anywhere here’s someone doing a cover of that song, but transformed into the classic genre of Ska

I went to a cat cafe this weekend. Well it’s called a cat cafe, it’s really more of a public facing cat cat rescue with the ability to purchase beverages if you feel like it.  The cafe itself requires a reservation and a fee to hang out with the cats. You get an hour with them, along with anyone else who booked the same time (up to a dozen people at one time). I’m really glad I went. I miss having a cat, and visiting with a bunch of cats even for a short while, was a very pleasant experience. Across the various rooms in the cafe there were 12 cats, we were told, and I’m pretty sure I at least touched all of them. They ranged from about 4 months old to about 7 years old and I was a little surprised at how quickly I picked up on their different personalities. Some were quite shy or skittish, some wanted to play more than cuddle and some loved skritches above all else. I joked before going in that we might come home with a cat or two, and while that wasn’t really a possibility (we can’t really get a new cat until we finally get around to building our own house) it was still rather tempting. Spending time with these cats at the cafe was a clear reminder of how much I enjoy and miss having one. That being said, I did have one complaint, although not about the cats or people running the cafe. One woman who shared the rooms during our time decided it would be a good idea to make multiple face time calls to other people and explain at full volume to them that she was at cat cafe. The cats didn’t seem to mind, but I sure did, as it marred an otherwise quite peaceful and quiet experience.  ------ Peacemaker is back for its second season. Only three years or so after finishing its first. I know I keep yelling at this particular cloud, but TV shows should have new seasons every year. And thos seasons should have between 18 and 26 episodes. Recently I've been granting some leeway to shows, because, well there was a massive strike of both actors and writers for a while in the middle there, but still, thee years between seasons means I barely remember what happened in those paltry eight episodes.  I'm reminded of a joke from The TV series The Good Place (4 seasons, 58 episodes) where a character mentions er favorite TV series ran on the BBC for 16 years and made almost 30 episodes in that time. It's a good Joke, because British series are notoriously short runners (usually 6 episodes per season) and can take a long time to be renewed, but the rest of the TV landscape is moving more and more towards that model.  Sometimes shows need only 6 episodes! I'm not saying that's they don't! But we used tt have a word for TV shows that lasted only 6 episodes: The Miniseries. Now everything is a miniseries. Sometimes you get a sequel miniseries 3 years later, and if you really want to be caught up, you should probably just watch the first one again.  Or you hope the show has a really long and robust "Previously On" segment to remind you of all the important plot points. Which, in it's defense, Peacemaker does!  Well Sort of. Becaust the other thing that kept Peacemaker off the air for so long was that its creator, James Gunn was given control over the entire DC Universe n that time and he ended up rebooting everything that had come before. Even his own TV show Peacemaker.  Long story as short as I can make it: James gun got fired by Disney after making Guardians of the Galaxy 2 because of some tasteless tweets he had made nearly a decade before. DC/Warner Brothers scooped him up to make The Suicide Squad, a movie a lot like Guardians of the Galaxy in ways that aren't important. In tat movie he introduced Peacemaker, played by John Cena, who was then given his own spinoff TV show, also written and directed by James Gun. Disney realized they let a good thing go and hired James Gunn back for Guardians of the Galaxy 3, but DC/Warner Bros didn't like that so they hired Gunn back to reboot their entire DU Movie Universe. Gunn Jettisoned nearly everything that came before (All of Zack Snyder's Justice League stuff, including the 2 Wonder Woman movies, the Suicide Squad & Birds of Prey movies, and anything else that was around those movies) and rebooted the whole universe with his new Superman movie that came out this year. But he wanted to make season 2 of Peacemaker still. Since he was now in charge of everything DC, he could just do that. He just picked up the entire show from the previous DCU and plopped it, almost unchanged into the new one.  This leads to Peacemaker being the only show I can think of that exists in two different cinematic universes over the course of it's run. In season 1 Zack Snyder's Justice League existed and now it doesn't. The leads to one of the weirdest "previously on" segments I have ever seen, where things that didn't actually happen replace things that did in the first season. They show whole new (parts of) scenes with new characters that didn't even exist when the first series was made. It's a wile choice, and if you're willing to just go with it, I think a pretty neat solution to a problem made (even unintentionally) by suits in an executive office (one of those suits now happens to be the guy who made the show, but whatever.) Anyway, Peacemaker season 1 was pretty good. I hope season 2 is also good. 

I bought my first single player board game this week. Well I bought it a week or two ago, but I recieved it this week. That's the side effect of ordering things from ebay, they don't arrive two days after you order them like with other online retailers. BUt I'm a sucker for a good deal and so I but probably an above average number of things from ebay.Although, typing that, I don't know what an average number of things to purchase from ebay is. Ebay feels like one of the only websites to survive the 2000 dotcom bubble. I mean Amazon is still around too, but Amazon has been so thoroughly enshittified that it doesn't feel like the same website anymore. but ebay mostly feels the same. There's slightly more sponsored listings and you have to do some price checking so you're not overpaying for something but think you're getting a deal (a lot of merchants sell things at a higher-than-retail price, which feels dishonest but not exactly illegal), but if you're looking for some obscure thing, like the type of coffee mug used by Captain Janeway in the TV show Star Trek Voyager, or a smart phone that was discontinued five years ago, or a blue ray that is out of print or only ever sold in a different country, then ebay is still a good place to check. I know that because I have purchased all of those things on ebay. If there's a particularly unusual item I'll et up an email alert so I can be updated whenever one goes for sale.  Some things are still listed for auction, but just as often I see things listed with the buy it now option, or my personal favorite "Best offer" option. BUy it now does what it says on the tin, allows you to just pay a specific amount (plus shipping) and have the packahe on your doorstep in a reasonable amount of time (two days is not reasonable, we shouldn't treat it like it is). But I love Best Offer, because I can make lowball offers on things that I kind of want, but somebody else might want more. If I submit a lowball ovver (usually at least 75% of what the seller is asking) and the seller doesn't accept, that's fine! I probably wasn't going to pay for it at the price they wanted, but I hope somebody else will. Sometimes they counter offer and it's the closest thing I've ever gotten to being comfortable haggling over the price of something. It's all done digitally through a website, so I never feel pressured by a hard sale. If we can't agree on a price, no harm no foul. OF course sometimes people do accept my lowball offers and then I ave to buy the thing. Ebay very helpfully automatically processes the transaction if an offer is accepted, so I have been surprised more than once by an offer that was literally too good to be true being accepted. But when that happens it's a pleasant surprise, because I'm usually getting a pretty good deal.  The most recent thing I bought, as I mentioned at the top of this email, is a single-player oard game. I've never owned a single player board game before, and the idea has always been a little weird to me. Board games are collective activities, something you do with friends or family. But this particular one had been talked up by some people I follow online, and when I was scouring ebay, I found a good deal on it. I say it, but the board game is actually modular, so you can't just buy one box and call it a day. I'll explain. The game is called Final Girl, and it's a single-player strategy game based on the idea that you are the final girl in a horror movie and you are trying to survive and kill the killer before they get to you. It's sold in playsets, which they call feature films, each one is based on, but legally distinct from a horror movie or genre you are probably familiar with. SO you buy the core set, which has the basic components, but isn't playable on its own, and then you add a playset with a killer, location, and final girl that you're going to play. The simplest version is called Camp Happy Trails, where you fight a masked killer murdering teens at a summer camp. You know, like that one movie. But there's other sets where you might be fighting an Alien on a space ship, or some Thing from another world in an arctic base, or some kind of Puppet Master and his puppets. What's cool is that you can mix and match these once you have a few different sets. Want to show down against a masked Killer in a space ship? You can absolutely live out your Jason X dreams.  The game itself is fun, although hard. I've played four times with the camp/killer combo and lost three of them. I do think I'm getting better, but learning the rhythms and mitigating the luck of the dice can be hard. But it's not like I win more than 25% of games I play with my friends, so I don't take it too seriously. The game isn't designed to be fair, it's designed to be fun.  I actually have it on my desk right now and writing about it is just making me want to play again. So I think I'm going to go do that. Wait, I forgot. I bought it on ebay. Someone was selling the core set and the camp playset and the one based on the Alien movies. I basically got them for the retail costs of the playsets if I had bought them new, which was like getting the core set for free. I was an auction, which i smy least favorite way to buy stuff on ebay, but I followed my normal rules: Put in you max bid, then do not change it or look again until the auction is over. I don't wan to get into a bidding war with someone else and end up paying more than I meant to, so this method keeps me from doing that. I managed to win with my original bid and nobody even bid against me. So that was cool.  Ok, gunna go play game now. 

I saw a video on youtube recently with an interesting challenge: If you could have only 10 Criterion Collection DVDs what would you pick? THe He presents it in one of two ways, what would be the disks you would take if you were going to be stranded on a desert island (with everything else needed to survive) for some extended period of time (ten years maybe?) or if your house was on fire, (and everyone else was safely evacuated,) what 10 discs would you grab first? I do think these are slightly different questions, even though they're trying to get to the same point. On the desert island version, you're thinking about long-term rewatchabaility, whereas in the burning building, I personally would be picking based on what is going to be the hardest to replace. So when I decided to tackle the challenge, I went with the former, so I'm focusing more on the movie quality itself, rather than the the rarity of the physical object. The original video creator also added the rule limiting himself to a single box set, because box sets kind of feel like cheating, which I agree with. But it didn't really come into play because, while I do have a few great box sets (Zatoichi, John Cassavetes, Bruce Lee) none of them quite rise to the level of desert island discs for me.  To clarify the rules 1. At most, one box set 2. I must already own the movie 3. Limited to criterion collection releases So here, in roughly the order I thought of them, are my 10 Desert Island Criterion Selections 1. Meantime - I've talked about this movie elsewhere, but this is a deeply personal film for me. It's directed by Mike Leigh, and while it's not usually pointed to as his best work (that usually goes to Secrets and Lies or Naked, both arguably better movies than this) Meantime is the one I ind myself going back to most often. A portait of life on unemployment in Thatcherite London, it is, like so much of Mike Leigh's work, deeply human and sympathetic to everybody.  2. For All Mankind - This movie, a documentary about going to the moon told through footage of the trips we made there and with narration from the men who did it, is a masterpiece of documentary film making. I think humanity has done a lot of absolutely astonishing things, but going to the moon and back is near the top of the list. It's the sort of thing that can only be accomplished through people working towards a common goal and I get emotional thinking about it.  3. True Stories - This movie feels like home to me. The only film directed by Talking Heads front man David Byrne, it's a meandering journey through a small Texas town. Spending time with the people there. Not a documentary, to be clear, but a stylized fictionalization that evokes a specific time and place. Some of John Goodman's best acting work (and that's saying a lot) and a killer soundtrack make this an easy choice.  4. Arsenic and Old Lace - Maybe the best screwball comedy of all time? Arguments could be made for other ones, but this would have my vote every time. And not just because I performed the role of Teddy in high school. A perfect example of how "dark" comedy doesn't have to be bleak, and a reminder that we're all a bit mad sometimes.  5. My Dinner with Andre - I don't know when I first saw My Dinner with Andre, it's one of those easy punchline movies that kind of shows up in pop culture. There was a joke about it in an episode of The Simpsons, one near the end of Waiting for Guffman (a film that would have made this list if Criterion released it) and I can distinctly hear my mom saying "It's just two guys having dinner!" when she described going to see it to me. And it is just two guys having dinner, but while they're doing that, they have one of those conversations that feels like it is about everything. I deeply connect with Wallace Shawn's character in this movie, and not just because my mom said I looked like him when I was a baby.  6. Mikey and Nicky - Another movie that's mostly two guys talking to eachother, but this time it's John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as two low level gangsters trying to hide out and survive the night. Elaine May directed this movie, and it feels like she didn't direct the actors as much as unleashed them. I love Peter Falk as Columbo, and he'll always be remembered for that the most, but this is some of his absolutely best work.  7. This is Spinal Tap - Because sometimes you just want to laugh. I own the original Criterion DVD release of this movie, and I will absolutely be picking up the 4k release when it comes out later this year. A genre defining mockumentary and one of the funniest things to ever exist. I think the mockumentary format has been deeply watered down by shows like The Office or Modern Family and the format is worse off for it. I am also very excited about the sequel coming out in just a few weeks.  8. F for Fake - Citizen Kane is still probably Orson Welles' best movie. Or at least the best one I've seen (I'm still making my way though his catalog) but F for Fake is a cinematic masterpiece of a magic trick. A movie about hoaxes and fakes and charlatans presented by the biggest fake hoaxing charlatan of them all. Orson Welles is laughing at you, but he does it so well that you'll laugh along too. 9. The Battle of Algiers - This is a movie that changed the world. Or at least changed the world for me. Watching it was a turning point in my life, and put into focus things that had been unsuccessfully been explained to me before. A movie that feels like it was cut together from clips of newsreels (even though it wasn't) as it depicts conflict in a way that I don't think has really been matched before or since.  10. Police Story 1&2 - OK, this kind of counts as a box set. It's only two movies though, so I hardly think it's padding out the list. I'm not putting the 30 film Bergman Box here (and not just because I don't own it). But I had to include some of the best practical stunt work ever put to film. Even if I didn't have the rest of the movie, and could only watch the finale in the mall, it would still be worth taking to the desert island with me. Also: They don't say this enough, but the movies are also very funny. It was hard narrowing this down to just 10, but that's the whole point. I'd list some of the movies that almost made the list, but that feels like just an excuse to get away with more movies. So We'll leave it at these 10. 

A thing I learned about recently, but that has apparently been happening for a while now, is the ESPN8: The Ocho programming block. If you're familiar with the 2004 movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story you might know the name. It was the fictional network where the lowest sport-like activities were presented for viewership, and it was the host to the national Dodgeball League finals. It was a good joke at the time, and it remains a pretty good joke now.  Apparently in 2017, ESPN did a programming block they called the Ocho, in reference to the movie, showcasing the kinds of sports that would appear to be jokes, but were taken very seriously. And over time it became something of an annual tradition where in August, various sport-adjacent activities, are given an enhanced amount of focus where they would likely never get any sort of national-level attention elsewhere.  Not everything that aired on the cable channel is available to stream, but I sampled a few of the shows (Calling them sports seems generous) that are available through the Hulu/Disney/ESPN app and tonally, it was a weird experience. The presentation can't quite manage to get a=over the fact that the whole thing started as a joke, but they really want to.  For example the PFC: Pillow Fight Championship, is an incredibly silly idea, that has been taken very seriously. There are rules (of course there are rules) about how to hold the official PFC pillow, what kinds of hits count, and for how many points. It's played by guys in MMA adjacent spaces, and the one match I watched as between a boxer and a Capoeira practitioner. The Capoeira guy started out by doing a full cartwheel before hitting his opponent. Which is silly. But also worth more points, it turns out. One of the commentators had to repeatedly state how serious this all is, as guys hit each other with pillows, which isn't a great indication that anybody is taking it all that seriously.  I also started watching the Popdarts championship What's Popdarts? That's not a well known playground game or similar being played at a professional level. No it's a manufactured gamewhere you throw suction-cup-tipped darts at a table 20 feet away and the closest to a target wins points. It's a toy. Toys are fun! But this isn't a sport like you would usually expect. This is a thing wholly owned by a single company. You can't find pickup-popdart games out in the world. If you want to play you have to buy an official kit from the popdarts company. But here's the real indicator that it's not serious: They only had three players in the tournament. Based on the videos package they played at the beginning, these three guys all know eachother, and stream popdarts games on twitch or youtube. They had to have a pre-competition to get the 4th competitor in the finals. They had a dozen guys chuckin' popdarts at a target, and the eventual winner was the dad of one of the other guys in the tournament. It's not a particularly large community of players is the point I'm trying to make. Add to that the fact that, the "best in the world" popdarts players seemed to my eyes to not be very good, and this whole thing came off like a marketing stunt more than a real sport. I know ESPN8 isn't about real sports, so it's fine, but I don't love being marketed to.  The last "sport" I watched was Extreme Archery, or Archery Tag, it was called both and a distinction was not made. This game is dodgeball but with bows and foam tipped arrows. If you hit a player on the other team you get a point. If you catch an arrow you get three points. It's dodgeball with bows and arrows. I have no notes. 

I’ve been trying to think of what to write about all week and haven’t really come up with anything. So here’s some bits and bobs. After watching an episode of the latest season of Taskmaster with Jason Mantzoukas, I decided to purchase a lock pick set. I did some research and found a reasonable priced one, then waited until it was on sale to save. a few extra bucks. The kit I bought came with a practice padlock which a clear plastic body so you can see what you’re doing. After a few weeks of practice I can reliably pick or rake open the practice lock, but haven’t ventured into trying other locks yet. It’s mostly a fun little fidget to have at my desk. I was thinking about the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya because someone reminded me of Endless Eight, which is one of the funniest pranks pulled on a TV audience. The show Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is an anime based on some books that originally aired from 2006-2009. It’s about a group of high schoolers who find themselves dealing with unusual pehnomena, think aliens and ESP and time travelers. The first seasons was kind of weird in that it aired episodes deliberately our of order, which meant viewers were always in the process of figuring out exactly what was happening when. But the real weirdness happened in 2009. The show was going to be rebroadcast, this time in chronological order, but with new episodes intermixed between the old ones. People were excited. The first 11 episodes went by and with only one new episode, people were expecting that the new episodes would all be in the back half, effectively making this season 2. Which is sort of correct. But by episode 13 something even more unexpected was happening. Episodes 12 & 13 were the same episode. Not exactly, but the same events happened in the same order. The episodes were different, and had been animated wholly from scratch, but fans thought it was weird that it happened again. By the end of the episode it is explained to the audience that the characters are in a time loop. So that’s kind of neat. Show the same events twice across 2 episodes t really hit home the time-loop of it all. But it wasn’t just two episodes. The next episode showed the same events again. Animated fresh, with a new performance from the voice actors. Then they did it again. They did this eight times. Eight episodes of the exact same events happening with slight variations. It was glorious. Some of the fans loved it and some of them were absolutely livid. I consider it one of the greatest feats in televisual animation. After eight episodes of this, viewers were given five more episodes of new content, and then the show ended for good. This week I finally got around to picking up the complete series on blu ray, something I should have done a while ago, but there are always more to buy. The episodes on the blu rays are in the order of the 2009 rebroadcast, but I think I’ll watch them in the order of the original broadcast, because that’s funnier. This week’s Heathcliff comics have been on an interesting arc (as much as a single panel comic where the titular character never speaks can have an arc) with the introduction of Jimmy Cool. Jimmy is a frog, who has been well loved by many in he comic (and has plenty of fans in the real world too, I cont myself among them). But this week Jimmy has undergone a rebrand, now called Jimmy Cool. Jimmy Cool is Jimmy the frog, but wearing sunglasses. People in the world of Heathcliff have not responded particularly well to Jimmy Cool. Personally, I feel bad for the frog, I think he’s trying new things and not getting embraced like he usually is probably feels bad. Personally, I hope Jimmy Cool finds his place in the world and people for to accept him as he is. You can read the whole week’s worth of strips starting here: https://www.gocomics.com/heathcliff/2025/07/21

Once a month, Criterion announces the new titles that will be released in a few month's time. It's July so this week we got the announcement of October's movies. It's an interesting slate of movies. You've got Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Ken Russell's Altered States and 4K upgrades of Eyes Without a Face and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. But the one that stuck out to me was Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley. It didn't stick out because I thought this was a great film (I think it's alright,but not his best work) but it stuck out because Criterion is releasing, alongside the original theatrical cut, a director's cut that is slightly longer and in black and white. This was screened in a couple theaters back when the movie came out, but there was no word of it getting an official release. This matters to me, because a little over a year ago, I was trying to do a survey of all the movies that were originally released in color but had official black & white re-releases. I thought I had tracked them all down, and where possible, I had acquired a copy and watched them. I knew about the Nightmare Alley screening, but had written it off as one that wou;dn't get a release.  So this was a pleasant surprise! But that got me to look back into other movies that I had passed up last time and I surprised myself by finding even more movies with B&W versions that I didn't know about. By my count there are now 13 movies which have received official black and white versions, and I have seen exactly half of them. There are also a few bonus movies that half count, which I'll talk about too. Re-releasing a color movie, regraded into black and white can be done for a variety of reasons. Most of the time it was the "director's intended version" but B&W films are less marketable so color is what they get pushed into doing by the studios. With digital filming, it's much easier to regrade a whole movie than it would have been 50 years ago, which is why one of the movies on this list really surprised me. In reverse alphabetical order, because why not: The Mist (2007) - dir. Frank Darabont Most people probably know Frank Darabont as the guy who created the Walking Dead TV series, but he also directed The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption and this movie. A kind of low-budget horror movie about a town trapped in a fog full of deadly monsters. He apparently wanted to originally film in black & white, but got pushed to do otherwise by the studio (not uncommon, as we'll see) but the black and white matches the kinda cheesy kinda campy tone of the 50s b-movies that this is calling back to. In my opinion, the B&W version is the only way to watch it. This is the first instance that I'm aware of where being filmed digitaly made it much easier to go back in and re-grade the whole thing from scratch in black & white. Plus it's a lot bleaker than you might expect. Texasville (1990) - dir. Peter Bogdanovich Bogdanovich was a direcor who could get great performances out of people. His masterpiece might be The Last Picture Show, a melancholy look at youth in a small Texas town in the 50s. 20 years later he made a film catching up with those characters called Texasville. Between 1971 (when Last Picture Show premiered) and 1990, two of the main cast (Jeff Bridges and Cybil Shepherd) had become major stars, and of you looked at the marketing material you would think this is a love story between those two characters. But that's pretty misleading. Bogdanovich wanted to film in black and white, like the first movie, but was overruled. Like Last Picture Show it's a nuanced look at a time and people. The black and white director's cut also re-adds a lot of previously cut material making it much longer. It's only available as a bonus feature on the Criterion 4k release of The Last Picture Show, but is absolutely worth tracking down if you like the first movie. Shin Godzilla (2016) - dir. Hideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi I haven't seen the black and white version of this yet, because ti was only released on blu ray in japan without english subtitles. That's not insurmountable, but I haven't bothered to surmount it yet Shin Godzilla is a modern re-working of Godzialla set in the modern day, where Godzilla shows p for the first time. A movie about bureaucracy as much as giant monsters, it's a good time. I think the black & white release is meant to be a throwback to the original 1954 Gidzilla, but I can't say that with 100% confidence. Parasite (2019) - dir. Bong Joon Ho Parasite won the oscar for best picture. The first non-english film to do so. It's a good movie. This is an example where the movie wasn't intended to be in black & white from the beginning, but because they shot digitally, the director figured why not give it a try. Like many of the others, its a bonus feature on the Criterion release. The B&W version is almost as good as, but not better than, th original. But either version is absolutely worth checking out. Nightmare Alley (2021) - dir. Guillermo del Toro This is technically a remake of a previous film and del Toro wanted to shoot in black and white as an homage to that film (also in the Criterion Collection, actually!) I'm glad this is getting a black and white release, because the things I liked most about ths movie were the cinematography and lighting which will be enhanced in black & white. Nickelodeon (1976) - dir Peter Bogdanovich I know almost nothing about this movie, but I was very surprised to learn Texasville wasn't Bogdanovich's first attempt to re-release a color movie in black and white. This seems to be a movie about the silent film era, so black & whit makes sense as an artistic choice. THe black and white version is only available as a double feature on standard definition DVD with, yup Last Picture Show. I'm in the process of hunting down this disc, which will make THe Last Picture show the only movie I own on 4K, blu ray and DVD. Mother (2009) - dir. Bong Joon Ho Proving not only can Bogdonavich release 2 films with black and white versions, here’s the second movie by Bong Joon Ho. I haven’t seen this movie and I have no idea what it’s about, which is how I like to go into my Bong Joon Ho movies. This was originally only available in a very rare limited release on blu ray, but in Korea it got rereleased in a more accessible way sometime in the last 2 years (I only found out yesterday). There is now a copy being shipped to me from a korean seller on eBay. It might take a while to get here. Mad Max Fury Road (2015) - dir. George Miller This is the first on the list that I have seen where I think it doesn’t really enhance the film to be in black and white (or black & chrome as it calls itself). The color palate on this movie is so impressive that taking it away mutes some of the movie. It also really feels like this wasn’t a case of “We filmed it for black and white, but had to release in color” because the re-grading makes things a lot more muted and the visuals become a little muddy sometime, when they were crisp and sharp in the original. Logan (2017) - dir James Mangold You know, that movie  Deadpool 3 literally desecrated in its credit sequence. Mangold claims this was originally meant to be in black & white (called Logan Noir in the rerelease) but like Fury road, it doesn’t really work for me. I don’t think Mangold has enough command of the lighting necessary for a black & white shoot, so a lot of what this ends. being is just dark. Too dark to really see anything, which I hope wasn’t the intention. Johnny Mnemonic (1995) - dir. Robert Longo This shouldn’t work at all, but it’s maybe my favorite black and white version. It elevates what felt like kinda silly hacker movie into a really strong neofuturist cyberpunk french new wave sort of thing. I don’t own the color version of this movie and don’t think I’ll ever bother watching that one again. I don’ think this was ever the original intention of the director (based on the interviews I could find) but he was happy to try it out for the fins 25th anniversary release and Im so glad he did. Hush (2016) - dir. Mike Flanagan I haven’t seen the original one, but i think I would like it. I haven’t actually seen any of Mike Flanagan’s work, but he’s got a couple popular mini0series on netflix, he did the Shining sequel Doctor Sleep and he’s even got a movie in theaters right now (Life of Chuck) that I know nothing about. I don’t follow horror a lot, so i never looked deeper into this. The black and white version also re-does the sound in ways I think are meant to reflect the protagonist (who is deaf). I’ll be picking this one up if I can find it on sale, but more out of a sense of completion than anticipation. I’d be happy to be pleasantly surprised. Godzilla Minus One (2023) - dir. Akashi Yamasaki An amazing Godzilla film. Worth tracking down in either version. The black & white re-grade feels a little perfunctory, like with Shin Godzilla i think it was don to harken back to Godzilla (1954) rather than because it enhances the film, but it looks great regardless. Because of the 1940s era the film is set in, it works well enough to set the tone, but that wasn’t a problem the color one had either. This got a theatrical release, and I snatched up the blu ray version as soon as I could because I was pretty sure they weren’t going to make a lot of them.  I’m not even sure you can buy them right now. Basquiat (1996) - dir. Julian Schnabel Possibly the most obscure one of these.  I only found out about it when someone was talking about Nightmare Alley on youtube. Criterion released this biobic of the 1980s era artist and didn’t even make a big deal of the fact that it featured a B&W directors cut of the movie. Basquiat (played here by a young Jeffrey Wright) had such a sense of color in his work, I’m curious to see what removing that does to the picture. Both versions are on the Criterion Channel, so Iw ill probably check them out before picking up the disc. Movies that almost, but don’t quite, count (also in reverse alphabetical order): Zack Snyder’s Justice League - Justice is Gray edition. You can’t say Zack Snyder doesn’t know what he wants. He makes the movies he wants, how he wants, I just don’t like the vibe of them at all. I have seen this, all four hours of it, in black and white, and oof is it a hard watch. The movie already had a very muted color palette, and this just dials that down until it’s gone. It really puts the gray into Justice is Gray, the whole thing feels so ugly to watch nothing stands out in a sea of muddied cgi that didn’t look great in color and looks worse here. But that’s not why it doesn’t count. It doesn’t count because I can’t buy this movie. It is only available on HBO Max to stream. I would probably buy a blu ray of this, but thankfully I don’t know that it’ll ever get one so I’m safe. Lady Vengeance (2005) - dir. Park Chan-work I like Oldboy, which this is part of a trilogy of thematically connected films with. I suspect I would also like Lady Vengeance. The Black and white version isn’t actually that, though. It’s a “fade to white” version where it starts in color and over the course of the film fades into black and white as the color drains out. I still think this is a very cool idea, and it’s a choice that feels like it could dramatically enhance the movie’s themes when it wasn’t in the original release. I’m gunna track this down, but copies are very hard to get and expensive. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) dir. George Miller Like the above movie with this name backwards, there is a “Black and chrome” release, but I cannot confirm if it has been put out on blu ray. It hasn’t been in the US,  but I have seen mixed information about possibly British release. The problem with that is that it’s going to be a different region and probably won’t play in my player. There is a digital only release, but like with Justice League, I’m not counting that because I only count it if it’s on physical media.  I'll keep watching these as long as people keep putting them out. 

I’m going to say something nice about what streaming media has done for the TV landscape. Pick your jaws up off the floor. I know I have made my positions clear to any long-time readers of my internet writing: streaming companies have been a net negative for the industry. People are getting paid less, consumers can’t own the shows and movies they love, instead succumbing to the eternal rent-seeking of the netflixes and disneys of the world, streaming shows have fewer episodes per season, whole seasons are spent building up to Dracula buying a surfboard [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/surf-dracula] and alll of the promises of more for less have routinely been broken as monthly prices go up with no end in sight.  But. I said I was going to say something nice. Shows rarely get cancelled four episodes in anymore. The binge release model has made its so that if netflix or seeso or whatever order a show to series, we’re getting the whole season at least. Sure, those seasons tend to be shorter, but at least the creators are given the opportunity to tell a season’s worth of stories. Many of them seem not to use that time well *cough* ten-hour-movies *Cough* but at least they have the chance and audiences can see everything that’s made. Maybe if they let Dracula surf every week, they might have a better chance getting an audience and not feel like everyone has had their time wasted.  “I’ll watch it once the series ends” is a common enough refrain I’ve seen online. People not wanting to get sucked into a show that gets cancelled after only a season or two of a planned 5 season arc. Which, I get, nobody wants to feel unfulfilled by a story, left on an an unintentional cliffhanger with only your brain to make up what happens next. Not every show suffers from this. I would love to see more of the lives of the dancers in the critically loved, but criminally underwetched Bunheads but the single season we do have is still very good ad worth your time. And it got a whole season! But there’s a somewhat forgotten scourge of the broadcast years and that was shows getting cancelled in the middle of their first seasons. TV production was different back then, where even if a show ha a season ordered, it wasn’t guaranteed to be produced. TV production happened much closer to airdate, and most series were only producing episodes a few weeks before being aired. So they maybe only have a few episodes in the can at any point in time. This was both good and bad. It’s good because shows can adjust quickly. This is sometimes reflected in what I think of as the 4th episode bump. About four episodes in the writers have had the chance to see how the audience is relating to the show, and make course corrections. They can see what stories and characters are working well and what strengths the actors arr bringing to characters that they may not have spotted initially. Some beloved shows had rocky starts and only really became what they are after a few bumpy first episodes, (the Office and Parks & Rec are both good examples). The flip side of only having a few episodes in the can at once, means that if a show is doing poorly, sometimes creatively but mostly in the ratings, a network can cancel it only a few episodes in. They don’t want to throw money into a show that is not going to become a success, so they cancel the show, cut the funds and move on. The only people who really care are the creators and the (usually small) audience the show managed to pick up first. Now there are plenty examples of when this is probably a good idea. There was a sitcom called Work It with the absolutely misguided premise that in this modern world (2012), jobs are much easier to get if you’re an attractive woman than if you’re a man, so two unemployed men put on some of the worst drag you have ever seen and get jobs as pharmaceutical reps. Hilarity did not ensue and the show was cancelled two episodes in. Of course not every rocky start can predict future failure. There’s the common refrain that Cheers had terrible ratings in the first year only to become a massive success in it’s second seasons and beyond (eventually 11!).  Most shows that get cancelled early get forgotten by everyone except the absolute nerds (like me). Maybe they become a footnote on a wikipedia page, or if they’re lucky a “what ever happened to…” article. But without a complete first season, they can’t even qualify for the rarefied heights of a One-Season Wonder.  One show that has lived in my brain since I originally watched it, despite getting cancelled only four episodes in was 2007’s Drive. I had a cannonball Run phase in the early 2000s, I watched the original film, the movie Rat Race, the Cannonball Run Reality TV show, anything about a cross country road race was my jam. So I was very excited to learn that Nathan Fillion, star of the cancelled too soon Firefly, was going to star in a new illegal cross country road race show, with the unimaginative name of Drive.  I tuned in to watch the 2 hour premier and each subsequent episode. Which turned out to only be 2 more. Because, as I mentioned before, the show got cancelled after the fourth episode aired. The cast was surprisingly deep with actors that would go onto more well known properties, or are at least recognizable. Nathan Fillion was the star, but it was clearly an ensemble show, following the different teams racing in this particular illegal underground road race. And the cast is pretty stacked, with names and faces you probably recognize nowadays. In addition to Fillion who you might know from Castle or The Rookie, or Firefly, if you’re a nerd. there was also:  Emma Stone (Zombieland, Easy A, The AMazing Spider Man) Dylan Baker (Spider-man 2 & 3, The Good Wife guest star) Melanie Lynskey (Rose from Two and a Hal Men, Yellowjackets) Taryn Manning (Pensatucky from Orange is the New Black) Rochelle Aytes (SWAT, Watson, the later. seasons of Criminal Minds, Work It the crossdressing sitcom I mentioned earlier) Michael Hyatt (The Pitt, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, The Wire) Kevin Alegandro (True Blood, Arrow, Lucifer, Fire Country) J.D. Pardo (Mayans MC, Revolution) Kristin Lehman (ALtered Carbon, Midnight Mass) Riley Smith (Nancy Drew’s 2nd dad in Nancy Drew Freaks and Geeks) Because this was in 2007, and Lost was still the biggest thing on the TV lanes, the show also features a prominent conspiracy. Not everybody in the race is there by choice, some of them are being blackmailed into racing, including Fillion’s character Alex Tully, whose wife (played by Amy Acker) has been kidnapped and will only be released if Tully wins the race.  But after that 2 hour premier, only 2 more episodes were ever broadcast over the airwaves. After a couple months of some minor outcry Fox decided to release the last 2 episodes online for fans to watch, although this was 2007 so watching video on the internet was still kind of a new thing. After tha, it pretty much disappeared. Except in the hearts and minds of the select few who watched and enjoyed it. This last month, I decided It was time I watch it again so I tracked it down on the internet (It’s actually available to ‘buy’ on amazon prime of all placed) and gave it a watch. I don’t have a lot to say about the show as a whole. I enjoyed re-watching the show, and it turns out I was one of the even smaller number of people who watched the 2 streaming only episodes, because I remembered what happened in those too. BUt the show is a pretty unsatisfying watch these days. Not because the story isn’t compelling or the cast interesting to watch, but because it all ends up going nowhere. We’ll never have a conclusion to what happened. So we do what we must when we are left unsatisfied by an artistic work: We turn to fan fiction.  Reviewing all 9 Drive (2007) fanfics on Archive of Our OwnHighway to Hell by limmenel (elevenoclock) https://archiveofourown.org/works/20630801 Published 2007-04-20 (3 days before the final episode aired) The first ever Drive Fanfic is a crossover fic with Supernatural. I. This is a supernatural fic first and foremost. The premise is that Sam and Dean are in the race, but still dealing with supernatural problems. They take detour to kill a monster, but are followed by Sean and Winston. Mostly this works. I like the idea of the two sets of mismatched brothers in the same situation. Sam & Dean feel more fleshed out as characters whereas Sean and Winston from Drive mostly stand around confused by the weird things. No real effort to tie in the race other than the different characters mentioning it a couple times. saith the lord by Jedi Buttercup https://archiveofourown.org/works/40058 published 2007-04-24 (1 day after the final episode aired) The second ever Drive fanfic on Ao3 is a crossover fic with Angel. The premise is that Amy Acker’s character from the final season of Angel has used her godlike powers to travel back in time and rewrite what happened in that show. But then she goes into hiding and evenrtually marries Alex Tully (Nathan Fillion’s character in Drive) before getting kidknapped for the race. The story implies that Wolfram & Hart, the big baddies in Angel are also responsible for the race, which is a fun idea.  It’s a short story (only 500 words) but I think it was very moody, and did a good job at evoking the central character. I got a chuckle at the idea of Illyria wreaking supernatural havoc in the middle of a cross country race.  Ten Racers that Never Competed For the Prize by Jedi Buttercup https://archiveofourown.org/works/40078 Published 2007-05-03 (ten days after the final episode aired) With the same author as saith the lord, it’s not too much of a surprise that we have another Angel/Drive crossover fic, with some additional Buffy The Vampire Slayer as well. This is a collection of 10 “drabbles” as they’re known in the fanfic world. short snippets or moments that could become something longer, but probably won’t. In this case each 100-word long drabble is about a different minor or secondary character from Buffy The Vampire Slayer or Angel as if they were participating in the race. Each one was surprisingly evocative, really giving me a sense of the character and their motivations for the race. There was a particular focus on the fact that some actors appeared in both Drive and the Buffyverse (particularly Nathan Fillion and Amy Acker) and but it's established that it’s mostly coincidence that the different characters they play look identical.  Waiting by Heather https://archiveofourown.org/works/72434 Published 2007-07-29 (two weeks after the last 2 episodes were streamed online, 3 months and 6 days after the last episode was broadcast) Another Supernatural crossover fic. This one doesn’t have Sam and Dean in the race. IN a hospital waiting room Sam is waiting for Dean to get a broken hand fixed, and there he meets Winston who is waiting on his brother’s surgery after getting shot. It’s not clear if this is the same shooting that happens in the show or not. There’s actually no direct reference to the race either. It’s mostly a dour meet cute between the two brothers. If you didn’t know who Winston was from watching Drive, this could be literally anyone.  One Foot On the Brake by apckrfan https://archiveofourown.org/works/750532 Published 2007-10-26 (3 months, 12 days after last episode was released online) Yet another crossover, this time with Heroes, a show I wish had ended after one season, but went on for… five I think? This is mostly a two hander between Alex Tully (Fillion’s character) and Claire (the cheerleader in Heroes played by Hayden Panettiere). It takes place after Alex is no longer involved with the race, and after he has learned that his marriage was a sham solely to get him to join the race (a plot point that was not in the show officially, but confirmed by the creator). Tully is driving anywhere he wants and almost hits Claire with his car. She’s been injured, but heals because of her powers as Tully drives her to a hospital. Instead of the hospital they spend the night at a bed and breakfast. There Tully learns of her superpowers and sleeps next to her in bed. The next day Tully takes her home and picks her up from school the next day to go for a drive  In the best of times, I’m not a big fan of romance, in fanfic or elsewhere, and the age gap between Tully and Claire squeaked me out a bit, even though nothing physical really happens between them. Claire is absolutely still in high school, which makes the whole thing feel gross. Also I don’t think the author really nailed Tully’s voice, he sounded a lot more like Malcolm Reynolds (from Firefly) in my head than he did Tully. And it’s been a lot longer since I last watched Firefly. As with most of the other crossover fics so far, more time is spent on the reality of the other universe than the race itself. Lots of mentions of The Company and supporting characters from Heroes, but almost nothing about Tully’s time in the race or the mysterious organization running it. This is the longest of all the fanfics in the Drive category, so I was particularly disappointed by the lack of Drive content.  Paved With Good Intentions by Jedi Buttercup https://archiveofourown.org/works/40593 Published 2007-12-25 (5 months, 11 days after the final episode is released online) Our third fanfic by JedI Buttercup! They have written fully 1/3 of all the Drive fanfic, seeing the spirit going. This is also the first fic to not be a crossover with anything else, so that’s cool. This one is set directly between episodes 4 and 5 of the show. It’s a short scene where Alex is driving Sean to someone who can take care of the bullet lodged in him. Despite the christmas day publication date, this is not a thematic story. Instead it’s just an evocative few minutes inside the mind of the main character. We get hints of who he is, and some additional backstory. I really enjoyed this one because it feels like it came right out of the show.  Driving Me Crazy by apckrfan https://archiveofourown.org/works/750553 Published 2008-03-14 (8 months after the last episode was released online) This one is a sequel to One Foot on the Brake, so imagine all the things I didn’t really like about that one, but more so. Alex calls Claire to pick him up at the bar after he’s gotten too drunk to drive. It’s his former anniversary and he decided to drown his sorrows. They go back to alex’s place and have sex. It isn’t particularly explicit, but it’s not my kind of fic. The characterization is about as curate as it was in the first one, which is to say adequate but not great. I flipped through the author’s profile and it seems they prefer the older man/younger woman pairing so this is just another variation on that. Almost nothing else about either the world of Heroes or Drive in this, so it really feels like it could be anybody rather than these specific characters.  First Gear by emungere https://archiveofourown.org/works/2311598 Published 2014-09-15 (Seven years, two months after the last episode was released online) So the publish date on this one is a bit of a lie. That’s the listed date on Ao3, but in the comments the author mentions that the story is about 7 years old (at the time of posting). That would put it much closer to when the show originally aired, but Im sorting these chronologically, so I’m using the dates that the website does.  The story itself is another crossover fic. It takes place in the Drive universe, but the characters are from Firefly. We have Simon Tam, who’s sister River has just been kidknapped. He gets a phonetical that tells him he needs to drive to Orlando and a bank robber will be driving by his house in a fast car in a few minutes. The driver is Malcolm Reynolds (played by Nathan Fillion, natch) who agrees to drive Simon to Florida for ten thousand dollars. It’s a propulsive into to a longer work, but the longer work doesn’t exist. So instead we’re left with a premise and not much else. It’s mostly a rehash of Alex Tully’s intro in Drive with some slight variations, but it’s clear that Tully and Malcolm Reynolds would have a lot in common if the story ever continued. I’m mostly just disappointed that someone didn’t write a fanfic for this show seven years after it stopped airing.  Synchronicity by CatLadyFirebird https://archiveofourown.org/works/66776848 Published 2025-06-22 (seventeen years, eleven months and 8 days after the last episode was released online) What? Someone wrote a fanfic for this show this year? Last Month even? I started rewatching the show on June 12, so this fanfic was posted after that. Absolutely wild.  The fic itself is our second non-crossover story, Like the firs standalone fic, we have a moment between episodes. This one takes place after episode 5, when they have prevented Sean’s death by gunshot and are heading back out. They stop for rest in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere where Alex Tully and Corinna Wiles (Alex’s actual partner from the series and the first canonical woman to appear in any of these fics) share a moment of comfort (meaning: sex) before getting back on the road. Sure it’s a romance fic, but at least it’s building on the characters in the show. The characters feel like themselves and the moment feels like it could actually happen in the show (well not on broadcast TV, even Fox, but still). I went so far as to comment on this one, because I wanted to say how cool it was someone posted a new fanfic for this show in 2025, and the author responded that they had it on their hard drive for a very long time before publishing. So it's not exactly a new fic, and was probably written much closer to the show's premier, but it was still a neat coincidence.  ____ So what have we learned reading the 9 extant fanfics? Not much. If you hadn’t watched the show you would have no idea that it stars an ensemble cast. The show follows roughly a dozen characters in six teams and in these stories we only ever see 4 of them across 2 teams. The crossovers mainly focus on the characters and their similarities to the main characters in other shows (played by the same actor, or of a similar vibe) or they’re just an excuse to write about people in different universe getting down (which is fine, but boring). Go watch some obscure TV. 

Someone told me that the US population eats 150 million hotdogs on July 4th every year. Which is a little surprising. That’s 1/2 hotdog per person. Which means lot of you aren’t eating a hotdog at all. I did my part, and I ate 3 hotdogs on the fFourth, but I can only do so much by myself. I totally get it if you aren’t a meat eater, but I’m pretty sure the meat-alternative hot dogs are pretty good nowadays so that hardly feels like an excuse. Obviously at this point we’re too late to make a difference this year, but that means you have plenty of time to make your plans next year, so get ready to eat some hot dogs! Together we can make a difference! --------------------- As part of my Hamletwatching project (yes I’m still on that) I wanted to rewatch the episode of the Simpsons where they do a sub 10-minute version. It’s one of the shortest Hamlets, along with the one done by the Reduced Shakespeare Company in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). I watch it near the beginning of the project, via disney plus, but figured I ought to own a copy as well. I did some perusing of eBay and found someone selling the appropriate season (13) on blu ray for five bucks, along with the next three seasons, also each for five bucks. This was much cheaper than it usually goes for, where season 13 alone is usually $30-$40. I think season 13 in particular is more expensive is because it was the first season released on blurry, but that is mostly just a guess on my part. The seller quickly let me know that his copy was erroneously listed as blur when it was actually DVD so if I wanted he could give me a discount, or a refund for that set. I wanted the blu, so I took the refund and ended up with three seasons that didn’t contain any Hamlet at all. I like the Simpsons well enough, so it was fine.  When I start ripping and sorting the episodes, I realize that each season goes with three bonus episodes from other seasons. This is a cool little surprise, and the sort of thing I can’t imagine happening in today’s physical media landscape.  A note on the Simpsons physical media: Did you know only the first 20 seasons are available to purchase on disc? The first seventeen seasons were released in order, with a special out of sequence 20th anniversary release of season 20. Then for a few years nothing happened at all. Disney, after purchasing Fox, released seasons 18 and 19 and then basically shut up shop in 2019. There have been no new seasons released in the intervening six years, and no evidence that there ever will be. I’ve been slowly buying up the available seasons piecemeal, but every time I do, I know I’m one step closer to having a complete set and that it will only cover half of the total episodes. 
 Side note to the side note: Earlier this year, Disney renewed the show for 4 more seasons, with the 40th season planned to start airing in 2028. Even a juggernaut like The Simpsons isn’t immune to the shorter seasonal streaming rot of the 2020s however, as each of the four seasons leading up to and including the 40th will only have 15 episodes. It’s still more than a lot of shows get, and it will take the show over 850 episodes, so there’s hardly a dearth, but even the longest running cartoon in the US is not unaffected by the overall cuts to season lengths that are becoming standard. I think a major reason It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia has been able to stay on the air for so long is because it started with shorter seasons. It’s also dirt cheap to produce compared to a lot of other shows (or at least i used to be, I don’t know if that is still true).  Back to the first side note: I know I bang this drum a lot, but I hate how much of media these days only continues to be accessible because of the whims of executives. David Zazlav at HBO Max, I mean Max, I mean HBO Max, has repeatedly shown it’s easy to throw media down the memory hole and make it completely inaccessible just because it makes number bigger on a spreadsheet somewhere. Usually it happens to smaller shows in the hopes that people won’t notice, but it still happens all the time. This is by design! Artificial scarcity isn’t new to this particular industry. Disney pioneered releasing movies on VHS for only a limited time with the eternal threat of the movies going “back in the vault” which meant you had to buy them now. This kept prices high and supply low. But now that streaming is an option companies don’t feel like they even have to release a movie or tv show to physical media at all. They have total control over it and that’s the way the people running the corporations want it.  While I was writing the last paragraph Peacock removed Murder, She Wrote from the streaming platform entirely, despite it being on there since Peacock launched. I should probably see about buying that show on blu ray, if it’s available.  Back to my main point. Did I have one? Oh yes, bonus episodes on the Simpsons blu-ray’s. I think this is such a cool extra. Some of the extra episodes are themed to go along with the box set, for example the 14th season has the alien character Kang and the bonus episodes are other episodes of the Treehouse of Horror series, where the character features. Or the 15th season features Otto the bus driver on the box art, and the bonus episodes are ons where Otto features prominently. The Sixteenth season whit Professor Frank on the cover, doesn’t have bonus episodes that focus on him, but rather a trio of “future” episodes. Occasionally The Simpsons as a show will come up with an excuse to show a potential future of what the family looks like in 25 or 30 or 40 years. Of course none of these actually come to pass because the Simpsons is eternally in the present. One of the earliest episodes that does this, “Lisa’s Wedding” is set in the far future year of 2010 (at least according to the Simpsons Wiki). As I was checking the discs to make sure none were faulty (a good idea when buying used) I clicked play on one of these bonus episodes, Bart to the Future. This is the one where Bart sees his future as a shiftless layabout who has accomplished nothing, while Lisa Simpson has ascended to the presidency of the United States. I remember this episode for a running gag where in the future “Smell ya later” has replaced Goodbye in how to wish someone farewell. I think everybody else remembers this episode, which was released in the year 2000 (March 19 to be specific) has President Lisa Simpson bemoaning the work she has to do after her predecessor left the economy in shambles. That president? Donald Trump. 

I have a new address. I have not moved. This has never happened to me before. Some fairly long time ago, the gubmint decided that the 2 houses on the unnamed service road connected to the street that my address is on was sufficient to give it a new name. But the residents in the neighborhood fought against it. So for the past umpteen years there have been 2 houses with addresses that have a street name for a street they’re not quite technically on.  I’m not sure I’m explaining this well. If you follow the google maps down the road my address is on, you will not reach my house. At one point the road forks, and the right hand side is the road, while the left hand side is, well, nothing. That is to say it’s a road, or at least as much as a single dirt lane can be, but it was a single dirt lane before the split too, so nothing really changes there. My house is on that little unnamed dirt road, along with another one a little further down. But I have to have an address, so they assigned the name of the closest road, even though it doesn’t really fit.  Well someone else is building a house on our title unnamed dirt road, and the outcome of that has been that the gubmint noticed us and our little unnamed road again. So we got a new name for the road, and along with that a new address.  It’s the sort of thing that pulls back the curtain on something that we all kind of know is manufactured, but we all kind of accept anyway. It’s good to have a centralized organizer of things like addresses. In particular the reason they needed to update our road to have a name was because of potential 911 issues. In an emergency it’s actually important to know where addresses are and not have houses on two different streets that share the same name right next to each other. The Post Office has to be updated as well, which was apparently handled; and by apparently handled, I mean our local postal worker knows, but the USPS systems are still updating. That means I have to change my mailing address on nearly everything that has my mailing address. I don’t even know how many things that is.  The last and strangest part of the whole process, is trying to tell mapping software that a new address exists, in a place that already has an existing address. This process has different levels of difficulty. On OpenStreetMap.org, which is what it sounds like, an open mapping software, it was as easy as making an account and updating the map. I clocked on the road and renamed it, as well as updating the address with a few more clicks. Google was a little more complicated. I can justest an edit, whichI have done, but it’s no an immediate fix, it has to be reviewed by their mapping people. I don’’t know what that review process entails, because it is all very opaque, or closed if you will. Ideally they’ll search the county GIS records, which have the newly named road and address, but it could also just be a dude in a room flipping a coin to decide yes or no on any update approvals. Or even worse, they could be using an AI now. Apple Maps is even more complicated, because you have to suggest the update only on apple maps via an iphone; there’s no way I can find to do it from a computer, where I made my other updates. They also really want a picture, so I’m going to have to go take a picture of the sign given to us by the county to indicate that a new road exists.  The good news is that I’m pretty sure Google and Apple both steal data from OpenStreetMap on a regular basis, so since the update went through there, it is likely to get picked up by the corporate crawlers in a couple months. Anyway, I live somewhere new, and it’s technically the easiest move I have ever had, since I didn’t have to actually change anything bout my living conditions. 

James Earnest got the rights back to Cheapas Games. I’ve been a long time fan of the brand, as it's what literally allowed me to get into hobby board games, because they were, well, cheap. The idea was that many parts of board games were interchangeable, things like dice and figures and money could be salvaged from existing games, and then only the absolutely essential parts like boards and cards and rules could be printed for dirt cheap and sold for slightly less than dirt cheap, but still way less expensive than other games. I followed his stuff all through the 2000s and own plenty of the original white envelope games, called that because thy were sold in white 5x8 inch paper envelopes with the name of the game and art printed in black and white. Everything in the envelope was also in black and white on plain yardstick. Eventually the board game market grew much larger and people had more discretionary income, so just being cheap wasn’t as much of a selling point as it might have been in the early 2000s (or if you were a teen with a part time job, like I was in the early 2000s). Cheapass Games pivoted to making (slightly) more expensive games. Games with full color art and all the components you need in the box. They were still pretty cheap, comparatively, costing on the low end of what a normal board game could cost. But this was also around the time that giant kickstarters for board games were happening; where bigger and bigger games with more and more stuff in them, were being made. Usually adding things through stretch goals so they could say there was more stuff rather than because it enhanced the games themselves. And in that market, paying $30 for a simple well designed board game was relatively cheap. Back in 2019 there was a kickstarter for Cheapass Games in Black and White, This was a giant book, roughly 600 pages, and bigger than a traditional hardback, that contained all the rules for every game James Ernest designed as the head of Chiapas’s Games. i was a lot of games! And along with each ruleset there was commentary from James Ernest about what the company was up to, and the design philosophy behind each one. He’s quite the prolific game designer. After the successful kickstarter, another announcement was made. Cheapas’s Games, the brand an catalog had been sold to another company. The company, Greater Than Games, was going to take on responsibility for publishing the games and could theoretically re-publish anything from the back catalog if they wanted to. James Ernest is a prolific game designer, however, and just because he had sold off his life’s work in the games publishing industry, he wasn’t going to stop designing games. So he opened up a new shop called Crab Fragment labs.Crab Fragment was a place for him to post about the new games he was designing. He made a few games here and there (actually more than 50 since 2019), and he posted most of them for free or dirt cheap or available throw low-cost print-on-demand providers, on the website. James hadn’t really changed in his ethos, he was still out there making games for cheapasses.  Crab Fragment labs hummed along for a while, as a relatively low key affair, and the Cheapass’s Games brand did… well.. nothing. After it was sold, Greater Than Games didn’t really do anything with the brand. They didn’t make new games, they kept the ones they had in print (or at least they didn’t sell well enough to go out of print) and that was pretty much it. It was pretty clear to me that they had bought an asset, not a company or an ethos they want dto keep making. It seems like James Rest noticed this too. He even got permission from Greater Than to post some of the old games they weren’t using back on Crab Fragment Lab’s web site, in as section called the Game Reserve (pun very much in tended) where you could buy a PDF of the rules and all the printable components for, ya know, cheap. So James Ernest was still making games, and a huge chunk of his old catalog was being sold by him again, but it really felt silly to me that it had to be done by licensing his own games back to himself from another company. I never go the sense that he  regretted selling, and I hope he got paid well enough for it, but it always felt like a merchant move to me, rather than something that would expand the brand. In early 2025, you may remember some news about the US Government putting massive tariffs on all imports, especially those from China. This was immediately devastating to the games publishing industry. Multiple companies announced that there was not a way for them to survive economically from this change. Almost every single board games is printed and manufactured in China and shipped out. I”m not here to discuss the god and bad of that particular supply line and distribution system, but a disruption like this on an already low-margin product usually made by people doing it for the passion more than the profit, was just insurmountable. One of those companies that was forced to shutter was Greater Than Games. Greater Than’s parent company shut down the entire publisher and laid off all the staff. They were just one of the many companies who had to face this situation, and it sucks for everyone in the board games industry. But if you want to look for a silver lining, it’s that in the shuttering of Greater Than Games, James Ernest was able to re-acquire the entire catalog and brand. It’s his again. He hasn’t done much with it yet, because that takes time and effort, but he has announced that they’re going to make much of the catalogue available again for free, including rules and design updates. So if you’re a cheap ass who likes games, there’s a place for you at cheapass.com. One last note: A bunch of the physical games made by Greater Than Games when they owned the license are still available on their website for almost nothing. I already own most of these, but if you want high-quality games made available at probably less than cost you could do worse than check out the online store while supplies last. I'm pretty sure the logistics are still being handled by the parent company so you can order successfully, but caveat emptor. A couple personal recommendations: Button Men is a surprisingly deep 2 player strategy game with just a little bit of luck, Kill Doctor Lucky is like Clue in revers, where everyone is trying to be the one who murders the old man in the mansion, and Give Me the Brain is a light-hearted game about trying to wok in a fast food restaurant where every employee (including you) is a zombie. 

Did I mention I went to a baseball game? I honestly cant recall the last time I went to a game before that. Probably before going to college. I'm still in this period of my life where I'm trying to figure out how to like sports. I can watch sports just fine, and I have absorbed enough of the rules for most of the major professional sports that I usually don't have trouble following what is happening. It also helps that most of the big ones (baseball excluded) are variations of "get the ball through a goal" and the specifics are in how each team goes a bout doing that.  Baseball is a different sort though, instead of getting a ball somewhere specific, baseball is a game of not letting the ball go to very specific places. The only way you can score points in baseball is if you can keep the ball away from players on the opposing team for long enough to make at least partial progress towards running in a circle of a designated radius.  Ok, I think that's about as abstract as I can make baseball sound. At least on a first pass. Baseball's a fine game, but as best as I can tell, it's a game with lots of subtext. What happens in a given moment of baseball (short of the spectacular exceptions) isn't just about the moment you're in, but also five other things that happened before now. But I, as a newcomer to the sport, don't know which specific five things I should be holding in my head.  I have encountered glimpses of this complex web of interactions, but, as perhaps is all to typical for me, I found it not in the game itself, but in reading about baseball in a manga series. I don't read a lot of manga, but for a while in 2021 I picked a couple of new series in Weekly Shonen Jump, the manga anthology magazine that posts a lot of it's content for free. On any given series, you can read the first three chapters and the most recent three chapters for free. Which means if you catch a series from the beginning and keep up with it regularly, you can read the whole thing for free. Or you could pay the three bucks a month to unlock the archive. But in the spring of 2021 I tried to manage reading a few different series for free weekly. One of those series was Nine Dragons' Ball Parade which was about a rag-tag group of high school baseball players trying to go up against the best of their peers. THe comic did a great job of explaining to me import aspects of the game that are not at all visible to the naked eye if one is just casually watching a game. The comic was a short-runner, getting cancelled after only a few months, and I had actually fell off reading it even before the series concluded, but while reading it I felt like I could start understanding the game.  I have since forgotten most of those things and once again my knowledge of obscure comics failed me when it counted, as I didn't really understand anything beyond the surface level when watching a recent game in person.  Something that has come up in almost every conversation I have had about going to see a baseball game recently has been the Savannah Bananas. The Bananas are an independent exposition baseball team, who travel the country playing a modified version of baseball called bananaball. Bananaball is designed to appeal to the sorts of people who don't like baseball. The games have a time limit, trick plays are common, and everything is designed to be a show. There's still a real sport being played under the glitz and glam, but not in a way that highlights the depth and complexity of the original sport.  The technique is working, though. Bananaball games sell out almost everywhere the team goes, and the "league" has expanded to 4 teams, which means they can twice as many games as they would otherwise. I've watched a couple livestream games as well, and I can confirm they are more entertaining than not, even as the entertainment sometimes feels lik I'm a baby being distracted by someone jangling keys in front of my face. I'm not above being distracted by shiny objects after all.  I hope that the majority of hardcore baseball fans aren't bothered by the existence of bananaball, since that latter is mostly built on the idea that baseball is boring and should be fixed. I think there's room for both and it's not like the MLB is going anywhere.  Ooh, I forgot to mention my favorite part of the game! There was an app where you could order food and beverages (from a limited menu) and someone would bring them right to your seat. No waiting for a guy to wander by with a tray of hot dogs or beer and trying to flag them down. 10/10 app experience. No notes. 

I got fooled by AI. I was browsing my social media (self-hosted) and I saw a funny comic. It was a variation of the “We have X at home” meme, where the version at home is worse. It was one of those broad comics that is designed to be both widely applicable, but feel very personally directed. the sort of thing that always gets boosted around because it lets people say “that’s me!” and we like seeing ourself reflected back to us. It’s a very human feeling. I saw the thing, had the “it’s me!” response and did the thing it was designed for, I shared it with friends. And not long after one of y friends said it looked AI generated. I was initially a little doubtful, because disliking AI has become something I care a lot about. I wouldn’t say it’s a core part of my identity, but I take a lot of pride in not using the plagiarism machine or spreading it around. But the plagiarism machine is designed to make things that are plausible. it could be blocks of human-sounding text or images that seem like they make sense, but they’re built on the back of stolen work made by actual people. Annd that’s before you get to the environmental impact, or the  abuse of Kenya workers to create the training for the paganism machines.  I know those things and those are the reasons I don’t use or share AI generated anything. So I was skeptical when someone said I did. this is an example of the sort of backwards facing justification that us humans are really good at. I’m tell myself that I’m not the sort of person who shares AI generated slop, so if I shared something it must not be AI generated. But I took a harder look at it. I asked for why the person who called it out thought it was AI generated. And they made some compelling arguments, pointing to some of the weird inconsistencies that my brain had skipped over. I also did some research trying to find the original creator of the comic. And when I was doing that I found other people pointing out mistakes that I wouldn’t have even noticed; but I did notice that nobody was taking credit for it. Maybe 15 years ago. In the earliest days of social media as we know it now, there was a big push from artists for attribution and credit. It was not uncommon for someone to take a comic or funny image that somebody made and repost it. there were whole accounts that made a business out of reposting the creations of other people, almost always removed from the original context of how it was created. They acted as if funny images and memes were just fossils being dug out of the earth rather than something that a person took time and thought and effort to make. I know multiple artists who called out this behavior at the time, and who put work into fighting the attribution problem, as it was often called. They lost, I’m afraid to say. There are still plenty of content farm accounts on every social media platform. they never really went away. At best you might see “Credit to the original artist” as if that was any sort of actual attribution. Now in the plagiarism and stealing of unattributed content has been scaled up through the use of AI generation. That’s what the AI is for. It’s actual purpose is fraud at scale. It used to take work and effort to make things, but now the sheer volume of slop that can be generated can overwhelm anyone’s feed. It got me. I got fooled by something I should have caught, and it was a combination of failures on my part. I should have sought out the actual source, I should have put some critical thinking into looking at the picture itself and look for any tale-tale signs. I say this not as a mea culpa but as a warning and an extension of grace. The internet is full of slop. It’s gunna get us all eventually. But I’m also just tired of talking about it. 

I like Nonograms. They're logic puzzles in a sudoku-adjacent space, in that there are numbers and a grid, but nonograms stretch a different part of my brain, and you get a cool picture (sort of) at the end. I have an app on my phone with a few thousand of them ranging in size from 5X5 to 50X50 squares. Usually they're designed so you can kind of tell what the picture is supposed to be at the end, ad every one can be completed with logic alone, no guesswork required. So I was delighted to learn someone made a website with every 5x5 nonogram, and made it collaborative. If a puzzle gets solved for one person, it gets solved for everybody. IT turns out that if you mathematical generate every 5x5 nonogram you end p with 24,976,511 of them. I'm usually able to knock out a 5x5 pretty quickly (well under a minute most times), and in the last 24 hours, when I learned the site exists, I have done about 500 of them. It's.been a fun little internet-only experience and you can jump in and try your hand at clearing them all. I'll warn you though, that any pictures you see at the end will be strictly in your own imagination. We're going for completeness rather than aesthetically pleasing.  ---- My friendly local library has an annual five dollar bag-of-books sale, which as the name implies means you can pay $5 for a tote bag and you can keep all the books you can fit inside it. The types of books available in the sale vary pretty widely, as they're all donated to the friends of the library, and people read a lot of different books. I usually go in with no particular agenda, because I'm never sure whats going to be there or what might strike my fancy. Often, I will throw a book into the bag, because I already paid for the bag, I might as well. Even If I'm not exactly sure when I'll get around to reading it.  This year's haul includes (In no particular order): Mike NIchols - a Biography by Mark Harris. Mike Nichols was a director and comedian who made some great movies and that everybody loved working with. You've probably seen at least a couple of his movies, either the Birdcage or The Graduate or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe. He lived an interesting life and it'd be neat to learn more about him.  The Word - Ann Associated Press Guide to Good News Writing by Rene J Cappon. I bought this book because it fit in the bag. a slim volume of advice, rules, guidelines? on using language in printed news-writing. It was published originally in 1982, although my edition is from 1989. This book is probably not 100% relevant anymore, at least in the specifics, but I suspect the philosophies haven't gone out of date yet.  Comedy - Techniques for Writers & Performers by Melvin Helitzer is, like The Word above probably a little out of date (originally published in 1984), but I like the idea of a manual for writing and performing comedy. The table of contents includes sections on theory and technique of comedy, as well as chapters on each of the major markets for comedy writers like: Speechwriter, magazines, stand-up comics, sitcoms, print cartoons and of course, greeting cards.  How Things Work  - An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology by... well it doesn't seem to have a single identified author. It's a translation of a German volume with about 250 double page spreads explaining in simple language how things mechanically work. There are entries on a wide range of topics from record players to hovercraft, to quartz clocks. Like the two books above, it is an older volume (copyright 1967) so some of them aren't as relevant as they once were (I don't need to know how a cathode ray tube works very often these days) but it seems like such a cool refrence volume, I couldn't pass it up.  Console Wars - Sega Nintendo and the Battle DThat Defined a Generation by Blake J Harris is a history book about the console wars of the 1990s. Sega versus Nintendo  was a huge deal, not just on playgrounds but in the market and I suspect getting to read the whole thing from today's perspective would be interesting. This is also, the last book in my stack with a subtitle, a trend I didn't notice until writing this list.  EverWorld 3: Enter the Enchanted. Techincaly this isn't a subtitle. K.A. Applegate, on the heels of writing Animorphs, one of the most middle-grade book series of all time started writing EverWorld a series that didn't last as long (only 13 installments, to the 54 of Animorphs) but similarly followed a group of teens secretly fighting an impossible situation. In this series a group of teens are sent to EverWorld, a plane of existence where all the myths are true, every time they sleep. I read the whole series as a teen, but when I saw this on the table all by itself, it had to go in the bag.  Mister Roberts by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan. It was a playscript, that's all I knew when I tossed it in the bag, but it also apparently won the tony award for best play in 1948. Its about a bunch of sailors in the pacific, during World War II. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman - Just seems like something that everyone should have on their shelves. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Technically this didn't fit in the bag. They had a table of individually priced books as well, and this whole six-volume set was only $5. I figured it was too good a deal to pass up, so I snagged it too. When I was checking out, the cashier had to check that it was really only five dollars for the whole set, but it was! There was also a selection of DVDs, so I picked up a few. The DVD selection is always a little eclectic, but this year was even more so. Almost every movie they had was an opera. filmed operas. not a lot of demand for those, but they had probably fifty of them in a box. I only picked up three: La Boheme by Puccini Macbeth bt Verdi and Hamlet by Faccio. I think the idea of adapting Shakespeare to opera is kind of weird, but turning it into a teen rom-com worked, so why not an opera. Hopefully I'll get to watching these soon. I'm not very good at watching opera, but here's hoping I get better.  That's everything i picked up, so I hope at least one or two turn out worth the five bucks I paid for the bag.

Had a great time at the beach. I managed to finish few books. Not as many as my goal, but sometimes just sitting and watching the waves. rash takes priority over speed reading through books. And watching Baywatch. I watched at least one episode of Baywatch every day, on the free streaming app Pluto, and let me tel you, nobody from the 90s talks about how weird Baywatch is as a series. I grew never having seen any of the series, I just knew it from its promos of people in skimpy swimsuits running in slow motion, and the. punchlines about people running in slow motion There’s plenty of slow running to go around, but for a show about lifeguard it goes some very surprising places. It’s never what you expect, at literally anything seems like it could happen. Here’s a list of actual things that happened in episodes of Baywatch I watched this week, in no particular order. A man who gets rescued by a lifeguard becomes obsessed with her, and stalked her waving every red flag along the way. She eventually quits, but it’s ok because she was only a guest star. Jewel thieves bury a box full of jewels under a lifeguard stand. A three-minute musical dream sequence where a homeless poet and a lifeguard dance together in formal closing on the beach. A 2-person submarine sinks and the lifeguards have to scuba down to rescue them, but they don’t have enough oxygen in the sub, so one lifeguard hooks his own tanks up to the sub to save them. Jason Momoa is a regular cast member, after the show moved to Hawaii. A bunch of lifeguards in “rookie school” are caught using performance enhancing drugs. Two lifeguards go son a romantic weekend at a hotel but get interrupted by another couple who is having too much sex. Two lifeguards start a business selling sandwiches on the beach. A tween develops a crush on Mitch (David Hasselhoff) which is only resolved by her witnessing Mitch’s son rescuing somebody. A county music star enlists Baywatch to help find his child and wife who abandoned him on Venice beach 2 years ago. This is apparently a serve they offer and are successful. Martina McBride shows up as one of the lifeguard’s best friend and aspiring country music singer. She gets multiple full music videos in to the episode. Baywatch thwarts an illegal offshore casino. Somehow the illegal offshore casino couldn’t just drive the boat a little further out into international waters. A midair hang-gliding collision by two people trying to crash into the MTV Beach House. The MTV Beach House has a televised competition with Baywatch to raise money for the Special Olympics Mitch Apparently knows Jenny McCarthy and just calls her up out of the blue to set up the above competition and she agrees without question, re-structuring an entire television show to meet his desires. Multiple jet-ski chases A woman fakes her own death by shark attack, in the aptly named Shark Cove The Beach Boys show up, because Mitch knows them too. They get multiple full performances on screen. An earthquake. A coal fire(?) interrupts a roommate dispute between three lifeguards but al of the action happens entirely off screen. We only see them leave and return after rescuing everybody. Multiple episodes where Mitch (David Hasselhoff) shows up only to briefly explain why he won’t be in the rest of the episode. A windsurfing class montage. Baywatch is a wild show. 22 episodes per season, running for 11 seasons, They had to keep coming up with weird beach adjacent storylines. You never know what tone you’re going to get from scene to scene or episode to episode. So with that, here’s the latest HugoWatch I finished Ministry of Time, and I think despite enjoying many of the individual moments, this novel didn’t quite click for me. Maybe it was trying to be too many things at once (spy thriller, romance, domestic comedy, and time travel story). The book spends a lot of time building up a big secret, and the reveal was underwhelming. Some of this is due to the protagonists’ limited POV in a world of spies and lies, but the payoff comes very suddenly and mostly ends with someone explaining everything that was going on. Just kind of a letdown.  Alien Clay, the first of Two Nominees by Adrian Tchaikovsky was a compelling read. Set on a penal colony on a barely inhabited world. There’s a mystery about life on the planet, as well as an uprising being planned by the prisoners, and those two things come together in a way that makes a lot of sense. The only problem for me was that I figured out how the two were going ti intersect about halfway through the book and so the back half felt like they were dragging out the mystery, even as it was well told.  A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher was a pleasant surprise. A regency-adjacent drama all about trying to get married to the right people, but also one of the schemers is a secret sorcerer, who abuses her daughter (the protagonist) and does’t hesitate to use her powers to ill people. I generally enjoy reading works by T. Kingfisher (or her other pseudonyms) and this was no exception. I had a little trouble getting started as e are plopped right into the perspective of an abused 14-year old, and that was rough, but getting past t hat lead to a story about friendship and hope and why horses are evil.  Slo I still have a coupe novels to finis, I have started Adrian Tchaikovsky’s second novel in the finalists, Service Model, about a robot valet who is having difficulties after his human master dies. It’s all quite funny so far, in a bleak, Kafkaesque sort of way. 

On vacation. Here’s a cat I met named Tanner. We’re friends now.

First, a Programming Note: I will be on vacation next Sunday, so don't expect much from me. Or the week after. As you probably know I've been watching a lot of Hamlets. In Act 3, there is a scene where Claudius is struggling with the fact that he killed his brother. He want to repent, but struggles with it because he's still the king and married to Gertrude and doesn't want to give those things up. He then bows in silent prayer. Hamlet comes upon Claudius and realizes he could kill the king right here, but if he did so, the king would likely go to heaven, what with being in prayer and all. Hamlet finds he can't bring himself to do it, because paradise is too nice an end and wouldn't be revenge as he wants it. Every time I watch the scene I'm reminded of one of the worst pieces of critical analysis I have ever read about the play. The author asked the question "Why doesn't Hamlet kill Claudius in Act 3 when he has the chance?" Then they proceeded to list all of the in-text reasons that could be used to justify Hamlet's hesitation: the above reason about Claudius being in Prayer, Hamlet's general ambivalence towards committing murder, perhaps Hamlet is actually mad and his faculties are diminished. But then the author of this analysis says all of those answers are wrong and the real answer is: Because there are still 2 acts left in the play! This frustrates me for multiple reasons. First: Shakespeare didn't write five act plays. The acts were laded decided upon by editors. At no point was Shakespeare sitting around going, “well i could have the play end here, but I still need two more acts!” He never thought of his plays as having acts. They had scenes (roughly) but even the first published versions of his works didn’t have the act breaks that have become so common. Shakespeare wrote plays as a complete thing, and they were as long as they needed to be. Shakespeare’s shortest play is A comedy of Errors. It’s a good play! It is a complete work and it is about 1800 lines long. Hamlet is, by comparison, more than 4000 lines long. more than twice the length, and Shakespeare’s longest play. The other of his 37 plays fall somewhere in that spectrum. If Hamlet were to kill his uncle in this act 3 scene and then the play ended there, Hamlet would still only be Shakespeare’s 7th shortest play. Macbeth would be about the same length. Shakespeare didn’t write this play then decide he needed to pad it out with more scenes because the ending was too short. In literary criticism, sometimes you see a distinction between “Watsonian” and “Doylist” explanations of something happening in a given work. The names from from the Sherlock Holmes stories, which were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but narrated as if they had been written by the fictional Dr. John Watson. A Watsonian explanation or reading of a text looks for answers to questions that come from within the logic of the text, while a Doylist reading will look at the context in which the text was written, and why the author set up the scenario the way that they did. What the original author of the analysis that I’m mad about was trying to to, it appears, was shift the perspective of readers from a Watsonian perspective (what are Hamlet’s motivations in this situation based on what has been set up previously) to a Doylist one (Why did Shakespeare put in a scene that could have ended the play, but didn’t?) There’s room for both types of discourse and analysis when working with a text, particularly one as rich as Hamlet. But if you’re going to only talk about the external causes for a text, you should least be willing to apply actual facts to the situation. You should also ask the question in a way that isn’t meant to mislead the answers. The original question was: Why doesn’t Hamlet kill Claudio in act 3? The question they want to answer is instead “Why did Shakespeare include this scene where Hamlet could kill Claudio but doesn’t?” You can’t ask a Watsonian question and expect Doylist answer. That’s just intellectually dishonest.  I do have an answer to the question "Why doesn't Hamlet Kill Claudius in Act 3?" but my answer isn't inherently the right one. The beauty of Hamlet being a play, with hundreds or thousands of different ways to approach the text, is that each version gets to make its own decision. They have to evaluate the text and create their own interpretation. But the answer will never be, "because there are 2 acts left in the play." Hugo Watch: Still making my way through the The Ministry of Time, but I'm on the downhill slope. I hope to read at least 2 or 3 of the novels while I'm on vacation, so I'll better be able to place it afterwards. I don't think I've talked about Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form yet, so let us do that. We have 2 Doctor Who Episodes (A perennial nominee) two episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks, and one episode each of Fallout and Agatha All Along. Best DPSF isn't supposed to just be "Best TV episode" it often becomes that. So we get a lot of TV episodes nominated. Conveniently I have seen all of these already, so I can quickly rank them from least to most favorite.  Agatha All Along: Death's Hand in Mine - This was fine. I didn't love this series but this was probably the best episode of it. I do love non-linear storytelling, so this got points above the rest for me. I'm so burned out on marvel, that even their more interesting attempts to do anything don't really wow me. And this whole series never really rose above the heights of the one it spun off from (Wandavision) Fallout: The Beginning - The fallout series was better than I ever expected it could be, but I also forgot it almost immediately after it was over. It was fine.  Doctor Who: Dot and Bubble - Both of the nominated Doctor Who episodes are 'Doctor light' meaning the Doctor actually has a limited presence. in the narrative. Here, he spends almost all his time on a screen viewed by the POV character. This episode is one of the recent crop that pretends to be about one thing before becoming something else entirely. The problem for me was that it didn't quite accomplish either thing at full power. But still it's a complete story and I wouldn't mind watching it again. Star Trek Lower Decks: The New Next Generation - This and FIssure Quest bounced back and forth in their spots. The New Next Generation hit me hard emotionally, because it's a well executed finale, but it's a finale more than it is a complete story. It is a wonderful send off for the series (even though I want more.) Star Trek Lower Decks: Fissure Quest - This episode works both as a standalone and as a fun romp through the history of Trek. I don't want to say mor ethan that, but I liked it enogh to put it above the finale, but just barely. Doctor Who: 73 Yards - This is the episode I knew would be at the top one I saw the list and i never really wavered from that. Another 'Doctor light' episode, but where Dot and Bubble is a little clunky, this one is tightly wound like a spring. The story refuses to explain itself and there's a little handwavyness if you thing about it to hard, but the emotional journey works and I was very satisfied when I watched it the first time. An easy first place ballot pick for me.   

It's too late for me to do the Justin Timberlake meme, but I am right on time for the Star Wars one. So imagine I put that here. Sometimes I come across a YouTube video that basically boils down to “here’s a thing.” I think of it a the YouTube video equivalent of the Marge Simpson holding a potato meme. Someone picks up a thing (sometimes a literal thing, other times it’s like a tv show or a movie) and says “look at this. I think it’s neat” This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, and if you’ve never heard of the thing before, it can be a chance for you to discover a thing you didn’t know about. But sometimes I get fed one of these videos via my algorithm and It’s about something I know about already. There's an example I was going to show you, but I just looked it up and the video was made private sometime between now and when I watched it. so I'll be a little more vague, as I can't give you the specifics. The tv show Solitary is something you probably haven’t heard of, but I have because I was a reality tv show obsessed teen and I watched it when it was airing. I watched the whole first season and then occasionally thought about it for the rest of my life. It’s not a great show and I don’t recommend you go looking for it, but I remember significant parts of it. So I was surprised when a video creator started talking about it. I was even excited to watch the video and see what he thought of it. But by the ends of the video the conclusion was “yup, that’s a thing, pretty messed up huh?” I walked away from it not knowing anything more about it than I started, not even much about what the video creator thought of it.  I came out of the viewing experience feeling a little hollow. "So what?' is the question I am left asking. Maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s enough to be an empirical historian. It’s enough to show someone something new, that they hadn’t seen before. But if the content of the video doesn’t accomplish more than recapping the Wikipedia page (or equivalent) then why am I watching this video instead of reading the Wikipedia page? Or why am I hearing about this from you? What additional context or perspective or opinion did you, the creator bring to the table? This is also why I’m generally opposed to the empiricist method of historiography, but I'm not sure this is the place to fall down that rabbit hole. Oh, maybe just a little. Empiricism is the kind of history writing that sticks to things that can be absolutely known and tried to provide no additional information or speculation. It's like the scientific method applied to historiography. Empiricism starts from the assumption that without evidence we cannot know anything. If there is a letter or a book or a shard of pottery, all we can know is what is written in that letter or book or on that shard of pottery. The empiricist says "here's the thing" and the only context provided is other things that also exist. They look at the job of writing history as one of discovery, but let the readers of history draw their own connections and conclusions. I am not inherently opposed to the ideas they present, and the basis for how they think history should be written, but they never seem to find themselves asking why. Why did this book survive, why didn't some hypothetical others. When an empiricist gets to a gap in knowledge their answer is to stop and say "We don't know, and we won't know until some evidence is found" and if no evidence ever shows up, then we'll just never know. But they claim an objectivity that I don't think they earn. Not speculating or asking questions is just as much an editorial decision as asking one is. When you can conveniently skip over gaps in history with no further knowledge, it turns out you tend to write histories about the people and institutions who had the power and ability to leave a record. Everyone else who exists remains un-written about. Any way, back to the topic at hand. I worry sometimes that I fall into this trap. I say “here’s a thing” in this newsletter and leave it at that. I want to avoid doing that, even as I feel drawn toward it as a technique. “Here’s a thing” is easy. I don't have to think about myself or how I feel. When I dabbled in making youtube videos, I always started with asking myself, why is this a video? Why is it a video that I should be making specifically. What do I bring to the table? And there always needed to be an answer to that before i figured out what the video was going to be. Sometimes it was a personal perspective, sometimes it was a clever approach to presenting the information, sometimes a little of both. But it always had to have a reason to exist in that form. So, here's a thing I discovered recently: You know how movie theater popcorn always tastes different from what you can make at home? I learned that part of the reason for that is almost every movie theater in the country uses the same butter-flavored popcorn salt. It's a brand called Flavacol and it's made by the same company and has been for decades. and more importantly I learned you can buy some from the internet with almost no effort. Most of their customers are industrial or commercial businesses, so the smallest amount one can buy is still a pretty large 35 ounce carton (think about a quart of milk, and you're close.) I couldn't live with that knowledge and not purchase some. So I did. I"ve only used it once, and unfortunately I burned the popcorn while making it, so it wasn't a great experiment. But I can confirm it improved the flavor and if the popcorn hadn't been burned I probably would have really enjoyed it. Further experiments are required, but I've got plenty of popcorn to work with. I should also note I used the Alton Brown method of popping corn in the microwave, which does involve a paper bag and a stapler. Also worth checking out if you want to save a couple bucks on microwave popcorn. Hugo Watch: It wasn't a great week for getting through nominees. I'm still reading The Ministry of Time but I also started reading teh nominees for Best Related Work. Abigail Nussbaum's book of reviews Track Changes is where I started. I'm not reading the whole thing, but I am skipping to the reviews of movies and TV shows and books I've actually read or seen. So far I really appreciate her insights and perspective. I know Nussbaum has been nominated (and won?) for best fan-writer in the past, so it's cool to see here with a book in the best related work category this year. Best related Work has some stiff competition, I've already read 2 of the other finalists, when they were originally announced. Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics” by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones and “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion” by Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford were both published on blogs I read, so I know what was in them. I  don't love when things about the hugos get nominated for the hugo awards, mostly because it feels so insular and navel-gazey to me. I do think both are very good works of journalism and managed to outlay some things most hugo voters should know about, but I don't know that they'll be top of my ballot. There's also “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel” by Jenny Nicholson which I watched already because I subscribe to the youtube channel it was from. I even had it on my nominating ballot. It's a really good video (4 hours long, so watch it in parts or set aside some time) and will be hard to knock off from my top spot.

I don't know how to be a sports fan. I've been following the work of John Green, author, youtuber and well known fan of AFC Wimbledon, a fourth tier English football (soccer) club. John green cares deeply about AFC Wimbledon, even to the point of sponsoring the team along with Partners in Health. He talks passionately about the feeling of camaraderie he feels in supporting the club and the connectedness he feels with the other fans at matches. He often uses the phrase (and credits the original coiner, whose name escapes me right now) "of all the unimportant things, football is the most important." That seems like a big deal! I've been watching Welcome to Wrexham, the ongoing documentary series about how Ryan Reynolds and his friend Rob bought the 5th tier welsh football club Werxham AFC. The show isn't about Rob and Ryan so much as it is about the club and the people who live near in the town it is named after and the history of ups and downs it has had. The voice of the fans, not as a cacophony, but as individuals, is present throughout the episodes I have seen. They care so deeply about this club and want the best things for it. I'm not sure what the process entails to be come a fan like that. I'm not sure I have the dedication. I know the key thing is to pick a sport and a team and watch the sport and the team, and find other people who care about the sport and the team and talk to them about it. Most often I've found myself stumbling on the part where I watch the games themselves. I understand that sports can be exciting, in theory, but most of the time I can't get particularly engaged. The closest I have find myself to being a fan of a sport is when the olympic winter games roll around and I get to watch some curling. Curling is a weird sport, but I find myself fascinated when I watch it. I get into the nuance of the game, and the strategy and I have opinions about the different versions of the game. When curling comes around I probably sound a lot like the rest of the sports sound to me when they talk about their favorite games. But my fandom is short lived. It usually begins and ends with the opening and closing ceremonies. I don't follow the players afterwards, or check out information on the professional curling leagues (do those even exist?) My attention wanes when the games are over. I don't really have a conclusion here. Hugo Watch This will be a new and temporary section of the newsletter where I try to keep up with reading/watching all the Hugo finalist material. The Hugo Voter's Packet released this week and so I have a ton of new material to get through. This week I voted for Best Professional Artist, which is one of the easier ballots to complete when the packet arrives. Each artist submits a collection of their eligible works and I look through them all and just feel out which ones resonate with me the most. This year, Micaela Alcaino's work resonated the most so it got the top spot on my ballot. I watched The Wild Robot, up for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form and while it worked really well for me in a moment to moment way, I don't think it'll stick around in my brain long term. The story of a service robot living among wild animals on an isolated island was almost exactly what I expected beat for beat, but it was executed at a very high level. Right now it sits below I Saw the TV Glow (which probably won't get knocked off the top spot, but there's always a chance) and above Furiosa, which are the only other two movies I've seen on the finalist list. I've downloaded and started playing both Caves of Qud and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, up for best Game or Interactive work. These two games could not be further apart, although I am enjoying both. Caves of Qud is a roguelike rpg where each time you play you are dropped into a new procedurally-generated world full of stories and monsters that will kill you. It's been worked on for fifteen years, but was eligible this year because the 1.0 version released. It's the sort of game I have a long history of enjoying and my first few hours with it have been nice as I explore the systems and learn a lot through getting killed over an over again. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes on the other hand is a puzzle game wrapped up in a stylish noir inspired frame. You play as a woman who arrives at a mysterious hotel were nearly everything is a puzzle. The puzzles are typically based in strict logic, but the game gives you a bunch of locked doors and tells you to start figuring it out. There is very little hand holding, and I had to pull out some paper and a pen to keep notes, which is always an exciting development. There have only been a few games where I've had to do that, but thy are often very satisfying. This category's ballot doesn't really have a shape to it yet. I want to try some of the other games, and comparing these two is a really weird task. Finally in the Fiction Categories, I read The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar (Best Novella) and started The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. The first was a slightly allegorical tale about class and small rebellions, while the second is about a woman tasked with helping a British sailor plucked from the 1830s adjust to livoing life in the present day. I liked The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain, which felt complete as a work, whereas the other novella I've read (What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher) while not incomplete, took place in a larger world with the same characters. Chain might beat it out on my ballot, but only just barely. I'm hoping to finish Ministry of time soon, and knock at least on of the other novellas out this week. Plus Dragon Age: Veilguard has finished downloading, so I can give that game a try too. See y'all next week!

I made the mistake of thinking I could remember what I wanted to write about without making a note of it. I had an idea and I thought about putting it down in my notes app but I didn’t bother. I said to myself “it’s a good enough idea, I’ll remember it later.” And here we are. Our pressure cooker broke this week. We think it might be just a blown fuse (they have fuses inside!) but until the new one arrives we won’t be able to check. I don’t know if I fully believe in planned obsolescence as an active strategic decision being made by companies, but I do think they are incentivized towards not making things that last a long time. This pressure cooker is not yet five years old. It’s one of those countertop versions that has 6 or 8 different modes so It can sauté, or become a rice cooker or a pressure cooker all in the same little R2-D2 shaped box on the counter. And it’s pretty good at what it does! I have a history of preferring a stovetop pressure cooker, because they can hold more (generally) and have fewer moving parts, none of them with a microchip. But this countertop one has been entirely functional. Until it wasn’t. I’ve been thinking about the economic and supply chain instability that’s facing our country as terrify are added, paused, added, adjusted, lowered, increased, and paused again (but only partially.) I’m not an economist, but almost none of the economists I’ve heard from seem to think this instability is a good thing. Something I suspect could happen if the arrogance continue and further cut the US’s economy off from he rest of the world is that we as a people will have to get better at making old and broken things work again. I’m not a very handy guy (I’ve only got the two) but I’ve been found some research on making old things work again. We have an amazing resource in the internet and if you want it, the information on how to fix almost anything is out there. Some of it is just a lot harder to fix than it used to be. Especially if it’s a device that requires an app or a live connection to the internet. I own the dishwasher in the video embedded in that article I watched the movie Duel this week, which was Steven Spielberg’s first ever outing as a feature film director. It’s a good movie! It is a very simple premise, albeit a terrifying one. A guy driving along a mostly deserted highway starts being terrorized by the unseen driver of a big rig. He’s chased and followed and it really seems like the truck is trying to kill him. It’s a good movie! It’s also firmly in the camp of movies that couldn’t be made today. One of the big plot points is the main character trying to find a phone, which would be hard to do today even if you did the “oh no, there’s. I service here” cliche, because you’re in a car so you can probably drive to somewhere with service. An early moment in the movie has the protagonist stopping for gas, and the attendant takes a look under the hood of his car. It’s the story of thing that wasn’t uncommon back in the 70s, but most modern cars have gotten increasingly computerized and complex that a simple look under the hood tells one a lot less than it used to. Again, I won’t fully endorse planned obsolescence as an active conspiracy, but things aren’t made to be user serviced anymore and that includes cars and pressure cookers. The movie is worth checking out though. They can’t make movies obsolete, as long as you actually buy them. It’s also written by Richard Matheson, a science fiction and horror author most well known for the story I Am Legend, which has been adapted into movies a few different times. The Hugo Awards! That was the idea I had. The Hugo Awards Finalists were announced recently, and that is always big news. I’ve been derelict in my duties as a Hugo Voter the last few years, not getting all of the reading done in advance and thus having to leave parts of my ballot blank. I’m trying to remedy that this year and get as many of the finalists read or watched before the voting deadline. I think I can pull it off, as long as I focus on it. The full list of finalists can be found here.  As with every year, the Hugos are administered by that year’s World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon. This year it’s being held in Seattle. Anyone can become a member of the World Science Fiction Society by buying a membership through the convention. It’s something I’ve been doing for over a decant now, even if I only ever attend the convention virtually (if at all.) A WSFS membership is $50 this year, plus another 30 if you want to attend the virtual version of the con. Still a pretty good deal, and you get to have voice in what many consider to be the biggest award in fandom.  I’m a little behind, as I sometimes have read at least one or two of the novel finalists when the list is announced, but fully all six of them are unread by me, so I have my work cut out for me. I’ve got holds placed for them all at the library, and hopefully the Hugo Voters Packet will contain most of them, or at least substantial excerpts.  I’ve read one each of the  Novella and Novelette categories and 3 of the short stories. The Short Story category is particularly strong this year and I’m already having a hard time ranking the three I’ve read.  Best Dramatic Presentation, Short form is an easy category this year, since all the finalists are episodes of TV shows I have seen, mostly Dear Trek Lower Decks and Doctor Who. The Long Form category is made up mod movies I want to see, which 2 I already have (Furiosa and I Saw the TV Glow.)  This year there’s also a new category for best Poem, which is an interesting change. I’ve read 5 of the 6 nominees, but the 6th is a novel-length piece of poetry, so it will take some additional time. I’ve got until July 23 to get all my reading and watching done, which should be possible, especially since I have a beach trip coming up in that time and that’ll be good for at least a couple novels getting knocked out. I can’t wait! If you’re interested in voting as well, I strongly recommend it. It’s a great way to participate in fandom and have your voice heard while also sing some of the best stuff that’s being made in a given year. 

Taking it easy this week. Here's the comics page. Dumbing of Age: Will this make any sense if you haven't read a significant portion of the archives? Probably not. Dinosaur Comics: Old timey words aren't old timey if you use them now! 9 Chickweed Lane: Still the horniest comic actually printed in a newspaper for some reason. This is not a good thing. Wondermark: Books are time travel! Heathcliff: Jimmy the frig is in this one. Everyone loves Jimmy! Pearls Before Swine: Today's comic seems to have been printed without black ink I don't know if that's a bit or not, because it's the sort of thing the comic would do on purpose to confuse people. And what are the comics without a puzzle or two to go along with it? Can you beat my score? Real Bird Fake Bird: I got 5/7 TimeGuesser: I got 32,020/50,000

I have been watching a lot of Hamlet in the last few weeks.  You know Hamlet, right? Shakespeare play from the late 1500s, A moody prince is visited by his fathers ghost to tell hime that he (the ghost king) was murdered by his brother who subsequently married the queen (Hamlet's mother) and took over the kingdom. Hamlet swears revenge and then goes about committing his revenge so poorly that almost everybody he knows dies, including himself? It's kind of well known.  I was (and am) pretty familiar with the play. I've read it a couple times and seen some of the various adaptations. My absolutely favorite production was one I saw in Prague that had been translated to Czech. I don't speak or understand Czech, but I knew the play well enough that I could follow along with wat was happening. And they made some really interesting choices in their production. I was a small, cramped theater with a relatively tiny stage, which meant they didn't have room for big set pieces alike sword fights or jumping in graves. I won't bother you with all the specifics, because it's not really important, but it really helped me see how flexible the play could be. Thinking about it, I wondered how many productions of Hamlet I had seen in total. The number was smaller than I expected when I counted it out. If I was generous with my definition of what counts as a Hamlet, I had the following list (Not in chronological order): • Prague - 2010 • Lawrence Olivia 1948 movie • Slings & Arrows season 1 • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead • The Lion King • The David Tennant/Patrick Steward BBC production from 2009 • Hamlet 2000 - the one with Ethan Hawke that fails in almost every way possible.  • The episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 • The filmed performance of the 2018 production at Shakespeare's Globe (the recreation of the original globe stage in London) • The Reduced Shakespeare Company's Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) • Arden (the podcast) season 2 (technically I heard it, rather than see it, but whatever) That's not a short list, but there are so many hamlets out there that I figured I should see more. So I started watching Hamlets. By my count, (really the count of someone on Letterboxd) there are at least 85 Hamlets on film. And that list doesn't include the non-film hamlets from my list above. So I had only seen 8 of those 85, just under 10% of the Hamlets. I could do better. So I started watching Hamlets. Why? I wish I could tell you. Here's the ones I've watched so far, since starting on March 26.  Le duel d’Hamlet, Directed by Clément Maurice - This is probably the first ever film of Hamlet  (and is absolutely the oldest surviving film of Hamlet.) It's a short, only a couple minutes long, and depicts the climactic sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes. ALso notable is that it stars Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet. She mad waves a few years before this film for being one of the first Women to play Hamlet on stage, and it seems she was happy to have that performance immortalized on film. And here we are 125 years later and I'm still watching it, so that's pretty cool. Wikipedia says there was originally a wax cylinder recording of the actors reciting their lines to be played along with the film, but it has since been lost. The film itself is not particularly remarkable, being a short sword fight shot from a static angle, but I'm still glad I watched it. Hamlet, Directed by Peter Pasyk - This is a filmed stage production from the Stratford Festival and features the first black woman to play the role at the festival. It's an impressive Hamlet,  the lead brings a whole lot to the role, playing everything at about 2 levels higher than her scene partners, which can be a but much. But Hamlet is a bit much so it works. I really enjoyed the scenic design on this one as it was minimal but evocative. The most interesting thing was a central rectangular platform that raised and lowered, serving multiple purposes including a magic trick like reveal that played really well. I also have to applaud the production for making the text very understandable. So often the actors can lose the words they are saying and the audince will have to go on vibes (Foreshadowing for the Branagh production down the list) but here it felt like people talking and the words never felt separated from meaning.  Hamlet from the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, Directed by Bill Colleran, John Gielgud - This is another filmed stage production, this time of a Brodway cast led by Richard Burton. Burton is an actor I know mostly fro Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which is a very good movie, but in ways that are perpendicular to Hamlet. Burton brings a lot of gravitas to the role, and the production was styled as minimally as possible to let the words and actions do the work. The actors are in "rehearsal" clothes and the set is functional only. I think my favorite thing is the Ghost, which is presented as a giant shadow projected on the stage, which is very effective.  Three Days of Hamlet, Directed by Alex Hyde-White - A 2012 documentary about Alex Hyde-White getting a bunch of actors together to put on a staged reading of Hamlet in 3 days. Hyde-White also plays Hamlet and it seems his time is spent between directing the play, playing hamlet and directing the documentary we are watching. "Time is out of joint" has never been a more appropriate line in this. We see a mix of rehearsal footage and live performances all in unpredictable order, and this is all interspersed with interview footage from the actors who mostly seem baffled by the whole thing. They end up reading scenes that didn't rehearse, picking up new roles as things go along and even in one case, bringing on an audience member to read a couple lines that they forgot tot cast someone for. Almost a Hamlet meets This is Spinal Tap sort of affair. Johnny Hamlet, Directed by Enzo G. Castellari - What if Hamlet was a spaghetti western? Ditching the original script entirely, this Italian produced western ersion keeps only the most basic structure of hamlet and jettisons everything else. Hamlet is a cowboy in this means there are more than a few shootouts, something surprisingly absent from the original text. Westerns aren't really my thing (or maybe I've just not seen the right ones) but this seems to have hit all the marks it was supposed to. I think the most surprising choice among all of this is that Johnny makes it out alive, even if almost nobody else does. I wonder if they were thinking about setting up a Johnny Hamlet 2. Hamlet, Directed by Kenneth Branagh - This one was a beast. I had been putting it off for a while because at four hours long, it is the only filmed Hamlet that uses the full original uncut text of the play. Branagh stars and directs and he does both with quite a bit of pomp. He sets the play in roughly Victorian times, and it mostly takes place in a giant hall in a castle full of mirrors. I'd like the mirrors to have a deeper meaning to the text, but I really can;t say it works. It's really pretty to look at and I even rewound a couple times to admire a particularly impressive camera move, but if the audience is focusing more on the camera moves than what is being said, you might have a problem. It often felt like the actors were reciting more than performing the text. It was almost like they didn't have a grasp on the words that were being said and Branagh as a director just told them to act certain emotions rather than the meaning. I'm glad a full-text version is out there, but I kind of wish it wasn't this one. Plus Billy Crystal and Robin Williams show up in act V to play small but important roles, which was a real surprise.  RSC Live: Hamlet, Directed by Simon Godwin - As the titles implies, this was a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2016. So far this is my favorite Hamlet that I've seen in this project. Everyone is firing on all cylinders, it all just works. The costuming also did a great job of reflecting Hamlet's changes over the course of the play, something I think a lot of productions neglect, preferring instead to just throw him all in black and call it a day.  I've still got so many more Hamlets to see. I've got a made by Hallmark for TV version from 2000 (before they were the Christmas channel), the same year the Ethan Hawke one came out, and the Mel Gibson version, which I'm dreading more than the Branagh one, a version I just picked up ad the used book shop yesterday that I know nothing about, not to mention all the "Based on" hamlets like Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, Strange Brew from he Canadian SCTV team, and the newly produced Grand Theft Hamlet which is a documentary about putting on Hamlet entirely inside the world of Grand Theft Auto Online. I better get to it.

I like short stories. IN high school I started reading collections of very short stories. Usually the designation for "Very Short Story" changed a lot between editors. Usually it was build around a word limit. 500 words, 100 words or even 44 words. When twitter came around I followed a few accounts that did tweet-length stories. And this was back when a tweet was 140 characters max. I like short stories. I like the constraints they place on writing, and how the limited form makes you want to use every word to its maximum potential.  I think the very short story community, such as it is, has migrated to reddit. Or at least that's where I see it the most. There are various 2-sentence stories groups, often with different genre constraints as well, i.e. 2-sentence horror, or 2-sentence sad stories. Regardless of the supposed genre, all of these 2-sentence stories have the same format (or at least the successful ones do): The first sentence sets up a scenario and the second one subverts that scenario to greater or lesser effect. Personally I find this format a little dull. It's constrained, but not in a way that encourages creativity to my mind. Rather, I find it makes most of them feel the same.  There is one other format, which I actually took to writing for a little while back in *checks notes...* 2009. This Very Short story format was the ficlet. This was the term d'art for sort stories that ranged between 64 and 1024 characters. These constraints were to keep the file-size relatively low (hence the binary-based upper and lower bounds.) I wasn't active in th community for long, and by the time I discovered it, they had already migrated once. Originally it was hosted in AOL (Kids, ask your parents) and AOL shut it down, so they moved to their own website, which was Ficly.com. That's where I discovered them. I wrote 10 stories in 2009, I think all of them were exactly 1024 characters, because that was the limit and I thought it as a neat accomplishment. But I got distracted (mostly by grad school) and moved onto other things. Sadly the Ficly.com website shut down in 2014, although they kept an archive of all the posted works. Another website, Ficlatte.com, showed up as a replacement, but it shot down too, although less formally than its predecessors. It just stopped working one day, a few years ago.  Until this week. They got the site up and running again. You can go there and read short stories made by people. You can't read any I wrote there, because I didn't write any. Bu I did write some ficlets on ficly, and I will share one with you now. I didn't remember writing it until I looked it up just now, but I'm pretty happy with it. Also I checked and it's not exactly 1024 characters long. You'll just have to live with my imperfections. Eli's ComingThere’s a storm brewing just over the horizon. There’s the sound of thunder about to break. There’s electricity in the air. There’s nothing that can be done to stop it. She’s about to finish dinner. She’ll clean up after herself, because she wants to be ready. She will scrape her plate and rinse it off in the sink. She will glance at the front door as she heads to the living room to see that it’s locked. She will curl up on the couch with a glass of wine, and see if the monologue makes her want to watch the rest of Conan. He will finish this one and maybe one more. He will convince the bartender that he’s fine to drive by reciting the alphabet backwards while standing on one foot. He will jingle the keys in his pocket, laughing at the sound that they make. The Officer will not be surprised by the call, just disappointed. The Officer will arrive on the scene and fill out all the appropriate paperwork. The Officer will mourn in the future, because there will always be a job to do. Then the rain will start.

I didn't write anything this week. I'm trying to not let it feel like a failure so much as an acknowledgment that writing is a process that involves more than just putting words to (digital) paper. You have to put work into thinking about what you want to write, absorbing new ideas, actually writing things down, refining what you wrote and all the other phemeral seps.  But I don't feel like I did any of those either this week.  IN college I got a 'job" as a columnist for the college newspaper. It was a job only insomuch as I did work, I did not get paid. I think I lasted bout 6 months before I quit. I had one successful column and a lot of others that weren't. I had a deadline of writing 600 words every week. and more often than not I woke p on the morning of my deadline and spilled out whatever I could into the pages. It probably wasn't very good. But I don't know that I;ve gotten any better either, since It is Sunday morning and I am seeing what words are spilling out into the page today.  I've watched a few different Shakespeare Adaptations recently and I can't seem to watch a Shakespeare adaptation without thinking about how I would adapt the same script. Back in Feburary I wrote about my imagined production of Two Noble Kinsmen where they never escape jail, and instead tell themselves the story of the play, acting out all the parts. This week I watched My Own Private Idaho and Much Ado. My Own Private Idaho, directed by Gus Van Sant is a 1990s  adaptation of Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 and Henry V, but set in the world of street hustlers in Portland. It's is already an adaptation, so I didn't think much about how I would change it, rather I went to look up what changes had been made to the source texts in the process of adaptation. What I learned is that its the loosest of adaptations. Even calling it that gives too much credit to the Bard, I think.  It's a very good film, starring River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, but the Shakespeare connections are there, but they are in service to the story being told, rather than the story being in service of the Shakespeare. I was reminded most of another adaptation (that I haven't watched,) Orson Welles' Chimes of Midnight. Chimes of Midnight takes all (most?) of the scenes of Falstaff across the different Shakespeare plays where the character appears and combines them into a single narrative following that character. There's a Falstaff analog in My Own Private Idaho, and his performance reminded me of Welles in some interesting ways. Much Ado directed by the aptly named sisters Anna-Elizabeth and Hilary Shakespeare, on the other hand, was a very straightforward adaptation of the original text. the changes that were made (In addition to the cutting down of lines, not unusual) were limited to location and time. The show was set in a roughly high-school-age setting. Instead of returning from a war, the men are all returning from a rugby match. Other than that, it's a Fairly straightforward telling of the play.  I like Much Ado About Nothing as a play. I don't know if it's my favorite Shakespeare (that's a hard question) but I like it a lot. Beatrice and Benedick are fun, and the central attraction of the play. When I was watching this version I kept thinking about how one might adapt it to be closer in spirit to something like 10 Things I Hate About You or She's The Man, where the structure serves as an inspiration but it's less of a direct literalization. Because some of the things in the script of Much Ado don't work great in a high school setting. There's a wedding within a week of people meeting, an infidelity plot, a fake death, a fake wedding, just a whole lot of things that feel... out of place in a high school.  So how would I adapt Much Ado for a high school setting? Well I 'd focus in on Beatrice and Benedick for much of the plot, they get sidelined in the latter half of the play as all those wedding shenanigans are going on. There was a modern interpretation of Much Ado last year called Anything But You which ditched almost all of the wedding shenanigans, to the films credit. It also subverted the "tricked into failing in love" story by having the Beatrice and Benedick analogues see right through the plot and use it to their own advantage.  I liked that Idea, but I would go a different direction with it. I would present it more like a double version of She's All That, where the popular kids make a bet to see if they can get two nerds who hate each other to fall in love. That would take up the majority of the plot, and the wedding stuff would easily migrate to Prom Queen & King , the ready made high-school analog to a big fancy wedding.  You could even still have Dogberry, a crowd favorite, be the one who discovers the villain accidentally and resolves the plot, but that would all be more in the background to the Beatrice and Benedick story. You can't take more than a third of the play away from the main characters.  I haven't settled on a clever name, but I also maintain 10 Things I Hate ABout You is a terrible name  for that movie, and only works at all because it kind of sort of rhymes with Taming of The Shrew. I think if I had to pick something now, it would be a line both Beatrice and Benedick say near the end of the play No More Than Reason. it has a similar vibe to Much Ado About Nothing (I'm not sure I can explain why) but feels far enough removed that you know not to expect the same thing 

Another week. Still March Do you ever have trouble remembering how many days are in a month? Maybe you've got a mnemonic like that poem, or the thing with your knuckles (which is what I use personally) or some other esoteric way of remembering that some months have 31 days and some of them have 30 and then there's one that has 28 or sometimes 29. Does that ever strike you as weird? Does it seem like there's got to be a better way? I don't know why there are the months that divide up into inconsistent numbers of days. I could probably look it up, but I'm not going to do that right now. Instead I'm just going to speculate that, like so many things in human history, it's an amalgam of people making relatively reasonable choices with incomplete information. I know one of the Caesars added July and August because thy wanted to show off or be remembered or something (I guess it kind of worked) which is why September, October, November and December aren't the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months anymore. So maybe that one wasn't particularly reasonable.  But momentum is a powerful force. We've had this calendar for at least a few hundred years now, and it has seeped into every aspect of our lives. The world has been connected more and more to each other through computers and even as different cultures use different calendars, it feels like there is a general consensus as to what the calendar is shaped like, and what its months look like too. Which makes the fact that there is probably a better way all the more frustrating. This idea/solution isn't mine originally, I first heard it from science communicator/author/youtuber/inventor of 2d glasses Hank Green.* And I should warn you, that despite a solution existing, it will probably never be implemented. So this is sort of cursed knowledge. Once you know it, you'll be stuck knowing it with no addtional recourse except for maybe telling other people about it. Like I'm doing now. You can stop reading now. I would not blame you if you did. So here it is: 13 months that are 28 days long. 13 times 28 is 364. That is almost exactly a year long. The month would always start on the same day of the week, and each day of the month would always be on the same weekday for the same reason. Of, the 17th? That's a Tuesday. It's always a Tuesday.  Maybe you, like me, love that the dates of February and March line up (barring leap years) so you know that, for instance, Feb 16 this year was on a Sunday. I know that because today is the 16th and also a Sunday. It's nice and orderly. But we could extend that to the rest of the year too! You're probably wondering about the bonus day at the end of the year. As you are smart people you have noticed that 624 does not equal 365, which is the number is days in the year. You are right! But we can deal with that. We already shove an extra day in the year every 4 years (with some exceptions, but we don't have time for that now) so why can't we just have a bonus day that is outside the calendar entirely? One day a year (two in leap years) we can just all agree that these days exist, but are not a day of any week or month. They do not have dates. We will still experience them linearly, but the day after the 28th of month 13 (we can work on a name later)  will just be an extra day. We know it's there and sometimes it's 2 days. We'll skip days of the week for that day, and there will be an extra day between Saturday and Sunday once a year, and then January will start up again.  But it's not going to happen. I know it's not going to happen. There is a balance between the amount of work required to solve a problem and the actual scale of the problem. The calendar we have works well enough, and we have mostly muddled along with it as is. It's a problem of aesthetics rather than one of practicality. There are much larger problems in the world with an amount of necessary work to achieve them much smaller than what it would take to update all the calendars in the world. We should solve those first.  *Note: I think Hank green originally proposed 12 months of 30 days, with 5 bonus days at the end of the year, rather than my 13 months of 28 days. I like 28 days because then dates line up, which would not happen on the 12/30 structure, although the downside is we get fewer bonus days. If you can wave a wand and et either accomplished, though, I wont mind. 

Don't forget they stole an hour from you. I don't care if they give it back in a few months, if it doesn't come with interest then it's not a fair deal. I've been sick with a cold all week, so I don't have much to add to the thoughts on the internet right now. I first wrote "I've been fighting a cold" in that previous sentence. Fighting illness is a weird metaphor, and I think about it every time someone uses it. I think most often it happens when I see someone discuss a "Lost battle with cancer" and because the phrase is so ubiquitous, I'm not sure how often it has been examined. Well, I know Susan Sontag examined it with her manuscript Illness as Metaphor, which I haven't actually read. But I should fix that, because the wikipedia summary is compelling enough to make me want to dive into the full text.  I first heard about this particular work of Sontag's though a musical of all places. IN Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a punk musical about the life and crimes of the 7th president of the United States. Jackson was a populist president, who among other things, vowed to root out disloyal appointees from previous administrations, defied the courts by refusing to enforce their judgements, and fast-tracked the ongoing genocide of the native population. Anyway, the musical has been on my mind a lot lately. There's a song that's not really about Illness as Metaphor but called Illness as a Metaphor, in the musical and int name-checks Sontag at bot the beginning and end of the song. So it has been rattling around in my head all week as I have been stuck in bed, or coughing a lot because of post-nasal drip. I am on the upswing, I can stay upright most of the day, and the body aches and chills have mostly subsided. So that's nice. Maybe next week I'll actually have something of substance to say. 

A coworker asked if I was on any social media last week, and I made the mistake of saying “Only one but you’ve never heard of it” which had the unintended effect of making me sound like both a hipster and a giant dweeb simultaneously. When I say “You’ve never heard of it,”that’s not because I am too cool for school, but rather because I run my own, and if I haven’t told you about it you would have never heard of it. 
 I don’t know the first time I heard about Twitter, but I do remember when I first heard about facebook, and it was from a friend a couple years older than me who had gotten access hen they went to college. I’m pretty sure it came up in an AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) chat because that’s how we talked to each other at that time.  It’s weird to think about the fact that AIM and Facebook overlapped on the timeline, but they did. Myspace was still a big deal, and Facebook was only available to folks with a .edu email and mostly existed so you could find people in your classes. I’m getting off track (what else is new?) I’ve talked before about ho I switched to Mastodon, joining a server in about 2017 and switching a couple times until I found one that felt right. If you’ve heard me talk at lengths about mastodon, you can skip the next bit, or you can read ahead and hear it all again.  Mastodon runs on a system called ActivityPub, which was designed to allow different social networks to talk to each other. Because the thing about facebook and myspace and AIM (and others) is that each one isn’t really a network. Yo can make a network of people on them, but the software is siloed. You want to follow your friend who only has facebook, but you’re on Myspace? Hope you like making another account to be on that website too. Because each website having their own walled garden that locks people in is to their benefit. They can serve you ads and control what you see, and if al your friends go to one website, they’re much less likely to move somewhere else. It takes a lot of social capital to get 50 different people to switch platforms at the same time. But with ActivityPub, you can move between websites much easier. because (theoretically) anyone can set up a new system and it can connect to all the others. So ActivityPub allows for networks to be social. Something posted from one network running ActivityPub can be seen by any other network running the same ActivityPub protocol. This means you can follow a goodreads-like book tracking network from your microblogging platform, or even your youtube-like video platform. instead of these being run in silos, they can see each other and even send content back and forth. Up above, I said anyone could theoretically set up their own server. The theoretical is doing a lot of work there, because it does take some technical knowledge to get it one up and run-in.g I probably couldn’t set up a Mastodon server in my spare time without learning more about how computers work. But there’s a smaller, similar software called GoToSocial, which is much newer than Mastodon, but is designed for small user bases of generally 1-10 people. That is somewhat easier to get up and running, and almost within my skillset. Another hurdle with setting up a new ActivityPub based network is the cost. People are so used to social networks being free and supported by advertising that we often forget ti costs real money to host all that data and run the software to manage it. In the fediverse (the term for all the networks connected by ActivityPub) there’s a regular refrain of “Support your admins!” meaning, if you can, help pay for the cost of hosting the server you are on. Many servers make it known what their monthly expenses are and ask users to help chip in. Generally smaller servers are cheaper, and some of the largest servers have costs in the thousands of dollars a month range. Most servers run on a pay-what-you-can mindset, which means they tend to be just scraping by, but enough people care about these interconnected systems that it mostly all works. It helps when you know your donation is going to an actual person instead of a faceless company or (even worse) the pockets of a billionaire. But solutions exist for that too. One company has put together a relatively turnkey solution to spin up a GotoSocial server for under four dollars a month. You have to already have a domain name, but I’ve got a few of those kicking around. So at the end of last year, I plunked down my digital cash and spun up social.catastrophic.horse* which is a social network so obscure you’ve never heard of it, because I just told you about it. I am the only user (there’s an Administrator account, but I also run that.) *longtime readers will also recognize Catastrophic.horse as the website for my on-permanant-hiatus Fiasco Actual Play podcast. The coolest thing about it is I can still connect with the network of people I developed while spending years on Mastodon. I can follow them and they can follow me, and their experience isn’t any different has it was before. I still see everything they post and they see everything I post, but I also now fully control and own all of my own data. And of course I don’t see any ads. If I want, I can also add friends to my server, although nobody has taken. me up on that yet, not that I’ve seriously offered, and they could follow anyone else in the fediverse, just alike anyone in that vast network of networks and follow me. I should mention BlueSky, not because I want to, but because I know it’s where a lot of people have fled to from twitter. But to my mind Bluesy is just another twitter waiting to happen. It’s a central server. I can’t follow anyone on BlueSky without setting up an account there. It’s like we’re back in the days of facebook and myspace, even though the technology has grown a lot since then. The space is owned by a single company and there’s nothing to stop a billionaire from buying it up again. Technically it’s possible to set up a separate relay,  which is their version of a new server, and could be controlled by a different company while still seeing everything on the network but the costs are literally a million times higher than what it cost me to set up a gotosocial server. How do I know that? Because there’s a group out there trying to do that. They took BlueSky at it’s word that a second (or third or fourth) relay could exist, and set up a go fund me to do just that. The mount of money they’re trying to raise? Four million dollars. I find it very funny that their slogan is “Free social media from billionaires” but the accidental subheading there is “And give it to millionaires.” I don’t have four million dollars, and it looks like a lot of other people don’t either, because the campaign has been running for six weeks now and has not even broken 100k. But I’ll be over here on the social network I control for four bucks a month posting about movies and telling mediocre jokes. 

Hard drives fail all the time. You should probably know that. They’re subject to entropy just like everything else. Do you have your data backed up? In multiple places? Have you checked them lately? Ok now that the PSA is out of the way, you may now continue reading the newsletter. I’ve been reading Dumbing of Age since it started nearly 15 years ago. I had been aware of Dave Willis’s earlier works, including It’s Walky, it’s prequel Roomies and the technically set in the same universe but mostly unrelated Shortpacked. I read most(all?) of Roomies in a binge (i binged a lot of webcomics in high school) and fell off somewhere when it transitioned to It’s Walky, as the plots became more convoluted including aliens, evil clones and a magic tree branch. But in 2010 Willis announced that he was rebooting his universe. This was a novel idea and it seemed like a great jumping on point for reading a new comic (the beginning) from someone who had been honing his craft for a long time already.  I was right! It was a good time to jump in. I’ve been reading the comic (which publishes a new strip every day) for that entire time.  This version of the characters starts with everybody in college, which is where Roomies started, but unlike roomies, it stays there. There are no big sci-fi set pieces. The comic has been running for almost fifteen years and all of the characters are still  freshmen. Whatever the opposite of advancing in real time is, this comic is doing it. over fifteen years we have progressed to the early point of the second semester. And that was including a three month time skip that happened a couple of years ago. Typically a comic will cover a few minutes in a given day for a few of the characters (the main cast is around 2 dozen deep at this point) so a whole day can take up months of daily comics. Each year a new book collecting a previous year’s strips is released and for the last few years that has rarely been more than four days. We’re currently in the 61st day depicted in the series, if my counting is accurate. So really in 15 years we have had about two months of progress. The outcome of this is that it makes mundane activities seem as important as they do to college freshmen. The comic revels in the small things (while also having the occasional big things happen.)  The progress and growth that happens is mostly character driven, rather than even driven  And the character grows is really impressive, if perhaps a little quick to be happening in the timespan actually covered. I recently started a re-read of the whole thing (because why not) and it has been wild to see how different people are, while still being recognizable the same characters. Some of the early storylines are particularly funny or ironic given where things are going to end up (fifteen IRL years later.) Also the whole thing is on a bit of a sliding timeline, which means whatever year it is in real life is also this year in the comic. It’s a little weird in a binge, but it means that the characters can make realistic pop culture references in the latest comics. Although it’s not exactly full of those, being that the characters are more the focus than the outside world.  There’s also something else that buck wild about the strip, and that is the Buffer Watch. On the home page in an unobtrusive box on the left side of the page, under a banner ad, is the Buffer Watch. It’s an inbox that says “Comics are currently drawn and uploaded through:” and then a date. As of this writing, that date is currently in February 2026. A buffer of a year is ridiculous. It’s also the sort of thing that makes me want to keep reading the comic. I want to know what’s going on with these wacky teens making bad decisions. I’m slowly winding down my Patreon subscriptions because of choices the company made, but every so often I am tempted to subscribe to the Patreon for Dumbing of Age  because the primary perk is that you get the strips a day early, and sometimes the cliffhangers are too strong. When I was a kid I would often take the comics section of the newspaper (back when newspapers were printed on paper and delivered to your house) and methodically read through every single strip in the section. The majority of the comics were the expected gag-a day strips like Garfield or The Far Side or what have you, but thre were also the "adult comics" as I considered them at the time. This of course, wasn't "Adult" as in behind thebeaded curtain, but rather "adult" as in boring. There was Prince Valiant and Mark Trail and Mary Worth and probably a few others I can't remember. Doonsbury wasn't quite on that level because I knew it was supposed to have actual jokes, even if the content of those went over my head. No these were the comics that were glorified soap operas, with complicated stories serialized into three panels a a day. But now I have become that which I feared as a child: An adult. I read a daily serialized soap opera comic every day, and I'm looking forward to the next release. 

I write a newsletter, not a blog. An I think the distinction is small but meaningful. I saw a blogpost (Are we calling them bloasts now?)about why people blog. It starts with a potentially uncomfortable proposition (stated as truth, but without evidence) that nobody reads your blog. The author then goes on to try to justify that blogging has a purpose beyond developing an audience, and I think that is an important point to consider. Blogging is about the act of creation just as much, perhaps even more than the process of it being written. Blogging can serve as a record (the root of the word is web log after all,) and your audience doesn't have to be large to be impacted by your work, and most importantly the practice of writing has value in itself. I have written (here? or in my personal space?) that i write as a way to think. Putting words down makes them concrete and able to be understood, by me just as much as everybody else. If I'm struggling with a topic writing about it can help me clarify what I really think about it. But. I don't write a blog. I write a newsletter. Sure it's fully accessible online, and I'm sure someone reads it there, but the intended audience is a very specific and self curated group of people. People who have said "I want to read the things you write." Back when RSS was at the peak of its popularity, people used RSS feed readers to collect their favorite blogs together and have the posts delivered to a centralized location. But the thing about RSS is that it's not immediately obvious how many people have subscribed to your feed, or who they are. When I hit send on this newsletter, I know exactly how many people it is being sent to. And I know their email addresses, even! I don't collect more information than that. I don't have tracking pixels embedded in the email to check open rate. Or at least I don't think I do. It's possible the platform I use is putting them in, but I have never seen stats on the open rate since switching from tinyletter. A newsletter is directed, it has an intended audience. A blog is a broadcast, there for anyone to pick up if they happen along. Neither is bad, but I like the one I have chosen. And not only that, I actually know the majority of people who subscribe to the newsletter. It's not a large audience, and if I looked at the subscriber list (not a thing I often do) I recognize most of the email addresses. This is not a project of extended growth. You can always forward it to a friend, but I'm not really trying to extend my reach. I would rather just let some people know what I'm thinking about on a regular basis. I'm thinking about Muppets take Manhattan. I think what keeps Muppets Take Manhattan from being a top tier muppet movie is that it spends a significant portion of the film sidelining many of the Muppet characters. The Muppets work best as an ensemble, and they work best bouncing off each other. The Muppet Movie is about getting the gang together, so over the course of the movie we increase the size of the ensemble up to the finale. MtM has the Muppets all together at the start, then uses a very flimsy excuse to break them up and Kermit becomes the sole protagonist for much of the movie. This is then further complicated by giving him amnesia, so we don’t even have a Kermit at the center of the film. So much of the film feels like we the audience are waiting for things to happen. Which is funny because there are lots of things happening, but in a sort of "When are they going to get to the fireworks factory" sort of way. The Muppet Movie, again in contrast, is all rising action. The Muppet Movie starts with the ending. We see the entire ensemble sitting down to watch the movie we are about to watch, and it's explained that this is more or less the story of how the Muppets came to be. We know where we're going and every step on that journey is one of progress. Whereas in Muppets Take Manhattan we are told that the muppets are headed to New York to try and break into the Broadway with their new musical, but they are sidelined almost immediately. The Original show falls though, and because they feel like a burden, most of the troupe leaves Kermit to be by himself. Kermit then gets a job at a diner before hitting his head, losing his memory and becomes an ad man/frog. Only in the climax of the movie do the rest of the Muppets return and the initial premise of them going to Broadway is actually followed through on. It feels like the writers came up with a premise, then wandered in the desert of non-propulsive story for an hour or so, then finally did the premise they initially thought of. This isn’t to say there aren’t good points, a lot of the work with Rizzo, the rats and the diner are fun, but If I'm going to watch a Muppet movie I want to see all the Muppets being Muppets together. 

I feel like I haven't written much about the movies I've watched this year. As always I have watched a lot of movies. I think I'm up to 48 so far this year, which is actually ahead of pace for where I was this time last year. What's funny is that I haven't intentionally been watching movies with a goal based on numbers watched, but I have been trying to clear out my backlog and find movies I enjoy watching. Turns out when I enjoy watching movies I'm more likely to watch them. One movie I watched this week was the filmed performance of The Two Noble Kinsmen by Shakespeare's Globe. The Globe is a recreation of the stage that Shakespeare’s group performed on some 400 years ago. I think it’s really neat that there is a reconstruction of a theater that old and not only that, but they perform works that are contemporaneous to the original stage. Their productions are not, however, purely historical recreations. They do put on Shakespeare’s plays (among others) but for a modern audience. This means that the don’t necessarily have all male casts and are often race conscious when casting as well, and cast towards a stage reflecting the diversity of modern london audiences.  Something I became aware of when watching Two Noble Kinsmen is that it’s so rarely been performed or adapted, at least for a Shakespeare play. It’s not one of his better known works, and I hadn’t even seen or read it before now.  As far as I can tell, this Globe production is the only professionally shot adaptation of the play available anywhere. It hasn’t been turned into a full movie by anyone. Or at least not a full movie with a professional release behind it. Even The Movie DB, which attempts to have every single movie ever released in any fashion on there (and has slightly less strict criteria than the Internet Movie Database) doesn’t have any other adaptations.  People often hold up Shakespeare as the greatest writer in the English language, and while I’m not here to debate superlatives, I do think he made some pretty good plays. Shakespeare feels like his work is almost ubiquitous, but I suspect there is a particular lean in the bell. curve towards his most well known plays. Most people ave probably heard of Hamlet, Macbeth, Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and maybe Much Ado About Nothing, but those plays cast a large shadow over the much larger body of work that Shakespeare produced.  I have seen multiple times (and in multiple languages!) the play The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) which is a humorous jaunt through the complete works of William Shakespeare (as advertised) but in cutting down all of these plays to fit into a roughly 2 hour time frame means a lot gets left on the cutting room floor. They really only present those pieces I mentioned above, the Shakespeare the audience is at least reasonably aware of.. Heck, the entire second act is spent on Hamlet alone. So a lot of the plays people don’t know are relegated to the “other works” section and barely get a passing mention. Have you ever read or seen King John? I haven’t. I have seen Timon of Athens, and I don’t think it’s as good as Two Noble Kinsmen, but Timon of Athens has multiple film adaptations. 

There was a project/TV series called BBC Television Shakespeare, which as it sounds from that very descriptive title was a production of Shakespeare’s plays for BBC Television, does not include it. This was possibly because Two Noble Kinsmen is a co-authored work, although the Oxford Complete Works of William Shakespeare contained The Two Noble Kinsmen from as early as 1986, so it's not exactly new to the cannon.  Theatre of the 16th century was a different beast in a lot of ways to the theatre of today. I’m not knowledgeable enough to fully and accurately cover all thee ways in which it is wrong, but the idea that Shakespeare sat alone in a dark room and came up with these brilliant stories all by himself, wrote them down and then they were performed by a troupe of actors perfectly performs the words, is a vast oversimplification. Theater was and is a collaborative art form. There’s no reason to believe a line or a scene was re-crafted in the rehearsal process by collaboration with the actors, and we know confidently that Shakespeare co-wrote at least a few plays. In addition Shakespeare stole ideas from absolutely everywhere. There is a wonderful (and very expensive) multi-volume set of books called The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare that takes over four thousand pages to describe all the places Shakespeare took his ideas from, as well as can be documented.  So Shakespeare worked with John Fletcher to write The Two Noble Kinsmen. Is this why it’s a lesser-known Shakespeare work? Maybe. But lots of Shakespeare’s plays have evidence of collaboration, you’ve probably heard of them. And most of them have had adaptations to the screen.  For what it’s worth, I think the biggest problem is that the play is an adaptation of another relatively well known work. Most of Shakespeare’s work is based on other stories, as I have said, but The Two Noble Kinsmen is based on Chaucer’s The Knights Tale from the Canterbury tales.  I wouldn’t say that The Canterbury Tales are as well known as the works of Shakespeare, but you have heard of them. So if one was going to adapt The Knights Tale (no not the one with Heath Ledger) why not go back to the original (and still recognizable) one?  I’ll contradict myself here and point out that it’s not like the world is overflowing with adaptations of The Knights Tale either. So maybe it’s just that the obscure play is obscure, even within a body of work as well known as Shakespeare’s.  So what about the play itself? I thought it was pretty good! The core of the story is about the two noble kinsmen (it’s literal!) who are cousins imprisoned after a war. From their cell they both see and fall in love with the same woman, a maid of the Queen’s. They fight over her both in jail and after they both escape through different methods. One of the cousins is freed by the Jailer’s Daughter, who falls in love with him, but it is not reciprocated. There’s a subplot where she goes mad and lives in the woods. Unlike say, Ophelia in Hamlet, this scorned madwoman is traced down by her caring father who tries to save her and get her to marry someone else. Of course this is done by pretending the new suitor is the man she fell in love with, so it’s all based on a lie (not great.) It is interesting to see such a similar story as Ophelia’s played for comedy instead of tragedy. The play itself actually challenges the traditional binary of Comedy ending in marriage and Tragedy ending in death, because this play has both! The Cousins end up in a duel (sponsored by the king) for the Maid’s hand in marriage and one wins, but is almost immediately killed in an unrelated accident so the loser gets to marry the Maid after all. That means we get a death and wedding both at the ending. So is it comedy or tragedy or both? Sure!  Maybe that ambiguity is part of why it hasn't been adapted? How do you market a movie like that? "Come see a woman go mad, but in a funny way! Also There are two Cousins who kill almost kill each other over a woman. But it ends happily! Sort of!"  Ooh, I just thought of a really dark adaptation. There's a very good scene early in the play where the cousins are in jail, and they agree to be best friends for what they assume will be a lifelong imprisonment. They decide to make the jail cell their whole world and forsake everything else, focusing only on each other and making the best of what they have. It's a funny scene about a pact that is immediately broken when they spy the maid through the bars of the cell. But what if they never escaped? What if you presented the whole play as performed by these two dudes in makeshift costumes from within their cell? Sort of a Marat/Sade thing. It would become a sadder play, because everything is in their imaginations and they are acting out the story of themselves as they wish for it to have happened. There's a lot of fun metatextual stuff you could do there. You might even be able to go one step farther and have the Cousins in jail actually be William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, his co-author, and the play is them (still in jail) but pretending to be someone else. THat might be harder to pull off. Does anyone have a connection at Blumhouse? If they gave me a million dollars I could probably make this movie in a few weeks. 

Well, it’s Groundhog Day. Again.  My birthday was last week so I’m taking this week off. Here’s a picture of a cat I’m cat-sitting. Her name is Willow.

Do you ever think too hard about New Year’s Eve glasses? Never mind that I’m going to write about Facebook’s streaming cartoon Human Kind Of. I got the whim to watch the musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer one morning and when you get that urge, you follow through on it. I can confirm that the episode is as good as it ever was (and it was great) but while I was watching it, I got a little sad that most of the stars of the show didn’t go on to a lot of other great things. In some cases that might be because Joss Whedon is a jerk who squashed their careers (seriously) but even outside of that I think most of them should have had more to do outside of Buffy (If they wanted it.) This lead me to looking up Michele Trachtenberg, who played Dawn in Seasons 5-7 of the show. She has a key storyline in the musical episode and I found myself enjoying her performance more than I had previously remembered. So I do what I often do after this confluence of thoughts and went to look up the actor on IMDB. I wasn’t surprised that she hasn’t done a lot of work lately, bathed the occasional one-off credit in a lot of shows. after playing a more hefty role on the original run of Gossip Girl (28 episodes, so I doubt that she was a lead.) What surprised me was a show called Human Kind of from 2018 with 21 episodes listed. Turns out it was part of the slate of programs This was that brief period of time where Facebook was trying to launch a streaming service, but before they (allegedly) colluded with netflix to stop producing content so as to not compete against each other. In that brief period of time Facebook created 14 original scripted shows, including 3 animated ones. This was around the time Bojack Horseman was big and it looked like there was a real future for adult animation as a genre. (Animation isn’t actually a genre but tell that the the pile of shows that tried to copy Bojack Horseman) Also, I think it should be mentioned, because it’s my favorite fact about Facebook Watch, There was a TV show based on a podcast called Limetown that starred Jessica Biel and Stanley Tucci, just to show how much Facebook was putting money behind their streaming service (until they agreed with Netflix to stop. Allegedly) The premise of this show is that a teenager, on her 16th birthday, discovers that she is probably half alien.  Each episode is only about 5-10 minutes long, which means you can watch all 21 in just under two ans a half hours. So I did. These are my thoughts. Episode 1 - Attack of the Period Monster Judy (our protagonist) has her first period at 16 and giant semi-sentient blood clot comes out of her and begins terrorizing the town (and eating people). Her mother explains that she expected this might happen eventually because Judy was conceived when Iris (Judy’s mother) had sex with an alien while high on Ayahuasca and Judy was born 2 months later out of Iris’s Mouth. Cory, Iris’s best friend calls Iris to tell her the monster is at the pharmacy. Iris and Judy drive there and kill the blow clot by pouring blood thinners on it. We also get a stinger where a secret agent scoops up some of the blood in a vial. As far as premise pilots go, this isn’t a bad one. We get a good sense of Judy and Iris, but not much of Cory, and an idea of what each episode might be like. A new alien related thing happens to Judy and then they have to deal with it. With episodes this short it’s hard not to do much more than that, but we’ll see how it goes. 7/10 Episode 2 - Gene Genie In class Judy is in class and discovering her powers which include Telepathy and telekinesis. Cody confronts her in the bathroom and learns the truth, after causing Judy of being a robot or doppelgänger. Back at home Cory and Judy decode her DNA (a process which takes only 30 seconds) and discover a message from her dad, and a phone number, embedded in the genome. She calls the number while her mom gets drunk and leaves a voicemail. The episode ends with the agent in a van nearby recording the message, and we see Judy’s dad receiving it as well. Not much of a plot in this one, which was actually more stage setting than episode 1. We quickly bring Cory into the fold, but this felt like a prologue to future events rather than a standalone episode. 3/10 Episode 3 - Volleyball Goddess Cory is painting a bruise on Judy to get out of gym class. Turns out half the class is doing the same thing. The teacher sees through it then makes the fakers play volleyball against the rest of the class, a blatantly unfair situation. Except Judy’s alien powers make her unreasonably good at the game and she single-handedly defeats the opposing team. One of the popular boys (Ethan) finds this hot. Back home Judy is exercising and getting noticeably jacked immediately.  Her mom disapproves, because Ethans are bad at commitment. Judy continues to get more jacked at a clearly alien infused rate becoming a volleyball-esque hulk. But then she hurts some people, gets sad and shrinks back down. She then breaks her own leg to get out of class. The only good joke in this (and it’s not a great one) is that the gym teacher would rather be a drama teacher, so she fuels all her instructions through the prism of theater. Averything else that happens is fairly boring teen comedy stuff, plus a thin slathering of alien powers on top. Nobody really thinks it’s weird that Judy gets jacked, then un-jacked so quickly. I’m not excited that I have 18 of these left. 2/10 Episode 4 - Judy and the Beast Judy wakes up and looks scaly and with tusks(?) poking out of her face. She is sad, but Cory says she can win the Costume Contest, which her mother support when she learns that the prize is. Judy is sad because Ethan was going to ask her to the dance. Iris and Cory put on a dress try-on montage and each time Judy comes out looking more grotesque. Judy’s teacher comes by to drop of her homework (I guess word travels fast that she skipped school) and Iris is smitten and asks him to combine and say hi. He tries to give her an inspirational task through the door. She comes out and he compliments her “halloween costume.” They go to the dance and bump into the agent from earlier but think he’s only a kid in a costume. Judy wins the contest with Ethan and they dance. She molts to look normal and Ethan asks her on a date (while she has a vision of biting his head off.) This one at least used the “alien as metaphor for teen problems” more than the last one, but so much happened that it felt like everything was set up and resolved at breakneck speed. These sub 10 minute episodes (this one was under 5) really have no room to breath at all. 5/10 Episode 5 - Mating Habits Judy is on her date with Ethan but kills him (oh it was a dream)  and now Judy is worrying that she wants to literally eat Ethan because of her alien parts. She grows mandibles when she’s attracted to guys. Iris offers a homeless man for Judy to eat before her date but Judy is not attracted to him, so she doesn’t want to eat him. Instead Iris offers appetite suppressants. Iris and Cory are going to follow her on the date incase Ethan gets eaten and they have to clean up. Ethan turns out to be a total loser who thinks he’s cool. He recites a poem and tries to kiss Judy which she rejects by transforming. After the women leave the agent shows up and erases Ethan’s Memory. Turns out Ethan is only attractive from a distance, so nobody gets eaten in this episode. I did kind of like the goofy fake cool gibberish he was spouting on the date. Plus there was a Twin Peaks reference at the end. 6/10 Episode 6 - Uncommon Cold We get another scene in class. Ethan is making fun of Judy after their date. She telekenetically pulls his eye out of his skull then sneezes into the future, where she sees a guy with an eyepatch.  She keeps sneezing which send her back to the present and then to the future where she sees flashes of her future including a wedding and giving birth to a slug. In her longest jaunt she tells the eyepatch guy she’s from the past. In her last trip she sees her future husband die of a future disease. She briefly considers Ethan was her future husband, but then puts his eye back in so it’s not him. There’s really no room for these things to breathe is there? Thins whole episode almost takes place in real time, covering roughly 5 minutes where Judy sees snapshots of her whole (potential?) future. Solid episode, good misdirect with the eyepatch guy. 9/10 Episode 7 - Interior: Bully Cory and Judy are playing with a nihilist cootie catcher. Judy accidentally uses her telepathy against her bully. Cory wants to use the power for evil. Judy reads Melissa (her bully)’s brain and learns she framed Judy for cheating in 6th grade. Judy stalks Melissa at home and it turns out she’s miserable because of her family’s pressure to be pretty instead of smart, but also that she got cheek implants. Judy connects with Melissa at school, until other kids show up and she reacts by pushing Judy away. We really are retreading all the classic teen comedy plots. This was better when Freaks and Geeks did it. I’m already so tired of these. and I’m only 33.3% through. 3/10 Episode 8 - Desperately Seeking Social Skills Cory isn’t at lunch and Judy can’t start eating without her. Judy has to eat alone, which means she doesn’t have a social group anymore. Her alien powers turn her into a got kid so she sits with the other goth kids. Then she transforms into a horse kid to hang out with the horse kids and a teacher to sit with the teachers. Cory sees all this and is mad. Judy keeps shapeshifting between different social circles and Cory confronts her. They fight because Judy sees Cory as her sidekick. Then the episode ends. Another half story. The show is trying to be serialized, but any time it leans to far in that direction the individual episodes really suffer. But it’s not like you could watch this as one two and a half hour movie (the total length of the series) either. Even though that’s kind of what I’m doing by binging the whole series. Also this episode had a total of 15 comments over the last 6 years and that’s very funny to me. Because this thing is so obscure, despite whoever much money facebook put into making it. I hope the cast got paid well at least. 1/10 Episode 9 - The Core An episode following Cory specifically as she deals with the fallout from the fight in last episode. It’s presented as an issue of the comic book she writes (Which we’re first hearing about) but also with flashes of what’s happening in the real world, where Cory throws together a makeshift costume to be her super villain alter ego The Core, which mostly includes wearing goggles and a sweat shirt tied rounder neck like a cape. She fights her parents and runs to school instead of taking the bus. Then she starts showing pencils at a teacher so the class doesn’t have to take a test, which works. The episode ends with a reconciliation between Cory and Judy. Cory is really having a breakdown in this episode, but it feels like it’s playing for comedy. 8/10 The facebook player is absolutely terrible. First of all I had to use a browser plugin to block all the login popups and watch the episodes. Then each episode starts muted, but if you click out of the player the default behavior it also pauses and mutes the video again, which means I spend the first 30 seconds of each episode trying to re-adjust the settings I can take notes while I’m watching. I’m suffering for my art.* *My art is apparently watching mediocre videos online and writing about the. Episode 10 - Mr. Russo is Missing Mr Russo, the regular science teacher who has been in a lot of episodes is out and has been replaced by a substitute teacher. He’s a “Cool sub” which means he is very not cool at all. Cool Sub gives an oral pop quiz where he threatens the students with the class bully if they fail. Judy decides Mr. Russo is avoiding Iris, so she and Cory leave class to hunt him down. The go to his home, but he’s not there. So they break in. Turns out Mr. Russo has a bunch of nice pictures of Judy and Iris on the fridge. Judy feels bad and decides to leave. Cory stays for inspiration for her comics. Cory discovers that Russo has been tracking Judy’s alien powers and know everything She confronts him when he comes home and the episode ends. We are sliding more towards serialization. Judy gets a complete arc in this one at least. She goes from suspicious of Russo to happy about him.  The only alien thing is Judy punching the door to Mr. Russo’s apartment in, although the rest are mentioned when the secret research room is detected.  The joke about the DVD of Stock Footage of Families was very funny. 5/10 Episode 11 - You can trust me Judy Judy gets summoned to the principle’s office. There the Agent is waiting, along with a bunch of other identical agents. He offers a chance to work together and even proves it by letting her read his mind. Then Mr. Russo freezes time and walks through the wall (He can do that I guess?) and Cory is there tool Russo removes the brain jammer the agent is wearing and Judy sees his true intentions are to cut open Judy and study her. Turns out Russo was sent to protect Judy and is taking her, iris and Cory to a rendezvous point. but they’re ambushed by agents. They’re saved by an alien who we know is Judy’s Dad. He kills a bunch of the agents, makes the rest promise not to hurt Judy, and then makes her the official ambassador to Earth and invites her to space  before jetting back off to space himself. Los of plot in this episode. Probably as much as we’ve had since the first episode. Really feels like a turning point in the series, and the fact that we’ve apparently run oft of Teenage alien at school material at the half way point feels rather telling.  This one has an ad break! No ad played, but there was the sort of cut to black cliffhanger where an ad would go if there was one. A weird thing to have in a 6 minute long episode. Good Joke: Cory kicks all the agents in the balls while they’re frozen. 6/10 Episode 12 - Space Camp Cory and Judy are preparing to go to space. Cory had a u-haul full of supplies, and Iris is sad about Judy leaving, even though it’s just for the weekend. She offers a tentacles hopper/chastity belt but Judy politely refuses. After waiting all day Judy’s dad still hasn’t arrived. Judy calls, but just gets his voicemail. Iris comforts Judy and shares she also spent years waiting for her dad. Judy lashes out at Russo, crushing his car, but he treats her like person and she feels better. Dad interrupts a TV show (Twin Peaks!) to tell Judy as an ambassador she has to spend at least another year on her planet before leaving. After all the rigamarole in the last episode and this one, we’ve really hit the reset button, going back to the basic premise of “half alien teenager.” We get some classic deadbeat dad stuff, and the fact that he’s an alien is really irrelevant. The stuff between Russo and Judy actually worked for me, kind of. This is the only one to put the episode number in the title of the video. That’s a weird thing, and I wonder if it was supposed to be there. 5/10 Episode 13 - Work is Work Judy gets a waitress job to help support her mom. She’s also working as an ambassador to a group of alien tourists to earth while working and serving a bunch of unruly teens from school. Iris an Russo come in and Judy quits when she learns that the space federation she is an ambassador for pays in diamonds. This is classic sitcom hijinks. It was a classic when Goldoni wrote Servant of Two Masters in 1746. But it’s also a classic for a reason. two competing groups demanding attention from one person, in this case aliens and teens. I also appreciated the escalating deserts Cory was eating over the episode culminating in a chocolate fountain she carried around with her. Plus we got a couple more Twin Peaks references, which I appreciate. The episodes stopped having english subtitles about 3 episodes ago, which is a real disappointment. They do come in auto-generated Spanish though! 9/10 Episode 14 - Aliens Anonymous Judy is sad because she knows there’s a whole universe of people out there. Mr. Russo sits down with them at lunch and recommends Judy come to an Aliens Anonymous meeting. all of the aliens take off their disguises and Cory tries to sit in wearing a costume but is caught and kicked out. The aliens share their stories then reminisce about their space histories. Judy learns that Earth is like a cosmic Nebraska where people come to hide out because it’s very forgettable. The aliens learn she was born here and they all try to get something from her dad before Mr. Russo shuts them down. Judy is still sad because she still feels alone even after the meeting. Iris and Cory sulk about being excluded. One of the aliens is clearly supposed to be Bill Nye, who likes eating kids and another one s is just Neil DeGrasse Tyson, which isn’t a great look, because of the history of sexual abuse allegations, but I think those came out after the episode premiered. This episode barely had a plot, it was mostly an excuse to show off some different alien designs. Judy is sad and alone at the beginning and end. 4/10 Episode 15 - Hoax of the Century Video of that tine Judy’s dad showed up is going viral. Everyone is watching it and know thinks Judy is an alien (because she is.) Judy is nauseous at the revelation, Iris recommends poisoning the water supply to kill everyone who saw it. They decdide to contact the Agent to enlist his let in a government coverup.  He calls preemptively to team up. Cory and Judy go to the generic government office and meet the Agent. He proposes reshooting the video from a different angle to “prove” the original was fake. We get a montage of The Agent doing a terrible series of takes. Judy learns that the government knows about many aliens on earth, but she’s special because she has a bunch of special powers.  Where did that video come from? Who took it? This episode doesn’t care. Videos just appear online doncha know? Which is weirdly on-brand for a facebook watch series. I think the further we move away from episodes that are about Judy directly the worse the series is. 1/10 Episode 16 - House Party Iris and Mr. Russo are going away for the weekend, so Cory is throwing a party at Judy’s house. Judy is pretending to be over Ethan, but he might come to the party so she gets excited. They have to get booze though for Ethan to show up. Judy texts an alien for a connection. Jonathan, the alien brings a bunch of alien friends who take off their human suits. Cory solves this with strategic banner reading “Alien Costume Party.” Melissa rips of an alien’s antennae to wear as a costume. An alien secretes booze, and gets drunk on water. Cory is doing alien drugs. Ethan and Melissa broke up for the duration of the party so Ethan can make out with her. But then when Judy is distracted they get back together, so Judy says one of the aliens can eat him. Judy meets her half sibling from a generation ship, but he was a deadbeat to them too. Turns out Judy’s dad is a time-hopping serial philanderer. The cops show up and the party ends. Except it was Judy shapeshifting as the cops. As all the aliens leave she sees her eye-patched future husband leaving the house. Most of the aliens we see are from previous episodes, so that’s kind of fun. Cory hallucinating all the organisms inside her body cheering her on was funny. Most everything else was standard party episode shenanigans with just a little bit of alien veneer on top. Nothing is significantly different because of aliens. 2/10 Episode 17 - Plan B from Outer space Judy in english class reading Taming of the Shrew. The Gym Teacher got transferred to English because of reasons, and still wants to be directing. Judy gets nauseous and buff and vomits chocolate on Cory. In the nurse’s office the nurse tells Judy she is pregnant. It’s clear the nurse is bad at her job, but Judy takes her seriously. She specs that when she walked in on some spore aliens at the party she might have gotten impregnated then. Russo takes Judy to a froyo shop and reveals all froyo shops are actually fronts for alien businesses. This one is an alien pregnancy center. Turns out she’s not pregnant, but has a space STD. I do like Shakespeare, so that was a nice surprise. But the rest of the episode… has nothing interesting to say. It’s not like i’ve come to expect particularly deep or insightful things, but at least some of the jokes can be clever. This didn’t even do that. FYI That is Betsy Sodaro as the Gym/English teacher, which I suspected back in the Volleyball episode, but didn’t look up until now. She’s one of my favorites as a recurring character in Ghosts (which is a much better TV show than this) 4/10 Episode 18 - Invisible Girl Judy becomes so embarrassed at her mom making out with MR. Russo in the parking lot that she becomes invisible. And also inaudible. Then she accidentally gets stuck in the car with Iris while she goes about her day. She works as a sample giver at a grocery store, apparently. and also is an uber driver, and works at the pier as a stevedore. It’s clear that Iris is doing everything for Judy as she is always talking about her constantly. Judy sees things from a new perspective and then becomes revisable and gives Iris a hug. Then Dad show back up. This is kind of like the episode The Core, but less interesting narratively. We just see stuff we probably could figured out already, Iris loves Judy and would do anything for her. But we don’t even get the fun comic book version of events. 5/10 Episode 19 - I Bought Your School Space Dad is back. He pays off Russo and Cory to leave and decides to move in with Iris and Judy. His presence isn’t appreciated, probably because he’s a dead beat and constantly criticizes everything. Be bought the school and renames it Judy is Fly as Hell high School, and hypnotizes the teachers to give her good grades. He bribes the students by abolishing class and giving everyone pizza and ice cream. It’s a constant party at school. Judy still thinks he is a bad dad, because he is, but everyone else thinks he’s awesome. Judy still is unhappy, so Space Dad undoes everything and tries to connect with her emotionally. It’s clear he’s not very good at it, but Judy want so badly to connect she goes along with it. Russo is clearly around and more emotionally available, but she can’t exactly see that. Dad says he’s going to submit earth to join the space coalition and wants Judy to help with the application. Can you just buy a public school? Sure whatever. And I guess whatever kind of alien Space Dad is pretty close to omnipotent. This episode was fine. But I really stated to notice how bad the animation is. I don’t have the skills to really talk about why but it just seems like a high budget flash animation from the late 2000s. Homestar Runner looks better than this. 5/10 Episode 20 - Big Fish Judy is traveling with Dad to see everything cool about Earth so it can join the federation. Iris feels like she is losing connection with her daughter while she and Dad jet-set around the planet. She and Russo are trying to do things while they have time alone but Cory keeps tagging along. Judy and Dad finish their prep for the application, and prepare to go to space and submit it. Iris is worried that Dad is up to no good, but Judy isn’t hearing it. Judy is sad as she leaves and Dad cheers her up with cool space things, in SPACE! Clearly half the story, to be finished in the next episode (and finale.)  I still don’t feel like we ever quite get past the trappings of the “deadbeat dad tries to make good” story we’ve seen so many times. It’s all just so cliche. Cory showing up over and over again was funny though. 4/10 Episode 21 - Small Pond Judy and Dad arrive at United Planets HQ. a quick universal translator moment and Dad takes Judy to his office. Back home Iris is pacing and worried about Judy but pretending not to be. Russo looks Judy up on the intergalactic tracker he has, but she doesn’t show up. Iris panics and they go to the Agent’s office to enlist his help in tracking her down. Turns out she’s near proxima Centauri which Russo describes as a backwater part of the galaxy. Julie gives her speech and afterwards learns Dad is trying to sell the planet to one of the other aliens including options to kill all the people. The alien tourists from earlier turn out to be prospective buyers. One buys the earth and Judy learns that the federation buys angels planets. She complains and he has her arrested by space cops. Iris, Russo and Cory arrive with the Aliens Anonymous group and Agent, who rescue her from the space cops. Judy and Dad transform and fight. Judy meets her future eyepatch husband who shows up to arrest everyone. And the show ends.  Obviously Space Dad was nefarious, we all saw that coming. This whole episode was pushing plot forward, which means there was less opportunity for humor. Sort of but not really a cliffhanger ending, and we obviously know it’s not coming back at this point.  4/10 I kind came around on this by the end. The character work was the best part, but even that wasn’t great. The story was predictable at almost every turn, which was disappointing. The animation was butts most of the time. sometimes they referenced Twin Peaks, that was fun. I’m glad I took the time to watch it, just because I find obscure media like this fun. It’s not a great lost series or anything but they were making the best show they could and that’s worth recognizing.  Series Score(average): 4.5/10

I spent a portion of Friday uncovering articles from a 2003 magazine. Because I can do that. It started when an online friend mentioned a list of 100 best cult films he remembered reading in an issue of Rolling Stone. I asked if he knew any of the movies on the list, and after some searching he couldn’t find it. He knew it was probably in 2003 or 2004 and mentioned that he remembered a cover with cult movie characters sitting in a movie theater. This in turn triggered a memory of my own. I never subscribed to Rolling Stone as a magazine (I do have their RSS feed in my feed reader) but I did subscribe to Entertainment Weekly. YEs, I was the kind of nerd who subscribed to a physical magazine in the early 2000s. EW was where I first learned that reviews were written by people and sometimes their tastes differed form your own. I still remember some of the names of critics writing back then, and I started sharpening some of my own critical skills by comparing what I thought of a movie or TV show to what the reviewer thought. The cover he mentioned reminded me of something I had seen and probably read, and I figured if it was in a magazine, it was probably in Entertainment weekly as that was the magazine I was most likely reading in the relevant time frame. I did some initial searching and found a gallery of Entertainment Weekly Covers. I browsed through the 2003 ones and did manage to discover one that mentioned The Top 50 Cult Movies. It wasn’t 100 and it wasn’t Rolling Stone, but it fit the time frame and seemed like a possible candidate. Having narrowed down the search to a single issue, I figured the next step was to see if I could find what was inside. I first turned to Archive.org which has hundreds of old magazines scanned into their database. The collections are rarely complete, but it seemed possible. A couple searches and filters lated, I did find a collection of Entertainment Weekly back issues, but it didn’t include issue 711, from May 23 2003, which was disappointing. I still wanted to see if this was the right magazine, an if I couldn’t find a digital copy, I would have to track down an original. Off to eBay! knowing what I was searching forbade it easy to find an issue currently for sale, and there were actually a few! I was opening up different listings, while I contemplated if I could justify spending 15 to 20 dollars on a silly internet comment. I have absolutely spent more on sillier things, but this was still a bit of a gamble. if it wasn’t the right issue all I would have done was spend some time and money on a magazine from 22 years ago.  Opening up the different listings was a great decision, however, because one of the listings actually showed the 2-page spread that introduced the cover article! It showed 4 different characters from 4 movies photoshopped together like they were sitting in movie theater! There was Stephen Root as Milton from Office Space, Daryl Hannah as Pris from Blade Runner, Michael McKean as David St. Hubbins from This is Spinal Tap and Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre! I could even zoom in enough on the caption to see the characters and actors named! One thing I should note, that is kind of interesting is that the version of Leatherface depicted is not the one from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as portrayed by Gunnar Hansen, but rather the one from the then new remake with Jessica Biel where Leatherface was played by Andrew Bryniarski. Not that I can tell my Leatherfaces apart on sight, mind you,I just read the caption. Fun Fact: Andrew Bryniarski also played Zangief in the 1994 Street Fighter movie. The 2-page spread seemed to be had a likely confirmation that this was the genuine article! The cover matched the description, the time frame lined up, this seemed like the real deal! I even sent the image of the 2-page spread to my internet friend toes if it was what he remembered, and he confirmed that it was probably it! I thought about buying the magazine on eBay, but I don’t know if it’s really something I want to own. I thought it was cool to rediscover it, but the physical magazine didn’t seem to be something I need to hold in my hands. I found multiple lists of the actual 50 films in the magazine that people had copied to IMDB or Letterboxd, so it didn’t seem worth the effort, as I wasn’t going to learn anything I didn’t already know.  Until I remembered libraries exist. And many libraries are connected to online repositories of journals. What was the chance that my local library had access to a database that also included this specific 2003 issue of Entertainment Weekly? Pretty good it turns out! The first database I found only had full text of issues from 2009-2014, so that was a bus. I did have Abstracts and summaries from articles in other issued, but I wanted more. I checked another database and hit paydirt. Full text of articles from 1990-2022. I found the issue I was looking for and began to scroll through the article list. There it was Top 50 Cult Movies. The actual content of the list was a mix of movies I recognize and ones I didn’t, even though I likely read this article when it was first published. I have some quibbles about a few of the selections, (Scarface and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?) but I also have to remember that the past is a different country and 2003 didn’t have the ready access to so many movies that we have in this digital age, so maybe they were rarer and less know back then.  I have seen 24 of the top 50 cult movies, as defined by Entertainment Weekly. Not a bad result, if you as me. But at the bottom I discovered something that none of the online lists mentioned! Three special add in lists, that as far as I know were not mentioned anywhere else. Those were:  RZA’s Top 5 Kung Fu Movies John Water’s Top 5 Tasteful Movies Roger Corman’s Top 5 Roger Corman Movies I’m not entirely sure why RZA was listed here. The member of The Wu-Tang Clan is a well known Kung Fu movie fan, and sampled lots of them in his songs. But he isn’t a creator of cult movies in the same way John Waters and Roger Corman are. Waters is a filmmaker for campy tasteless trash (complimentary) and Roger Corman almost singlehandedly kept the low budget exploration film industry alive. Both of them have movies in the larger Top 50 list from this issue, so their selections make sense.  It makes sense to ask RZA for his top 5 Kung Fu movies, even if it doesn’t quite make sense to put them in this article. Asking John Waters to list his top 5 tasteful movies (I.e. the opposite of his own movies) is the sort of joke I hope he appreciated, and Roger Corman listing Roger Corman Movies is a funny subversion of the joke established by the Waters List. So anyway, here are the above three lists, which have, as far as I know not been widely seen or talked about before I found them this week. Sadly, I’ve only seen one from each list, not nearly as good as my score on the larger list.  “RZA'S TOP 5 KUNG FU MOVIES SHAOLIN & WU TANG Chia Hui Liu (1981) FIVE DEADLY VENOMS Chang Cheh (1978)  THE KID WITH THE GOLDEN ARM Chang Cheh (1979)  BLADE OF FURY Sammo Hung Kam-Bo (1993)  ENTER THE DRAGON Robert Clouse (1973)  JOHN WATERS' TOP 5 TASTEFUL MOVIES THE LEOPARD Luchino Visconti (1963)  THE DEVIL, PROBABLY Robert Bresson (1977)  THE AGE OF INNOCENCE Martin Scorsese (1993)  THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD Francois Girard (1993)  PERCEVAL Eric Rohmer (1978)  ROGER CORMAN'S TOP 5 ROGER CORMAN MOVIES The Intruder (1961)  The Masque of the Red Death (1964)  The Trip (1967)  X--The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963)  Bloody Mama (1970)” Bal, Sumeet, Marc Bernardin, Scott Brown, David Browne, Neil Drumming, Casey Farley, Amy Feitelberg, et al. 2003. “The TOP 50 CULT MOVIES.” Entertainment Weekly, no. 711 (May): 26. https://research-ebsco-com.proxy008.nclive.org/linkprocessor/plink?id=7af3ac24-db62-334c-96f3-2ef3d95d7708. But that's not all I found! There are DVD Reviews! There’s a review of King of the Hill Season 7 and Sex and The City season 4. My favorite part of the King of the Hill review is when the reviewer mentions According to Jim and call it the sitcom “with the scariest knuckles” a phase that is incredibly evocative even if I have no idea what it evokes.  There’s also a review of Adaptation on DVD, which is probably my second favorite Charlie Kaufman film. It doesn’t say much interesting, but it’s cool to see all of these different  Which is something magazines do that we lose out on in today's world of mostly getting individual articles passed around on social media. We don't have the permanent connection between desperate items that makes these physical objects a record of their time, as well as a way of sharing information. Maybe I'll go hunt down some microfiche next. 

I've been writing/journaling daily since the new year in an attempt to kickstart a writing habit. However it's been mostly writing about writing. Here's a sample of what the has come out of the process. ------------- I looked into my local community college. To take a writing course. Its something I thought about doing before, although not specifically for writing. I originally set up an account in June of last year (still in the weird period of time where saying “last year” for 2024 feels wrong) when I was looking at a python class. However this time when I looked into it I though I wanted to take a credit class instead of a continuing ed class. But I forgot that community college is a real college and that means applications and transcripts and choosing an academic path and talking to and advisor and all the things that go along with college. So maybe a continuing education class might be the better option. I had to get over my own prejudices regarding some of the continuing ed classes. The topic I want to learn about seem really rudimentary based on the syllabi available. But it’s probably worth going back to basics. Learning is a good thing and I’m mostly self taught when it comes to these things. I watched a video about ADHD and accountability this week, from How To ADHD and it really hit home. I’ve struggled with bad and good kinds of accountability over my life and this video did a really good job of identifying how that has impacted me. I’m still only self-diagnosed with ADHD, and I feel some shame and I don’t know what to call it, stolen valor maybe, about calling myself with the disorder. I also don’t like the category of disorder, but that’s another problem. This newsletter has been a form of accountability to me. Every week (barring the occasional natural disaster) I hit send on the newsletter. Sometimes I’m not very happy with what I wrote, sometimes it is just a notice that I’m on vacation, but I still log in and hit send on something. I wonder if a class would be the right kind of accountability or not. I also looked at Study Hall, the program from internet education company Complexly, that is trying to bridge a gap in college education. I have a college education, two of them even. And when I think about my college classes, I mostly remember the bad parts. The stress and the fear and the doubt. So maybe that isn’t the right kind of accountability. I don’t know if I have the time to take a college level course right now. The English Composition Study Hall course says to expect spending 18 hours a week on the class and that’s a significant commitment. I want to learn. I want to grow, and the the easiest way to do that seems like a class. ----------------- I think maybe part of my problem is I write chronologically. I start writing, and I don’t always know where I’m going to end up. I think this isn’t inherently a bad thing, Stephen king historically writes his novels that way. But I also don’t know if it’s the right way for me to write. I think when I used to write plays* it had benefits and drawbacks. The benefits were when things could surprise me, but the drawbacks were I sometimes felt like I was spinning my wheels. *I say I used to write plays here, because I haven’t really written them in a long time. I absolutely feel shame about that, and the only real way to clear that shame is to start writing them again. So this is me admitting I used to be a playwright, and maybe one day I will be again. ----------------- But writing chronologically is the only way I know how to do it. I’ve started with outlines before, but every time I put one of those together, I find myself revising it repeatedly. I joke that the only time I know what the outline of a project is going to look like is after I have completed the whole thing. I think back to my three youtube video essays on The Muppet Christmas Carol, Mike Leigh and Kevin Smith’s Dogma, and in each one I started with a thesis and worked my way backwards to it. Usually that thesis is also reflected in the eventual title of the video: Mike Leigh is a Dungeon Master Dogma is (structurally) a joke Muppet Christmas Carol is an episode of The Muppet Show (this one didn’t end up in the title, but I allude to it, calling the whole thing “haunted” by the Muppet show to make it kind of spooky. Christmas Carol is a ghost story after all. But in all of those cases, I wrote most of the essay from start to finish. Only when editing the script did I start to re-arrange things, and even then I didn’t rearrange a whole lot. If I’m being generous I’d say that when I start with a thesis, I know what I’m trying to say and I already have  a rough idea of what the arguments that make up that lead to that conclusion are going to be. I have a sense of what the beginning, middle and end should be and where they go by virtue of being the middle, end and beginning. If I’m not being generous, it’s because I’ve developed a series of bad habits when it comes to writing and I’m to unaware of them or stuck in my ways to noticeably change. ------------- I chickened out of signing up for an online class about writing. Well maybe I didn’t chicken out so much as do some research and decide that the online courses offered to me weren’t what I want or need. My local community college uses a national platform calle Ed2Go for their continuing ed online courses. This is a campy that seems to exist to allow community colleges to offer distance learning without actually having to hire instructors directly. YOu sign up for the class on the college’s website, but then you’re directed to Ed2Go where it becomes clear that this same class is being offered to absolutely anyone across the country. There’s no indication of class size, but it feels like it’s going to be pretty big for most of them. Big classes aren’t great to begin with, but I can also hear the sales guy talking to an administrator about how this service will save the college so much money while still providing the classes their students want. The whole thing was rubbing me the wrong way. And on top of that, the classes being offered felt like they wouldn’t meet my needs. The Beginning Writing one made it clear that it was useful for people who have English as a Second language, or very limited proficiency, whereas the Writing Online Content class felt like it was going to be spending a lot of tie on making your writing sound like everything else on the internet, which is not a goal I have. I want my writing to sound like me. Additionally I looked up the instructor for that one and her online writing (she has a blog, so at least she practices what she preaches) feels exactly like what I don’t want to be making. Not to mention her post about the benefits of using large language model based AI as a writing tool, which was an instant turnoff for me. I’m not giving up on improving my writing, but I am going to look towards other options. I think I might start with the Study Hall Composition video series.  I like what Study hall is doing as a company, trying to bridge the gap in college education through accessible internet based solutions. It came out of Crash Course, the internet education series that believes in creating free to use educational materials for everybody, and is in partnership with universities. You can theoretically start with the videos and sign up for a class for as little as 35$ and if you like the results afterwards, you can pay more to turn it into actual college credit. i don’t need actual college credit, and I don’t even want to sign up for a class yet, but I think I can start with the video series and see if I like it. I think the “try and see if it works for you” educational philosophy is one I want to explore, and see if it works for me, as a student.  

Feeling a lot of imposter syndrome this week. Well not imposter syndrome exactly, but I don’t think we have a catchy name for “You have been doing a thing consistently for nearly seven years and you haven’t gotten any better at it” which is what I’m feeling with this newsletter.  Small nitpick: It hasn’t actually been seven years yet. It’ll be seven years in March, but I’m bad at remembering anniversaries of things, if I don’t have a calendar alert set to remind me. So the start of a new year is as good as anything.  There’s a lot of reasons Malcolm Gladwell’s Ten Thousand Hours concept is bunk (check out the If Books Could Kill Episode on his book Outliers) but an important reason is that doing something over and over again doesn’t automatically make you better at it.  I’ve been breathing for roughly three hundred thousand hours and I’m not the world’s best breather. I’m probably not even in the top ten. To get better at something takes time and reflection. I’ve been putting the time in, when it comes to writing this newsletter, but I don’t know if I’ve gotten any better, and that’s probably because I’ve done very little reflection.  If this thing is just a personal public diary, then that’s probably ok, it doesn’t have to be polished every week. Or any week, for that matter. And my habit is really one of just pushing this out into the universe. But it hasn’t exactly made me better at it.  Do I want to get better at it? There’s a joy and freedom in not feeling the need to be the best at everything, even in being bad at it. At the end of the day there’s still a hat where there never was a hat.  Is the creation of something that didn’t exist before sufficient, though? I used to say yes, but now the web is being flooded with slop generated by Large Language Models and Image Generators and they’re all creating things that never existed before, right? That seems to counter my normal argument that creation is an inherent good, but maybe I need to think more about what I mean when I say creation.  There’s an idea originally proposed by David Bye called the Workmanship of Risk. I’m going to dramatically oversimplify it, by boiling it down to the idea that when creating something there is a risk that the creator, or the artisan if we’re comfortable calling this art, can ruin the work. This is traditionally applied to physical objects made by hand, such as painting or sculpture or even the manufacturing of clothing by hand. A factory that stamps out forks can fail to make forks, but because of a failure in the machinery or even in the design stage, but the system is designed to make a fork the same way every time.  With the written word, it almost feels like there isn’t a risk of this nature. If I make a typo I can (and often do!) go back and fix it before publishing. So is the written word something hand made? I think it is if we expand the risk of failure to also consider the risk of lost time. If I spend hours writing a scene for a play (a thing I have done in the past) and at the end of that time, the scene has to be deleted from the final work that time has been lost. If I were a better playwright, I could have skipped writing the scene entirely.  So is the slop generated by computer programs regurgitating stolen art (written and visual) hand made? No. At best it’s manufactured, but it’s a black box system. You input a request and the machine spits something out on the other end that has a high mathematical probability of looking authoritatively like something you requested. But there’s no risk of the “prompt engineer” (ew, i felt gross even typing that) making a bad decision that can ruin the work. Because the prompt isn’t the output. It’s not a direct one to one process. You can enter the same prompt dozens or hundreds of times and get different results each time. Nothing the hypothetical artisan does has a direct impact on the result. Rather they are pushing buttons that whip random monkeys in the infinite room full of typewriters and sometimes something useful comes out.  This has gotten way from me a bit. Do I want to be a better writer? Yes. I don’t need to be the best, but I want to look back at my work seven years from now and see some improvement. The only problem is I don’t know what that improvement looks like. 

It is the end of the year newsletter! I watched 383 movies this year (as of this writing) and even though I was tempted to rank them all, I decided to just do a top ten new to me films of the year. Plus some honorable mentions that either would have just been off the list or were worthy of inclusion for other reasons.  Top 10 movies of the year (that I saw for the first time in 2024) Honorable mentions: The Fly This David Cronenberg horror movie is actually a tragic romance between Gena Davis and Jeff Goldblum. It just happens that alongside that romance, Goldblum is turning into a human/housefly hybrid. This movie is absolutely carried by its two lead performances, but it probably is best known for its jaw-dropping special effects. Cronenberg had been on the scene for a bit, but I think this was his breakout success. A treasure trove of gross practical effects that make turning into a giant fly man feel both viscerally real and horrifying. I avoided this for a long time, because I’m squeamish about body horror, but the body horror actually becomes lessened to me as the transformation progresses. He is clearly not human after long and so I could revel in the grossness instead of being sickened.  The Marvels and Spider-Man Across the Spider-verse Two super hero movies that were focused on being fun that anything else. I’ve pretty much written off the majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’S output for the last few years. There were only two shows I could fully endorse and those two shows happened to be recommended viewing before The Marvels: Wandavision and Ms. Marvel. I don’t think either show was perfect (and both suffered in their latter halves,) but they at least tried to do something new. The Marvels, is technically a sequel to both of those series as well as the film Captain Marvel stating Brie Larson. I said in my initial review that watching The Marvels felt like picking up three issues from the middle of a run of a comic you’ve only heard about, but even then it’s a lot of fun and knows not to take itself too seriously. The second Spider-Verse movie took the initial premise of “there’s a bunch of spider-people” and followed it to the only logical conclusion. To say more than that would veer into spoilers, but like The Marvels, this movie knows how to balance serious storytelling with the understanding that superheroes are a deeply silly proposition. It’s technically only the first half of a two part story, but it’s closer to Empire Strikes Back than Catching Fire Part One. Dick Johnson is Dead This documentary  the director of my number one movie last year (Cameraperson) didn’t quite blow me away as much as that one did, but it was still a fascinating proposition. To help her deal with the inevitable death of her father, documentarian Kristen Johnson works with him to film a number of different ways he could die, via movie magic. Like Cameraperson this is a deeply personal effort, and like Cameraperson, the movie is mostly about the director even as we don’t see much of her on screen. Mostly we see the world through her eyes and her lens and have to put together who the person we are inhabiting is. It is ostensibly a portrait of her father, but I think it doesn’t succeed there as much as being about Kristen’s own fears. Also it’s equal parts heart wrenching and funny.  Throne of Blood/High and Low The fact that Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth didn’t make the top ten says a lot more about how many great films I watched this year, rather than the quality of this one. This might be one of my favorite Macbeth adaptations, despite having one of Shakespeare’s original dialog. Toshiro Mifune does wonderful work, as usual, and Kurosawa has a clear understanding of the story.  High and Low is one of Kurosawa’s contemporary-set films, rather than being set in feudal Japan. There are no swords or samurai here, but I found it just as compelling. Centered on a kidnapping for ransom and the aftermath I Found this compelling to watch. The first half spools out like a play, confined to the penthouse apartment of the target as he struggles with the demands of the ransomer, and the second half spreads out into the world as authorities try to capture the criminal behind everything. It is a film of congrats and Kurosawa uses both the structure and form of the film itself to really highlight those dualities.  Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe This is a short documentary about Werner Herzog eating his shoe, and the particular series of events that lead to that outcome. It’s also a meditation on creativity a motivation and some other deeper ideas than you would expect from a movie about a guy eating his shoe.  Now, onto the main list! 10. Highlander 2: The Quickening This movie, I green considered one of the worst sequels of all time, is absolutely bonkers. The immortals from the first Highlander movie are either aliens or time travelers (depending on which cut of the film you watch) and I don’t know which one is sillier. Sean Connery, who was killed in the first one comes back through the magic of “don’t think about it too hard” and the Highlander himself is now an old man, who helped create the giant sphere that now encloses the earth to protect it from the sun. Except maybe enclosing the planet in a giant sphere was a a bad idea and now the Highlander regrets it, so he teams up with an ecoterrorist to make the sphere go away. Meanwhile another alien/time traveler has come to the future to kill the Highlander because… reasons. This movie is gloriously bonkers and I’ve only scratched the surface with this description. Is the movie good? Not really, but it does manage to be one of my favorites of the year despite that.  9. I Saw the TV Glow I watched both of director Jane Schoenbrun’s movies this year, and the first (We’re All Going to The Worlds Fair) left me cold. This, however stabbed a knife into my brain, in the best way possible. It’s set in the 90s and is about two teens who bond over watching an obscure kids show about paranormal investigations. Think Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Eerie Indiana. They grow close watching the show and sharing vhs tapes of episodes, then grow apart because that’s what happens to teenagers. Except maybe there was something else going on the whole time. The movie has trappings of a horror movie, or maybe something else, and isn’t quite like anything else I’ve ever seen. It felt laser guided to appeal to me, someone who discovered weird sci-fi shows as a teen. 8. The Last of Sheila In a year without a new Benoit Blanc movie this fit the bill. Except Rian Johnson clearly took inspiration from this movie to make both Knives Out and Glass Onion. The parallels to Glass Onion are more obvious, as this movie takes place mostly on a boat, full of Hollywood elites who have gathered together to play a game put on by their host. But things don’t go as planned and someone gets murdered for real, so it all becomes about that instead. A very clever mystery and saying more about it than that risks spoilers, but if you’re looking to scratch that itch before Wake Up Dead Man releases sometime in 2025 this is worth checking out.  7. Chris Grace: As Scarlet Johansson  Chris Grace is a fat gay asian man, Scarlet Johansson is not. But also Johansson has played an Asian woman in a major blockbuster, so Grace decides to see what it would be like for him to play Scarlet Johansson on stage in this one-man show filmed for Dropout Presents. This is a show about identity, and who gets to tell what stories, and while it doesn’t quite have any answers, I also think it’s one of the best constructed stage shows I’ve seen in a very long time. Deeply personal, very funny, and starts conversations in a way that makes that cliche actually seem new and like a good idea.  6. The Last Picture Show/Texasville I think The Last Picture Show is a pretty well known movie. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich it stars a number of young actors who would grow up to be famous. People like Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd. It adapts an Elmore Leonard novel about a bunch of teenagers In a small Texas town in the 1950s. It’s all about being a teenager at the start of adulthood and trying to figure out who you are and where you fit into the world. It’s a pretty well regarded movie, and with good reason. Cloris Leachman won an Oscar for her supporting role, picked up 5 other nominations including for best picture (but lost to the French Connection.) somewhat unusually for a movie from 1971 it was filmed in black and white, which was a big part of what made it feel so lived in as a place. In 1990 Bogdanovich decided to revisit the characters 30 someodd years later, and adapted Leonard’s sequel novel Texasville. Like the first movie, it was about many of the same characters in that small Texas town, only now they are all adults and wondering how they ended up where they are. It was shot in color and most of the marketing seemed to focus on the stars of Shepherd and Bridges, even though it is much more of an ensemble picture. It was not commercially successful, and ran under the radar for a long time. Bogdanovich eventually re-cut the movie to add back in about half an hour of additional footage, and even more importantly re-graded the whole thing in black and white to match the look of Last Picture Show. This is the version I watched, and while I can’t speak to the original’s quality, I think it works incredibly well this way. It becomes a story in conversation with the first, but not in a way of trying to repeat the beats of the original. The movie wonderfully captures the way life just sort of happens and then you look back and aren’t quite sure how you got here, even if you’re glad you did.  5. Playtime Possibly Jacques Tati’s magnum opus, Playtime is a movie very difficult to describe. I could tell you what happens: a man arrives at an airport, has a meeting, sees a technology showcase, has dinner at a new restaurant and spends some time in traffic, but none of that captures how any of it feels. And it’s barely about the man at the center of all that anyway. It’s a movie about humanity as if watched by aliens. I don’t mean there’s any science fictional element, but rather it showcases the absurdities of humanity in a way that shows how even the mundane aspects are strange and humorous. It’s a film very light on dialogue, but full of characters and gorgeous screen pictures. It’s the sort of movie that changes the way you look at the world and those are rare indeed.  4. Cane Toads: An Unnatural History A documentary on the invasive cane toad species that was brought to Australia and absolutely took over the continent. The film is structured around interviews of people discussing their experiences with the species and features a few re-enactments as well. The interview subjects are some of the most unusual people ever put to film. It feels at times like a Christopher Guest mockumentary, except all these people actually exist and live in the world. I had no idea a movie about toads in Australia could be this funny.  3. Sorcerer Ok now we’re splitting hairs. These top three movies could be in almost any order, but this is the order I settled on today. Sorcerer is based on the novel Wages of Fear, and directed by William Firedkin (possibly most famous for The Exorcist). It follows a group of four down on their luck expats who find themselves in a small South American village who are hired to transport cases of dynamite 200 miles through the jungle in a pair of large trucks. But the dynamite is old and has been sweating nitroglycerin which means any sudden disturbance could cause the whole case to explode. This is possible the tensest movie I have ever watched. This is an incredibly dangerous job and we get to learn more about the kind of people who would take on such a risk, even as we aren’t sure all of them will make it. The movie handles tension and release in a way I’ve never felt from a horror movie, which is impressive because this isn’t a horror movie at all. Unless the horror is people, but that’s a read that undersells the stakes of this very specific terror. There is another movie that adapts Wages of Fear from the 1950 and a remake of that film coming out soon, and I plan to watch both, just because of how good this was.  2. Citizen Kane I’m almost mad at how good this movie is. So often it gets held up as one of the greatest movies of all time, because of the groundbreaking filmmaking techniques that Orson Welles pioneered in this movie. But I’ve seen enough highly regarded movies to know that sometimes they don’t stand up to the hype. Maybe they were great once, but they have been copied so much and were so influential that the broken ground just feels normal. But I can say that Kane lives up to its reputation. It’s so dang good. It’s a beautifully shot picture where scenes of people just talking to each other look better than they have any need to, but not in a flashy way, rather in a way that serves the story. And the story is good too! It’s told in an out of sequence way, where as we learn more about Kane we come to understand him better, even as nobody in the film manages to find the answers they are looking for. Dang, this is a good movie. Maybe you should check it out.  1. No Bears Jafar Panahi is an Iranians filmmaker who in 2010 was banned by the government of Iran from making films or leaving the country. He documented his earliest days in house arrest in the 2011 documentary This is Not a Film, which was smuggled out of the country on a thumb drive inside a cake. But despite the ban Panahi has continued to make movies illegally. This is his latest film. It stars Panahi as a fictionalized version of himself as he stays in a small town near the border of Iran and Turkey to remotely direct a film over zoom. He also walks through the village taking pictures of the locals. At one point he may have photographed a couple of teenagers holding hands, and some of the villagers demand the photograph as evidence because the young woman was promised to marry another man from birth. Panahi denies having taken the photograph, but the villagers are insistent and continue to pester him as they escalate towards conflict. This is a movie about a lot of things, and it’s impossible to remove from the context in which it was made. It’s hard to not watch the fictional Panahi’s arguments with the locals and not see a reflection of his ongoing punishment from the Iranian government. But the film is not just metaphor, you come to care about what will happen, not just to Panahi, but also the children he mar or have not photographed, and even the actors in the movie he’s filming across the border. Structurally, and formally this is a very straightforward movie, but it is a perfect example of how a well told story can be so much let than itself.  So that’s a bunch of movies. I loved all of them, and would recommend any of them. Not all of them are perfect (the top 3 are, though) but all of them are worth watching. 

I almost forgot to write anything for the newsletter this week.  By which I mean I forgot to write anything and I am also having trouble thinking of what to write.  Yesterday was the solstice, so we are literally, if not metaphorically, past the longest night.  Survivor season 48 ended last week. This season was often frustrating for the same reasons I find any season frustrating. I think the producers have come to over rely on advantages and twists in the gameplay instead of letting the players drive the game. The season before this one had (I believe) a record number of players go home with an idol in their pocket and while that is compelling in the moment, I think it shows that people are too worried about the gameplay implications of the advantages to use them effectively. Also this season exposed the ridiculous nature of the Shot in the Dark, a one time use advantage where you can give up your vote at tribal council for a 1 in 6 chance of immunity. The goal from the producers’ standpoint was to create tension in the votes, someone could always play it and there was a chance it would ruin everyone’s plan. But it has only ever been used successfully once and this season the players gave up their shots in the dark unanimously in exchange for rice. So clearly the players didn’t think it was as powerful as the producers did. But on the other hand I’m pretty happy it wasn’t a consideration for the rest of the season agate that point. And the rest of the game was good from a gameplay standpoint and I am happy with the eventual winner.  I watched three hallmark style Christmas movies this week. And also the Captain Underpants movie. I can recommend that over the others. Which isn’t necessarily a slight against hallmark style Christmas romance movies, but Captain Underpants managed to surprise me, which isn’t what the other movies were trying to do. Surprise is not high on the list of goals for hallmark adjacent Christmas movies.  Also I watched the latest Jason Statham movie, The Beekeper. It’s mostly a Jason Statham movie, but also it has a lot of lore about bees. Jason Statham plays a guy who keeps bees, but also is a  secret government agent called The Beekeeper, and uses bee metaphors for everything. It isn’t subtle, but you don’t watch a Jason Statham movie for subtle.  Ok, I think that’s all I got in me this week. We will try again next time. 

I don't have much new to say this week, so I'm rerunning one of my favorite pieces. I don't think it exists on the internet anymore, since TinyLetter shut down. A line by line breakdown of FriendtopiaMusic video Starring Rachel Bloom, Vella Lovell, and Gabrielle Ruiz  Original song Written by Rachel Bloom, Adam Schlesinger, Jack Dolgen, and Dan Gregor When my friends and I stick together, there's nothing we can't do. This is a fairly typical opening of a Spice Girls pastiche that the song starts out as. (And ends as) However it also sets us up for the first punchline of the song, where the actual message comes into focus And when I say that I specifically mean, we're gonna stage a coup This is where we start seeing the metaphorical ideas of things like "Girls run the world, to the literal running of the world by this specific group of girls With the power of our gossip giggles we'll storm the pentagon. Gossip Giggles is not a term I was particularly familiar with on first hearing the song, but I think it is incredibly evocative. Taken literally, it could refer to a whisper/propaganda campaign to undermine the government bureaucracy currently embodied by the world's largest office building, The Pentagon. Home to many government agencies, and arguably the actual seat of power in the US where the white house is just the figurehead. Then celebrate with bottomless mimosas on the white house lawn. Here they embrace both their success at the overthrow of the executive branch but also their continued femininity by drinking from an unlimited supply of mimosas, typically considered a "girly brunch" drink. They are going to take over but not relinquish any of their womanhood in doing so. We're gonna braid each other's hair A fairly typical "girl group activity, often performed at sleepovers.” perhaps overly stereotypical, as something for this group of grown women to do, but if they feel this is the best way to express their friendship, than I'm not going to stop them Then cut each others braids Ah, so It seems they too are fighting against the stereotype itself, but making the braids, but cutting them off, they are throwing off your expectations of them. Instead they do what they want. Connect the braids to build a rope. The idea of women being connected through their shared struggle and throwing off their societal bonds. The metaphorical ropes of femininity and expectations thereof have now become literal ropes that they have built themselves. To hang all of congress. Then they're going to use this metaphorical turned literal rope to murder the entirety of both houses of congress. I think it says something about the power of women in this context that the rope they built was formed from the hair of a small number of women (three, and we'll get to who each of them are in just a moment) has the ability to kill the entire bicameral system. Imagine what could happen if all women stood up and fought back against the systems that oppress them. Squad goals! Stay together forever! A fairly typical use of the term squad goals, which I believe rose to prominence in reference to Taylor Swift's "squad," the group of women she was often seen hanging out with via her instagram account. Of course T-Swift’s squad was a highly manufactured event, despite the fact that they probably did have a lot of fun hanging out with each other and were, I'm sure, genuinely friends. T-Swift is in such control of her image, and that extends to her squad as well. That being said She and her squad were certainly aspirational. However it's worth noting that :Squad Goals” as a phrase was likely never something uttered by the original Spice Girls, as the term Squad wasn't in high usage outside sports when the Spice Girls rose to prominence. Here Rachel Bloom (and her team of co-writers) put an appropriately modern spin on the tropes they are using in their pastiche. Maybe Spice Girls never said Squad, but they would have today. Squad Goals Take control of the banks! No we see that this friendship cabal isn't content with murdering the legislative branch, but also seizing the reins of the financial sector as well. It's interesting because nationalizing the banks is often a political talking point (maybe not so much now with all the other terrible shit happening to our country) but a Group of women friends taking control is probably not what those folks had in mind. Once they have the banks, it will be much easier to implement the other plans they have outlined later in the song. Squad goals don't let a man come between us We're still maintaining that delicate balance between despotic leadership and empowering female friendships. That's because (as the song has already told us) one powers the other. You can't take control of the world if your besties aren’t the absolute best. An no besties would ever let that friendship be ruined by a man. And if he does shoot him in the head See? The power of running the word is too important. More important than any man. Men have truly become disposable (or at least replaceable) in the friendship based dystopia. What's a good name for that? Ooooh, Friendtopia! A dystopia around our friendship There it is. I'm all about those portmanteaus. I even used to run a podcast where we did our level best to make each title a portmanteau. (the podcast is gone now, sorry about that) . but the greater thing here is how the friendtopia, while explicitly a dystopia is still pretty great for those at the top. I also think it's worth noticing the self-awareness of the situation. Rarely in history has a group of despots taking over a country been called a dystopia from the beginning. Friendtopia! Our manifesto is fun. There's a double meaning here in that the manifesto is a great time to be had by all, but also the manifesto is just the singular word "Fun." Traditionally Manifestos are considered to be rather long incomprehensible screeds, although their actual length is more flexible. The archetypal example is the communist manifesto which comes in at 12,615 words (roughly 50 pages) is hardly a novel in length, despite what it's reputation may have you believe. However our despotic girl group has once again subverted expectations by having a manifesto that is incredibly short, but still incomprehensible. What does it mean to have a manifesto be a single word? Is it a command? A mission statement? Something else? The answer to all of these questions is the manifesto itself. Fun! Zigga Zow! Zigga zow is obviously a reference to the Spice Girls’ “Zigga Zig Ah” refrain in their chart topper Wannabe but by making it their own they avoid any claims of copyright infringement. “Is Zigga Zig Ah” copyrighted you ask? I'm glad you asked. All works are copyrighted in the US at the moment of creation and while individual words can't typically be copyrighted there's an argument to be made that Zigga Zig Ah is unique enough to be an original creation instead of just another word or phrase. It certainly could have been trademarked which is a whole different ball of wax. If it was trademarked then the production team of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend did the right thing in using a variant phrase. Trademarks have to be actively enforced or there’s a risk of losing them (see for example this video by the lawyers of Velcro) Now that we have total control get ready for what's in store The song has jumped in time here, from the future tense of "we are going to take over the world,” to the present tense of "we have taken over the world, now here's what we're going to do.” Our reign will be like Sweet Valley High meets 1984 Referencing two very important historical works of fiction. Sweet Valley High is a series of over 700 books about the trials and tribulations of a world where teenagers are forever stuck in high school reliving the same experiences over and over again. For example there have been thirty five books about prom in the series, many of which contained the same characters. On its surface this is a sweet and romantic series for young adults but more lurks below. 1984 on the other hand is more explicit about its dystopia, "we have always been at war with Eastasia" is a mantra to indicate an eternal present that may constantly be in flux, but nothing ever changes. Big Brother is watching you, and Big brother Loves you. Just as much as these friends love each other When one of Us gets dumped that becomes memorial day This is the first of two lines that are playing the propaganda angle of the new rulers. While in reality nobody would be allowed to dump any of the three if they were actually allowed to date them in the first place. When a metaphorical (if not literal) dumping occurs it becomes a day of mourning and remembrance observed by the whole country, because the leader is the country and the country is their leaders. All Agriculture will be devoted to making us Rosé At first blush this is a terrible idea because if all agriculture is making them rosé there will be countless environmental and political disasters that befall this newly controlled nation. But if we look deeper they specifically that agriculture will be devoted to making rosé which involves more than just growing grapes and fermenting the juice of those grapes. You have to feed the nation of workers who grow the grapes and squish the grapes and ferment the grapes. And those things can all be done more efficiently if those working on the rose fields are well supported by a system of ...support. Things like doctors for when the rosé workers get sick, or people to build the roads on which we have to transport the rosé to the new white house. And One cannot live on rose alone, so there would need to be ways to feed the workers. There are countless other structures that will have to be in place to make this enormous undertaking feasible here in what I'm now calling the US of Rosé. When all that is taken into consideration things aren't that bad. There's a really exclusive sushi place that never lets us in This is another propaganda moment. Our rulers are just like us! They can't get into that cool sushi place either! Of course we understand that the whole thing is an elaborate ruse. Our fearless leaders can and do go wherever they want. So when we don't get in we say "Let's just go home and drink rosé" And what they want, what they really really want is to go home and drink rosé. But it's nice to think that they're drinking the same rosé that the rest of us are drinking, because it's our primary export and the number one way to stay hydrated! Roll Call! This segment of the song is a reference to the Spice Girls being called by their reductive nicknames (Sporty, Posh, Ginger, Scary and Baby) instead of their real names. However, as is in line with the taking back the control over their narratives that this song is all about, we get the names first, then the descriptors. Rebecca the Brainy One Head of Censorship and Mind Control But who are these women who have taken over the world with the power of friendship? Well Rebecca (who is the smart one and arguably the future Beyonce to this groups Destiny's Child) runs two interrelated programs. Censorship and Mind Control are two sides of the same coin. You can control what people believe by controlling the information they receive. Heather the cool one "I put drugs in the water supply" Shades of Brave New World here, where the populace is kept in check by mind altering chemicals. But instead of relying on the individuals to keep taking their meds every day (a significant flaw in many of these plans historically) our dear leaders administer the dosage directly into the water, thus ensuring everybody gets some. Valencia, the Sexy One. Tsar of Torture! Torture is bad, let's move on. Oh Friendtopia! We nostalgically watch Hocus Pocus I've never seen Hocus Pocus, but I've heard it's good. Friendtopia "Aw! I love Hocus Pocus" This is often how I've heard Hocus Pocus is good. I never watched it as a kid because I thought it would be a very scary movie and I don't deal well with scary movies. I've since been informed that it's actually not that scary. There's also a sequel coming out and it has its center a teen lesbian romance. So that's cool. Friendtopia All citizens must watch Hocus Pocus or they will be killed! Guess I should watch Hocus Pocus. [Editor's note: since the original writing of this essay I have since seen Hocus Pocus. It's pretty good. I even did an episode of my podcast about it.] Zigga Zow I should mention the awesome arm motions that go along with this line in the video. Think Charlie's Angels.

The Stack of Shame I own a lot of movies. If you’ve followed my shenanigans For any period of time, you have probably heard me one about the joys of physical media. Some might argue that t’s just a version of the sunk cost fallacy whereby I have bought a lot of movies and tv shows on disc, so therefore I’m going to post hoc justify the decision. And that might be true, but I think the argument doesn’t hold as much water when you see how much I also watch things on streaming. 
 Side note: The best streaming service right now is Dropout, and the second best is Hulu (and technically Disneyplus, which is slowly merging with Hulu). Netflix is like 7th or 8th on the list and it’s not even close. I think N Netflix is still seen as a juggernaut not because they’ve kept the game high, but rather because they were there first. Netflix’s catalog has changed from feeling like “almost everything” to only netflix originals that got cancelled after 2 seasons, or movies staring comedians that were popular in the 90s. Ok, this side not has gotten longer than I meant it to. I dropped a bunch of streaming services into my favorite sorting tool, Monkey sort and here’s the list that came out. The actual mechanism/sorting algorigthm that monkey sorties is kind of cool, so if you want to read about that you can do so here: https://leonid.shevtsov.me/post/a-human-driven-sort-algorithm-monkeysort/ it’s a modified version of quick sort, where the user input comes when it runs into an unknown comparison) From best to worst the list came out as: • dropout • hulu(and disney) • criterion • max • paramount • peacock • prime video • nebula • Apple tv • Netflix So netflix is even worse than I expected.  But the fact that netflix is bad isn’t the point of this, or it wasn’t when I started.  The point is that I would rather cancel all of those services instead of giving up my media collection. My own media collection is personalized to my tastes, curated by me, and never is at risk of losing a beloved entry because of the whims of an executive in a corner office somewhere. Plus, it only gets bigger over time, while the cost remains steady. There’s no chance of a subscription price hike or ads being shoved into a service I already pay for.  I can admit, however, that there are some shortcomings to my collection. Not the things that are missing, which can be rectified, but the thing that are there and remain unwatched by me.   I call this sub-collection my backlog, or if I’m feeling less generous, the Stack of Shame. It’s not  actually a stack, foe what it is worth, nor do I feel that much shame about it (hence writing about it on the internet) but I like the alliteration.  There’s a wide variety of movies and tv shows in the stack, and I’m going to share some of them today.  The latest entry is The Keep, which is a movie I only just acquired, making it possibly the least shameful selection in the Stack. This is a movie by famous director of “dad movies” Michael Mann. I should say I don’t use the term dad movie with any sense of disdain, but rather that Mann directs movies that appeal to a certain class of hypothetical dad. Movies like Collateral, and Thief, and Ferrari, stylish movies about cool dudes doing cool things like driving an assassin around in a taxi, or being a thief or inventing the Ferrari. His movie are stylish, and grounded and look effortlessly cool. Except The Keep. I bought this movie on the recommendation of some friends and have done as little research about it as possible. I have no idea what the story is, but I do know it was quite a departure from what the rest of Mann’s oeuvre would become. It’s supposed to be visually impressive and much weirder than his other movies, and just recently there was a 4k restoration that a certain sector of film nerds was incredibly excited about. So I picked it up. I’ll watch it sooner than later probably.  Fishing With John is a 30 minute long tv show where musician John Laurie goes fishing in exotic locales with other famous people like Dennis Hopper. It’s not exactly a travel show, although it looks like one from the outside. It’s also only got six episodes and it’s the sort of thing I could knock out in an afternoon, but I haven’t done so yet. I couldn’t tell you why.  License to Wed is a movie that I’m pretty sure Amy bought on DVD before we were even a couple. But also, I haven’t seen it yet, so it’s part of the stack. All I know about this one is Robin Williams plays a priest and John Krasinski (people’s sexiest man alive) is going to fall in love with Mandy Moore. It feels like a real low-effort production by all involved, and that it came out of a machine that was just slapping premises and actors names together back in the 2000s. It is directed by the same guy who made Sesame Street’s Follow That Bird, so it can’t be too bad, right? The Rockford Files is perfect for Saturday afternoons. James Garner plays Jim Rockford, a PI who often gets in over his head, and has trouble getting paid by his clients. At some point I feel like they stopped making shows like this, so I’m kind of savoring the chance to still have new episodes. But any time I throw one on, I smile the whole time I’m watching it.  Possible the last movie I’ll watch in the stack of shame (ha, as if the stack will ever disappear) might be Un Corazon Para Dos (one heart for two) a Spanish movie about (I think?) romance involving a heart transplant. I’m not entirely sure where I even acquired the movie, but it might have been a gift given to me in college. It’s not that I don’t want to watch it, but rather it’s on Spanish and doesn’t have English subtitles. It’s also a rare enough film that nobody has made (as far as I can find) a fan translation. For some perspective, the most popular 2023 movie on movie logging website Letterboxd (Barbie) has 4 million logged views from users. Un Corazon Para Dos has 28. I may just throw it on anyway and see what I can gleam. I watched live theater in Czech, I can probably get something out of it.  I’m actually going to spend some effort shrinking the stack in 2025. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I do sometimes set goals for myself. This one feels achievable. I’m on track to watch 365 movies this year, so even if I don’t keep up that pace (I probably won’t) and even if I leave space for other movies, (I probably will) I can probably get the stack down by a significant margin. I’d be real happy if I can get it to under half its current size. 

Why am I mad about Wicked? I’ve been mad about this movie coming out for probably two or three years now. I’m not exactly a Wicked super fan, but also I’ve seen the show two or three times on tour, and own the soundtrack and have listened to it enough times that I could still knock out most of the lyrics to Popular without looking them up. I appreciate the show even as I can acknowledge its flaws. Flaws like a second act that isn’t nearly as strong as the first, or the fact that there are at least two just okay songs for each good one, or that (spoilers, I guess) they undercut the inherent tragedy of the character of Elphaba with a tacked on, and frankly unearned, happy ending.  But if you were to ask me on the street point blank if I like Wicked, my first instinct would be to say yes. I remember the kerfuffle when Wicked lost the Best New Musical Tony to Avenue Q. I’m not going to re-litigate the whole thing, other than to say Wicked has had a much longer shadow that Avenue Q, which might vindicate the people mad it didn’t win, but I would counter by saying I think Avenue Q much more accurately reflects the moment in which it was made. There’s not a more 2003 musical than Avenue Q. A Wicked movie has been in development for literal decades, probably since before it lost the Tony. It was always going to happen, and it took less time to get to the screen than the film adaptation of Cats, so by one lens, only taking 20 years is downright speedy. Making a movie is always impossible, and making a movie musical in the 2020s is even harder. There’s such an aversion to musicals (in the minds of marketing at least) that there have been multiple musical films released in the last few years where nobody could be seen singing in the trailer. Off the top of my head, there was: Wonka, Joker Foil a Deux, Mean Girls (which was only remade because it was a musical now) and even Wicked didn’t show anyone singing in the trailers.  I’m usually trying to be Mr. Let People Enjoy Things. I like lots of movies and TV shows that pretty terrible most metrics. But for some reason I’ve been increasingly grumpy about how much praise the Wicked Movie has been getting. I’ve had multiple people recommend it to me, and I’ve even overheard people in restaurants talking about it, which sounds so made up it has to be true.  I don’t know that I ever expected the movie to flop, or be as disturbingly weird as (for example) Cats (2019) but I also didn’t expect to be as successful as it apparently has been. Almost everything I’ve seen about the movie (I haven’t seen the movie yet, which we’ll get to) has made me think it would be bad.  I’ll start with the good stuff: Casting. By all accounts Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo are great choices to play Glinda and Elphaba. And the director, John M Chu has had success with movie musicals before, including In the Heights, which I quite enjoyed.  Ok now the bad stuff: Wicked, the Movie, is actually only Wicked Part One. The cut the stage show, which is two hours and forty five minutes long (including intermission) into two movies (part one and two, although none of the marketing hints that this is a bifurcated film) and the first movie is longer than the entire stage show. It’s like if you watched the first act at .5x speed on YouTube. And the justification given for cutting the movie in half, to make two movies, is that Defying Gravity is a “curtain number” which means the curtain should drop afterwards, and give the audience a chance to breathe. Which is true, and why it works so well on stage. But it turns out that film and theater are two different mediums and trying to replicate the experience of one in the other is a bad idea. This is also why there being so many broadway musicals based on movies lately is bad, but I digress.  But the real reason to split a movie in half is the same as it always is, too make your audience pay for two tickets. Wicked the stage show is already pretty long for a movie, but when the movie’s done it’ll be twice as long. But longer doesn’t mean better. There are absolutely people who will love the opportunity to spend that long in Oz (there’s a reason the books and adaptations have been popular for so long, and it’s not just that they are in the public domain. But stories aren’t theme parks, they should be as long as they need to be, rather than a place where you can spend a whole day just wandering around, looking at the sights. The sights which, from what I’ve seen in trailers and clips, are completely washed out. It feels like the saturation has been turned down across the board, proving that we have learned nothing from the Barbie Movie and still think movies, even fantasy musicals, should feel dark and gritty. Only one musical number clip has been released officially online, the early-ish song, What Is This Feeling. I watched the clip in hopes that it would help me make sense of the disconnect between what I thought was happening in this movie, and what people were apparently experiencing. And I think I did, even if it doesn’t explain why I’m so mad about this whole thing still.  Some context: What is The Feeling is a song that takes place not long after our two leads meet for the first time at school. They both have a large emotional reaction to the experience, and because this is a musical, when someone has a large emotional reaction, it becomes a song. The opening lines (and even the name of the song) imply some ambiguity or even mystery about the feeling that Elphaba and Galinda are experiencing. The first lines ask “what is this feeling I’m having,” and follows their exploration in search of an answer. The answer comes in the form of a punchline and the chorus of the song: Loathing. Dramatugically, this is a punchline because the opening lines describe physical responses that the feeling engenders, pulse rushing, head reeling, face flushing, are ambiguous enough that it could be almost read as love at first sight, and that possibility is thoroughly crushed by the blunt answer that the feeling is actually the polar opposite.  It’s a good bit, it’s economical, and it does a lot of work for both the characters and the sense of humor the play has. But the film version makes it clear the characters aren’t confused or surprised by their emotions. As Erivo and Grande recite their lines, they’re already fighting and looking daggers at each other. There’s no twist, or confusion, because we already know where it’s headed. After that the song becomes a montage that segues into a big dance number as soon as possible, big dance numbers being John M Chu’s wheelhouse. But, the song is mostly a duet between our leads, with occasional support from the chorus. Shooting it like a big dance number, often with the leads not even on screen at the same time, or lost in a sea of dancers takes away the opportunity for the relationship between them to really build. Even when it’s just the two of them, we cut back and forth so quickly (and jump through time via montage) that neither one gets to show us who they are, the work is all being done by the song.  To be clear, Chu can shoot a big dance number like nobody’s business, he’s a master at it, but it feels like he retreated to that skillset instead of asking what the scene really needs.  After pondering this for far too long, I realized that I think I understand why it works for so many people but not for me. The song is a note perfect replication of the broadway soundtrack version.  Kevin, of course it’s the same. It’s the same song. Are you getting confused?  What I mean is this: The majority of Wicked fans have probably experienced the show through the soundtrack more than any other way. They may have seen it on stage, they may not, but the soundtrack is right there waiting always exactly the same as the last time they listened to it. Broadway soundtracks are amazing, they allow people (like me!) who don’t get to see big broadway shows a chance to experience some of the magic of the stage. They bring the show to life in your living room (See: The Drowsy Chaperone for an example of this experience being made into a musical in itself.) But a soundtrack is a recording, it’s a moment in time captured in amber. It doesn’t show you what it feels like for a show to be a living breathing thing in front of you. The different Galinda’s I’ve seen on stage aren’t trying to be Kristen Chenowith, instead they’re trying to be Galinda, and what that looks like embodies through their choices feels different. It’s not wrong, it’s how theater works. A movie musical should be free to explore how the new medium makes the story feel different, explore how new actors make different choices with the same lines, it should be free to become its own thing.  But What is This Feeling in the movie sounds like a carbon copy of the version from the broadway soundtrack. When I close my eyes I can see the version of the show that has played in my head hundreds of times when I played the album. And i think, for at least some portion of the audience, hearing the song almost exactly as they remember it, allows them to overwrite parts of what is actually happening on screen with the version from inside their head. The audience is getting the version of Wicked they always imagined, and that’s even better than any choices that the creative team might have made.  To be clear, I don’t think this is 100% true or literal for absolutely everyone in the audience. Maybe it’s not true for most of the audience. Maybe the movie is just very good and I’ve written 1700 words (so far!) about this for nothing or nobody but myself.  Kevin, what do you know? You haven’t even seen the movie! I haven’t. That’s the elephant in the room, splash of water on the witch, the gust of wind sending the whole house of cards tumbling down.  I’ve built up this elaborate explanation of my emotional response to a movie I haven’t even seen. I’m reacting not to the movie itself, but to The stories being told about and around the movie. And I’m telling my own version of that story too. I should see the movie. I should go in with an open mind, and I should see the movie with the goal of enjoying it. Wats the point of seeing a movie if you don’t want to like it? Sure I watch movies all the time that are bad, by most metrics, but I don’t go into them hoping to have a bad time. I watch bad movies because every bad movie is bad in new and interesting ways and I love to see passion on screen from creative teams with more passion than anything like talent or money or basic understanding of story structure. Wicked the movie (from what I’ve read, and seen) doesn’t feel like a passion project. It feels like the next piece of corporate output by a media machine that really misses the days of the Studio System, where actors, directors, writers and everyone else, where all hired by the movie studios for long exclusive contracts to make dozens of pictures a year, churning them out like cattle feed, trading them like commodities. That metaphor got away from me.  Wicked the movie feels corporate. Corporate down in its bones. Corporate like they need this movie to do well, not because they want to make art, but because they need to make the Q4 projections for the next earnings call. Corporations can make great art, they’ve done it before. Some of the absolute best films of all time came out of the studio system. But great art is a byproduct of the machine. A masterpiece making no profit is so much worse than Grown Ups 2 making 150 million in profit.  I like Wicked, the stage show. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. And it feels like the last gasp of a creative period that’s largely gone from the broadway stage. More and more the boards are filled with jukebox musicals or adaptations of increasingly obscure movies, any exploitable IP that can be mined for the stage, hoping even the barest of name recognition will push the stage show into profitability.  I think I’m mad about Wicked because it has become what it always threatened to be: just an other piece of corporate content for the machine. It could be good, or even great, lots of people have loved it, and I’m glad it brought them joy in a time where that can be hard to come by. But it will always be that movie they cut in half because they thought they could get a second ticket out of audiences. They could have solved the “curtain song” problem any of a dozen ways that better adapted it to the screen, but the choice they picked in the name of “fidelity” also happened to be the one that let them potentially double the next box office. That was a corporate decision, not one made for art. 

I don’t know when other people don’t know something I am trapped in my own brain. Trapped by my own perceptions of the universe. All I have is the input I receive though my senses and how I interpret those sensations. Cogito ergo sum But I know (have chosen to know?) that other people exist. And I try to live my life in such a way that respects that existence in ways both small and large.  In Terry Pratchett’s novel The Truth, which follows the creation of the first newspaper on his fantasy planet of Discworld (a giant flat disk resting on the back of four giant elephants, who are in turn on the back of a giant-er turtle flying through space.) I’ve probably read The Truth three times, the most recent of which was while we were without power in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene.  I don’t re-read a lot of books, but Pratchett is an author I feel like I can always come back to and be satisfied. Some of this is because I find new jokes I had forgotten, but often it feels like I’m seeing the book in a new light. The book hasn’t changed, but I have.  Something I noticed on this, my third read through, is how limited the main character’s point of view is. Not limited in the sense of not knowing what is going on (they’re a reporter uncovering a mystery, so there’s some missing information) but in the sense of not quite understanding how they are perceived by others.  William de Worde is a man who comes from wealth and privilege. Due to reasons, he has tried to push away from his background and forge his own path. Due to his new profession, he finds himself interacting with new populations, people like dwarves, trolls, vampires, the unhoused and even women. There’s a moment towards the end of the novel where he makes a point of saying how he doesn’t treat anyone differently, and the vampire character notes how hard de Worde is working at not treating anyone differently. It’s not the first, but it is the most obvious example of the way we the reader see the character (through his eyes) doesn’t quite line up with how the rest of the world sees him.  It’s not quite a situation of an unreliable narrator, nothing the reader sees is incorrect, but rather we now see things in a new light. The facts are the same, but context changes.  Sometimes I find myself explaining ideas or concepts that seem straightforward or obvious to me, only to realize that the person I’m talking to doesn’t have any of the same context I do. It isn’t that I’m necessarily more informed (although sometimes I am) but rather I see the situation differently and bring that perspective to the conversation.  Sometimes this can be valuable, my job offers lots of opportunities for creative problem solving and my particular blend of insights can come to play. And I write this newsletter, which hopefully brings joy or at least new insights to my readers.  But because I’m trapped in my own head, I sometimes have trouble distinguishing the obvious from the interesting (to others.)  A very specific example is from an episode of the comedy lecture series Smartypants (available exclusively on Dropout.) Frequent Dropout contributor Jess Ross is giving her presentation which has the very simple thesis: Professional Wrestling is Drag. The way this is presented in theory show, and the reaction of the cast showed me that this was meant to be a revelation, with significant worldwide implications. But my response was more one of “yeah, so?” Jess Ross continued to lay out all the evidence for the thesis, and I continued to be surprised at how surprising everyone found it. But I thought the premise was obvious on its face. Of course wrestling is drag. Drag performance is all about identifying and heightening specific aspects of the inherently performative act of gender. In the popular consciousness, (I.e. RuPaul’s Drag Race) drag is more limited to heightened performance of womanhood by (typically) gay men, but the historical practice has a much broader scope. And the hypermasculine characters and performances in professional wrestling are clearly in that same ballpark.  I’m not trying to say I’m a genius for noticing this, but rather I was so stuck in my own context that it hadn’t occurred to me that everyone else didn’t know this already. But my context came from the collected experience that makes up my entire life. Things like being a student of theater and performance for so long that I got multiple degrees in it, watching Paris is Burning a long time ago (everyone should watch Paris is Burning. I should watch it again,) and being curious enough to try to figure out why pro wrestling is so popular. These various threads wove together a tapestry of meaning so unobtrusively that I didn’t realize it hadn’t always been hanging there or that other people didn’t have one I their home. That metaphor got a little tortured. Sorry.  I can’t believe I’m going to do this, but I’m going to bring up Donald Trump. Trump has a lot of behavioral patterns, but the one I personally fixate on more than the others, is when he says “a lot of people don’t know this” on any given topic. Every time he says this, it’s covering up the fact that it is something he just learned. Trump is a man who is constitutionally incapable of admitting growth, because in his eyes, to grow is to imply weakness in one’s past, and Trump cannot admit to weakness at any point, even through hindsight. But Trump will learn something new (to him) and then present the information to anyone who will listen, or the nearest microphone, as if it was a stunning new insight or secret about the world that didn’t exist an hour ago. When he says “a lot of people don’t know this” what he is actually saying is that *he* didn’t know it until recently.  But not knowing things is the default state of everyone. There should be no shame in it. We all start from a place of ignorance, and even a lifetime of study cannot meaningfully close the gap. That’s what civilization and society and collaboration and specialization are for. I know almost nothing about rocket science but I can still cheer for humanity going to the moon. Most people don’t think about structural dramaturgy nearly as much as I do, but they can still enjoy the latest Benoit Blanc murder mystery.  We are learning all the time, and there is always more to learn.  Any time two people meet or share information there’s a possibility both of them can learn something from each other. I see that as a good thing, even if what I learn is that most people don’t really care about fictional sports as much as I do.  Which could be the thesis of this whole newsletter. Not just this issue but the entire history of it. This space is me talking about the things I know, and providing the context I have for how I know those things. My context is different and hopefully it’s interesting enough that you’re willing the keep reading it and learning from everyone around you. 

Sometimes I think I want to write about something for this newsletter, but then I have to ask myself if I already wrote it at some point in the past. Checking on this isn't as easy as I would like it to be. I have an archive of all the newsletters from when this was on tinyletter, but it's in a format that is difficult to scan through at a glance. And since then I have written almost another year's worth of newsletters on this platform. I remember one of the writers on The Simpsons saying they had to impose a rule where they don't have to worry about repeating a joke if the last time was more than five years ago. Which makes sense. The show has been on for a very long time (either 1987 or 1989 depending on if you count the shorts from the Tracey Ullman Show) and they have produced such an unbelievable number of episodes.  Now I don't want to say writing this newsletter is the same level of accomplishment as putting out an episode of the Simpsons, but they only have to do 22 a year, and I put a new one out every week. And like The Simpsons, there's an argument that I peaked in the early few years, but have petered out in the time since. I don't think that's actually true for The Simpsons or this newsletter (if I did, I would probably stop writing it) But I do think it's an interesting experiment to put this newsletter up against episodes of The Simpsons.  By my count, which could be wrong, this is the 343rd issue of this newsletter I've put out. Which is no small feat in and of itself. Wikipedia tells e the 343rd episode of The Simpsons is Homer and Ned's Hail Mary Pass, the 8th episode of the 16th season. The 16th season is well past most metrics of when the "Prime" seasons of the Simpsons were.  Homer & Ned's Hail Mary Pass is an episode I remember watching! I didn't remember the name, but the summary triggered the memory. It was a Super Bowl themed episode, that aired after the Super Bowl. This was back when I watched both the Super Bowl and the shows that would air directly afterwards. The Post-Super Bowl spot was a coveted one in TV land, as it had the largest guaranteed lead in of any show on network television. Or anywhere for that matter. I don't know if the Super Bowl is as much of a ratings juggernaut anymore, but even still, I know it's probably a sweet spot for any TV show to get.  Often it was a chance to show off a big hit show, or premier something the network wanted to have the biggest chance of a success. Examples of the former include the episode of This Is Us where the dad dies or the Grey's Anatomy episode with a bomb inside a guy's chest(spoilers I guess?) and examples of the latter would be the pilot episode of Family Guy (a show famous for being cancelled multiple times) or the pilot of The Wonder Years (which only got cancelled once, as far as I know.) What was I talking about? Oh, the Simpsons. Anyway, this episode that aired after the Super Bowl, was not a particularly memorable one, except that it revealed the name of Comic Book Guy in the most understated way possible. It was a throwaway line, where he said his name when asked, and then the show moved on. BUt I still remember it, so that's petty funny. But I don't remember if I wrote about the thing I origiannly sat down to write about, so maybe I'll check and write about it next week. 

Hello friends. Here I am again. Here's a thing I wrote.  November 1 2024 I and my partner drive to the nearest town without a boil water notice, so we can spend the weekend ordering takeout to a hotel room and watch cable. On the one hand it doesn’t feel particularly luxurious, but on the other hand it’s the peak of hedonism since we’ve recently survived a hurricane and the death of our cat (unrelated.) October 2013  I am working at the Apple store. There’s an apple keynote going on, but we’re not allowed to watch it from the floor. Instead people are playing it on laptops in the break room, or the back of house, and when someone moves from one of these places back to the main floor they bring with them fleeting updates about what the latest news is. On a stage in Cupertino California Phil Schiller says “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass” after unveiling the new mac pro. it is possibly the most ridiculous computer apple has made in my lifetime. Or at least since I started paying attention. The base model is three thousand US dollars, and you can upgrade the configuration to cost close to seven thousand.  November 3 2024  We are leaving the hotel and driving to the Apple Store. We ate way too much pizza and wings and have leftovers to last us for days. I realize my pants are still basically pajamas and decide to change in the car once we get there. I have a set of hard pants I packed in case of an emergency (if you knew why you needed Emergency Pants in advance, then it probably wouldn’t be an emergency.) I slipped out of my ratty PJs and into something acceptable for the apple store (low bar, but still.) We are here to buy iphones and probably a new iPad. We have arrived at the mall so early that many of the stores aren’t even open yet.  Sometime in 2015  I am working at the apple store. I am at the front doors serving as what we affectionately call the Air Traffic Controller position. The store has a lot of moving parts, and many of them are invisible to the casual observer. My job is to quickly assess what someone walking in the door needs and get them to the right people. A woman comes through the big glass doors and pull back almost immediately. It looks like she is blown back by a huge wind. What is actually happening is that she needs to get her phone fixed, but the sheer number of people in the store gives her an anxiety attack and she can barely cross the threshold. I’m a little taken aback by her reaction, but like a fish who doesn’t know what water is, I don’t know what it’s really like for someone who doesn’t spend nearly every day in this environment. We get her paired up with a technician near the very front of the store and they even offer to take her outside to work on the problem.  November 3 2024  We walk into the apple store and assess the situation. Despite the map being barely open, I would describe the number of people in this store as “healthy.” I spot the person who I think is doing whatever the equivalent of air traffic control is and I make eye contact. she raises her voice pas the customer in front of us and lets us know she will be with us shortly. While we stand awkwardly and wait, we pick up one of the iPhones on the table in front of us. The first thing I notice is the security cable.  October 2013 Angela Ahrendts is paid an unreasonable sum to take over as the head of Apple Retail . She’s is reportedly paid more than the CEO, Tim Cook, in 2014. Angel works to put her own stamp on the retail space doing things like getting id of name tags and probably other things that actually mattered. One of the last things she does before I quit is decide that security cabled don’t match the vibe the store should have. A security cable attached to a device implies that there might be a theft, but the Apple Store is a welcoming place where people gather to build community, not a place where angry customers come to yell about broken phones. So the security cables go. Does it lead to more theft? I couldn’t say. November 3 2024  I laugh at the security cables that are clearly attached to each device in the tore. the technology has improved since 2013, because now each one retracts under the table via a spring-loaded mechanism. A technology I’m party sure Best Buy had in 1997. We’re approached by another apple employee. while waiting for the first one. He asks us from the other end of the table we’re at why we came in today. I tell him we’re here to buy some iphones. This idea seems to give him pause, but re recovers quickly and tells us to go stand at a different table. The someone will come talk to us and have us go stand at a third table where someone will eventually come to sell us some iphones. I’m both confused and unimpressed. At this point two different employees have given me contradictory instructions and I’m still not sure where I should be.  October 2024  I’m browsing craigslist like I do, and I see something marvelous. A 2013 Mac Pro. The glorious trashcan. And it’s cheap. I’ve been eyeing eBay listings on and off for a few months now, butI couldn’t never quite justify spending the money that they typically go for there. But this one is going for easily a third of what they go for on eBay. And it’s got decent specs as well. A top of the line computer for 2013 is not as impressive today, but it’s still a computer that would be more than adequate for most uses, and it has more RAM and storage than my main computer right now. and the price is roughly 3% or original retail. What a steal. I send him a tentative email asking a basic question, mostly to see if it is still available.  November 3 2024  I am becoming overwhelmed by the noise of this place, and the lack of a welcoming environment means I last another 5 minutes before I’m done with the store. My sweetheart and I discuss the colors we want, and we have a hard time picking. We want the same phone, but in different colors so we can tell them apart at a glance. She dice ides on the pink, and i end up choosing the “Ultramarine” which is blue in all but name. But since nobody here in the store is all that excited to take our money, we decide to order them in the car on the way back home. We take our leave from the store. The ordering process online is simple and straightforward and They’ll deliver everything by November 5.  November 4 2024 I finally her back from the guy selling the Mac Pro. I’m not sure what the delay was previously, but it’s still available and He’s happy to meet tomorrow. Meeting someone from craigslist isn’t the worst part, the worst part is deciding where to meet. He finally suggests Atlanta Bread, which to my outsider eyes looks like Panera Bread in all but name. It’s a bit of a drive from me, around 30 minutes, but I’m willing to make the drive for such a nice computer. He also double checks that I know it doesn’t come with a monitor, something I know and am fine with. I don’t actually have a monitor for it yet, but that’s a Future Kevin Problem.  November 2 2024 I walk to the grocery store next to our hotel for some additional supplies. On the way in I notice someone stop and take a picture of a car in the parking lot. Only when I look at what he’s taking a picture of do I realize there’s a cyber truck in the lot. Not just a cyber truck, but one that has been wrapped with a weird blue geometric pattern. This is the first cyber truck I’ve seen in my life. ITs just as weird looking in person as you’ve heard. Expect it’s even bigger than I think. I snap a pic or two on my way in. November 5 2024 I’m anxiously waiting for the arrival of our new phones, but I’m also excited to meet the guy from craigslist. I take an early lunch and head out the door. I make it in a little under 30 minutes, because I’m both excited and I know I need to get back to work. We pull into the parking lot at the same time, a fact we only realized when texting each other to confirm our presence. I hope out and shake hands with the man. He pops the hatch on his car and there it is. The little black metal trashcan of my dreams. It seems a little smaller than I remember it, but I’m so excited to see it. He throws in a magic mouse and apple keyboard, and I take all three. I place the computer into the passenger seat and briefly consider seat belting it in. I make it back to my desk before my lunch hour has even ended. Our new iPhones have not arrived. a few hours later I get a notification that FedEx was unable to deliver the phones and will try again tomorrow. Despite someone being at the house all day. And instead of a picture of the “attempted delivery” note on our door (which wasn’t left) the driver took a picture of their hand. My suspicion is that the picture is supposed to prove they were there, but this one just furthered my suspicion that they didn’t even try. 

As a head's up, this email is going to discuss the death of a household pet, if that's not something you're in a space to deal with, maybe give this one a pass. Hello, Friends. My cat died this weekend. It's hard to even type that. It's also why this newsletter is coming to you on a Sunday afternoon instead of our regularly scheduled time of whenever I wake up and remember to hit send. One of the hurricane stories I didn't tell you in last weeks newsletter was the one about our cat, Felicity. In the weeks leading up to the hurricane, she had greatly slowed her intake of food. We thought she might just have become a picky eater so we tried a variety of different foods for her and she would eat each new food for a little bit, then stop eating that one too. Thursday before the hurricane hit we scheduled an appointment for her at our vet for the following week. Then the hurricane hit. Among all the devastation, our vet was utterly destroyed. We didn't know that at first, because we spent nearly a week before we could even leave our neighborhood. When we did finally get her out to an emergency vet they ran a sonogram and determined she likely had lymphoma. There wasn't anything we could do but give her drugs to make her comfortable for as long as we could and wait for her to tell us when it was time. We got longer than I expected. We originally thought she wouldn't survive the immediate aftermath of the storm, but she was always stubborn and wouldn't let her tragedy get overshadowed by some water from the sky. The drugs perked her up a bit and she even started eating some, but we knew it was only a reprieve. Yesterday morning she made it was clear that it was time. The specifics of how aren't important, but if you've gone through this as a pet owner, you already know. We called a vet service that specializes in euthanasia at home, and we were able to have them out early yesterday afternoon. The doctor who arrived for the procedure was incredibly caring, and made a very difficult process a little bit easier. Amy's dad is a recreational woodworker and surprised us with a very nice box for her remains. Last week, when we had a guy out with a backhoe to replace our culvert (Thanks, Helene) he also was kind enough to dig a hole for her. We buried her, and because sometimes the writing is just a little too on the nose, there was a peal of thunder and it started raining just after we started filling her grave. It was the first rain since the hurricane. We're going to plant wildflowers on her grave, and I can see i from my office window, which is both very nice and very difficult right now. I'm sticking mostly to the facts here, because I don't know that I have the words for how I feel. I'll miss her, I miss her already. Hopefully she's brought you a little joy in the years I've been publishing this newsletter, as she is most often the cat at the end. I know I've had complaints the few times I forgot her photo. I've got about four thousand photos of her on my phone and computer, and I could keep putting them in without interruption for a very long time. But I don't know if I can bring myself to do that. I'm not actually sure that it will feel alright even writing this newsletter without her, but I'll have to find out. I'm going to take a week off next week, because this Friday Amy and I are going to grab a hotel room in the nearest big city that wasn't hit by the hurricane and order takeout all weekend. I'll see how I feel about it after that. Here's the very first picture I ever took of Felicity. It's not a great photo, but it'll do. This was when she was just a cat we found at our door, and I was trying to get photos for lost and found posts if we needed them. We eventually got her to her home, but circumstances conspired that made it clear her real home was with us. I'm glad we could give her a good one.

Hello friends. It has been a minute. If you don't know, I live in the part of the world that was severely impacted by hurricane Helene. I was without power, internet or phone for about 19 days. Thankfully I, and my family are all safe. We were lucky enough to avoid significant damage to our property. During the event and its aftermath, I kept a log of what was happening. It ended up being over 11000 words long. I'm not going to post everything here, but I'm going to drop a few excerpts, lightly edited. I'm also considering putting the full text into a zine or something, once I have the mental wherewithal to accomplish something like that. 9/26 - Thursday Hurricane Helen coming in as of Thursday night Lots of wind and rain as we go to bed The mouse I ordered in from amazon finally arrived. It was delayed by a couple days, probably because of the storm. It was delivered to the wrong place. Our neighbored have a parcel box for deliveries, with their addresses listed right on it. Our address is not listed on it. Amazon sent me a picture of the box sitting outside the package box for our neighbors, loosely covered by a plastic garbage bag. I’m not even mad at the amazon driver, the weather is already pretty bad ad they probably should have even bothered delivering it. We decide to drive down and pick it up. By the time we get there it looks like someone put it in the box, and we don’t have enough light to put in the code to the parcel box and retrieve it. We go back home and go to bed 9/27 - Friday Wind and rain all morning, and by the time it ended about 10, things were looking up. We still had internet and power, but that wouldn’t last. The internet went out about 11:30 and the phone was out when we tried to make a call to my manager and let her know. We went down the driveway and it was covered in trees. At least two had fallen into the drive way. Our northern neighbor's driveway up was also blocked by a couple trees. Water had flooded the creek and was running down the road, which it would do for at least another few hours. When we finally got down past the blockage (after the water stopped rushing) and looked further down the asphalt, just past where it ended, there were some down power/phone lines We could see pas that on the dirt road and there was a divot at least 2 feet deep down the middle and an even larger tree down in the road. Another neighbor came to use our landline, because she didn't know it was out. We gave her some water anyway and I took her a big travel mug for her once she made her way through the brush on the driveway (we didn’t want her crying to carry it an navigate the fallen trees at the same time. We had cheeseburgers on the grill for dinner. Without internet we started watching The Good Wife on my plex server. About half way through the episode we lost power.

I’m on vacation. Here’s a picture of a cat.

I would be absolutely terrine as an intelligence agent. I love telling people about obscure things I know. It probably a blessing nobody wants to ask me about the intricacies of VA mortgages in comparison to Conventional ones. If I had state secrets, I would spill them at the drop of a hat. A thing in my possession: A bunch of different cat food At her latest checkup, felicity, the cat you often se at the end of this newsletter, had lost a couple pounds. Since she's not a huge cat to begin with this was a little concerning. She hasn't been eating as much lately, but it wasn't something we really noticed until after the visit. She's always been a bit of a picky eater, and a grazer, eating not on a set schedule (despite waking me up every morning at an unreasonable hour to put food in her bowl) but rather whenever she feels like it. But it seems like she feels like eating less lately. To see if it was her food that was the problem, we have now bought 6 different types of cat kibble and set them up in little ramekins next to her original food bowl, each with a different sample she can try. Our hope was that she would gravitate towards one more than the others, and we could transition her to that one. But she has sampled all of them, and non with any particular regularity and not at the level she ate previously. So now i have way too many bags of cat food an no better understanding of what she wants to eat or why she is eating less. Cats are bad at communication. The good news is that per personality hasn't changed at all. She's still the annoying butthead she always has been (affectionate.) She sits on our laps while we watch TV and yells at us if we're gone for too long. Oh! A programming note: There will be scant newsletter next week, as I will be in a different part of The Woods on vacation. I might throw something together from my phone, but don't panic if it's late, or not there, or very short. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: The Passage of Time Two things happened this week that made me aware of the passage of time. The first was I picked up an iPhone 4s. I don’t mean picked up metaphorically, but rather I Simply had the opportunity to hold one in my hand. For the first time in probably eight or nine years. What I immediately noticed was how small it was. It felt like a miniature in my hand. Despite the fact that I used a similar sized phone for years, the sense memory of a phone being that shape and size had been completely overwritten in my brain by what a phone feels like now. But putting the size of it aside, I was also really impressed by the design. This was a good looking phone. The front and back glass panels felt cool in my hand and the metal band around the outside edge is probably still apple’s best design choice on a phone ever. Sure the glass was fragile, and prone to shattering (I saw plenty of those when I worked at the store) and the metal band was the source of antenna-gate (remember when Steve Jobs said “stop holding your phone like that”?) but even though the physical realities of using a phone like this day to day were more complicated, I cannot argue that this phone had rizz (I don’t know if people still say rizz, usually by the time I hear slang it is already pretty outdated.) I thought about what it would take to try using this phone today, and I immediately hit the biggest stumbling block: the 30-pin charging cable. In 2012, when apple released the iPhone 5, and introduced the lightning port replacing the 30-pin connector people were angry. There was an entire sub-ecosystem of devices and docs and chargers built up around this plug that had been in use since the earliest days of the iPod, back when apple was a computer company that also made an mp3 player. 30 pin chargers were ubiquitous once, but with a wave of a magic wand (and time) you now stumble on them about as often as you stumble across an audio cassette. I briefly considered spending seven bucks ot have one shipped to me overnight from amazon, and I might still, but also I became weirdly nostalgic for when the cable was everywhere and I could find one by reaching betwen the couch cushions. Of course, we're just past the precipice of another seismic shift in phone charging cables. With the iphone 15 that came out last year, apple switched to USB type C ports on their phones. But unlike the switch from 30-pin to lightning, this change was met with cheers rather than boos. This is in no small part because USBc cables are  already ubiquitous, or at least close too it. They were the cable the EU decided to regulate apple towards. Many people are excited to only need one cable for their devices now. I am as well, the next phone I buy (maybe within the next year?) will have a USBc charger and that's cool. Maybe time marching forward can be a good thing. I expected that section of these poorly organized thoughts to be a little smaller. I wanted to balance it against my re-watch of the show Warehouse 13. Warehouse 13 was a sci-fi show that started in 2009 and followed the adventures of secret service agents whose job was to track down, collect and neutralize the harms of, dangerous artifacts that existed across the country. I watched it in the original run, but in rewatching it 15 years after its premier, I have been struck by how 2009 every thing looks. Sure there's the fashion, but less obvious are the film making choices, It's shot on digital, but that kind of digital that has a certain terroir placing it firmly in a particular time. It's a combination of the lighting, the special effects quality (which aren't bad, just particular) and even the fact that they communicate using a handheld video chatting device called a Farnsworth, that could easily be replaced in the next few years with a commercial available device (like the iphone 4s). That's one risk of predicting futuristic technology, sometimes it comes true. Stuff I'm playing I picked up Immortality in a recent Humble Bundle and I have really enjoyed playing it. It's a game by the same designer that made Her Story and Telling Lies. In those games, you used a unique search engine to sift through dozens of hours of video clips to piece together a mystery. The cool thing about both of those games was that the video was all of actual people. It was an evolution of what used to be called Full Motion Video games, like the TEx Murphy adventure series(starting in the late 80s), or the 11th Guest (1995). FMV games were very cool, because what's more realistic than reality, but they were hard to make within the limitations of video game technology of their time. They fell out of fashion for a while, but have come back as the software has improved alongside computer storage. Immortality changes the format a little of the previous two games by this designer. INstead of using a text search to find clips, you click on different objects in a given scen and get taken to a similar object in a different clip. This "match cut" feature aligns very nicely with the content of the game. It presents the player with the raw footage from three different incomplete films, all staring the same woman, made over three different decades. The introduction to the game tells us the actor at the center of these movies has disappeared, and the movies were never finished, but they creators are presenting it here for anyone to explore. There's a puzzle here, but it feels different from Her Story or Telling Lies. In those, you were working with incomplete knowledge, only seeing a single interrogation room for example, and having to piece together what the mystery even is, or being limited to only seeing one side of a video chat at a time, so you had to piece together whole conversations in Telling Lies. But Immortality is more of a jigsaw puzzle or building a moasic than a mystery. You will probably figure everything out and where the puzzle pieces go, but the joy is in the discovery of the next piece rather than a solution to the mystery itself. I'm really enjoying it. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is We'll Never Have Problems Again Here's a picture of a cat [IMG_0359.jpeg] 

We're going formless again! It's Sunday morning, and I have not thought at all about what 'm going to write this week, so let's see what comes out. I got my latest COVID and flu shots on Friday. I don't like that we as a society didn't do enough to stop the virus when we had a chance, and i don't like that we should probably be making at least 2 vaccines a year instead of the almost one we are currently getting. I don't like that people I know are still getting it, I don't like that masking has gone out of fashion despite the numbers being as high as they ever were, and I don't like that society level problems are being left at the individual level for solutions. But I'm glad I got my shot. This weekend has been a little rough, but manageable. You should get yours too. You wanna read a webcomic? Here's Annie Forever, a self contained story based on the public domain parts of the comic strip Little Orphan Annie. It just finished it's run and is about 100 strips long. Just. the right length for reading through on a Sunday afternoon. I got incredibly lucky when I stopped by the library yesterday. I was going in to pick up a movie I had reserved (Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well) and stopped by the ongoing library book sale on my way in. I don't know if every library had this, by my library has a wall of used books you can buy for 2-3 dollars. These are mostly donated and are used to support the friends of the library. I have found some good stuff in there over the years, and I always like giving them a little extra support. Next. to the wall of mostly hard back books, they have a spinner rack with mass market paperbacks, and another one with DVDs and CDs. I always give the rack a spin, just to see what's there, although I'm never really hoping to find anything. The stuff that ends upon these racks is usually stuff that I would have found otherwise if I really wanted it. But on this most recent theip there was some gold. I first spotted Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is such a wonderful film, but well known enough to not surprise me on the rack. I own it already (from the five dollar bin at walmart) but I was happy to see someone would be able to get it at a great deal. So I kept spinning and one row over was Double Indemnity, a Criterion Collection release. Long time readers know that this is a pretty big deal. I collect Criterion collection movies and the MSRP on them is #40, but you can usually get them for $20 if you'r patient for a sale. But this one was $2. The same price as everything else on the rack. I didn't even think about picking it up, because it was already in my hand before i could complete the thought. If you don't know the film, it's a classic noir thriller starring Fred McMurray, Edward G. Robinson and Barbra Stanwyck, all directed by one of the greats, Billy Wilder. I kept spinning just to be sure and I also found The Killing of Sister George, which isn't a movie I'm at all familiar with. Bu tit was a cover I recognized from browsing the Kino Lorber website (another boutique bluray publisher) so that was in my hand pretty quickly as well. I finished putting the rack through it's spin and landed on Shaun the Sheep Movie. I recently discovered Shaun the Sheep when I was exploring the Wallace and Gromit films, and this was his stop motion animated full length adventure. I took my prizes to the desk and picked up my reserved movie and left with a smile on my face. (and six fewer dollars in my pocket) This week's Crazy Exx-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Sexy French Depression Here's a picture of a cat

It is September! Congrats! You made it another month, and I'm glad you're still here. A few years ago one of my internet acquaintances had an idea to do on online film festival. But not a normal film festival in the way that people submit movies and a jury selects them and then other people buy tickets or passes or whatever. Ideally it would push people to explore new films they wouldn't have seen otherwise, and maybe discover something new and interesting. Not unlike a real festival. But it's hard (impossible?) to find a bunch of movies that nobody has seen, so this film festival allows each participant to program their own slate of movies. So he started with a list of prompts, and then everybody who participates would fill their list with different, but related movies. And we would all spend the month discovering and exploring films together. I think it was a great success. Not a huge number of people participated, but I was one who did, and I loved finding new movies and talking about them(mostly on Mastodon and Letterboxd) with other people doing the same thing. The original author (a guy who goes by Derek_G) only planned to do it one year, but with his permission, I took up the mantle the next year. And now it is September again, so once again, I have created a list of prompts for people to fill with movies. There are 30 prompts and 20 days in September, but since the goal is one of exploration, nobody is required to watch them in any particular cadence or even watch everything. Some folks started a couple weeks ago to get a head start, and some folks will just use the list as an inspiration to decide what to watch. I'm gunna try to watch one every day, but I already "cheated" and watched a couple early (It's not really cheating if you don't have rules) If you'd like to participate too, feel free to do so, or even just use a single prompt to help find a movie you might not have watched otherwise. You can find the list of movies I picked here on Letterboxd, or just grab the list right below. 1. Movie that won an Oscar for best sound 2. A movie with someone’s first name as the title 3. A movie with at least six words in the title 4. A movie with Dick Miller, M Emmet Walsh or Harry Dean Stanton 5. A movie with Judy Greer, CCH Pounder or Margo Martindale 6. The oldest movie in your watchlist 7. The movie that’s been in your watchlist the longest 8. A movie your teacher might throw on when they’re having a bad day and don’t want to teach 9. A legacy sequel (legacyquel) double feature (minimum 15 years between movie & sequel) 10. A legacy sequel double feature (part 2) 11. A movie based on a book 12. A movie based on a TV show 13. A movie made at least 100 years ago 14. A movie made in a country with land south of the Tropic of Capricorn 15. A movie directed by an LGBTQ+ filmmaker 16. A movie directed by an Indigenous filmmaker 17. A movie directed by a non-white non-male-identifying person 18. A movie with a 112 minute runtime 19. A movie by a director who had a film at SXSW in 2024 20. A film directed by Lotte Reiniger 21. A Wuxia movie 22. A movie from 20 essential disabled life films 23. A non-Christmas/non-Halloween holiday movie 24. A movie where they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they don’t stop to think if they should 25. Capitalism is the bad guy! 26. A movie from country you have never logged 27. A movie from a year you have never logged 28. A movie mentioned in a Criterion Closet Video 29. A movie made by/featuring someone picking movies in a Criterion Closet video 30. A movie shot in CinemaScope Have fun watching movies! This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Man Nap Here's a picture of a cat

I'm not saying I have ADHD, but I will say I have accidentally made a second cup of coffee because I forgot I made the first one before. A Thing In my Possession: Home Made Hamburger Buns I'm not turning this into a cooking blog, but I'm also not *not* turning it into a cooking blog. Yesterday, we spent a portion of the day making hamburger buns. The recipe was fairly straight forward, using an adaptation of the hot dog bun recipe from Claire Saffitz, the most intimidating part of which was making the tangzhong. Tangzhong is a cooked milk, water and flower mixture that you prepare and mix into the rest of your bread ingredients. It allows the bread to hold more moisture and makes the final product much softer and gives it a real pillowy delicate texture. I have seen recipes that use them before, but it always seems like a scary extra step, but it turns out not to be much harder and wow did it make a difference.  I'm not exactly going to be making buns with any regularity, but when I do make them again, I won't be skipping that step. Poorly Organized Thoughts On: Internet Quizzes  You know what you don’t see enough of anymore? Silly internet quizzes. I read a lot of magazines as a kid, and one of the ubiquitous things in the magazines I read was the quiz. 10-20 questions on a topic like “how messy is your bedroom” or “how to tell if someone like likes you.” You would circle you answers then check the key at the end to find out “your bedroom is very messy” or “they only think of you as a friend” or whatever. I loved these quizzes, not necessarily because of the deeper truths they revealed about the universe or the person who was taking them, but because of how they were constructed. Each question had four possible answers, A, B, C, or D, and it was obvious from the very beginning that each letter was one of the eventual categories at the end. They were so blatant. Question one would be “how much dirty laundry do you have in your bedroom?” And the answers would be something like A) None, I do my laundry every day. B) Some, but it’s all in the hamper. C) There’s a few pieces scattered around. D) My bedroom is a wasteland of scattered clothing, there's no where to exist without touching some of it. Archeologists would weep with joy as they discover a lifetime's worth of work in digging everything up  in here. This would repeat over and over again and the answer key would be Mostly A: Get checked out by a professional for OCD Mostly B: Clean and tidy, I bet you make your parents proud Mostly C: You could be trying harder, but at least you're trying Mostly D: A total slob, but at least you're happy. You are happy, right? And the trend would continue. So when I took these quizzes, I wasn't trying to find out anything about myself, but rather I would try to figure out which category each answer belonged to. You (meaning, I) could tell how much work went into creating the quiz by how long it took to figure out the categories and trends. The lowest effort ones had the four categories on a spectrum getting progressively more intense from A to D. Not unlike my bedroom question above. But if they wanted to be clever, they would mix the categories up, so cleanest would be D, messiest  would be C and the two middle options would be B and A. But even then most of the time you would have the answers lined up so that all the As fit one category, the Bs one category and so on. This is because you can still take the answer key and have the Mostly A, Mostly B format. If they really wanted to impress me, they would truly mix up the answers from question to question. This took a lot more work, both for the writer and the quiz taker. The writer would assign each answer a point value (usually one to four) and the answer key would describe how much answer each one was worth. this made it so you had to guess the category solely on vibes instead of the ordering, and was a lot more fun (for me, the person taking these wrong). At the end you would add up the point values for you answers and that number would then be mapped to another group of categories. It was a lot of fun. Then then internet came along and made this whole process much easier. Both the writing and the taking. It became so ubiquitous that society renamed them buzzfeed quizzes instead of magazine quizzes. People were churning these out constantly and they were the lowest of low effort. One would hope that by making the scoring something that could be automated, it would allow the quiz writers to put more nuance and complication into the quizzes, but now, they got evermore shallow. "Which ninja turtle are you?" Would have questions like What is your favorite color? A)Blue B)Purple C)Red D)Orange Which best describes you? A)Leader B)Nerd C)Cool, but sometimes rude D)Party Animal you get the picture. It became a real wasteland of garbage quizzes, not unlike the messy room in category D from the earlier quiz. Every no and then you might find one that was worth taking, but you never knew when you started, and most of the time it wasn't even worth the 2 minutes to take and find out. But! There were exceptions, and parodies. The format became a place for humor to thrive, and did allow for the greatest internet quiz to ever exist. So I present to you: Which One of My Garbage Sons are you? Please enjoy. Stuff I'm Playing I re-installed No Man's Sky again, because there was another recent update that made it even better. It's a space exploration game with an absolutely gigantic procedurally generated galaxy. You start out with a tiny little ship without any fuel or even a hyperdrive. You gather resources and repair the ship and then begin exploring the galaxy. The scale and scope of the game is realy impressive and you can fly from planet to planet and system to system learning more about the universe as you go. You even have to learn the languages of the aliens you encounter, word by word. This is really a game that has been a true labor of love by the developers. It had a pretty disastrous launch back in 2016, where it was completely unable to live up to the hype that had been generated about it, but in the intervening years, they have just kept working on it, releasing regular updates to address the problems it had and make the game even more fun. I'm only a few hours into my current playthrough, but already there are some real quality of life changes, that make it into a game I could see myself playing a lot more of. Speaking of games that I have played a lot of, I got back into Rimworld for a while. Rimworld is a colony buoilding game where you start on planet at the rim of the galactic sivilization and try to create a society and survive. It's a lot of fun, but I think I might have hit my limit with this recent playthgough. I feel like I have exhausted all the available systems, and I think I'll have to pick up one or two of the expansions that exist before diving back in next time I've been playing only on vanilla mode, no mods or expansions, and I still managed to get nearly 300 hours into the game. Not bad. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is If you Ever Need a Favor in Fifty Years Here's a (kinda blurry) picture of a cat

Sorry for the lack of cat picture in last week’s newspaper. The responsible parties have been appropriately reprimanded. A Thing in My Possession: New Headphones Bluetooth might be my favorite technology of the recent past. It’s hardly new, but it is such a specifically useful feature for device to device communication. The most common use of bluetooth is of course, headphones. Now the actual audiophiles out there will say that listening to anything without a wire is bad for you because your life will be demonstrably worse without the richer fuller sound that a wire can bring, and they’re probably right! But I’ll take convince over quality three out of four times. And there’s nothing more convenient than bluetooth headphones. I have owned apple AirPods, but they wore out over time because the batteries aren’t replaceable and batteries are a disposable product. But airpods are expensive, so the last time I bought some headphones I waited until there was a sale on meh.com and bought the most reasonably priced AirPods knockoff they offered. now I say knockoff, but they look nothing like AirPods, instead they are just “true wireless” earbuds, meaning they don’t connect to each other and have a little charging case. This is, of course, the exact style of headphone that the AirPods pioneered and arguably made very mainstream. These, however, were much cheaper. I got two pairs for twenty bucks. I like that I have two pairs, because one of the least fun things about bluetooth headphones is disconnecting them from one device to connect to another. I have my computer that I want them to be attached to during the day, but in the evenings or on weekends, I will often connect them to the tv, because our tv is in the bedroom and I don’t want to disturb my sweetheart if she is sleeping. So now I have a set in my office and one by the tv and all I have to do is pop them in and they connect. It’s great for my specific use case, which is all that matters. Poorly Organized Thoughts On: Patreon I don’t know anybody who uses pattern as a service (either creator or customer) who actually likes pattern as a company. What they offer is valuable despite all the work the company does to create new features that people don’t want, or turn off features they do. When pattern was created, they offered a “per creation” style of supporting creators. You pledged a dollar amount and when the creator released something, you paid your pledged amount. It was truly a crowdsourced form of art patronage. It was a killer feature that allowed artists and creators to set up a recurring mini-kickstarter that supported the creation of their art specifically. It was a huge success and ever since then the company would like you to stop using that feature instead of any other options they offer. Those other two options are “first of the month” billing and “monthly subscription” which sound similar but are slightly different. With first of the month billing, you only charge your patrons on the first of the month, which makes sense. This also allowed for a sort of “try before you buy” option to creators, where you could not charge for the first month when they signed up, and let them sample your wares and decide if they wanted to stick around. Or you could charge them they day they join and then have a recurring charge afterwards. Choices! Choices are good! So there are three different ways you can run a patreon with the ability to customize to fit your needs. Nice. Except, Pay per thing billing was a mess on patrons end. They had to pay a lot more in processing fees instead of lumping everything together into one lump transaction. That was money their investors really wanted. Because their investors were silicon valley types who didn’t want pattern to be a payment processor, a profitable and stable business, no they wanted pattern to experience 10x growth, which meant making new features and squeezing every dollar out of the platform as possible. A while ago they turned off the ability to start a new pattern with a “per thing” pricing. My podcast was only able to get away with it because I had an unlatched patreon sitting around from before the cutoff. And now they’re removing the First of the month option for creators as well. So instead of creators getting one lump sum at the beginning of each month (helpful for budgeting) they’re getting amounts scattered around. And for patrons who support multiple creators they are no longer charged for all of their first of the month subscriptions at the same time (the first of the month), but instead on whichever day of the month they subscribed. So if you support five different creators, you could have five different subscription payment dates. So by november 2025 (still a ways away) everyone on patreon will be forced to switch to this model, even if you previously had a different payment setting. Patreon is blaming this change on Apple, because (according to patreon) Apple is forcing them to switch to apple’s subscription model (recurring payment on the same day of the month) for everything or apple will remove the app from the app store. Plus Apple will be taking their exorbitant 30% cut from all subscriptions through the app. Patreon is “helpfully” letting creators eat the cost, or helping the creators raise their rates for Apple customers. But Patreon has another option. Ditch the app. The app is bad. Lean back towards being a payment processor. You can save your creator’s money by not paying apple extra money they don’t need, you can still host everything on a website (remember websites? They were the thing we had before apps.) And once you start bending to these rules from apple, you’re going to be bending to more. There are a lot of creators on patreon who make “adult” content. Patreon hides them, because if you get flagged as adult you can’t be searched for, but if they have an audience outside the platform (and most creators on patreon do) discoverability within the app is next to useless. Have you ever discovered someone because patreon recommended them? I haven’t. But I don’t think patreon wants to ditch the app, and I think they weighed the costs and benefits (to them) and decided this was the path they wanted to go down, while trying to blame apple for their decision. Apple doesn’t need my support, but they’re at least setting the terms fairly (unless yours one of the companies who gets a better deal, but that’s for another time.) So I don’t know what I’m going to do about my very modest patreon. Maybe I’ll shut it down, completely and go back to just making the podcast without support. Maybe I’ll let the automatic switch to subscription billing happen and just roll with it (which is what patreon wants) but either way I won’t be happy about it. Maybe patreon will listen to their creators for once, but I’m not holding my breath. Stuff I'm watching: I really enjoy the youtube channel Veronica Explains, which is run my a self described "Linux mom" who, well, explains things. She does a mix of retro comupting, gaming, and linux content, but shes fun to listen to and explains things in a way I can understand. Her videos helped me make the switch to linux a few years ago and I'm glad for it. Another youtube channel I like is Michaelcthulu who is a welder wo makes really giant swords. He does a great job of making long form videos that explain what he's doing and how it works, but they also take a long time to make, so he only puts out a couple a year. They're still worth watching though. A third youtube channel I'll recommend is Uncommon Ephemera which is a channed dedicated to preserving filmstrips. You remember film strips? The slideshows that you watched in class where a series of static images were played alongside a tape? The whole channel got nuked awhile ago due to a copyright strike, but they've been rebuilding it, and it's worth checknig out if you want to learn about things like journalism from Scooby doo, or how syphilis works. This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is I Feel Like This Isn't About Me. Here's a picture of a cat. For real this time.

Our local walmart won't let us buy frozen vegetables for curbside pickup. I don't know if this is a national thing, or a local problem, but I am not going inside walmart for frozen vegetables. Poorly Organized Thoughts about The Criterion Collection CC40 Box Set Criterion Collection! For a lot of film buffs it’s the gold standard in boutique Blu-ray and physical film collecting. I can say that for me, at least, it was the doorway to a deeper understanding of film. They put out high quality physical releases of movies. Generally they are movies people consider outstanding and worth recognition. Not every movie they release is a masterpiece, but anything they put out is at least worthy of consideration. They have a reputation for putting out snooty art house fare, but the actual variety in the collection is quite broad.  I’ve been collecting Criterion DVDs for a long time. And one of my general practices is to use a random number generator to select a movie when I need one more to bump my order over the free shipping threshold. It’s been pretty successful strategy and I have discovered some absolute favorites that way. (Shameless plug: I even made a youtube essay because of one I picked randomly). Because there are literally over a thousand movies in the collection it can be pretty overwhelming to pick out some. Criterion seems to have realized this and done something to remedy this with their recent announcement of CC40, a 40 film box set collection of movies from the collection. It was put together to celebrate 40 years of the Criterion Collection existing (they started with Laserdisc!) The box set has some really well known and very good films in it, the complete list is  “8½ (1963), Tokyo Story (1953), All That Jazz (1979), Bicycle Thieves (1948), Repo Man (1984), Naked (1993), Jules and Jim (1962), Being There (1979), Weekend (1967), Yi Yi (2000), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Pickpocket (1959), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), On the Waterfront (1954), Do the Right Thing (1989), Ratcatcher (1999), Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), Mirror (1975), Barry Lyndon (1975), Safe (1995), Seconds (1966), His Girl Friday (1940), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Y tu mamá también (2001), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Love & Basketball (2000), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Ace in the Hole (1951), 3 Women (1977), The Red Shoes (1948), Down by Law (1986), La Ciénaga (2001), Wanda (1970), House (1977), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Battle of Algiers (1966), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Persona (1966), In the Mood for Love (2000) all on Blu Ray.” Now all of these are existing movies that are available in the criterion collection, either individually or in another box set. The retail price for each of these movies on blu ray is $40. So if you do some math that means if you bough all of these movies individually it would cost $1600, which is a lot! Of course most people probably would buy them during the semi-regular 50% off sales, putting the actual likely price down to $800. Still a lot! And $800 is what the MSRP is for this box set. So far, this sounds like a decent deal; 40 well liked movies in a high quality presentation with all the supplements you could want for twenty bucks each. It’s a pretty big initial cost, but generally I would say the movies are worth it. And it’s yet to be seen if this box set will also be eligible for the 50% off sale, which would push it down to $400 or $10 per film, which is actually a very good price compared to the $40 individual film MSRP. But this assumes you want all the movies, or don’t already own them as a criterion collector. I’ve been actively collecting for at least 10 years, buying 6-10 movies per year, and as a comparison, through sheer coincidence I happen to own 8 of the films in the box set, which if I buy it on sale means that I would be paying $12.50 per movie for the ones I don’t already own. So even then this seems like a really good deal, assuming you can stomach the upfront cost. And that cost is still pretty steep. Sometimes people (it’s me, I’m people) talk about the Criterion collection as a film school in a box. That is, because of their robust supplemental features like commentaries, essays, and behind the scenes videos that come with every movie, buying a Criterion movie or tow is a great way to start learning about the art form of film. And now there is this literal Criterion Collection In A Box for the people who want to dive in head first a(nd have 400-800 dollars to spend.) I’ve seen some people calling this a cash grab, which i think is pretty funny o it’s face. Because if it was a cash grab it would probably be more expensive. What I think this actually is, is a starter set for someone new to collecting Criterion Collection films. It’s a (relatively) inexpensive way to kickstart a collection of movies with a single upfront purchase. It’s not ideal for the people who own most of the movies, and If you’re the sort of person who feels like you have to buy all the criterion releases, then you might be pretty conflicted buying this if you already own most or all of the movies. But that can easily be solved by not buying this. The one area of compliant I kind of understand is that of aesthetics. The movies come in a big box, which means you’re missing out on the display opportunities of individual releases. There’s something to be said for this. I like displaying my movies, and one of the things that Criterion boxes are known for is their above average box art. Often they have absolutely gorgeous covers the boxes and they are an art all to themselves. In one big box you don’t have that aspect of owning the movies. But also, I don’t store my DVDs facing out, because that’s very inefficient and I’m not running a blockbuster. I have them spine out on a shelf and I own them because of what’s in the box more than I ever would because of the outside cover. 
So am I going to buy this? I don’t know! I don’t exactly have a spare $400, but also the box doesn’t some out until November, which means the next Criterion Flash Sale it would be in is not until February. So maybe? We’ll see. A Thing in my Possession: a big batch of caramelized onions. I spent the morning yesterday caramelizing onions. It’s not a complicated process, but it is time consuming. I threw a stick of butter into a dutch oven over low heat and let it melt. Then I sliced about four or five pounds of onions, which was probably the worst part. I did it with the slicing disc on my food processor, so really the hardest part was peeling the onions before slicing them. Once they were all sliced I dropped them into the pot and butter. I put on the lid and every fifteen minutes or so for the next three hours I got up and stirred the pot for a bit. What happened then was culinary magic. The onions stank by probably 75-80% as they cooked out all the water, and turned from white to a deep rich brown. the end result was a sort of rich flavorful jammy onion blob. I then took that oniony goodness and spread it out into two ice cube trays. This is the most crucial step. Caramelized onions are great in everything, but since they’re so time consuming it’s hard to have them on hand at short notice. So by putting them into ice cube trays, I can freeze individual portions, and when I want some for a dish, I can pop a cube of them into the pot along with the rest of the whatever it is I am cooking and then get an instant intense burst of additional flavor. I don’t know if this is what the term flavor bomb was invented for, but it seems like a perfect use. Stuff I’m watching: Cartoons! Because some things never change, there are cartoons from my youth that are still being made today. Say what you will about the Intellectual property giants taking over everything in hollywood (and most of the things I would say are bad) but This week I started watching the brand new episodes of Futurama, an animated series about Batman and one about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These are all things I enjoyed as a kid and now that I am definitely not a kid, it’s wild that they are still making these shows. Futurama is technically a continuation of the original show from 2000. It’s been cancelled and brought back twice (three times?) now and with a lot of the same creatives at the head and all of the original voice cast. One the three shows I’m talking about here, it’s probably doing the worst. Satire of modern culture is hard and the more specific it gets the less well it ages. SO the first episode back being about NFTs is real evidence of that. People stopped caring about NFTs a while ago, but with the long lead times of animation, it’s hard to make jokes that anyone is interested in about them. Batman: Caped Crusader isn’t technically the same show as Batman The Animated Series from my youth, but it does have that show’s creator Bruce Timm at the head and it apes a lot of the former show’s style. Instead of being set in a modern day Gotham, it’s explicitly a period piece, taking place in roughly the 1940s. This lends a grounded feel to everything, where batman’s gadgets are a little more plausible and he has to do some real detective work to solve mysteries. So far it’s a lot of fun, showing you can have still have a serious Batman cartoon, whithout going into grimdark territory. Finally Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the largest deviation from my youth, but still in conversation with it. No creatives from the 1987 show here, but Turtle fans are used to that and embracing new interpretations o the characters. From the live action movies, to the four other animated series that came before this one, and even the Michael Bay movies (which have some good parts!) the Turtles are a flexible product and this is another chance to flex them around. This show has the same voice cast as the movie that came out last year, Mutant Mayhem, and that voice cast did a great job. The turtle brothers actually felt like brothers in a way that doesn’t always happen, and they felt like teenagers. Probably because they were played by actual teenagers for the first time. The animation style is based on the movie, and I’m not sure it translates well to the 2d space from 3d, but I’m willing to give it a chance. The TV series is a little more heavily serialized than I would like, at least so far, but that’s also the curse of almost every modern TV show. I hoped a cartoon for kids could lean a little less heavily on that but in the can time i’ll watch it anyway and wait for the pendulum to win back to episodic stories. Also the theme song doesn’t have lyrics, which is a huge mistake. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is I have Friends Here's a picture of a cat

We're going free-form today. Just some little thoughts about things. It's like a twitter feed but not run by a fascist. I did finish that book from last week. Felt good to get finish a book, even if it was a short one and I'm not even sure I liked it. I started a new book too, and it's of a similar lenght, but I'm already about 60% done with it. I don't want to call my reading slump over prematurely, but it's a good feeling. I'm gunna change your life with one phrase: Sheet-Pan Pancakes. You make the batter like normal, then you line a sheet pan with parchment and pour it all in, and then bake them in an oven (350f) until they're golden brown and delicious. Slice and serve. No standing over the stove trying to guess when each one is ready to flip, and they're all done at the same time! I've been using the same podcast app forever, and it's pretty good. But then the most recent update was a full ground-up rebuild and now everything is different in the UI> I'm sure it's fine, but the worst part is that the app apparently had to re-download all the previously downloaded episodes that I had saved on my device. Which is a problem, because I probably had 50-100 episodes of things I swear I was gunna get wound to listening to eventually. And the two or three episodes I actually wanted weren't available when I tried listening in the car. I pre-download them because I have bad internet and worse cell service, so It would be nice if the app kept the things I downloaded. Nor is there a way to prioritize the episodes to download, so it's just trying to download everything at once. And it apparently is having trouble downloading when the app isn't open so it's just not happening unless I leave it open on my desk, like I'm doing right now. Grief never really goes away does it. I lost a dear friend many years ago and every time I remember it's like picking open a scab. The wound is still there. It's the 9th anniversary of his death tomorrow, which I did not know until I started writing this. I've watched about 90 minutes of live olympics coverage so far this games. I'm more of a winter olympics fan, so I don't try as hard to catch what's happening in the Summer games. But the one thing I learned watching the live feeds is that a good commentator can make a sport cool, and the ads they show during the olympics are excruciating. I get ads on one or two of the streaming services I have, and I don't love them but they're tolerable. They happen only a couple times per episode and are usually short. Olympics live overage ads feel like they can happen at any second. They're like commerce jump-scares and also they're bad? Not in a charming "local heating and plumbing company doing their best" sort of way, but rather in an "Uber trying to convince me I'll never be alone if I can pay someone to deliver food to me" or a "pharmaceutical company trying to make me excited about drug ads (A thing I actively hate)" sort of way. I actually stopped watching the olympics because of the ads. I got tired of fighting the apple music app, which is no longer an app for playing my own music, but rather an ever present series of design choices to encourage me to sign up for the apple music streaming service while making it harder to access the music I own and paid for. So I downloaded the plexamp music player app and have used it a very small amount. I like it so far since it immediately recognized the music on my server/computer and made it easily searchable. I can also download the music for offline play, which is something I was previously paying apple $25 a year for. So this is already an improvement. Ok, I'm gunna go make some coffee. Remember: Salt binds to the same taste receptors as bitter flavors do, so a very small amount of salt in your coffee can greatly improve the cup. It's the same reason salted caramel works and people put salt on dark chocolate. You don't need to put it in an already good cup, but a bad cup will be better. This Week's Crazy Ex Girlfriend Song of the Week is Hungry Vagina Metaphor Here's a picture of a cat

There's a British game show called countdown where one of the rounds involves getting a series of numbers and trying to put them into a mathematical formula to give a randomly selected number. It's an interesting brain puzzle and I find myself doing it often when I see a series of numbers. Like I saw the numbers 2 9 and 3 in order for some reason recently, so I bounced them around until I was able to get "The Square(2nd) Root of 9 equals 3" So if you ask me what I'm thinking about there's a nonzero chance that the answer will be putting numbers into math. Stuff In my possession: A bunch of DVDs* "Kevin, we already know you have so many DVDs I hear you shouting at your screen. Yes, I know, but I want to talk about something interesting regarding them. ANd I can't remember if I've written about it before. I recently came into a pile of used DVDs and have been in the process of ripping the video files off to add to my plex server. I'm pretty good at the process by now, having been doing it since, I dunno, 2017? But every time I put a new DVD into my drive, I get a little thrill of excitement wondering what the DVD is going to be called. Sure I know the name of the movie or TV show on the DVD but that's not the same thing as what the computer recognizes as the name of the disc. DVDs store data. That data needs to be organized in some way. If you’ve touched an actual computer in theist 10 years you’ve probably seen a filesystem. This is typically organized with a Hard drive, then a bunch of folders and subfolders with all the individual files floating around somewhere in there. Typically we’re not too interested in the majority of the files, but there are certain ones we really like. For example, the Film I’m currently writing this text in is in a folder called Newsletter drafts which is in a documents folder which is in a user folder which is in a another folder inside another one until you get to the top level, which is the hard drive. Knowing where it is is important, although not as important as it once was, because my word processor has an “open recent files” option, so I can just pull this back up without going through the entire heirchy. But the program I’m using is also a bunch of files inside a series of nested subfolders. I don’t need to know anything about that organization because the software handles itself on my behalf. So effectively the entire structure is invisible to me the end user. I could go learn it, but why bother. I’m oversimplifying a little bit, but you get the idea. I hope. So the computer needs to know what to call the top level of the DVD and someone somewhere originally had to decide what to call it. But it's not exactly a piece of information that was ever meant to be public facing. They needed a name to use when authoring the DVD and they picked whatever worked best in the moment and their workflow. Usually this is something simple like "jackass2" or "taxiS1D2" to refer to Jackass Number Two or The second disc of the first season of Taxi. but sometimes they get weird. There's a disc in my drive right now with the name 1000029739. I have no idea what that number refers to, or how it relates to the content of the disc, but I really like the mystery. And the mystery will be even deeper for you because I'm not even going to tell you what's on the disc. JJ Abrams would love this. *Note: I use DVD to mean any disc based physical media used primarily for watching video. This includes DVD classic, Bluray, 4k Blu ray (Bad branding if you ask me) and even Laserdisc. All of these (except laserdisc) store video digitally on a disc. Laserdisc stores its video signal in an analogue format, but we don’t have time for that right now. Besides, I only own one laserdisc. Poorly Organized Thoughts On: How to make coffee I like coffee, but I also and independently like all the different ways there are to make coffee. I have half a dozen devices for making coffee myself, an there are always more. And as many ways as there are to make coffee, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to tweak any given process when you factor in things like grind size, water temperature, bean, roast level and water to coffee ratio. I want to talk about that last one for a moment. There's not universal truths when it comes to coffee making, but one of the most standardized things is the goffee to water ratio. Without over complicating things, a very commonly agreed upon "good" ratio is 60 grams of coffee for a liter of water. This comes out to roughly a 1:16 ratio of coffee to water. This is a good ratio because you get a maximum of the good coffee flavors without over extracting. Over extracting a coffee brew pulls all of the worst, bitterest tasting, solubles into your coffee. If you've had an over extracted cup it probably didn't taste very good. And probably nothing like it smelled. Some people just think this is how coffee tastes, because the majority of coffees they've had are over-extracted. But they don't know that . They just think it's too strong, so they want to make a "weaker" cup of coffee and then doctor it up with cream and sugar and sprinkles. There's nothing wrong with cream and sugar or any other additives to coffee. Drink it how you want, but also I think it's a good idea to start with a great base if you going to have coffee at all. But instead people end up in a cycle of putting less coffee into their brewer and more water and making a worse and worse cup in hopes of making it better. I still remember the most significant example of this I experienced in my life. I was probably middle school aged, and I was offered the opportunity to help make the coffee for Sunday morning at church. My church had a fancy commercial coffee maker that brewed right into the large pump action carafes. This meant making the coffee was a pretty full proof process. You opened the basket, put in a filter, added the coffee, and then closed everything up and hit the start button. But when the very nice woman was explaining these steps to me, she made it clear that I should only use half of the pre-filled coffee packets that came with the machine, because otherwise the coffee would be too strong. I thought it was weird that pre-portioned packets of coffee wouldn't come in the right size, but what do I know? Well now I do know. I've done some research on the tools and packets involved and what I know is that those carafes held about 3 liters of coffee. and the prepared packets had about 2 ounces of ground coffee. 2 ounces, is roughly 60 grams, which means that we were already starting on the back foot, where we had less coffee that we should have for that volume of water. But by cutting the coffee packet in half, we ended up with roughly 30 grams of coffee for 3 liters of water. Meaning our final ratio was much closer to 1:100 coffee to water instead of 1:16. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is I'm sorry to all the people who drank my terrible coffee at church. I hope you;ve had better coffee since. Stuff I'm Reading: I'm still in a bit of a reading slump, as I ave been most of the year. But a youtuber I liked recommended a few short books that felt like twilight zone episodes, and that was a good enough reason to try one (or all of them) out. The first one I could get my hands on was The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada. It's a relatively short novella, at roughly 120 pages long in the copy I have. It takes place in a giant factory of indeterminate process, and follows 3 employees who aren't even sure how their jobs serve the unstated purpose of the factory. It's sort of a meditation on meaningless jobs and I'm enjoying it. I hope to finish it this week. This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Apple Man Here's a picture of a cat

I think it's very funny how when I lose internet access I also have to explain to people that I lose my ability to make phone calls, and can't just use a wifi hotspot to get back online. I have no cell towers near enough to me that I can reliably get service (there is one corner of my bedroom I can occasionally get one bar, but it's mostly a phantom. It's not ideal, but on the bright side, I just saw a bunny outside my window, so on balance, I think I'm coming out ahead. A thing in my possession: A bunch of Takis Are you familiar with Takis? They're a rolled tortilla chip, similar to a dorito if each one was rolled into a tube. But where doritos give you a pleasant nacho or ranch flavor, takis are a flavor explosion. The classic flavor is called Fuego and it is a surprisingly spice and sour flavor combination. They're so intense that when I first started eating them I could only eat one or two at a time before putting the bag down. I would come back though. But I learned that Takis makes a lot more flavors than just Fuego, so I set about trying them to see if any were as good. The short answer is no, but some come close. I bought every flavor my local grocery store had (which was more than I expected) and have now tried them all. Here's my thoughts. Guacamole: These taste unreasonably like guacamole. I don't really like guacamole, so they were never going to rate high for me, but I have to give them high marks for accuracy. None spicy as well, if you want that. Intense Nacho: These are the Taki version of a nacho cheese Dorito. They're not bad! Doritos still does it better, even if that's just familiarity talking. And they are intensely cheesy, which I don't think Doritos nacho flavor quite captures. None Spicy Buckin Ranch: This is closely related to, but distinct from a cool ranch dorito. This feels less like trying to mimic those flavors, but instead asking what does ranch dressing actually taste like and can we turn that into a powder to put on our chips. The answer is yes. I also don't love ranch dressing, but these chips are more palatable to me than the guacamole ones are. None spicy Blue Heat: Flavor wise these are just too close to Fuego. The whole time I was eating them, all I could really think was that I would rather be eating a different taki (fuego) I think the biggest defining feature is the very unnatural shade of blue they turn your mouth (and fingers if you're not using takis chopsticks to keep your fingers clean) High Spicy Dragon Sweet Chili: These are really good. Where fuego takis are hot and sour, these are hot and sweet. They also aren't quite as spicy as fuego, and the flavor profile is distinct enough that I feel like they could find regular shelf space in my cabinet next to the fuego takis. Medium high spicy Fuego: These are the gold standard. These are the ones the kids are singing about, the ones that set the bar. The ones that no other chip can compare to. These will blow out your palate and make your head spin. Highly recommended. High Spicy. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Group Hang Here's a picture of a cat

I don’t want to give Zack Snyder too much credit, but he did manage to write one line that I have thought about often since I first heard it. In Zack Snyder’s Justice League (which is the official title of the film) Zack Snyder has Bruce Wayne/Batman played by Ben Affleck say to his butler Alfred “I’m older now than my father ever was.” It’s not that this line is particularly clever, it’s a sentiment I’ve probably seen elsewhere as people grapple with grief and how it never really leaves, even as time continues to pass. But the line, in this context, being said by Batman/Bruce Wayne, who turned his grief over the murder of his parents into his only reason for being, casts it into a new light. We see Brucie/the Bats putting his entire existence as a vigilante into a very particular time frame. That one moment, the defining moment of his life, was so long ago that he has overtaken his fatter’s age. We wonder if Mr. Wayne/Mr. Man is questioning his decision to put on a silly costume and punch petty criminals. He looks back and thinks he could have spent the past however many years doing anything else. Raising a family, perhaps. But no, he spent it punching criminals, and as his next line indicates, he isn’t sure it was worth it. He says, “ Criminals are like weeds, Alfred; pull one up, another grows in its place.” He’s been doing this all and isn’t sure it was ever worth it. The line is so good. It probably isn’t Oscar worthy, but by the existing standard of Zack Snyder, the man who thought he was so clever that he was the only one who ever realized Batman and Superman’s mom’s first names are the same. And then went the extra step of making that fact a key plot point in his previous movie. Poorly organized thoughts on: DVD Collecting I don’t want to start off by making it seem like I have too many movies. I have lots of movies and I will probably have more in the future. But I am trying to keep in mind how many movies I have and haven’t yet watched before I go buying more. There are a number of boutique blu-ray labels that have had sales in the past month, and it has been a bit of a struggle for me to not add to my collection. But I also recently cataloged which movies in my collection I haven’t even watched, and the number is higher than it should be As of this writing, there are 189 movies in my “Owned but unwatched” list on letterboxd (https://letterboxd.com/kevsaund/list/movies-i-own-but-havent-watched-yet/) and if you compare that to my list of owned movies (https://letterboxd.com/kevsaund/list/all-the-movies-i-own/) You can do the math and see that it comprises about 22% of my total collection. That’s higher than it should be! There’s a few reasons for the discrepancy. The biggest reason is probably Boxed Sets. I’ll occasionally find a box set on sale, or even better in a used book store for cheap, and buy it. I have a hard time passing up a good deal. I’ve picked up more than a few boxed sets that way, including the Zatoichi The Blind Swordsman set and the Complete Universal Monsters set (you know, Dracula, the mummy, Frankenstein etc) each of which has nearly 30 movies in it. I’m bad at binging, and so when I pick up one of these, it’s not easy for me to sit and watch them all in a row. I like to pace myself out and watch them here and there, between other movies. But that can be harder if I have multiple box sets in the queue at once. But sometimes I’ll pick up a movie because it’s something I want to watch eventually. There’s a fuzzy calculation where I compare the price of a movie to my general desire to watch it, and if the price is low enough, it can push even a vaguely interesting movie into the realm of buyable. And boxed sets make this movie math even more enticing. It’s easy to buy a box set with even a couple movies I know I want and the rest becomes cruft or filler but also makes buying those two or three movies I want seem like an even better deal. I bought a BBS Studios box set, which had classics like Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show and Easy Rider (which I have watched) but also had stuff like Drive, He Said and The Kind of Marvin Gardens, which are films you’ve probably never heard of. So even though, Criterion, Arrow, Kino Lorber, Vinegar Syndrome, and Severin all had/have sales this month, I’ve instead put more effort into making that list smaller. Even a month ago, it was at just over 200 films, so progress can be made! But also, a friend has literally just mailed me a box full of movies from a family member who passed away and wanted to make sure they ended up with someone who would want them. This isn't even the first time this has happened. A side-effect of being "the DVD Guy" to more than a few friends. So progress will continue to be slow. Some highlights from the list, ranked in rough  order from least to most shame I feel for not having seen them. The Creature Walks Among Us - A Creature from the Black Lagoon sequel. I’m watching the Universal Monsters movies in chronological order, and this one came pretty late in the game. Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl - A Post apocalyptic musical set sometime after the “Google wars.” this is in the category of “internet movies I don’t quite remember acquiring.” I may have backed it on kickstarter, or just gotten a copy because someone blogged about it. I don’t remember. Yi Yi - I bought this in a Criterion sale because it came highly recommended, and I needed something to get me over the free shipping threshold. Jeanne Dielman 28, Qua du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles - Recently topped Sight and Sound’s best 100 movies of all time list, dethroning previous winners like Citizen Kane and Vertigo. I want to watch it really I do, but it is also three hours long and mostly consists of a woman doing household chores in silence. West Side Story - I really don’t have an excuse for this one. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is What U Missed While U were PopUlar Here's a picture of a cat [IMG_0209.jpeg] -

Just over five years ago, I spent a week watching The Young and the Restless every day. It was mostly an experiment in seeing if I could figure out what was going on. Soap operas have a reputation for very dramatic and complicated plots, and I wondered what it would be like to jump in with no additional research or understanding of the show other that what I learned from a week of watching. I was surprised by just how much was happening on an episode by episode basis. Sure each episode was mostly people in three different locations cross-cut at specific moments to build tension, but something happened in almost every episode. There was a sense of forward momentum, even it wasn't always clear where we were going or where we were coming from. But there was plenty of exposition and I was able to follow the story lines well enough that by the end of the week I felt like I really had a grasp on where things were, even as they ended on a bit of a cliffhanger. I also learned that the show's cast rotated between episodes, so the whole cast was never in a single episode, but rather they would show up a few times a week, but rarely in every episode. And at the end of the week, I had become invested enough that I actually considered watching the show some more. I didn't do that, but I thought about it. Looking back on my notes on watching the show from four years ago, There were a lot of classic soap opera bits either mentioned or depicted on screen. There was a kidnapping, a history of someone with amnesia, people pulling guns and big revelations. So I was excited to try jumping back into the show this week, to see if it would catch my attention again. My original intention was to do what I did last time, keep a daily log and write up my thoughts every day to put into this newsletter. That didn't go quite to plan, as I ended up missing one day and having to double up. But I'll at least give you a quick breakdown of what happened each episode. I'm gunna use names, but one interesting thing about watching this show cold, is that I often spend the first half of any given scene trying to figure out who everyone is and their relationships to each other. But here I'll save you the work of figuring it out and just tell you. I'm also going to split it up by storyline, rather than jumping back and forth. Monday: Summer arrives at the home of her child Harrison, and has a confrontation with Harrison's nanny, Claire. Claire's aunt kidnapped Harrison sometime in the past, but he seems to be doing a lot better now. Harrison's Dad Kyle shows up and Kyle reveals that he got fired by his mom, but has a new job lined up with Audra and a secret investor. Summer hates the idea and thinks Kyle is being erratic and threatens to renegotiate their custody agreement. Meanwhile in an office, Billy and Lily discuss their plans to force a separation of their company into two corporate entities, something along the lines of when AOL and Time Warner split. The board meets and there is a contentious vote, with Billy's Mom makes it clear she hates the idea and votes against it. But the split passes anyway. Billy also reveals his mom is sick, something else she gets mad about. Traci and her Niece Abby discuss Abby's mom's mental health, although in very vague terms, so I have no idea what is actually wrong with her. Alan shows up to take Traci out on a date, after giving her a nice scarf as a gift. Traci is a novelist (Oh, I remember that from when I watched last time, she had just finished the first draft of her book) and Alan has an evil Twin brother. Which is exciting, but we never see Alan or Traci at all the rest of the week, which is disappointing. Tuesday: Jack and Jackie see each other in a bar and have a conversation. At some point in the past Jack almost killed himself by taking a bunch of pills to convince Jackie to get sober (which seems like a bad plan, but I guess it worked.) Diane, Jacks wife got really mad about it, and hasn't forgiven Jackie. Speaking of Diane, she's meeting Michael in a coffee shop to catch up. Shes  venting about being forced into firing her son Kyle. Diane is Kyle's mom from yesterday, so there's a connection we didn't have before. Michael reveals he only became friends with Diane because Victor ordered him to. They speculate that Victor might also be the secret investor in Kyle's new job and must be trying to get back at Jack because of the thing with the pills. (I guess Jackie and Victor are together?) Victor meets with Kyle and Audra to discuss the announcement of their new partnership. Victor is the secret investor and wants to stay that way. Kyle doesn't trust him (because of history) but Audra is fully on board. Claire is back home with her parents, but has a date with Kyle planned. Her parents are worried about her, despite the fact that she's in her 30s probably. But she had been raised by a crazy woman who tried to turn her evil. So I guess that's reason to worry. At the date Kyle explains what we already learned on Monday about his new job, and he learns that Claire doesn't drink when he tries to toast to his new freedom. Wednesday: Audra meets with a guy whose name I never learned. They flirt a lot and the guy hints that big things are happening at his company but he can't share yet. (It's the company split that got voted for on Monday) They share a kiss at the end of the episode. Summer meets Chance at a bar and recaps what happened with Kyle on Monday.  Chance also tells her that the company is splitting. Lily is leaving her brother's half of the company to stay with Billy. Chance doesn't think Summer should get lawyers involved or renegotiate custody. Billy and Lily meet to celebrate the split, but Lily has doubts about leaving her brother. They fight but nothing comes of it. Kyle gets home to find his parents Jack and Diane. They all have a fight about Diane firing Kyle, and Kyle may be working for Victor. They think Victor is trying to start up The War again (I don't know what that is.) Kyle storms out and Diane tells Jack everything from her conversation with Michael. Jack gets a text from Victor wanting to meet. Thursday: Billy and Sally are meeting in a coffee shop. Their respective partners, Chelsea and Adam, are in Baltimore with their shared child, Connor, who is in intensive psychiatric treatment. Billy tells her about the company split from Monday. They discuss the possibility of flying out to Baltimore to surprise Chelsea and Adam. Jack and Victor meet in Victor's office, they trade barbs and Jack tells Victor to stay away from his family (Kyle.) Jack still doesn't actually know if Kyle is working with him, but he fears the worst. Jack leaves and Nick, Victor's son arrive. They share some exposition about things, including Connor being in Baltimore with his parents. Kyle and Diane keep arguing about the fact that Diane fired him, and when Jack returns from seeing Victor, Kyle demands his mom's job, which Jack refuses. In Baltimore Adam arrives at Chelsea's hotel room and they share a bottle of brandy. They drink and worry about their son Connor What if things don't get better. They eventually have sex which is a big deal because it was previously established in this episode that they were each in a relationship with someone else (Billy and Sally from above) Friday: Summer meets with her parents (including Nick, so we have a direct line of parentage from Victor>Nick>Summer) and she recaps the fight she had with Kyle almost beat for beat. But it takes a long time because she keeps not wanting to tell them but her parents keep pushing her. Kyle and Victor meet, where Victor recaps his fight with Jack and that he doesn't trust Kyle didn't spill the beans. Kyle didn't (that we saw) and asks Victor if this is to get revenge on Jack. Victor doesn't answer. Claire comes back and runs into Victor (who is also her grandfather?) as he's leaving. Victor glares at her and Kyle through a window as they talk. Chelsea and Adam get dressed, and talk about how sleeping together was a mistake, even as they don't quite seem to believe it. The episode ends with each of them back in their respective rooms calling Billy and Sally to say how much they miss their partners. Conclusions: This was not nearly as exciting a week of the soap as what I got back in 2019. It felt like every episode had at least one, but more often two story lines that were just people telling each other information we the audience already had. Someone learning new information can be a story beat, but if it's the only story beat you use as a writer, I am going to get real bored. The most interesting thing that happened was the company split, but that was on Monday and then people kept (not) talking about it all week. All of the drama around Kyle, who felt like this week's main character, was speculation or people arguing about what had either already happened or might happen in the future. Nothing actually changed from Monday to Friday. I guess Chelsea and Adam hooking up was a big deal, but also paced so weirdly. It felt like a Friday reveal, but it happened on Thursday and so we had an episode of them talking about it on Friday instead. I don't think I'm nearly as excited about coming back to The Young and The Restless next week. Maybe I'll circle back in anther five years and see what is happening then. This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the week is Trapped in A Car with Someone you Don't Want to be Trapped in a Car With. Here's a picture  of a cat

Something I like about cooking as a hobby is that it is both practical, and low stakes. You can try a new recipe that sounds good and when it's done you can eat it. I was going to have to eat something anyway, so having something to eat is a good outcome. But I'm also food-secure enough that if it all goes terribly wrong, there's always pizza or pb&j as an option. "we can always order pizza!" has even become a mantra in the house when we're trying something new. We haven't actually needed to exercise the option recently, but it gives us a comforting reassurance when trying something new. It's only an experiment if there's a chance it could fail. Poorly Organized Thoughts On: Audio quality Sometimes people will say something like "I'm an audiophile." They don't say it to me, because I don't talk to people, but they're probably saying it to someone. I once stumbled into the part of youtube for audiophiles and they had a clear surplus of both graphs an opinions. I think my favorite video in my brief journey to that world was called something like "the objective reason these types of headphones are better than those." The host started off by spending five minutes explaining that he really did mean Objective when he put that in the title, and that if you came in here just to leave a comment saying "that's just like your opinion man" or "I think you mean subjective" you should bounce right now. I was amused by how defensive this dude was, and it was clearly the result of previous drama in the audiophile community. I don't remember all the details about why they were better, because he used a lot of hobbyist terminology that is impenetrable to a casual observer like myself. I took most of a couple videos to even realize that IEM wasn't a brand, but stood for In Ear Monitoe, which is a very fancy and specific name for what is commonly known as the earbud. Of course if I were to say that to someone making these videos, I would be due for an explanation about why earbud is an insufficient term, and how IEMs actually are not just a better name, but an important subset of the something something and the technology something something which makes all the difference. And they would be right! I am not even mad about it, I do not have the depth of knolwdge in this topic to understand or care*, but I'm glad they do. *instead my brain has spent space on understanding the difference between a minor action and a bonus action in dungeons and dragons. Two things from different editions that seem like the same thing, but aren't. For reasons. I like it when people are passionate about their hobby, and they get to learn deeply about something that relatively few others understand. But even after my journey into youtube corners I didn't expect, I will not be an audiophile any time soon. The first thing I noticed in my journey was that nobody talked about what they were actually listening to after spending years and hundreds of dollars finding the perfect audio equipment. There's a running Joke on Linus Tech Tips where they always play Crab Rave to test the speakers of whatever new tech they're playing. And on the one hand, while it's a silly test, mostly to play a video of crabs dancing, on the other hand it creates a sense of continuity and a baseline of what to expect. The audio guys I was watching were so deep in the hobby that they didn't need to actually listen to music or whatever in their testing or discussions. But I'm never going to be an audio phile because good enough is good enough for my ears. I bought some wireless* headphones from meh.com 4 or 5 years ago and they're good enough. I can hear what's being said on tv without turning on subtitles and the rare times I listen to music through them it's stuff like They Might be Giants, a band who through most of their 30+ year career has continued to regularly released new music over the phone. Meaning you were limited to the quality of your phone's speaker and the infrastructure of the phone lines. Could my audio experience be better? Yeah, but I don't need it to be. Stuff I'm Watching: The Bear came back this week. this is my first new season since discovering the show last year, and I'm doing my best to space my viewing out. Both because I hate the binge release model anyway, but also because the show is a work of art and I want to savor it. There was a moment in the first episode of the newest season where I went "Oh, this is what we're doing" and I was once again blown away by the creative risks this show is willing to take to tell a good story and be the best TV show it can be. I struggle to recommend things without tautologically saying "if you like the sort of thing this is, you'll like it," but i do honestly think The Bear is the best thing being made in television right now. The Lair of the White Worm is a 1988 movie with Peter Capaldi and Hugh Grant as they are menace by the followers of an ancient snake god in rural England. It's loosely based on the novel of the same name by Bram Stoker, but it never occurred to me that Stoker wrote other novels, so when I saw "Based on the novel by Bram Stoker" I thought they meant Dracula ans spent a good portion of the movie confused. But my confusion aside, I really enjoyed how bonkers this one gets with weird mythology, bonkers dream sequences and Peter Capaldi eating worms and playing the bagpipes (not at the same time.) Check it out if you like weird. Also: Watch this space. I'm going to try something I haven't done in a long time next week in an effort to get back to a daily writing routine. Long-time readers might know what to expect. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the week is the Triceratops Ballet Here's a picture of a cat

I had to fight with my cat for space on my own bed when I went to sleep last night and so I slept weird and now my neck hurts. A Thing in my Possession: Strawberry Syrup There were two big days this week if you believe in things like calendars. June 20 was the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, and the day before that was Juneteenth, the federally recognized holiday when we remember that Texas continued enslaving people for two years after the Emancipation Proclamation and only stopped when the US Army showed up to actually enforce it. Juneteenth celebrations vary across the country, and the holiday is recognized in different ways. It has been celebrated for over 100 years in black communities and especially in Texas (i went to a Juneteenth festival as a kid), but only became a federal holiday in 2021. But one of my favorite celebrations is to drink red beverages. There's not (as far as I know) one singular type of red drink that is emblematic of the holiday, but hibiscus and strawberry sodas are popular. This year I decided that in stead of buying strawberry soda directly, I could make my own. Or at lease make something closer to home-made. Semi-home made if you will. So here's my very-unofficial recipe for strawberry soda. 1 pound strawberries 8 oz sugar Unflavored seltzer Wash and hull the strawberries (remove the stem) Quarter the strawberries Cover the strawberries in water (roughly 32 oz, but I didn't measure) Boil the water and strawberries until the liquid reduces by half (roughly 30 minutes for me) Strain out the pulp with a fine mesh sieve or whatever you have Put the liquid back in the pot and add the sugar. Stir over heat until the sugar is fully dissolved Once the syrup has cooled mix some into the unflavored seltzer. I rarely measured, but a roughly 5:1 seltzer to syrup ratio will give pretty good results. Drink over ice if you're into that. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: Micropayments First off, I need to set some definitions. You've probably heard about microtransactions, the things where video games that are ostensibly free-to-play ask you for a dollar or five dollars or a hundred dollars to refill your bucket with digital gems so you can save the kingdom faster or smash the monster faster or build the house faster. These have a relatively long history in gaming spaces and are widely hated by everyone. They exist as a profit extraction machine, designed only to prevent you from having fun by making the game less good in hopes you might pay to actually enjoy the thing you will cough up some cash. I'm not talking about those, Instead I want to talk about micropayments, which is the term Scott McCloud coined (pun intended) in his book Reinventing Comics. Reinventing comics is a book from the long ago times of the year two thousand. Normally there's a conjunction following those two words, but the time was so long ago we hadn't yet developed the need for further qualifiers. In two thousand and nothing, Scott McCloud released his second book about comics. It was a sequel of sorts to Understanding Comics, a book where he used the medium itself to present an academic exploration of how it works and the history of little pictures with words. If you've ever heard the phrase "sequential art" it was probably being said by someone who read Understanding Comics. In Reinventing Comics McCloud was interested in how this new technology of "the internet" might reshape comics as a medium and artform. I was enamored with both books in the duology, and they even inspired me to try my hand at the art of webcommiking. But we're not here to talk about me. One of the big revolutions McCloud saw in the potential of comics on the internet was one of creator compensation. While the up front cost of time and labor was significant, the cost of publishing a comic digitally was close to nothing, on a per user basis. McCloud reconciled these two things by proposing a payment to access that reflected the relatively small cost to reproduce. He called these micropayments. He theorized that if you could get a large enough group of people to pay a small amount, playing at the ends of the supply/demand curves, you could become successful while charging very little. He suggested that in the comics world, 25 cents per comic might be the sweet spot for making something viable and sustainable. It was a radical idea at the time, and people lost their freaking minds about it. There were flame wars. I'm not going to link to them, but people I respect had very strong opinions based on their lived experiences and this was the sort of revolutionary idea that was truly a revolution, meaning you had to turn your back on how things had been done to that point to accept it as a possibility. For what it's worth some of the people most strongly against the idea would, just a few years later be vocal opponents of kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms, calling them a form of digital begging. Of course those same people would also then host their own campaigns and not once admit to being wrong about their usefulness. But the micropayment flames dies down and people seemed to kind of forget about the idea, or at least in name. But then patreon showed up and presented the same concept in a new framing. They also brought to the table an easily accessible way to do it all, and couched it in supporting the artists rather than transacting for goods or services. But the core idea was the same. And it worked! One other difference was one of discoverability. If you put everything behind a paywall, then it is hard to grow an audience, but if you put lots of stuff out for free and ask people to support you when/if they can, and provide bonuses for your supporters, you can grow an audience while also converting some of hat audience into supporters. I'm thinking about all this because I do actually have a patreon. It's not for this newsletter, but rather for my sporadically updating podcast where I talk about movies I watched with my sweetheart. Ever since starting the patreon, I think about micropayments and how they did eventually come about. I also support a number of patreons for other creators. I like to pay for things that are given away, so that the artist can keep making their giant swords or podcasts or comic strips. And I do support a comic on patreon, in fact it's one of the ones who was vocally against the idea of micropayments, of charging 25 cents per comic. And at the tier I support them I actually end up paying about 40 cents per comic, which is particularly interesting, because if you put 25 cents in two thousand dollars into an inflation calculator, it comes out to about 46 cents in today's money. Stuff I'm reading Here's a couple articles/opinion pieces that really resonated with me recently. I will f**king piledrive you if you mention AI to me again - An opinion piece by a data scientist who is fed up with AI creeping into everything. The Empty Brain - an article about how the metaphor of the human brain as a computer is a deeply flawed one and how that metaphor is giving us incorrect ideas about how artificial general intelligence will ever work. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is West Covina (Final reprise) Here's a picture of a cat

I saw something very funny online this week: A headline about teens "sadfishing" which is a made up word (all words are made up) for teens performing sadness online for attention. I don't know how real a phenomenon this actually is in the universe, but I do know a lot of people my age who would performatively post the saddest, most emo lyrics in our AIM away messages, and if that's not sadfishing, then I don't know what else it could be. A Thing in my Possession: Lungs Now before you get all weird on me, these are my normal lungs inside my body. I didn't pick up an extra set down at the farmer's market or anything.* But I have lungs in my chest, and now I have official documentation that they work correctly. For reasons that aren't very interesting my doctor referred me to a pulminologist for a pulmonary screening. In this screening they use a fancy device to measure how much air you are breathing into and out of your lungs. And it turns out I breathe in and out the right amount of air. Well within the normal paramaters, and because I'm a larger than average dude, my lungs are a little larger than average too. But not too big. Or too little. These are Goldilocks lungs right here. *Side note: Watch Hannibal, the three season show that was on NBC, somehow. Poorly Organized Thoughts On: Stuart Semple and Anish Kapoor. So in 2014 an engineering company announced a new product/process called Vantablack. It’s a chemical coating made of carbon nanotubes (no, I don’t know what that means either) which has the property of absorbing 99.965% of visible light (according to the manufacturers.) That’s really neat! It has some interesting potential applications in engineering products (like space telescopes) where any light reflection can cause problems. But it’s also a pretty expensive and relatively difficult thing to do. You won’t be running to your local art store to pick up a bottle of vantablack to slap on your canvas or warhammerr 40k minis. So far so cool. But in 2016 it came out that the exclusive artistic license of the product had been sold to a single artist, Anish Kapoor. Kapoor is a sculptor, often focusing on very large products. For example you are probably familiar with his very well known sculpture Cloud Gate, AKA the giant reflective bean in Chicago. But he’s done a lot of other stuff as well. To be clear Vantablack can be used for other purposes by other people, but not for artistic purposes, but I don’t love the idea of a company limiting even one particular use to a single person. It’s not my all to make, but maybe they were trying to stir up controversy and marketing. It sure worked at the time. Lots of artists got mad about this. https://www.artforum.com/news/artists-angered-as-anish-kapoor-receives-exclusive-rights-to-vantablack-228162/ and one even went so far as to make a lovely little piece of performance art about it. That artist, who at the time was named Stuart Semple, was so incensed by this whole exclusivity thing, that he decided to make something that everyone but Anish Kapoor could use. He developed a pigment he called The Pinkest Pink. I even bough a sample jar because I thought it was funny. And in the years since he has been releasing more paints. He has a series of Black paints that get progressively blacker (so he claims)  and other x-est X paints. He’s got a bright flow in the dark, a very white white, a shiny mirror and glittery glitter. and he also tried to “liberate” corporately owned colors, releasing a paint based on Tiffany Blue, Calvin Klein Blue, and maybe some others. He’s kind of made “liberating art” his whole brand. And he went a step further a while ago and had a kickstarter for an Adobe photoshop knockoff because he was tired of Adobe charging monthly or annual licenses for the software and he thinks (and I agree) it’s better when soupy for software once and then own it. But that project, while successfully funded, seems to have gone dark. Which isn’t great. There’s a lot of stuff that has turned out “not so great” in regards to this artist. Delayed shipments, weird things like making hot sauce, and most recently he announced a new dubmphone. A dubmphone, if you didn’t figure it out already, it meant to be an alternative to smart phones. They harken back to the days when cell phones did one or two things: Call and/or Text. There’s a market for these phones, and a small community of people who really like them The idea is that you can stay connected for emergencies or the like, but you don’t have a distraction machine in your pocket all the time. The market exists, and there are dozens of phones out there you can choose from if you want to. If you don’t just want to buy an old used nokia (which you can do) there are newer nokia style phones, some even from nokia themself! They’re often sold as Feature Phones instead of being called dubmphones, but the idea is there and people buy them. And they’re pretty cheap! The market stats at about 30 bucks US, and can go up to a couple hundred if you want to be able to install android phone apps (which seems against the purpose, but someone must be buying them.) So last week the artist formally known as Stuart Semple legally changed his name to Anish Kapoor. Or he claims he did. He shared pictures of what appear to be real legal documents, confirming the change. I’m not sure why he did this. The easiest guess is that’s it’s just marketing. He got international attention with his very one-sided feud against the original Anish Kapoor, so this could just be an extension of that. He may also think it’s a clever loophole to get around the ban on using vantablack by any artist that isn’t Anish Kapoor, but I hardly think he’s going to have much luck if he just calls up the company and says “I’m Anish Kapoor now, give me vantablack!” It’a a weird decision, and it makes talking about him a little bit difficult. I want to respect his chosen name and use it accordingly, and I’m trying to do that. But it’s particularly difficult do do so if one is also talking about new-flavor Kapoor and his fight against original Kapoor. But it’s make a little easier by the fact that the Anish Kapoor who is legally allowed to use Vantablack and made The Bean in Chicago, left this story a long time ago. So now when I refer to Anish Kapoor, you can be rest assured I’m talking about the guy who changed his name to that last week. So Anish Kapoor, one day after announcing his name change, launched an indiegogo campaign for his dumb phone called, Burnr. And how does he start the announcement? “My name is Stuart Semple.” My dude, I really need you to be a little more consistent here. Burnr is meant to be a dumb phone like all the others, but Kapoor/Semple can’t say that. Instead he’s pretending that he had this great idea to use dumb phones to cure mental illness and stop online bullying (somehow?) And there’s the other problem that Burnr doesn’t exist. There’s one piece of concept art that, if we’re being honest, looks like it was made by an AI image generation software. It’s a little wobbly around the edges in ways that only those kinds of images are. I can’t promise that it was made by an image generator, but I can promise that the actual phone doesn’t exist. He doesn’t even have a working prototype. How do I know? It says so right at the top of the page. But despite having no actual phones, not even a prototype, he’s promised that the final phone will be incredibly rugged and even have an IP66 water and dust resistance rating. A very specific claim for a phone that doesn’t exist and actually requires testing to meet that standard.  He’s also promising to ship the phone in October of this year. Phones take time to manufacture and even if you’re taking off the shelf parts and slapping a new case with a custom sticker it can take 5 months to ship from China alone. But the phones aren’t shipping yet. If they will ship at all. Most folks who have looked at this have clearly backed away from the project. Only 75 people as of this writing have backed the campaign and he’ll need about 1500 minimum to reach the funding goal. So this phone probably isn’t happening. Which is good! I don’t think people should give this guy money for something that doesn’t exist. Uf you want a dumb phone you can buy one, I’ve even thought about it in the past. But buy one that actually exists. Stuff I'm Videogaming I booted up Cookie Clicker again this week, and have had it running in the background ever since. Cookie Clicker is one of the oldest and most robust idle games, and while it didn't invent the genre, it did do a lot to codify it. The short version is you click a giant cookie on screen to make cookies. Then you use those cookies to automate the cookie making process. You can keep stacking on upgrades and make the number of cookies go up. There's more to it than that, but some of the fun is in the exploration. For example, if you hire too many grandma's you can potentially anger them and trigger the Grandmapocalypse. Which sounds bad. But also it ends up in making more cookies, so who can say for sure. My friends and I got to the end of the available content in Abiotic Factor last week. This is a survival crafting game, in the vein of so many others out there like Valheim, the more recent Palworld, or even the original Minecraft. But the twist in this one is that you're not in an unspoiled wilderness chopping down trees and making campfires. Instead you are in a vast underground science facility where countless terrible experiments have been performed and things went very wrong. So you play a group of scientists trying to get along. Instead of chopping down trees, you're chopping up desks and hunting wild staplers to make new inventions to help you get through another night of killer robots and mutated creatures. It's a lot of fun, and the new setting takes a lot of the old tropes in these games (of which I have played many) and makes them feel fresh again. The game is in early access, so they'll likely be adding stuff for a while, and it'll be fun to come back and see what has changed or been added. I haven't actually pulled the trigger, but they finally added all the Kingdom Hearts games to Steam. This is one of those series that I hav aleays been fascinated by, despite only ever playing the one entry for the Game Boy Advance. Unlike every other game in the series, it was a card battler. I am sorely tempted to jump in and play all of them for the first time now that they're on steam. It feels like a series I could get really into if I'm not careful. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Textmergency Here's a picture of a cat

Good morning! I hope you had a good week. I did. I saw a bunny. A thing in my possession: A pocket full of dog treats I don't currently own a dog, but my outlaws, whom I live with do. His name is Viktor, and I think he was names after the character of Viktor Krumm in the 4th Harry potter novel. I point this out, because my outlawas have not, to my knowledge, read Harry Potter recently at all, and did not name the dog. He came as a rescue with that name and they kept it. Viktor is a friendly enough dog, but not to me. I don't know if he had some trauma in the past with a large bearded man, or if it's just personal to him, but Viktor is scared of me most of the time. It's been this way for a couple years now, and I don't know that it'll ever change. I do try to buy his love however, as Viktor is a very, very food motivated dog. He'll do almost anything for a treat or a piece of whatever it is you're eating right now. He'll even take a treat from the big scary guy (me) even though it's really scary. So in a likely futile attempt to buy the love of this dog who doesn't like me, I keep a pocket full of dog treats on my person a lot of the time. He'll occasionally swing by to see if I have a treat and if he's feeling particulrly brave will even take it from me. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: Dropout I don't know if you're already aware of the streaming service/independent network Dropout, but I've found myself trying to sell it to a couple different people this week, so I figured I'd save some time for future me and pot all the reason's Dropout might be worth your six bucks. Some background: Dropout started life as a website named College Humor. Most people probably don't know remember the original College Humor, but it was one of a bunch of early 2000s websites where people would post funny pictures. College Humor had the particular focus of "college based" funny photos, which meant in practice, a lot of photos of people in compromising positions at frat parties. Along side the rise of these websites, was another college themed website you probably have heard of, The Facebook. The Facebook is a networking webs-- I'm not going to explain facebook you you. Fast forward to Facebook's "Pivot to video" where they told content creators that video content was getting much more investment than text based articles and so if you wanted to be successful you had to make video content. Of course that was a big lie, but the damage was done anyway. College humor was one of the websites that pivoted to video, and started making original content. Lots of this was sketch comedy and some of it was good! By the time the truth about the Pivot to Video came out College humor had put too much work into making these videos (and even a short lived MTV series, remember MTV?) that they had to find a way to make money on it. That way was the streaming service Dropout. Dropout was a bit of a wild card, an independently owned streaming service like a netflix, but not as corporate. Dropout chugged along for a couple years making original content, most popular was the D&D Actual Play show Dimension 20, where comedians played D&D together to great entertainment effect. In early 2020 College Humor was shut down by their parent company and everyone was fired. Then it was immediately bought for a song by former employee and now CEO Sam Reich. Everyone was still fired, but Sam managed to bring many of them back as contractors to keep performing in the various shows. This was only made a little bit harder by the global pandemic that started a couple months after everyone got fired. But Dropout the streaming service kept going, and eventually became the name of the whole company. And you can still subscribe! Dropout the company has continued to make new shows, and really push the boundaries of long form unscripted comedy on the internet. Lets get into the meat and potatoes of what's on Dropout. and why you might want to give them six pucks a month (or 5 if you pay on an annual basis!) Dimension 20: This might be the hardest sell for some folks, as the thought of watching other people play Dungeons and Dragons might be weird. But the folk at D20 might be putting on the best actual play D&D show going right now. Each season is stand-alone so you don't have a massive backlog of a years of content to binge through to catch up(although you can do that.) You cans start with whatever season is starting now (as of this writing, an action movie pastiche called Never Stop Blowing Up) and watch a group of people who know that they're making a TV show first and foremost and put their skills on display as they play D&D and make up a story together. Each season is also in a new genre, ranging from gritty modern day New York to, a John Hughes inspired fantasy high school, to high court game of thrones style politics, to kids at a school for wizards, to outright horror. Game Changer: I think of this as the flagship Dropout show. Hosted by CEO Sam Reich, each episode is a game show, but the rules are different and the players don't know what game it is they are about to play. They have to learn the rules as they go, and figure out how to win by playing. This show is a little gremlin of a thing, and I am consistently surprised by how creative the designers manage to be. Um, Actually: This is Dropout's version of a British panel show. You know those shows where comedians ostensibly come on to play a game, but it's mostly about them hanging out and chatting? It's that. A panel of 3 contestants come on to play a game and the game is a very strong core premise to hang a bunch of fun around. The host will read a series of very specific and incorrect statements about nerdy things (of almost any stripe) and then the contestants have to buzz in and correct the statement with the phrase "Um , actually." Some of the contestants are very knowledgeable of the topics, but sometimes they're just blindly guessing, but either way it's a lot of fun. Make Some Noise: This is probably the show you are most expecting within the genre of Unscripted Comedy on the Internet. Each episode presents the three players with a series of humorous prompts that they then have to act out. It is short-form improv like Whose Line is it Anyway, distilled to the simplest form. I think this show can be a little uneven, mostly based on the quality of the prompts and players but I also think it hits some unbelievable highs, with jokes that I still laugh at whenever I think of them. Dirty Laundry: This is Dropout's other British panel show, but instead of nerdy statements, the host reads secret or embarrassing things that the contestants submitted in advance, and have to guess which contestant submitted which statement. Like Um, Actually, it's mostly an excuse to hang out and tell funny stories. But the stories are very fun and the casts usually have great chemistry and at least know each other a little bit which makes the guessing more fun. Breaking News: This is probably the most structured of the Dropout shows, in that each episode is entirely scripted. It's just that the cast doesn't get the script in advance. Instead the cast (who is always playing news anchors) has to read off the script from a teleprompter without seeing it in advance and try not to laugh at the ridiculous things they're saying. Whoever laughs the most loses. It's a good time and most episodes are only around 10 minutes long. Play It by Ear: A long form musical improv show where the cast is only given a title and genre of the musical and then they have to perform the whole thing. Musical improv is a magic trick, and I am blown away by how good these people are at it. I've watched each episode at least 3 times. Very Important People: Another long-form improv show, a comedian gets put into a makeup chair and given a ridiculous appearance. They then have a couple minutes to come up with a character and sit down for an improvised interview with the host of the show. Like a lot of long-form improv it's a great chance to see some unexpected character work, where the ridiculous is grounded in the reality of the format. Smartypants: Comedians give powerpoint presentations on the topic of their choosing. This show is probably the broadest in content, and lets them take absolutely wild swings. You never know exactly what you're going to get. Thousandaires: Each episode features a group of friends who were each given $1000 to spend on eachother. Who ever does the best job, as judged by the host of the episode (who is different each time) wins. We've only had one episode so far, but like Smartypants it feels like a show where people are just getting to go wild and do whatever they want for our amusement. Good stuff. Anyway, that's all currently airing on the network, and this isn't sponsored (but I'd take a sponsorship if that was the sort of thing they do.) Check out their youtube page to sample the wares, then maybe give them six bucks at Dropout.tv to watch everything. This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Maybe This Dream Here's a picture of a cat.

My vacation was very relaxing, thank you for asking. I sat on the beach and did very little all week besides reading and eating. A thing in my possession: a mini pc I've been interested in these small form factor PCs that have been popping up in the last few years. Their closest progenitor is probably the Mac Mini, in that they're all very small form factor boxes designed to sit on your desk and be a fully functioning computer. Most of them have a footprint of something less than six inches by six inches, and rarely more than half that in height. These aren't like the Raspberry Pi and similar Single Board computers at the ultra-low end of the spectrum, but rather designed to be capable enough to run real operating systems and function as your daily driver for most people. They're not overwhelmingly powerful (in general) but are good enough. There are some that can be pretty beefy, with higher end gaming capabilities, but those become much more expensive and at the relative price point you can get a lot more bang for your buck going with a traditional tower. I started looking at them because I was thinking about what should replace my apple TV 3rd generation when it finally goes kaput. I was lamenting how most couch-based tv boxes have terrible UIs and tend to be unitaskers when you get down to it. I thought it would be cool to have a device that could switch between being a Streaming box, but also do things like access my Steam library, so I could play some of my older/lower-requirements games from the couch. Steam even has a couch mode, called Big Picture, which is designed to be controlled with a gaming controller rather than a mouse and keyboard. Sadly there doesn't seem to be a device that merges the two together. You want remote friendly streaming apps? You have to have a roku or apple tv or amazon fire TV. You want to play one (1) video game that wasn't first designed for a mobile interface? You need a full featured OS. Steam OS, which runs on the Steamdeck handheld computers, is close, but if you want to stream something you're basically stuck running the service through a browser. But after some research, I went ahead and bought one anyway. Mostly what I learned from the research is that at any given price point they're all pretty similar, so I found one that was good enough in my budget and hit the buy button. I also had to buy a handheld keyboard/trackpad, so I could control the thing from the couch when I wasn't in Steam, but that was easy enough and a relatively small expense. I've had it hooked up to my TV for a while and since my apple TV is still working fine, I haven't been using it to stream, but my hopes were correct in that it's nice to play some games from my couch. The one I've put the most time into while testing is probably Super Retro Retry which is a delightful and challenging platformer with 100 single screen levels in a variety of difficulties, served to you randomly. Any mistake will kill you and send you back to start over, so the meat of the game is learning the levels, and hoping you get a good run. Poorly organized thoughts on: Blue Sky era tv shows There was a period in the early 2000s where the cable channel USA cultivated a particular brand of TV shows. They were relatively light takes on fairly common procedural formats, often defined by a strong central character. In the mystery/cop show genre you had Monk, White Collar and Psych, Royal Pains was a medical Procedural, Burn Notice and Covert Affairs were different variations on the Spy show, and Suits was a legal drama. There's probably a few I'm missing, but these were all part of what was called the Blu Sky era of USA. You might also remember it by the slogan "Characters Welcome." And while the slogan was from USA, the style wasn't limited strictly to that channel. There were shows like Leverage or Rizzoli & Isles on TNT and Warehouse 13 nd Eureka on the channel formerly known as Sci-Fi that had a very similar vibe. But you'd be hard pressed to find anything like that on the air today. They've mostly disappeared. And I blame one show: Breaking Bad. In 2008 AMC premiered a show that, if you weren't paying attention, could have easily slotted into the Blue Sky genre. "He's a science teacher, but also a criminal mastermind" feels like a twist on the "he's x but y" of frankly a lot of those shows. He's a psychic detective, but it's fake; he's practicing law, but he's a fake lawyer; he's a spy, but cut off from all his resources. It even has the requisite blue sky in the promo materials. Top that off by the lead being played by comic actor Bryan Cranston, and it seems like a natural fit. Of course Breaking Bad didn't turn out to be light and silly (although you could be fooled by the pilot,) Instead it became dark and haunting and frankly one of the best TV shows of it's era. But it also set the tone for so much of what drama tv shows would become. If you weren't paying attention when it happened, I don't know that you understand or remember how much the TV landscape was bent around the success of Breaking Bad. It launched dozens of imitators and the new TV shows coming out now still bear hallmarks of its style. I don't think you could get Yellowstone and it's murderous ranchers without Breaking Bad. Other shows also contributed to the sea change in TV (Lost and Game of Thrones, to name a couple) but I think Breaking Bad was the tipping point. But as TV became darker and grittier in a race to see who could make the most despicable leading man anti-hero, the light and fluffy shows slowly started disappearing. It wasn't immediate, but now, sixteen years after the start of Breaking Bad, there's not much to be found that could be called a Blue Sky show. Of course TV has changed in a lot of other ways, too with the rise of streaming (on the back of complex dramas in the style of Breaking Bad, one could argue,) to shorter seasons (doctor who went from 13, already short in 2004 to 8 in the latest season airing now) and a perceived hunger from audiences for long season-plus story arcs instead of episodic episodes. Now I don't think this will last forever, and TV has been known to cycle back to older ideas before, but I don;t have a lot of hope that it'll be happening soon. I have been trying to find currently airing shows that fit the bill and I have found a couple, but they're hardly trend setters. Resident Alien, is a goofy fun time about an alien hiding out as a town doctor in a small Colorado town, and Elsbeth is a mystery show that is a throwback in more ways than one. There's also the recently cancelled So Help Me Todd where's it's deviation from the standard TV norms was it's own downfall (In my opinion.) Hopefully we'll get some more. And maybe we'll even get lucky enough for a 24 episode season. But I'm not holding my breath on that one. Stuff I'm watching The Star Trek: Discovery season finale aired this week. I don't have a lot of good things to say about the season or the finale. I can say my expectations were low enough that it didn't disappoint me, and that the show ended as it started, being all about Michael Burnham. In more exciting scifi tv shows, the latest season of Doctor Who has really been killing it in the last three episodes. Russel T  Davies back as the showrunner and Ncuti Gatwa as The Doctor are a marvelous pairing. The first couple episodes after the Christmas Special were fine if not great, but the last three episodes have been solid bangers. It's also being treated as a whole new show, so you can absolutely jump on here if you've not watched Doctor Who before, or not in a long time. It's made me excited about Doctor Who in a way I haven't been for a while. This week's Crazy Ex Girlfriend Song of the Week is: I want to be a child star Here's a picture of a cat

I'm still recovering from vacation, so here's some videos on youtube you can watch. I think it's interesting how in the ever-more algorithmically driven internet, the stuff you see doesn't look like the stuff I see. But if you watch all of these videos (as I have) maybe your youtube recommendations will look a little more like mine. These are roughly in the order of what I think is the most generally interesting to the least, but what do I know? Inside the Peculiar World of Farming Simulator eSports The First Fraction of a Second | Crash Course Pods: The Universe #1 The mathematically impossible ball that shouldn’t exist. Your Lawn Sucks (Why No Mow May is Good) Clamato Steak (NSE) I put an RTX 2070 in an old Mac Pro! MAD MAX or BAD BOX: can Thunder Road cut it? Another Crab's Treasure | Fully Ramblomatic There. Now your youtube history looks a little more like mine. Here's a picture of a cat.

I’m on vacation. Here’s a picture of a cat.

Programming Note: I'm going on vacation next week, so don't expect much here for the next two weeks. Poorly Organized Thoughts About: Jury Duty My sweetheart and I both received a jury duty summons on the same day. They were delivered to our PO Box, simple plain envelopes with the county seal on the front. This is probably the third or fourth time I’ve been summoned in my life, but the first time at my current residence. We did think it was a little weird that we both got summoned at the same time for the same service date. It was the style that is not uncommon, where you call in to the clerk the night before to find out if your physical presence is needed. I had ample notice to let my job know, although there were some key events that had to be either rescheduled or covered by someone else. But with the call system, I was in a bit of a limbo, where I didn’t know one way or the other if I would be available. If I wasn’t needed at court, I could just do my job as planned, but if I was a lot of gears had to move quickly. But we had a plan in place, which to my mind, all but assured that I would be called in. Sort of an inverse Murphy’s law sort of thing. But it was not to be! I got called in the night before to perform my civic duty. And so did my sweetheart. We were in two different groups, but called in to the same location, “the Jury Suite” the following day. So we got up and drove down to the county courthouse complex. Our host for the day, the clerk who checked us in and would be por primary point of contact for the day was downright shocked that a married couple had been called at the same time. She confirmed that we were both willing and able to serve that day, I guess in case we had to deal with childcare or similar, and then got us checked in. We weren’t the first ones there, but we were probably one of the first five. The jury suite had chairs for probably 75-100 people and over the next 30 minutes it filled up to about 80% capacity. This was already a nicer experience than what I had when I served in Austin, where potential jurors basically waited in a hallway outside the courtroom until we started. The suite had wifi, and they explicitly told us it was fine to use phones, tablets etc. until we were actually in the courtroom. At the tip of the hour our host came in and started giving us our official introduction to the process. As a group we had to stand and take an oath of service, after witch we watched a pair of videos. The videos were on physical DVDs, which made my little physical media nerd heart proud, and we watched them in a TV wheeled in like one of those carts teachers use when they’re having a bad day and don’t want to work very hard. The first one was about how the courts actually work. It gave us an overview of the different jobs that people would be doing in the court room, like the judge, defense, prosecutor, bailiff, clerk, and court reporter. It also covered the entire process of being a juror, from how the list if potential jurors is generated to what the responsibilities of the jury are throughout the trial process. The whole thing felt a little basic to me, but I realize that when you’re pulling from the entire eligible county population, you can’t expect anyone to know the whole process and all the parts in advance. So telling us what we needed to know, without expectations, was the right choice. The second video was more interesting, if only because u didn’t expect it. The topic of video two was unconscious bias. The video outlined what unconscious bias is, how it effects everybody to one extent or another, and gave us some tips on recognizing that bias and working against it to be fair as jurors. Not much in this video was new to me, but I was impressed that it was something the court took seriously enough to produce a video about and show to all potential jurors. I should mention that our host for the day was incredibly good at her job. It was clear she took jury service very seriously, but that was because she understood how important it is for a functioning justice system. She was experienced enough that she must have been doing this same thing for years, giving the same speeches and explanations, but she still seemed excited about all of it. I was already excited about jury duty, because I’m a weirdo, but if I wasn’t, I suspect some of her enthusiasm would have rubbed off on me. The rest of my service was spent waiting in the suite. There were three cases on the docket that day which needed juries to be selected, we found out later, but we never made it into the courtroom because as each case came up, the defendant accepted a plea deal instead of going through with the trial. Our host tried to spin this as an example of the justice system working, and that our presence was what convinced the plea deals to go through. I’m a little more skeptical of that, as it’s well documented that the vast majority of cases never go to trial in the first place, and that’s because DAs/Prosecutors push incredibly hard for plea deals instead of trials, usually by over-charging defendants with the expectation that they will plea out to lesser charges. I don’t actually like that the system works that way, but as a potential juror, all I can do is show up and hope the trial actually happens. Once all three cases ended without a trial, we were dismissed. We all lined up to get our official letters confirming our service (to take back to our jobs and prove why we’d were out.) Our host continued to impress me by remembering almost everyone’s name as they came up to get a letter. I can’t imagine holding that many people’s names in your head after talking to them individually for less than a minute each. Over all my jury service was a bit of an anti-climax after all that build up, but at least it wasn’t an explicitly painful experience. Plus I got to get some reading done. Stuff I’m Watching It’s always a little touch to watch the final episodes of a TV series. It’s even worse when you’re watching a show that was cancelled after these episodes were made, but before the production knew about it. Which exactly what had happened with So Help Me Todd, a silly and slight legal procedural about a guy working as an investigator at his mother’s law firm. The show lasted two seasons, but really only one and a half with a strike-shortened second season. It’s not exactly a comedy, but the core cast of characters get up to a variety of shenanigans each week and while you won’t learn much about the actual practice of law by watching it, you’ll probably have a good time. The show takes the occasional mild creative risk, and isn’t afraid to challenge the status quo of the show in any given episode. All of which is to say that I think the show was a little too weird to survive at CBS. To be clear, the show is not weird. There is not any fantastical element, no aliens, no supernatural monsters, The biggest twists to happen are usually akin to someone coming home early. But CBS has a very limited set of criteria for tv shows they consider to be part of their brand. You know the ones. Shows like Blue Bloods, or shows that can be spun into franchises about dour people looking grumpy at crime scenes. Shows like the three different FBI branded shows, or the NCIS franchise, or Fire Country, which is getting its own extended universe next year with Sheriff Country (a terrible name in a sea of awful names.) Even So Help Me Todd’s name is too weird for CBS. It’s a pun (not a good one) for crying out loud. Do you think the network that greenly a 6th and 7th NCIS TV series (NCIS: Origins, coming this fall and NCIS: Tony & Ziva coming whenever, I don’t care) was going to being impressed by a pun? Anyway, the show is fun, which I can’t say for most of CBS’s other primetime programming. I also finished watching Sex Education, which started life as a charming British show about the son of a Sex Therapist (played by Gillian Anderson) starting his own underground therapy clinic at his high school. By the last season it really wasn’t about that anymore, but it also wasn’t sure what it wanted to be about either. We followed these characters for four seasons, but by the end I wasn’t really sure why. There wasn’t a lot of overlap between them anymore and I couldn’t help but wonder why some were still on the shows, when others had been abandoned in previous seasons. But I watched it all, so there’s that. I expect more people will be looking into it over the years, because one of the main characters is played by Ncuti Gatwa, who is now on everybody’s radar as the current incarnation of The Doctor on Doctor who. It’s fun to be on the other side of the fandom for once, where I’m familiar with the Doctor’s actor’s past work before meeting them as the Doctor. I remember when the internet was digging up everything David Tennant had been in pre-doctor and watching it even if he barely made an appearance. That’s the only reason I ever watched the pretty terrible remake of the Quatermass Experiment. There’s every indication that Gatwa is going to be a great Doctor and so people will absolutely be rediscovering this show before long. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Episode of the Week is Etta Mae's Lament Here's a picture of a cat

Happy May the Fourth be with you! Today is the only day you can watch this Video where Tim Russ explains star ways day. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: Bad decisions. Sometimes I make bad choices. I was complaining to a friend about my iPhone ten R, which as a diminished total battery life, due mostly to being over five years old. Batteries don’t last that long with their original capacity. My friend said that he had the same thing and a new battery put a tone of new life into his phone. On more or less a whim, I looked into what it would take to get the battery replaced I don’t have any apple service providers anywhere near me due to my living in The Woods, so the best option was to have it shipped to a service center and the battery replaced there. Of course I would be without the phone for a few days (maybe even a week) but I wasn’t too worried. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you might remember that I bought a google pixel 3a to load Ubuntu Touch, the linux OS for smartphones onto it. I figured I could drop my sim card into that phone before shipping my iPhone off for a replacement battery. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Except it turned out to be difficult difficult lemon difficult instead. Well putting in the sim card was easy, because I had a sim tool in my desk drawer and my cell phone carrier is fine with swapping sims between devices without any particular notice. I spent most of the day using the linux phone as we went out to mail my iPhone off and pick up groceries. While I was in town, everything worked fine. But then I go home and I eventually realized that mini calling wasn’t working. Living in The Woods, I have no cell service, so instead I rely on connecting to the network via wifi. My carrier has wifi calling and text, which is great. But ubuntu touch doesn’t have this feature. It turns out the technology is proprietary and locked up between the carriers and phone companies in a way I don’t completely understand. But what it means is that I can’t actually use this phone as a phone. At least not with the current OS. So I have to re-install android on it, a prospect I do not relish. I’ve use android before, and even tried the android spinoffs like cyanogenmod (now called LineageOS) but since switching to an iPhone, I never really looked back. I’ve had android for a few days now, but even with that it’s been a rough adjustment. Whichever version of android I’m using has gestural controls, but not the same ones that ios has, so I keep swiping or flipping or whatever and the wrong thing happens. I would probably be able to better shake the muscle memory if the gestures I am using didn’t do something on the phone. So my lizard brain* gets the haptic feedback that whatever i just did worked, even as the rest of my brain gets mad because the phone isn’t doing what I want. But at least I’ll be back to my trusty iPhone soon. But not with a new battery. Oh didn’t I mention that? Apple won’t replace the battery because the phone also has a crack in the glass backplate. (why are we still making phones with extraneous glass?) I should have known better. Apple is notorious for this sort of thing. And I should know, I used to work there. The only option for me (because I have multiple “issues” that need to be fixed is to do a full device replacement which costs $400. For hundred dollars. I could get a new in box iPhone 12 for roughly the same price on eBay (I checked.) I’m not paying four hundred dollars for a “new” iphone that is five years old. So now they have to ship the phone back to me, unrepaired. My next step will likely be to take it to a local mom & pop shop and have them do it. Either that or go buy the supplies on fixit and give it a shot myself. Oops, I just checked and it’s a 40 step process just to remove the battery. I’m not going to do that. I may make bad choices sometimes, but I’m not going to let that be one of them.  *I feel obligated to note that the lizard/monkey brain whatever understanding of how the mind works is apparently vastly oversimplified and not even a good or useful simplification like pretending imaginary numbers don’t exist. It’s bad science and I’m strictly using it for artistic license. Stuff I'm Eating I don’t know if it was Futurama’s Bachelor Chow or that guy who lived on monkey chow for a week that made me first think about a “human food” version of dog kibble. Now, before we get too far, I like food, I like food with different flavors and textures and I like the experience of cooking food. But also I’m lazy sometimes and spoiled for choice. How many times have I been caught in that “I’m hungry, but I don’t know what for” loop. So the idea of an all purpose food seems like a good one. At least occasionally. And I’m not the only person who’s thought of this. There’s actual companies out there making products called Soylent and Huel, but both of those are liquid/shake concoctions rather than something with any textural experience. Plus the names are really off putting. Soylent is named after the famous all purpose food in the movie Soylent Green, which my dude, my guy, you don’t want to name your food after that. ITS not as funny as you think it is. Also the Soylent company (and resultant products) in the movie were bad guys, profiting off overcrowding and poverty, naming your company and product after that isn’t ironic, it’s bad marketing. Plus the founder is exactly the sort of guy who would think naming your company Soylent is a good idea.  And Huel sounds like the noise you make when vomiting. But the dream lived on. When would I have my own freeze dried balls of food? Starfield, Bethesda’s latest space based RPG even has a company called Chunks, which manufactures cubeoid food products in easy open pouches. The Expanse books and tv series has Kibble, a common staple among belters. Whole researching fan made recipes for that kibble, I discovered TVP or textured vegetable protein, which turns out to be exactly what I’m looking for. First of all, the name is the sort of straightforward uncluttered sort of thing, that tells you what it is, but also has a relatively useful initialism. It comes in a few different shapes and sizes, but at the core it’s a plant based meat replacement that is relatively shelf stable and in certain configurations comes in little dog food shaped chunks. It even says chunks right on the bag! How do I know this? Well I bought a couple bags. This is a product typically used by vegetarians or vegans who want a convincing meat substitute. I don’t actually need it to be convincing, because part of the appeal to my brain is the inherent inauthenticity of a human kibble product. The bags only just arrived yesterday, so I haven’t actually eaten them yet, but I’ve got a simple curry dish I’m probably going to throw them into this week instead of diced chicken or ground beef. Should be fun! Or weird! This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the week is The End of the Movie (reprise) Here's a picture of a cat

I hope you slept better than I did last night. Nothing was really wrong, I just didn't sleep well. I hate that because I don't even have a cool excuse, my body was just saying lolnope. A Thing in my Possession: Really Janky Headphones I was at the airport waiting for my flight back home and I wanted to listen to a podcast. I hadn’t brought my regular headphones, because they’re bulky and I was traveling light. So I stopped in the little market in the south terminal to see if I could find some cheap headphones I could use for the flight. I picked out a pair that looked like iPhone knockoffs, mostly because the lightning connector I would have to use was prominently displayed on the front of the box. When I checked out, the clerk checked with me to make sure I had an iphone, because they wouldn’t work with anything else. I confirmed I did, and left with fifteen fewer dollars, but one additional set of headphones. I found a seat in the terminal and plugged them in. Almost immediately, the popup on my screen for connecting apple bluetooth headphones popped up. It displayed a set of BeatsX wireless headphones and asked if I wanted to connect them. I figured someone nearby must have tried pairing a set right as I was looking at my phone. I declined, since I didn’t want someone else connecting their headphones to my phone. But when I went to listen to my podcast nothing was coming out of the earbuds, instead still playing through the phone speaker. I tried unplugging and replugging the. headphones in again, and the beatsX display popped up again. Well what the heck, I thought. I said connect, and then the audio started playing correctly. These were wired headphones, but they apparently worked by tricking the phone into thinking they were bluetooth somehow? I can’t imagine I bought actual bluetooth headphones for fifteen dollars at an airport (average markup 200%) so something else had to be going on. I opened up the bluetooth settings and sure enough there was a new device connected labeled only “Baets” (spelled the way) I chuckled to myself at the strangeness of it, but went on anyway. The strangest thing was when I got on the plane and put my phone in airplane mode again, they stopped working. So whatever was going one, turning off Bluetooth was going to be a problem. I manually restarted the bluetooth and left all the other wireless settings off, and listened to podcasts for the rest of the flight. I probably won’t be using them again. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: Vertical Video I’ve been around the internet long enough that I vividly remember the time before smartphones. And before smartphones, there were cameraphones. Cameraphones didn’t take great or even good video, but they did take video. And sometimes we uploaded those videos to the internet. In the early days of smart phones, most people watched those videos on their computers, even if they were taken on a phone. And this saw the rise of the Dreaded Vertical Video. Instead of taking up the whole 4:3 ratio screen, instead the video took a small sliver of it down the middle. It felt like we were losing so much to the giant black blocks on either side of the screen. There were campaigns trying to teach people to turn their phones to the side while taking videos, because even though they looked good on your phone, they would look terrible if you watched them anywhere else. Anyway, tiktok is here now and we lost the vertical video war. By far the largest majority of videos taken on smart phones these days are on phones and viewed on phones and they’re done so in a vertical format. We’ve learned to watch and frame things in a new way. It has changed the language of video production. I don’t know if we’re too far away from a feature film presented in a vertical video format (possibly something in the Screen recording genre like Unfriended or Missing or Searching.) At one point I would have been madder about this than I think I am now. I’m not happy about it, and I probably won’t be watching anything longer than 5 minutes on my phone anyway (long videos are for the big screen, short videos are for the little screen) and 5 minutes is pushing it even then. Which is funny because tiktok is explicitly pushing for longer videos and won’t even monetize your account if your videos aren’t more than 60 seconds long. But people are out there making them and some is out there watching them. I hope they’re all happy. Stuff I’m playing I played a lot of games on my long weekend, but the one I keep telling people about was a warehouse-scale VR experience. There’s a few companies out there doing this, since all you need is a bunch of VR Helmets and some specialized controllers. Plus the software and a network powerful enough to run eight of them simultaneously. And a warehouse space. But’s it’s probably easier than starting an escape room. But like an escape room, this is a communal experience where you get to solve problems in real time, and the problems are things like “too many zombies.” We played two 30 minute sessions, one in a tropical island environment shooting pirates and another in a zombie infested city shooting zombies. The VR level design was really clever, putting you in situations where you were literally walking in circles around a big rectangular space, but it felt like you were traversing actual distance. There were some clever safeguards to prevent you from running into your fellow players, and you got to actually coordinate fighting hoards of zombies or pirates together. It was a little disorienting at first, but quickly you get immersed and by the end of the hour we were all sweating from the exertion and excitement.  Highly recommended if you get the chance. I also downloaded the version of Fallout 4 with updated graphics that just got released. I’ve been spending some time in New Vegas, so switching to the improved graphics in the sequel has been a really impressive jump in quality. I think it’s great that so many people are exploring or rediscovering how great these games are, since the player counts across all of them are though the roof since the tv series dropped on Amazon prime. The series is pretty good too. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the week is Thought Bubbles Here's a picture of a cat 

No newsletter this week because I am spending the whole weekend traveling to see some old friends and play board games, and I'm bad at planning ahead. See y'all next week! Here's a picture of a cat

This might be hitting your inbox a little late today, and you can blame my cat. For the last three nights, she has decided that it's good and fun to wake me up sometime around 2AM and not let me get back to sleep until 5 or so. she insists I pay attention to her, by lightly tapping my arm with her claws outstretched. It's not quite a scratch, but it also isn't that. I'll pet her for a bit, but if I stop (because it' the middle of the night and I fell back asleep) she goes back to scratching me until I give her the attention she so desperately craves. So I'm a lil seepy. A Thing in my Possession: A Pinhole Eclipse Viewing Box So the total solar eclipse happened this week for a large portion of the US population. I hear it was real neat. I was in a zone that only got about 85% coverage of the sun, and even then it was really cool. I spent an hour last week making an eclipse pinhole viewer, using a cardboard box, some duct tape and a piece of a coke zero can. It wasn't exactly the method in this video, but it was pretty close. I know the eclipse glasses were everywhere, but I think the pinhole viewer is actually a cooler, and dare I say it, better way to view a partial solar eclipse. Eclipse glasses aren’t bad by any means, but the thing I don’t like about them is the very thing they are designed to do: block out light. You shouldn’t look at the sun. It’s a bad idea in almost every situation, even, or especially, during a partial solar eclipse. But if you are going to look at the sun, doing so through heavy filtration is a good idea. The sun is too bright, and the level of filtration you need is significant. Most welding goggles actually don’t have enough flirtation, because the sun is brighter than the plasma arcs that occur when welding. I think we’re so used to it, that we often forget just how dangerous the unknowable ball of fire in the sky that gives us all life really is. So eclipse glasses are good and cool. But a Pinhole viewer works a little differently. instead of filtering out parts of the light, the pinhole viewer uses all the light in a smaller quantity instead. It also creates a photograph of what the eclipse looks like with nothing between the light and your eyes. Photograph’s etymology means light-writing and that’s what you’re doing with a pinhole viewer. You create n image of what the sun looks like in exact moment you are looking at it. My pinhole viewer was so precise that I could actually see the clouds around the sun while it was peeking through them. And it was all in glorious color! I tried to take some photos of it with my phone, but they didn’t turn out well. I wish I had thought about it earlier and I could have built in a hole to slide my phone through. Oh well, there’s always next time. Poorly Organized thoughts On: Quitting a Youtuber I don’t want to slag on YouTubers too much, but I’ve seen a couple videos lately that made me so disgruntled that I had to shut them off. It was almost a visceral reaction. I’m not here to make this a callout, so I won’t name and shame and the two examples were on relatively small channels (although larger than my own.) The first example was a woman who was doing a book blog about some books she had finished recently and wanted to share some of her opinions of “mistakes” “feminist” books make. I was willing to give the video a try, because I like checking out smaller channels, but she started off with a condescending and inaccurate definition of what feminism means. Feminism is a complex and robust field, and I’m willing to accept a broad variety of intersecting definitions. But this definition was very specific and very incorrect. She then followed it up with her first example of a “mistake” that a “feminist” book she had read made. The example she gave of a mistake was a narrative choice about certain characters in the book, but the larger problem is that the book she used wasn’t even what I would call a feminist book. I wouldn’t call many books feminist, anyway because I like to think of feminism as a lens through which to examine any work of art, rather than a specific mode of creation or output, but within the very narrow and incorrect definition this youtuber outlined, it technically qualified. But the narrative choice in the book she described didn’t feel like a mistake to me; it felt like a choice. I haven’t read this particular book, but I also suspect that the choice was actually more nuanced in the text than this youtuber made it out to be. So at that point I checked out and did not learn what other “mistakes” “feminist” books make. The other example was more egregious because it included an actual factual error. The context isn’t important, but the content of the inaccuracy was that in 1935 a prize was offered in a contest. The prize, as described in the video was Fifteen Euros. This pinged my radar, because I know the Euro didn’t; exist as currency in 1934. I wasn’t sure exactly when the Euro came into existence, but I remember it happening, so it wasn’t in 1934. I did a very quick wikipedia search to confirm it was created in the 1990s. While I was there on wikipedia I also checked the wiki page for the subject of the contest, to see if maybe the video author was converting to modern money or something, but nope, the original prize was 15 British Pounds in 1934. Not Euros, and not adjusted for inflation or converted to a different currency or anything. I’m mostly fine with videos that tell people cool things. I don’t think they’re as interesting to me as videos with analysis or personal experiences, but I understand why they get made. But if you’re going to just recite a list of facts at me, you better get the facts right. You better believe I clicked the “Don’t recommend this channel to me” box on both of these. Stuff I'm Watching First, an update: I got Dick Miller replaced by a different Richard Miller on the IMDB page of that movie. Good things can happen, as long as you set your sights real low. The Criterion Channel, the streaming platform of the Criterion Collection, announced a new feature this week, a 27/7 stream of movies on the platform. You can just click a button and be watching something unexpected. It's all the joys of turning on a random movie on cable some Saturday afternoon without knowing what it is before hand. There were some mild criticisms when the feature launched with no warning: the biggest one is that you couldn't see what movie you were watching. You also can't rewind back to the beginning, or save the movie for watching later. You can however pause it. So that's something. They did roll out a solution for the "whats on now" problem, by launching a companion website WhatsOnNow.CriterionChannel.com which is just a very simple page with the name of whatever movie is playing now. Personally I like the mystery and surprise of just tuning in and seeing what's on. I've even gone so far as turning it into a game. I start a stopwatch and see if I can figure out what movie is playing within 30 seconds. I can often do it in under 10. Of course I have a much broader knowledge of the films on the platform than most people, but I'm still pretty proud of my hit rate. So far I've won the game with the following films: Police Story Daisies Blood Simple (actually took slightly more than 30, but I should have caught it sooner) Mon Oncle Umbrellas of Cherbourg Gimme Shelter All of which I have seen before, but most of which I don't mind revisiting. There's a couple movies I haven't solved, but one of them was just starting and so captivating that I watched the whole thing. that move? The documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History. I had never heard of this movie, but the opening shots of people looking down on the camera (as if I was a toad?) and either shouting insults or singing praises was enough to get me hooked. This documentary is ostensibly about the cane toad, an invasive species brought to Australia with the goal of fighting sugar cane beetles. It was completely unsuccessful in that goal, but managed to breed to the point of ubiquity in just a few short decades. The movie is a series of interviews with people about their opinions and history with the toads, and these are some wild interviews. It felt like I was watching a lost Christopher Guest mockumentary, but it was all real (or as real as any documentary can be.) I learned about the toads, but I also laughed and was frightened along the way. More documentaries should aspire to be this good. This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Who's The New Guy Here's a picture of the cat that kept me up all night

I'm still not used to the fact that it can snow in April where I live. It wasn't a lot of snow, but it did in fact snow this week for part of an afternoon. Wild. A Thing In My Possession: A Triangle Deck of Cards I really like the "triangle deck" of James Ernest's Pairs. It's called that, not because of the shape of the individual cards (They're rectangles, as usual) but because of the distribution of cards in the deck. It has ten cards, nine 9s, eight 8s, etc. It's a clever structure and dozens of games have been made with it. Pairs, the base game is a simple push you luck game, where on your turn you take a new card or pass and take the lowest card on the table. Because you know how many of each rank are in the deck, you feel much safer taking a a new card when all you have is a three, but if you have an 8 and a 9 in front of you taking another card becomes much riskier. If you end up with a Pair of the same rank you get points for the value of the rank. Points are bad and you keep laying until someone hits a predetermined number of points. That person wins and everyone else loses. I've been thinking about other games you can play with this deck, and I landed on Cockroach Poker. Cockroach Poker is a light bluffing game, where you have knowledge of the cards in your hand, and other people try to pass you cards and can lie about what they're giving you. The core moment in the game is deciding if you want to call out if you think the person is lying or telling the truth, or instead Pass the card on to someone else. If you guess wrong about the person lying, you take the card and put it in front of you. If you guess right, the person who gave you the card takes it instead. But the deck has an even number of each type of card. If you sub in the triangle deck, you then have additional knowledge that there are a lot more of certain types of cards and very few of others. This adds a delicious frosting of additional imperfect knowledge to the an already wonderful game. Poorly Organized Thoughts On: Dick Miller Dick Miller. He’s a guy. You might see him in a movie and go “Hey it’s that guy!” Dick Miller is so much a “That guy” in movies, that there’s a documentary about him called ‘That Guy Dick Miller.” A month or so ago I watched Chopping Mall, a 1980s movie about a group of horny teens trapped in a shopping mall overnight with killer robots. It’s exactly the movie you expect it to be, good or bad. But about 20 minutes in, Dick Miller showed up as a Janitor with just a couple lines. I was so excited, I said “Hey, it’s Dick Miller!” to nobody in particular. I got to thinking about how many movies That Guy Dick Miller must have been in, and it turns out, a lot! I thought it would be a fun ongoing project to see as many of the 139 movies he has been in. I made a list on Letterboxed called Phallus Molendinum (faux latin for Dick Miller) and got to work watching movies and listing them there as I watched. when I got the urge I would pull up the list of all 139 movies he had been in on Letterboxd and sort and filter them until I found one I wanted to check out. I’ve generally been leaning towards his earliest or least popular works (least popular is a metric that Letterboxd creates, but doesn’t explain exactly what goes into it) as I figure If I start with the more obscure stuff I might find some hidden gems on the way to the more well known movies he has been in. Notice how I mentioned 139 movies a couple of times up there? I’ve been looking at the list enough that the number stuck in my brain. So imagine my surprise when I opened the list this week and noticed that it had ticked up by one. Letterboxd now listed 140 movies in the Dick Miller oeuvre. I was pretty sure he hadn’t been in anything new since he died back in 2019, so I started sorting the list to see if anything stuck out. I was worried that I would have to carefully search each of the movies to see what changed, but I got lucky, because the newly added movie was literally the first on the list when sorted by release date (Old->new.) Dick Miller, more than once, told the story of how he got started as an actor. He moved to Hollywood to be a writer, but while he was waiting for that to take off, he found his way onto a movie set where Roger Corman was working, and Corman hired him as an actor. His first role was on a low budget western called Apache Woman. He played an Apache, because it was 1955 and nobody thought that was a bad idea. This has been confirmed by Roger Corman and others. And you can find the movie and watch it too. I did. But now his first listed movie was something called Intermediate Landing in Paris. I’ve never heard of it, but that’s not unusual for me to never heard of a movie. But what was weird is this movie is a French/German collaboration from 1955 that is so obscure that only 5 people have logged having seen it on Letterboxd, and all of those logs are from more than 3 years ago. The IMDB has a single review from someone who watched it. And that review is from 2009. This isn’t Roger Corman Obscure, it’s a whole other level. If Dick Miller was in a French/German co-production as his first film, don’t you think someone would have mentioned it before now? I think so. So I think something is up. I know that Letterboxd pulls data from The Movie Database (instead of IMDB) so I go there. TMDB is a much easier to edit site, and people can make changes pretty much any time they want, with no oversight. But there’s an edit log so I can find that someone added Dick Miller to the cast list just a few weeks ago, along with some other people.  Was someone trying to rewrite history? Or was someone just doing their best to accurately reflect what they thought was the truth? I needed to find out. My gut said there was no way Dick Miller was in the movie. But can you track down an obscure film from 1955 that never even had a physical media release in the US? The internet can. I started posting about this mystery on my mastodon account and after a day or so, one of my internet friends found a streaming copy of the German language version. I didn’t care about the language, since I was looking at faces instead. My first stop: The opening credits. To my surprise there is someone named Richard Miller listed in the cast! Was I wrong? Was this actually a movie we can add to the Dick Miller canon? Was he actually in a movie that came out before his commonly accepted first movie role? Did he actually fly to another country after moving to Hollywood in 1952, but before he got his “first” acting gig with Roger Corman? I was going to find out. I didn’t watch the whole movie, as there were plenty of dialogue scenes with people who clearly aren’t Dick Miller, but I scanned through it and am now confident that whoever Richard Miller is, he isn’t the Dick Miller known and loved everywhere people say “Hey! It’s that guy!”  Of course, actually watching the movie isn't sufficient for the folks who run IMDB, because I have submitted a correction multiple times, but it has not been approved, regardless of the evidence I shared. I even watched the whole movie "That Guy Dick Miller" to make sure there weren't any errant mentions of working on a movie in France. So anyway, the IMDB is incorrect and will likely stay that way. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Ping Pong Girl Here's a picture of a cat

I don't have much to say this week, so here's some stuff from other people. The Dead World of Blippi by Nathan J Robinson (from 2020) explores the world of online children's entertainer Blippi and finds it hollow.  Modern web bloat means some pages load 21MB of data - entry-level phones can't run some simple web pages, and some sites are harder to render than PUBG - A clunky headline, but it points to something important. When my family was first on the internet we used to joke about how one day the internet would load like cable channels, you would click a button and it would be there waiting. This was based on the idea that would stay the same and bandwidth would get ever faster. Well bandwidth did get faster (in general) but websites bloated and bloated with all sorts of invisible garbage behind the scenes to load some text and pictures. I Can Stop Playing Balatro Whenever I Want - A short video exploration of what it's like to start playing Balatro, a digital card game that has sunk its teeth into me. 2024 Hugo Finalists Announced - I don't think anything I nominated in the big slots became a finalist, but that just means I get to find new books! Also there's a nice number of Chinese language finalists, which at least some of the fans from the Chengdu world con last year took advantage of their nominating privileges. Regarding HIGHLANDER 2: THE QUICKENING by John Bierly - I discovered this week that despite its reputation I really like Highlander 2 - The Quickening. And not in a so-bad-its-good sort of way, but actually genuine enjoyment Sorry to everyone who still thought I had good taste. This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend song of the week is Having A Few People Over Here's a picture of a cat

Are daffodils wildflowers? I see a lot of them popping up on the side of the road. Why am I asking you? A thing in my possession: 10 Books from Canada A few years back I made a post on a message board looking for books that had the same vibe as the TV show The Rockford Files. I like the Rockford files as a show where it’s a cunning guy solving mysteries that the cops won’t touch. I was recommended the Ben Perkins mystery series, which is about a guy who does PI work on the side from his normal job of being the head of security for a fancy gated community. He does the PI stuff for beer and car money, because he also likes classic muscle cars. I read the first one digitally, though Archive.org, and enjoyed it. But the reading experience of going through a website with a mid tier UI at best wasn’t great. Sadly the books have been out of print for quite some time, and they were never block busters so they aren’t easy to come by. Occasionally I would drop the author’s name into eBay hoping to get lucky. And get lucky I did! A few weeks ago I found the whole series on auction with a starting bid of 75 cents. What a steal! That 75c was actually lower than eBay’s regular minimum bid, which I quickly realized was because it was listed in Canada. So 75c was actually 99 Canadian Cents. I checked the shipping, and yup it was shipping from Canada, and the estimated shipping to my neck of The Woods was 30 Canadian Dollars (I think they call ‘em Loonies.) 30 dollars was a lot for shipping, but if I bid a dollar, I probably wouldn’t win, and for the nine books in the series, it still came out to about 3 bucks each. Which is what I’d probably pay at a local used bookstore if I stumbled on them there. Of course I’m writing about them now, so it’s already a forgone conclusion that nobody out bid me. Which means I paid one Canadian dollar plus 30 for shipping to have these used paperbacks mailed to me I got to learn about Canada Post, which is their postal service, and tracked the package until it made its way into the USPS. At that point tracking stopped, because I guess you have to pay extra for the USPS to tell you where it is. The books apparently cleared customers though, because after 12 days in transit they showed up at my mailbox. I was hoping the shipping price I had paid was exaggerated a bit, because I felt bad the seller had to go to all the trouble of mailing these books for one single Canadian dollar. But they must have been fine with it, and the postage paid on the label was exactly what I was charged. The seller even gave me a bonus book (which wasn’t a mistake, because it had a slip of paper with “bonus book!” written on it.) I’ve got a beach trip coming up in May and these will now be a perfect companion. Poorly Organized Thought on Surveys: I got a call from the State Health Department and CDC this week. Actually two calls. A couple weeks ago I got a call from an unknown number, and unlike 99% of the time when that happens, they left a voicemail letting me know I had been selected for a state health survey. So when the same number called back I was excited to answer.  I think telephone surveys are one of those things that feel like a relic of a bygone era, but from what I understand they’re actually still pretty common and relatively useful for large scale data gathering. So I was happy to take some time out of my day and answer some questions.  The survey taker was surprisingly talkative as she asked my questions, which surprised me, and even weirder, occasionally gave some mild commentary to my answers. For example after she asked me my gender, and I said male, she dismissively responded “I know, but they make me ask anyway” which I’m guessing was due to the sound of my voice, but was put into stark contrast when she later asked if I was transgender. So the people who wrote the survey knew it was a good idea to include that possibility, but the survey taker didn’t seem to share that idea. In another place she made it very clear that I could refuse to answer any questions that I wanted to, right before asking me my household income, but not right before asking me if I had taken illegal drugs or had sex for money in the past year. I guess she thought would only find one of those questions too personal for me to tell a stranger.  The whole time I was taking the survey, I couldn’t help but also think about how the survey was constructed, why certain questions came in a particular order, or which ones (if any) were tied to the specific things being studied. Generally, the farther afield the question seemed, the more I figured it might be relevant. For example, there were questions about heated tobacco products, which at first I thought were the same as vapes, but it turns out are slightly different, because (as the name implies) they heat tobacco directly. I honestly answered the survey taker that I had never heard of these products, and as such had never used them before. Nor, as was asked, do I ever smell tobacco smoke through the walls from my neighbors (which I don’t have.) Also, I mentioned the “sex for money” question above, but it wasn’t just a yes or no thing. They listed out 5 different activities, of which having sex for money was just one of the options, and then asked if I had done any of the five things in the last year. I’ve heard of this technique in surveys before, where when you’re asking about something where you are afraid the participant will lie, you couch it with other possibilities to present plausible deniability. The other options in this case were things I can’t remember very well because I was distracted thinking about how I recognized the question technique. It’s the same as those social media messages that say something like  “repost if any of the below are true: You like cats You wish for the violent overthrow of the government You’re gay You’re wearing socks Nobody will know which one applies to you!” But it turns out you can apparently do some statistics if you ask this question to a large enough sample size to get useful data and even get a pretty good estimate of how many people like cats or whatever. At the end of the survey they gave me information on how to look up the results when they get published, but also that it won’t be for at least a year or so. Who knows if I’ll remember by then! Stuff I'm Playing I picked up Helldivers 2 to play with some friends and it’s a lot of fun. It’s a squad based shooter where you drop on a planet full of giant bugs, shoot them all and then accomplish a task. But also its’s got friendly fire always on, and you will accidentally kill your squad mates, pithy by shooting them dropping a bomb on them or having a turret shoot through them to hit some bugs.  But if you go into it with the right attitude it’s a lot of fun and accidental deaths are just part of the dark humor that permeates the rest of the game. It’s the sort of thing I would never want to play with strangers however. I don’t need people yelling at me for playing bad. I do that well enough on my own, thank you very much. I’m trying to get through old games I put down for whatever reason, so I’ve been spending some time with Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, which is an RPG from the early 2000s where you play a vampire in a modern day city and have to deal with all that. There’s lots of political intrigue and solving problems though talking instead of killing. Because you can’t actually kill a lot of people without causing problems and breaking the Masquerade, the rules that keep vampires a secret from the public. Which will get you in serious trouble. It’s a fun game, but has a lot of the junk from games of that period. You don’t always know what to do, or where to go, so you wander around and in the process discover new different stories you might not have encountered otherwise. I do still have to pull up a game guide occasionally to make sure I’m not way off base, and it’ great that there are still guides on gamefaqs.com that someone wrote in 2005 to help me out. This Weeks Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Buttload of Cats Here's a picture of a cat

It's Saint Patrick's Day! I'm wearing green underwear, as far as you know, so no pinching will be necessary. A Thing in my Possession: A Laserdisc When I was a youth, I would spend literal hours wandering through my local Blockbuster Video as I struggled with deciding what movie to rent. Often I would have to walk every single aisle at least once to make sure I had looked everything over and had carefully weighed all my options. I couldn’t just pick out a movie I wanted to see, I had to pick out the *right* movie. And with literally hundreds of vhs tapes to pick from, I had to be sure. But there were two parts of the store that were safe from my explorations. I still have the rough layout of the store in my mind, so I can even mentally point out where they are. Just to the left of the checkout counter was where the foreign films were. These didn’t interest me, for reasons of  impenetrability. I wouldn’t understand them. I didn’t have my mind opened to the possibilities of foreign cinema until high school when i worked at a bookstore and a coworker expended my horizons through the Criterion Collection and hand recommending me some of his favorite Korean films. But on the opposite side of the checkout counter up against the wheelchair ramp between the two levels (ours was a split-level Blockbuster) were the weird laserdisc movies. I didn’t know what they were, but I knew they weren’t for me. We didn’t have a laserdisc player and I wasn’t interested in movies I couldn’t watch. But I was missing out! I didn’t know it at the time but laserdiscs were the first high definition home video format. It had roughly twice the resolution of VHS, and looked great even on CRT tvs (which was important because LDC and Plasma  were still pretty rare). And because it was the format where you could see widescreen movies, instead of cropped pan-and-scan versions, the cinephiles loved it. I didn’t even know I was watching movies in a different format that how they were originally released! I only learned widescreen was an option because of a display by the laserdiscs with side by side comparisons of the same shot from Ridley Scott’s Alien. Nowadays that people have widescreen tvs, it’s standard for movies on home media (let’s be clear, streaming) to be widescreen, but back then it wasn’t even a consideration. If you paid attention you probably saw a “this film has been modified to fit the screen” message at the start of the tape, but I didn’t even know what that meant. Laserdisc was a special format where the best versions of movies were often released. Star wars fans still collect the original trilogy on laserdisc because it’s the home release closest to the original theatrical experience (George Lucas even made changes to the VHS before the special edition rereleases.) There are as all handful of films that never received a DVD or Blu Ray home video release, so are only available in higher definition on laserdisc. So fast forward to the present day, when I have completed my transformation into a real movie lovin’ sicko, and I have since learned about how cool laserdisc was as a format. I’m not going to get into collecting them, because I already have enough collections, but if things had turned out differently I would have been. Anyway, an internet friend of mine has announced that de to an upcoming move he will be downsizing his considerable laserdisc collection. He’s mostly getting rid of movies he either has duplicates of, or won’t watch again anytime soon. He’s going to sell most of them, but as he is also a proselytizer of the format, he’s offered to send out a free laserdisc to any of his internet friends who want one. I jumped at the opportunity, if only so I could own a small piece of home media history. He sent me the list of discs he was getting rid of, and the one that jumped out to me was Lawnmower Man. Lawnmower Man is a movie that shares a name with a Stephen King short story, and literally nothing else. The movie is so different, that despite having his name on it originally, King sued to have it removed. Which is extra funny because the version of the movie on laserdisc that was sent to me is from the batch that prominently says “based on a Story by Stephen King” after the lawsuit was settled. So he had to go back and sue again for additional damages after the studio broke the court order removing his name. The movie itself is about a scientist played by Pierce Brosnan using computers to turn his lawnmower man into a genius. It’s full of mediocre CGI and is a horror story about the powers of technology. It’s not a good movie, but it is a movie that sticks in my brain because I saw countless trailers for it on the other VHS tapes I rented at Blockbuster back in the day. If my laserdisc story was to come full circle, this seemed like the best option. So now it sits on my desk. And it’s a good thing working laserdisc players are pretty expensive on the secondhand market because otherwise I’m afraid it would be the start of a much bigger problem (collection) for me. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: Shutting Up I’m a pretty opinionated guy. By which I mean I have lots of opinions. And for the most part, I’m fine with that. I don’t mind having opinions on little things like which movies are good or the right way to cook vegetables. I also have opinions on more important things like fundamental human rights and which Taylor Swift album is the best. And I share these opinions when asked, or when people subscribe to my newsletter. But I also try to remember that opinions are based on the information I have available to me, and that information can be flawed. Which means my opinions can be changed with new information. I’m being a little vague here and that’s on purpose. Earlier this week I wrote one of these on an opinion that I felt pretty sure about. I even outlined it and made bullet points and everything. But the situation was an ongoing one and as I heard more perspectives that challenged my own I started to doubt myself. Here are people who were sharing their lived experiences and while I don’t want to deny those experiences I had trouble understanding how they came to the conclusions they arrived at from those experiences. Now this is a mid-level opinion, and it’s one where as I continue to question if and why my conclusions could be wrong or should be changed. But even on mid level opinions, I think I’m better off just shutting up. This is one of those situations where the best thing for me to do is probably shut up and listen to other people. More often than not in my life when I’ve identified those moments I haven’t regretted listening instead of talking. So I decided not to share my opinion this time. Maybe I’ll do so later, after I continue evaluating the information I have, and maybe I won’t. To be clear this isn’t a topic you probably have an opinion on already. It’s a small fandom squabble happening in a tiny corner of the internet. But it matters to the people discussing it. All I would be doing is bringing more attention to it, which I know because I had to do an explainer of the whole situation at the start of the version of this I deleted. So instead you get this. A wandering, set of paragraphs that say nothing. So I'll say this: When a cop asks you questions: Shut up! Stuff I'm watching: I finally got around to finishing the 4 season CW Nancy Drew tv series. I'll be honest, I mostly completed it out of a sense of obligation. It's not a terrible show by any means, but before watching the show I had no real interest or connection to the characters or premise. I had never read a Nancy Drew book, and to this day I still haven't. I'm sure they're good, but I can't compare this series to them at all, due to my ignorance. What surprised me most about this show when I first started watching it, was that it was very explicitly a show about supernatural events. In this series ghosts and other spooky things like curses and witches are all real. This puts it much more firmly in the realm of a show like Buffy The Vampire Slayer (although not nearly as good) than a show where a young sleuth solves mysteries. By the series finale they're throwing around curses and demons and not-technically-time travel with such abandon that it feels like every problem and solution are just being made up on the fly. Because with poorly defined magic you can just do whatever you want. but fans would say the show is much more about the relationships than it is the specifics of supernatural activities, and I would have to agree there. Somehow this show made me ship a couple for the first time in forever. And because on half of the ship was a ghost, they eventually move on to the afterlife and are never mentioned again. Justice for Bess/Odette. I recently mentioned that I'm trying to watch all the official black and white releases of movies that were originally shot in color. I continued that this week with Parasite, which is already a great film and one of the few times in my lifetime where I agree with the academy's choice for best picture. It may not have been the pest picture of 2019, I haven't seen them all, but it was the best picture nominated for that award. I am real glad I revisited it this week, and I have to say the black and white version is absolutely stunning to watch. I don't know that it's better than the original, after all it's still the same film, but it might be the version I go back to the most often. This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Settle For Me Here's a picture of a cat

We’re heading back home today, as the plague seems to have vacated the premises of our actual home. We’re ten days out from initial symptom onset so we trust that it will be safe to return. It has been fun and weird being only a short drive from home, and I’ve had to actually commute to work (at my home office) every day this week, which hasn’t been necessary for almost exactly four years. It was a weird time, but I’m also glad to be going home.  Poorly Organized Thoughts on: Chili I’ve lived in three different regions of the country now for long enough to feel comfortable talking about something important: chili. Chili’s a fascinating topic because people get very protective of their particular variety.  First of all, there’s Texas style chili. Being from Texas originally this is of course the chili I think of when i think of chili. I think due to its seeming simplicity it’s the closest thing to an idealized version of chili. The platonic ideal, if you will.  Side note: did you know that the phrase “platonic ideal” come from the philosophy of Plato? That’s what the name means. To his way of thinking, everything in existence is merely a reflection of the best or most perfect version of that thing. So if you have a chair, you know it is a chair because of how closely it hews to the pure perfect version of a chair that all chairs are shadows of. And as I understand it, these platonic ideal forms weren’t just hypothetical or theorized, but understood to be actual things in what we might call another plane of existence. And it should be further noted that these platonic are different from Platonic solids, which are the 5 regular convex polyhedra. You’re likely familiar with at least the Cube, which is made up of 6 regular (that is to say, identical) squares, but the is also the tetrahedron and octahedron and icosahedron, all made up of regular triangles, the dodecahedron made of pentagons. Although now that I think about it, the Platonic solids are also sort of the platonic ideals of those shapes. Any icosahedron you make in the real world won’t be exact (just ask any D&D player about their favorite d20) so it is merely attempting to be the true icosahedron. And then of course there’s the platonic friendship, which I leave as an exercise for the reader.  Was I talking about chili? Texas chili is my favorite. It’s a hearty meat stew that can hold up to cheese, sour cream, and saltine crackers. But to a lot of people Texas chili is defined by what it lacks, which is beans. Most other chilis use beans. Most commonly red kidney beans in my experience, but other beans are certainly on the metaphorical table. I’ll be one of the few Texans out there who says it’s fine if you want to put beans in your chili. I don’t think it improves anything if the rest of your chili isn’t up to snuff, but you do you.  There are also the non-red chilis that come most commonly in shades of white or green. These are fanciful deviations and experiments that push us further from the platonic ideal of what a chili can be, but in those experiments we get a better understanding of what it means to be a chili. Chicken or pork instead of beef! Fresh chilies (with an e) instead of dried or powdered! I even once made a seafood chili using scallops and shrimp. It turned out well and showed me just how far one can push the boundaries of what a chili (with an I) can be.  Then. There is Cincinnati. Cincinnati style chili is an abomination. They serve it over spaghetti, often with beans, and I’ve heard rumors of ingredients as strange as cinnamon and even cocoa powder. And the worst part? I think it’s pretty tasty! But I still think it crosses the metaphorical threshold into a land beyond chili. One should expect it to count, after all chili is right there in the name. And the general scope of ingredients seems to match: beef, tomatoes, brownish red sauce. You can even serve it on a hotdog with shredded cheddar cheese, for a delightful experience. But I think it doesn’t count as chili for a single reason: you wouldn’t eat it alone. If you walk into one of the 160 Skyline Chili locations across the Midwest (mostly Ohio) you won’t find “bowl of chili” on the menu. The simplest way you can order it is with spaghetti underneath and cheese on top. That is the minimum complete dish. And you need those components to work in harmony with the chili, or it won’t taste right. So for that reason, Cincinnati style chili has to be demoted to sauce. Sorry. Stuff I’m watching The Traitors (US version) season 2 ended this week and it was a killer finale. If you’re unfamiliar, the Traitors is a hidden role game like The Resistance or Werewolf or Mafia where a group of people have to work together towards a common goal while also trying to seek and expose the traitors amongst the players. As far as reality competition shows go, it’s nowhere near as strategic as a survivor or big brother, as it mostly runs on vibes. And the vibes are immaculate. This season’s was entirely reality TV stars and people of similar levels of game (including a former member of British Parliament.) I won’t recap. The whole season or spoil the finale, but it became clear there were two groups of players, one who saw this as the game it was, and one who took everything at face value and played like they just hanging out with friends. The whole thing takes place in a castle in Scotland and Alan Cummings hosts in a series of outrageous outfits. It’s a silly good time, and I recommend the second season in particular as a good intro to these types of tv shows.  I have also watched the first episode of Elsbeth, a show that is technically a spin off of The Good Wife and The Good Fight, but requires absolutely no prior knowledge of those shows. What it is is a reverse mystery show where we the audience see the crime being committed and then follow Elsbeth, who is technically a lawyer but is working alongside the NYPD for reasons, as she figures out who did it and finds a way to solve the mystery. This format was originally pioneered by Columbo, played by Peter Falk and now with Poker Face by Rian Johnson and starting Natasha Lyonne, we now have two of these shows on at the same time. It’s a good time to be a fan of this format (which I am) This Week’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is I’m not Sad, You’re Sad Here’s a picture of a cat

Haha! Remember last week when I was talking about needing a vacation! Well that became a bit of a monkey’s paw situation. Because Friday morning, a member of my household got a positive COVID test result. I immediately started shopping on Amazon for the things needed to build a Corsi-Rosenthal box, and while I was doing that my sweetheart called on her way home. She told me that our neighbors, whomst are out of town for two weeks and having their cats sat by aforementioned sweetheart, had heard the news (which travelled fast) and offered for us to stay at their empty house to wait until the plague had passed us by. So now we are staying at someone else’s home to avoid contaminating ourselves. It’s nice here! There are two cats! It’s been useful for my mental health to think of it as a vacation, except just down the road from our regular house, so we can pop back in (masked) if needed. As a further result, I don’t have my computer with me and so I’m offering a truncated email to you this week. Please stay safe out there! Here’s a picture of a cat.

I feel like I should take a vacation. Not from anything in particular, but I’m just feeling a bit restless. Maybe I should just take a walk. A Thing in my Possession: 99 granola bars I bought 99 chewy granola bars for kids from meh.com It was the sort of thing that really makes the website live up to the name. But I thought to myself, well I like granola bars, and this is a lot cheaper than it would have been otherwise to buy them. And they’re not bad! meh could get them and reset them for cheap because they are relatively close to their best by dates, but on shelf stable foods those are more of a suggestion than anything else. They don’t immediately become poison 24 hours after the date. But the funniest thing about buying 99 granola bars is that they came loose in the cardboard box. I mean each one is individually wrapped, but I kind of expected there to be some additional internal packaging. Nope! Just a big jumble of bars in a box. Of course there are fewer than 99 in the box now, because I just eave it next to my desk and when I feel the urge, I reach over and grab one out of the box. Stuff I'm Watching I bought the DVDs of Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation, which is the only live action Ninja Turtles TV series to exist. This show is not good, and in fact is widely regarded as terrible. I’ve watched the first half dozen episodes, and I don’t want to imply that it is anything approaching good. However, it is less terrible than I was originally led to believe. The crimes against Ninja Turtles it commits begin with the title, which very deliberately removes both Teenage and Mutant from the equation. Like we know that both words are included, but it is a bad decision to not include them, if nothing else because it makes alphabetizing one’s collection difficult. Do you just include them with the other TMNT shows and movies? Or do you drop them in the N section like a rube? I would probably do the former. But beyond the title, the show was clearly made with a budget of thirteen dollars. The turtles themselves look OK until they start talking, at which point I’m forced to ask if they even knew what the lines were going to be while filming, or if the dialogue was written entirely after the fact. The audio is clearly all dubbed in afterwards, but it feels like no effort was put into making the mouth movements match what was being said. The writing is pretty bad. They created a whole new villain for the turtles to fight, they explicitly state the turtles aren’t brothers (seemingly to make it less weird when they perv on the new girl turtle) and they added a girl turtle. Now having a girl turtle in the show isn’t inherently a bad idea. But the way they did it was not great. She has two main character traits, the first is she isn’t a ninja, but rather a shinobi, which to this show means a ninja but with magic, and that she doesn’t speak English well. There’s not an episode I’ve watched that doesn’t include the “joke” where she says a phrase wrong and is corrected by one of the boys. Plus the other turtles don’t use her given (Chinese) name, instead calling her Venus de Milo, who you might notice is an artwork rather than being an artist. I feel like I’m not doing a great job of convincing you this isn’t terrible. But effort was clearly being put into the show, and one thing I think they got pretty well is the characters. These dudes feel like themselves. I’ve watched the H Bomberguy video about the CG animated pseudo anime show RWBY three times now. I have never watched a single episode of RWBY. I’m not gunna rehash the video, because it’s two an a half hours long. But I thin kit’s a fascinating piece of media criticism because he isn’t content to call the show bad, but rather he tries to understand why the show fails to be the best version of itself. I really like this style of criticism, breaking a thing apart to understand how it works, and comparing that to what it is trying to accomplish. Obviously this is a subjective process, as all criticism is, but when it’s done well it helps you understand why someone feels a way about a piece of media and can even grant the audience a deeper understanding of it too. So even though I’ve never seen any of RWBY, the structuralism and format of the analysis is enough to bring me back. on my recent third viewing of the whole thing there was a quote that really stood out to me, which is "at it's core, writing means making decisions and risking making the wrong one.” and wow did that hit close to home for me. In a very literal sense of the word, I’m a writer. I come on here and put out roughly a thousand words every week for you my (very small) audience to consume. I hope you enjoy them but I don’t actually know if you do because I don’t get a lot of feedback. But I write words every single week and so I am a writer. But I feel very comfortable in this format because I can shorten the period between writing and publishing to basically zero. I often type directly into the post creation box, so I don’t have to go back and look at what I wrote more than once. And I don’t look back much either. After a post is published, I move on to the next one. Which means I never have to question if I made the wrong decision because I’m on to making the next one. Once I start thinking about the decisions I’m making I get vapor lock and the words do not come out as well. I have a play I’ve been writing on and off for *checks watch* 3 years. And the more I ave written of it, the slower I’ve gone. I wrote two pages last week, which were the first pages I had written in months. And if I were to hazard a guess I might be about half way done. And it’s because every time I open the document I start second guessing the writing choices I have already made. I’ve changed the (as of yet unwritten) ending three different times, and I have about two and a half different opening scenes because I can’t decide where to start the story. I’ve even thought of taking the coward’s way out and writing all three endings and letting the audience decide which one would be performed on a given night (or do the thing from Clue and show all of them) but I also know that it wouldn’t serve the story to do that. It would be failing to make any decision instead of doing my best to make what I think is the best choice and living with the consequences. (To be clear, I think it actually is the best choice in Clue, because it reflects the source material, and reinforces the inherent silliness in the whole endeavor.) This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is: What'll it Be Here's a picture of a cat

I often get the Day of the Triffids confused with the Nigh of the Lepus. Which I really shouldn't because one has Triffids and one takes place at night. A Thing in my Possession: A Doctor Who Scarf Yes I know his name isn't Doctor Who, but It's called that because it comes from the tv show Doctor Who. Or at least that's how I'm justifying calling it that. Because if I called it a Doctor scarf, or more specifically a Fourth Doctor Scarf, I feel like I'm being more accurate (I've been watching a lot of Um, Actually on dropout), but also feels like it's pushing the person I'm talking with to have to ask more questions in a feat of verbal entrapment. They can ask questions if they want to, but it's kind of mean to be intentionally obtuse just so I can talk more about the topic. And if they're already asking questions about my 18 foot long scarf, I've got them plenty trapped. Of course this is my newsletter, so I can opine on it at any length I find desirable. When I originally opined on length regarding the scarf, it was in the period of time where my sister had recently started knitting and let me know she'd be willing to make one of the iconic scarves worn by Tom Baker when he played the Doctor on Doctor Who. There were three different lengths of scarf he wore over the course of his tenure, and the longest one was roughly 18 feet in length. It was incredibly nice and giving of my sister to agree to make me this scarf and I selfishly took the opportunity to ask for the longest one. We worked together to find the right pattern and screen accurate yarn colors, by which I mean I googled the answers and gave them to her. (remember when google could find things?) Ever since she finished it while I was in college (she probably put hundreds of hours into it,) I have relished the cold days when I was also going outside and it was finally practical to wear this entirely unpractical garment. This is a long winded way of saying it's been cold lately and the scarf is in storage, which means I miss wearing it. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: Camp Songs I miss singing camp songs. When I worked at a scout camp for the majority of my teen years, and even into my early twenties, every time we got together we would sing songs. There are probably two dozen or more camp songs that I have permanently embedded in my brain from that experience. At least once a month we would have a meeting, and at every one we would sing a couple of songs. It was a very important part of the experience, so much so that when the camp actually started, the whole first day when campers were arriving, we the staff would sing song after song after song. Most of the time the campers were not at all prepared for this experience of 20 young men singing nonsense songs without pause, which was part of the fun for us, but also it set the tone for the whole week. We would back off a bit as the days went on, but there was never a time when the whole camp was together that we weren’t likely to break into song. It was wonderful to see these young scouts transform from confused and annoyed by all the singing to joyfully joining in on every song by the end of the week. I still know the words to almost all the songs we use to sing. There's something powerful and comforting about a community who breaks into spontaneously breaks into songs together. Stuff I'm Watching: I was a real Glee-head back in the day. And to be clear it was from the jump. I watched the pilot on TV and then went and bought the episode on iTunes (ITunes was a place you could buy digital media. {Buying is a concept where you pay for something once, the you can use it forever instead of paying for it every month

Once there was a dutch man, his name was Johnny Verbeck. He mad the finest sausages and sauerkraut and spek. He made the finest sausages, the world had ever seen. And one day he invented a sausage making machine. A Thing in my Possession: Pocket Games I wrote last week about how I don't play a lot of board games with people in person any more, but I also realized that I don't let that stop me from wanting to. I went to see a play with some friends here in person, and even thought the afternoon's activity was already planned, there was the possibility we might go out for coffee or dinner afterwards. So I slipped a couple games into my pockets. In this case it was Pairs and Love Letter. Two simple games that pack a lot of fun into small packages. Tiny games are maybe my favorite sub-niche in the hobby. I love the idea of having something that would become part of your everyday carry that includes a the possibility for fun. Sure some folks carry a pocket knife, or a stack of 3x5 notecards held together with a binder clip, but I carry a game or two when I go out (which is rare.) 90% of the time I don't end up puling them out, but I like the comfort of the possibility. And when I have pulled them out it's been worth the initial awkwardness, because we've had fun that the others I was with didn't expect to have. I think more people should carry games in their pocket for when boring things happen. I have plenty to recommend! Poorly Organized Thoughts about: Search Engines I don’t really do new years resolutions. But I kind of fell backwards into one a few weeks ago. I was thinking about how bad search engines have gotten lately. I generally haven’t used google for a few years, because their company motto some time ago stopped being “don’t be evil” and started being “don’t? Be evil!” between the tracking and advertising and I’m still mad about them shutting down google reader. My primary search engine has been Duck Duck Go, which doesn’t track users (yay!) But I have also noticed how bad search results have gotten over the years. More often than not when I search for something specific on any given search engine, I get garbage instead of anything useful. Every blogpost I find there feels full of filler trying to masquerade as content specifically designed to juice whatever search algorithm is being used to serve up these pages that mostly exist for advertiser dollars. I think it started with the glorification of recipes. You know that thing where you have to scroll past a 2 thousand word story just to find out what ingredients you need to make a cake? I don’t think that happened on accident. I think for whatever reason those pages did well in search (possibly because they appeared to be made by actual people?) and then the feedback loop started. You have to write pages like that so that they show highly on search engines, but then why bother actually writing anything real on them, just churn out some spicy autocomplete garbage and slap a generated recipe on the end too. I don’t think this was inherently malicious on anybody part, but instead the result of competing automations and prioritizing page rank over actual usability. Why do you need a good page rank? So people will see the ads next to your content and you will make a few cents. I started noticing that whatever page I ended up on felt like it was specifically designed to look like a human made it, but without any of the touches of an actual human behind the keyboard. I don’t think I could put into words specifically, but then someone else went and did it for me. This article on the Verge goes into great detail in helping me understand what happened to search, and in particular how it has made all websites feel the same. Once you start seeing it, it’s everywhere. Like seeing the code in the matrix. So I quite using search engines. I’m not the first person to try doing this, which I know because I got the idea from the internet’s resident Linux Mom Veronica Explains. She hasn’t yet posted a video about the experience, but she has posted a bit about it on her mastodon account, where I follow her. I thought it was a cool thing to try and so for the last month or so I have done everything I can to avoid any search engine. And honestly? It’s been pretty good. nine times out of ten I can just go to wikipedia for a quick piece of information on a topic, and if I need to go further I can always check the sources there. I even updated my browser’s default search to start there instead of DDG to break myself of the habit. I hadn’t realized how insidious having a search engine in also in the address bar really was for changing my behaviors. It really made DDG (or google or whatever) the default behavior for interacting with the web, and ultimately that gave them more power over my browsing than I would have if I thought about before now. The other thing that I’ve rediscovered in this practice is the ability to flex my own research muscles. I have to ask myself where a given piece of information might exist, rather than offloading the work to a computer. When wikipedia doesn’t suffice, I have to think about where the information might exist. Often I’ll start by trying to remember websites I have visited before, which works pretty well, but I’ve also just guessed at websites and gotten where I need to go. I complain about the death of websites, but a lot of companies still have them, with at least basic support information. website’s built in search functions are often better than you might expect, and help limit the results to what’s actually in the site. Youtube is still a useful resource, and I’ve gone back to using reddit more, just because too much of what is there has actually been written by a person. Reddit has’t been the most useful, so usually it’s a place of last resort. I’ve also started using bookmarks again! You know those things where you save a website to come back to it later? They’re great and I’m kind of mad at myself for not using them more. I used to have dozens of websites bookmarked, and now I have maybe 6. Which is more than I had when I started this process. But I’ll probably have more soon. Here are some of the things I have found without a search engine: A liquid soap recipe My doctors office The solution to a weird problem I was having with an obscure piece of software (thanks forums!) That above article about how google changed websites (I hadn’t saved the link) song lyrics for Fast Car by Tracy Chapman And those are just the things I can remember while writing this. It’s been a fun experiment, and the longer I go without using search engines, the more I realize I don’t really need them for most things. Stuff I'm Reading: I dove back into Joker Moon, the 29th book in the Wild Cards series. Wild Cards is a fun series, set in a world where in the 1950s an alien virus swept across the globe. It killed a lot of people let some completely unharmed, and for an even smaller population it mutated them beyond humanity. Almost nobody who mutates does so in the same way, which led to naming the virus the Wild Card. And when your card turns, you could end up as a relatively normal looking person who can lift very heavy objects with no effort, or fly, or turn your body into a swarm of insects(an Ace), or you might wind up as a giant mutant snail or some other hideous thing(a Joker). With 30 plus books in the series, there's a lot to explore, but most of them are standalone and can be read in any order. Most of them are also what they call Mosaic Novels, where a handfull of different authors tell stories from different characters' POV over the course of the book. Soone character will have 1-6 different chapters in the book about them, written by one author, and a different character will tell their character's part of the story in other chapters. Joker Moon, the one I'm currently reading has nine different authors telling the story of a young man with too much money who decides to build a refuge for all Jokers, where they can get away from their harsh treatment on earth. By moving to the Moon. I generally enjoy the Wild Card books I've read so far and this one is turning out to be quite good. I actually picked up two more at the library this week so I"m ready to jump back in once I finish this one. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Danny's Turn (Live) Here's a picture of a cat

Did the groundhog see a shadow? I don't know, and I didn't check. What is the average lifespan of a groundhog? What does Puxatawny do when Phil dies? Is there a backup groundhog waiting in the wings? Or do they have to go on a hunt for one like they do with the Dalai Lama? It's probably better if we don't know. A Thing In My Possession: A big aluminum measuring cup I think the silliest thing I got for Christmas was a 1 qt measuring metal measuring cup. It's made of aluminum and looks like it belongs in a commercial kitchen or bakery for the purpose of measuring bulk dry goods. But I don't use it for that purpose. I suppose I could, but I mostly drink water out of it, often with a squirt from one of those flavor boosters that have been around for years, but got popular on tiktok when someone called them "water hacking." I put it on my amazon wishlist not because it seemed like a particularly useful drinking vessel, or because i needed to measure things in quarts. I put it there, because it's a screen accurate version of the mugs that Klingons drink bloodwine from. It shows up in a few episodes across The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. It isn't immediately obvious that they're using measuring cups for mugs, because theu just look like large metal mugs. but someone on the internet noticed and I have loved that fact ever since. It's clear someone in a props department needed to find something they could use that looked appropriately klingon-like, and a large metal mug with flared lips has the appropriate brutalist flair. I've been using it for over a month now and it's great. It has a wide base, and holds enough water that I don't feel the need to go refill it all the time. Plus it lets me secretly pretend I'm a Klingon in boring zoom calls. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: Shut Up and Sit Down Huh. Shut Up and Sit Down is ending. Well that’s not technically true. But it feels true. Shut up and Sit Down is a youtube channel and podcast and website that reviews and discusses board games, card games, and similar things. It started a bajillion years ago in some fake year called two thousand and eleven? that can’t be right. I discovered them through another defunct website Penny Arcade TV. Penny Arcade is a webcomic that has been around for probably twice as many internet eons as SU&SD, and they have dabbled in lots of different things. They tried to make a gaming news website, and they tried to make a gaming video site. Both of those failed in different ways, but one of the web-shows they hosted on their eventually defunct video site was Shut Up and Sit Down. I discovered the game review show there, particularly with the video where they reviewed six games in about fifteen minutes. It was a new thing, and they introduced it as a new segment called Rapid Reviews. I’m pretty sure they never used that segment name again. But I was hooked by these wily boys and their board games. I had only recently gotten into the hobby with any particular zeal (mostly off another ended game show, TableTop with Wil Wheaton). But these guys were looser around the edges, not polished, filming in their living rooms. It felt like friends telling me about the games they liked and why they were cool. About five years ago one of the two dudes, Paul, had left the channel. It wasn’t a huge surprise, after he had moved to Canada a couple years prior and was focusing on his own writing. It was a big change, but one the site weathered.  They had brought on some additional on screen talent, and by that point it really felt like a 3 person show anyway. And in the time since, they had hired even more people to be contributors. More voices in the game review community was a good thing, and the videos changed to match the style of the new contributors. Quinns, the other remaining original host felt like he was doing a lot less month to month, after all, he had a second job doing absolutely amazing reporting work on non-board games for the website People Make Games (seriously, check it out.) So I can’t say I’m too surprised by this change, but I can say I am a little sad about it. The videos will still exist, and I can go back to them whenever I need to find info on new (or old) games I want to try. If I’ve ever recommended a board game to someone, it was in the hope that I could spread some of the enthusiasm for the hobby I felt coming through the screen from their videos. One of my favorite things to do when I was at PAX South (RIP) was wander through the tabletop freeplay area and find a game they had recommended so I could play it with my friends. That’s the other side of the coin then. I’m not the same person I was when I discovered their game videos. I don’t play bored games nearly as often as I once did. It started with the pandemic, where all my gaming had to be don remotely, but by the time in-person events with friends had become safer, my closest friend group had migrated to different parts of the country (including my move to The Woods.) We still get together and play games every Sunday night, but if we want to play a board game, we have to do it through a piece of software to simulate the experience. And by that point, why not play a video game (which we often do?) I have friends I see in person, but they tend to be the ‘sit around and drink wine’ sorts, while I’m bringing more of a babadook vibe with my board games. And I don’t honestly know if I’ll ever go to a real board game convention again (because of viruses. Con crud was a real problem even before COVID.) It isn’t like I’m done with board games, any more than Quinns is officially leaving Shut up and Sit Down (he’s moving into a “contributor” role) I still have lots of games that I’d love to get to the table again, and I can’t shake the idea of hosting a mini-con of just people I know here in town to play games with my friends again, but my priorities have clearly shifted a bit. This is as good a time as any to remember that we are always changing as people and that it’s ok we aren’t the same people we were before. Stuff I'm not yet watching For by birthday I bought myself a bunch of movies. I've been fascinated by the niche category of color movies that have an official black and white release. I first heard about this particular phenomenon when it was announced that a black and white version of The Mist, based on a Stephen King novella was getting released. This seemed silly and kind of weird, but it's what the writer/director Frank Darabont had apparently always wanted, but had been kept from doing by the studio. But if you sell it as a DVD special feature it's a pretty cool idea (this was 2008, when people cared about DVD special features.) Since I first hears about The Mist, my ears would prick up any time I heard another director was looking to do that with his film. It's the sort of thing that feels kind of silly, but also shows how changing the color gamut on a film produces a different viewing experience. This is something I discovered as a relatively young child. I grew up with tv that was predominantly in color, but there were enough black and white shows I could access (thanks nick at night!) that i knew it was a possibility. Mostly I knew it signaled that a movie or TV show was old. But I was also a kid who liked to play with the settings on my TV. More than a few times I would ignore whatever show was actually on TV, instead spending time playing with the display settings. I could increase the green, red, or blue levels, driving them up or down and make the picture change before my eyes. I could dial up r down the contrast and sharpness to change whatever I happened to be watching into an alien looking broadcast. Or, I could dial down all the colors, and dial up the contrast and make any tv show look like it was old, which is to say black and white. So when I hear about directors re-releasing their movies in black and white, I can't help be reminded of afternoons in front of the TV playing with the remote to see what I could make the picture do. I've been trying to keep track of all the movies that get this treatment, but I wasn't sure anybody else was noticing the trend or not. So I was surprise3d and delighted to see this article about Godzilla Minus One's recent limited release without color.  It pointed out this mini-trend that has been going on for a while. IT listed some I knew about, like Logan Noir, and Fury Road Black and Chrome, and even Zach Snyder's Justice is Gray edition of Zach Snyder's Justice League (which I actually watched instead of the color version)  The article also pointed out a few I didn't know about like Peter Bogdanovich's Texasville, or Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley. But not all black and white versions are made the same. The better versions of these films are shot in a way that makes the lack of color work as if it was never in color to begin with, rather than just dialing down the saturation and calling it a day. Every shot needs to be re-graded in order to really make it sing. back when black and white film was actually being used, there was a lot of work put into how specific colors would impact the film, and a lot of work put into coloring everything to create a particular look in the final product. Working from a color version and re-coloring it to black and white is not guaranteed to actually make for an interesting picture. So did any of these movies accomplish that? I don't know because I haven't seen most of them! Back to my birthday. I decided I'd track down as many of these "official" black and white versions I could find. Some of them were easier than others. I managed to get Logan, The Mist, Fury Road, and Johnny Mnemonic (of all films?) on blu ray, and while I haven't bought them yet, Parasite and Texasville are both available from the criterion collection, so I'll pick them up in a future sale. And there are still 5 official versions that are unavailable as far as I can tell. Godzilla Minus One just came out last year, so it hasn't even hit physical media yet, Nightmare Alley and Justice League have official versions in b&w, but no physical releases as far as I can tell, and the last two Mother by Bong Joon-Ho and Lady Vengeance by Park Chan-Wook might have had official releases, but if they did it was in Korea, where both movies hail from, and I've had no luck tracking them down. At least some of these were re-graded with the director and cinematographer supervising and approving the work, so I hope to find them one day officially. But until then I've got some more movies to watch.  This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Sexy French Depression Here's a Picture of a cat

My birthday was this week, so as my gift to you, here's a song about a bucket of beans. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: The Hugo Awards I almost wrote about this in last week's newsletter, but I held off because the situation was still developing and I hoped there would be a resolution soon. That does not appear to be the case. As I was writing about how the Emmys are silly because of their categorization shenanigans, at roughly the same time the 2023 Hugo Award voting results were released.  But first, context! The Hugos are an award for science fiction anf fantasy media given out annually at the World Science Fiction Convention, AKA WorldCon. But WorldCon isn't a singular event, instead different, smaller conventions bid to be the worldcon in a given year. Usually the locations are selected a few years in advance through a process that is complicated and not super important to what is going on right now. Except in that the Worldcon for 2023 was in Chengdu, China. Some people weren't happy about this choice, but I was mostly fine with it. I think a worldcon should actually happen in different places across the world and China seemed like a fine place for one year's convention. Because each worldcon is technically a whole new event, run by new people, there is also a set of rules governing how the Hugo Award process is handled. For this story you need to know 3 things.  1. Any member of the worldcon (even non-attending members) can nominate works for the award and vote for the winner.  2. The nomination and final voting process is designed to be easy for people to vote & nominate, but there's some semi complex math that happens in the back end to determine the winner.  3. Because of item 2, there is a requirement for the Hugo administrators to share the results of the semi-complicated math process to the public.  Item 1 was taken advantage of for a few years by a small people coordinating their votes to overwhelm the previous calculation system in order to push certain ideological nominees to the final ballot. This was distasteful to some, but within the rules. It did lead to further refining the math in item 2 so that it would take a much larger act of coordination to force an entire slate of nominees to the final ballot. There were lots of arguments about this, but they're not too important right now. The final version of the math made it so that a small group of people coordinating could maybe get one or two items to the final ballot, but it would take a much larger coordination to take it over completely. This was considered a fair balance, because if a large enough group wanted to nominate all the same works then why shouldn't that be allowed? If the majority nominates something it should probably be a finalist. The rules were tweaked to avoid minority rule. I've never attended a worldcon, but for the past 10 or so years I've bought a non-attending membership so I could nominate and vote. I say that to make it clear I've been doing this for a while. I don't always like who wins, because that's how awards work, but I do generally trust the system, and how it works, to pick a winner that most of the voting populace will be happy with. And that's the point of voting after all, isn't it? So the 2023 worldcon took place in Chengdu China, and the Chengdu Hugo administration team was a combination of english speaking and Chinese speaking individuals. And it would be generous of me to say they were unprepared for the task. This is particularly surprising since the chair of the admin team has actually done the job multiple times in the past at other worldcons. But for Chengdu, things were messy. The mistakes started fairly early, with unclear nomination timelines, processes that were confusing and even the initial ballot of finalists having a mistake on it. Most of these were either corrected once they were pointed out, or chalked up (by me) as weirdness due to needing to make the whole process bilingual slowing things down overall. But I still was able to nominate, and vote on the final awards. The actual worldcon came and went and the hugo awards were given out. It was a messy process, but a successful one overall. Except. Traditionally the hugo stats are released soon after the awards are given out, so people can see how the winners were determined, who was on the long list of nominees, and because (surprise surprise) there are a lot of stats nerds in this particular fandom community. But the hugo admin team announced that the final stats wouldn't be available immediately. In fact they wouldn't be ready for a while. A while turned out to be three months later. The actual numbers came out a week or so ago (at the time of writing) and they looked weird. Weird is the best way I can describe them. There are people out there doing actual statistical analysis on the numbers and process, and I'll link to some of those at the end, but the best way I can describe it is that it looked weird. According to the documents, there were more votes counted than submitted, the vote spread doesn't align with historical voting patterns, and possibly most important, there were straight up errors and omissions. One nominee was listed twice in the rolls, and other nominees were deemed "not eligible" with either no reason or contradictory reasons given. What makes the whole thing look the weirdest to me is that it doesn't look like a conspiracy, or someone putting their thumbs on the scale. It's not organized enough for that. There are errors that seem to be at cross purposes with each other, where if one was to say "Ah, the shadowy figures are trying to make a certain result happen" I could point to a different error that shows an entirely different and opposite goal. I'm being intentionally a little vague here, because I don't want to mis-repeat someone else's opinion and also because I see a lot of anti-China sentiment being thrown around in the comments, which I do not wish to replicate. (I'm not trying to defend the Chinese government either, *cough*Uyghurs*cough* I just don't like how quickly people jump to what feels like rather sinophobic explanations) The one Hugo Administrator who has publicly commented on this situation has stridently and repeatedly refused to give any answers and has done so in a way that makes him look like a huge asshole. The explanation I've seen that resounds the most with me, is that this is actually not a conspiracy where someone is pulling strings to achieve some master outcome, but rather a farcical series of mistakes that keep compounding as each fudging "correction" to hide one mistake actually introduces three more. A quote from one of my favorite movies comes to mind: "There is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It, it's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan." A real conspiracy could have done a much better job of doctoring the statistics so that nobody would have noticed. What I know is this: The 2023 awards are over, and I don't see any way to fix them. I have lost a lot of trust in this system however, and I don't know what that means for my participation unless they make some significant changes. As everyone's favorite TV parents say, I'm nos so much mad as I am disappointed. Some Sources: https://www.thehugoawards.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2023-Hugo-Award-Stats-Final.pdf https://file770.com/chengdu-hugo-administrator-dave-mccarty-fields-questions-on-facebook/ https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2024/01/24/im-coming-around-to-the-unified-stuff-up-theory/ https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2024/01/22/hugo-stats-where-are-we-today/ Stuff I'm Reading Usually when I talk about stuff I'm reading, it's books, but here's some online stuff I've read recently. Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco - I mostly read this while looking for a source about how the enemies of fascism have to be depicted as simultaneously incredibly strong and pathetically weak. This is where the original thought comes from The Crab Bucket Fallacy - This is a very long (174 pages!) forum thread that I gdid not read in it's entirety. I was looking for general advice for running skill challenges (or something equivalent) in 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons, but I got sucked into this thread for longer than I should have. The core premise is dealing with the mathematical differences between martial and arcane classes in D&D, but of course which is something I really don't care about but a certain category of D&D players really do. It was a good reminder for why I don't read Character Optimization forums any more. Debunking AGI inevitability claims - This is a blog post by the authors of a preprint paper (linked in the post) looking at the mathematics behind proposed artificial general intelligence (the "human-like/level" AI you might have heard people worrying about.) The paper presents an ideal version of a computer that mat the criteria and then explains why mathematically it's computationally intractable. What this basically means is that an AGI computer would take more resources and time than the likely heat death of the universe. This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Ping Pong Girl Here's a picture of a cat

There's a Mitch Hedberg joke I'm going to butcher that goes something like: I'm a comedian, my job is to come up with jokes and write them down. Unless the paper and pencil are across the room, in which case, I have to convince myself that what I thought of just ain't funny. I sometimes feel like I have the opposite problem. I come up with things I want to write about and I have to write down at least the topic immediately or I will forget it forever. Sometimes that's not even fast enough as my brain is so distractible that I lose the idea in the gap between thinking of something and opening the notes app on my phone.  It's the digital equivalent of walking into a room and immediately forgetting what I came in here for. Anyway here's some of the things I remembered long enough to write down this week. A Thing in My Possession: A Pencil Object permanence is the mental process by which our brain remembers that things exist once we cannot see them anymore. It's a skill developed in the early stages of life for us humans. And people with ADHD will sometimes joke that we have no obje4ct permanence. (Side note: My spell check recommended I change ADHD to ADD. ADD is considered a depreciated term, get it together spell check!) People with ADHD don't actually have object permanence issues, because we know things exist outside our perception, but we do have a very similar Out of Sight, Out of Mind issue. Once something is out of our immediate perception range it gets de-prioritized to the point of non-existence. I dropped the pen I use for writing in my journal a couple days ago and I cannot find it. It has to be in my office, because I know that's where I was when I dropped it. But It's gone forever now. Instead I picked up a nearby pencil and started using it instead. I don't like it as much, but since it's the thing in view when In need to write something down, it's the thing I use. I'm kinda hoping that by writing this down I'll put in the effort to find the pen later. Who knows. Poorly Organized Thoughts About: Awards The emmys happened last week. I do keep up with the winners, not so much because I put any stock in the awards themselves (after all, most major awards are bought) but because I think it is an interesting reflection of where a giooven industry is at the moment. CODA won Best picture not because it was the best picture (necessarily) but because Apple really wanted to legitimize its streaming platform and so spent the most campaigning for what, by all accounts, was a pretty good but not overwhelming family drama. With the emmys what I was really looking at was how one of my absolute favorites shows of the recent past did. The Bear. The Bear is an occasionally 30 minute long tvs how about a group of people running a small restaurant in Chicago. But to limit the show to that description is like saying ted Lasso is about a guy who coaches football in England. The Bear is an amazing show that is not like much else on TV. I don't want to say too much about it other than to make clear that it is not a comedy in any real tradition of the term. Some bits are funny, but mostly it's a dramatic exploration of grief and stress. The comedy/drama divide in various awards never really made much sense. The place where it made the most sense, however was TV. Because TV shows used to fit into neat little buckets based on how long they were. At some point all 30 minute long shows were comedies and all 60 minute long shows were dramas. But handing out awards based on how long your TV show is seems silly. So instead we used a proxy for that, by calling them comedies and dramas. Forr time 30 minute shows were (almost) exclusively multi-camera sitcoms, which have different production and acting requirements than something like a police procedural would. But that distinction has blurred and diminished over the years to the point of being meaningless. I could hold up an episode of The Bear (this year's best comedy) next to an episode of Succession (this year's winner for best drama) and you would see more stylistic similarities than differences. Both seasons this year even featured extended single-take, continuously filmed scenes at different points in the season. I know the shows often submit themselves in their chosen categories, and that a show will select the category they think they have the better chance of winning. But there are eligibility requirements too. Survivor can't submit for best musical at the Golden Globes (probably.) Except genre isn't a criteria any more. They changed that a couple years ago, so The Bear is a comedy because they say it is. In the end it doesn't really matter, and I think you should watch The Bear (and Succession) and it's nice that it gives me something to write about every year around this time. Stuff I'm Watching I've started watching Out 1, a 1971 French film directed by Jacques Rivette and Suzanne Schiffman. Out 1 is especially notable for its extensive runtime. At nearly 13 hours long, it's a big boy of a movie. I've ranted here a few times when talking about television shows that call themselves 10-hour movies. And I often follow this up with the complaint that most people don't want to watch a 10-hour movie. That mostly holds true here too. The directors even went so far as to divide the movie into 8 parts that are closer to normal movie length (1.5-2 hours.) I'm treating the whole thing like a TV season, watching each part like an episode. So far I've only watched the first part, which mostly consists of footage of two different theatre troupes rehearsing for productions of a pair of ancient greek plays. But it's not just the actors reading their lines, instead they're doing the sort of weird theater exercises that you would expect to see in a french theater in the 70s. I know there's probaly more plot coming in future parts, but that's not here yet. But for watching people writhe and make non-word sounfs for an unbroken 45 minutes, it's not bad. I'll probably circle back when I've got a couple more under my belt. I'm also almost completely finished with watching Titans, a show set in the DC universe following Robin, Raven, Starfire, Beast Boy and other members of the superhero team known in the comics as the Teen Titans. The show started on the streaming service called DC Universe before that shut down and it moved to what was then called HBO Max. It's an uneven show at best, where the first season was ok, the second was not bad at all, the third was a slog and the fourth is just ugh. Why am I still watching it? I don't know, but I've only got two episodes left, so I'm gunna power through. I don't really recommend it. This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is I don't care about Award Shows (Not technically from CXG, but by the same creative team, and about the show) Here's a picture of a cat

It's real cold out there folks, stay safe. A Thing in my Possession: An extremely needy cat I'm trying to finish this newsletter for you this morning, but it hasn't been easy. At around 3 AM my at woke up me up for breakfast. this in not particularly unusual for her, as she has a tendency to do this to me. Most days I can get up, feed her and get back to sleep with minimal disruption. But this particular morning it wasn't enough. From about 4-6:30 she insisted that I pay attention to her. She alternated between meowing loudly as she wandered around to jumping on my bed and clawing various parts of my body. I can't tell that she actually wanted anything other than attention and I was trying too hard to stay asleep to give it to her. And now that I've gotten up she is standing (not sitting or relaxing) on my lap and repeatedly shoving her head under my hands as I type. This has become a new favorite pastime of hers, as she has discovered that it almost feels like getting petted, and results in further attention. I will say as a side effect it has made me slow down while typing and I have caught more errors than I would usually have. Maybe she's just trying to help. Poorly Organized Thoughts On: Video Media Formats Our Flag Means Death got cancelled after 2 seasons. It was a good show! I liked watching it, it was funny, heart wrenching and surprising in equal parts. I've seen people upset about how they don't get to spend more time with their favorite gay pirates (also the show is very gay(superlative.)) But I have also seen the take that this is why TV is never going to be as good as film, because the creators don't know how long they are going to have to tell the story. Sometimes shows get cancelled before they're done telling a story and sometimes they have to keep going because the show gets renewed beyond the original intended lengths of story the creators wanted to tell. With a movie, this argument goes, the creators got to tell a complete story and then it's done. There's no chance of a movie getting cancelled in the middle (although Monty Python and the Holy grail makes a joke about this exact thing happening.) But I reject this argument because the core unit of film as a medium isn't the same thing as the core unit of television as a medium. In film, it's the film. This isn't a shocking or controversial opinion I hope. But the core unit of Television is not the series, or even the season, but rather the episode. The great TV series in the history of the medium all understood this. Sure you have your strictly episodic greats like The Simpsons or M*A*S*H but even your best serialized TV Shows know that the episode is the building block of those great series. All you have to do is look to the Sopranos or Breaking Bad or even the recently finished Succession to see that. Each episode of these shows is, while part of a larger story, a complete unit. Next time you watch a TV show, ask yourself if what you just saw was an episode or just a chunk of story that started and ended at arbitrary points in time? This is an extension of Ten-Hour-Movie-itis, where the people who are making the show don't understand how the medium they're working in works. I would argue that most of the mediocre shows out there are better than a lot of so-called 'prestige' TV if they know how to use an episode well. Television, by using the episode, also gets to grow and change over time in a way that a movie cannot. If a movie works, it works, but once it's done there's no going back. A TV show can course correct from early mistakes and even make past decisions retroactively better. They can also make progressively worse mistakes too, but we're talking about the peak potential rather than the worst case scenario. If a show goes beyond the originally intended lifespan, it can even improve beyond what was expected. Sarah Z made a compelling video not too long ago about how Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 6 is good actually, and it is in part because the main story lines had wrapped up in season 5, so now they had to figure out what to do next, and then they did it in a way that grew and changed the show while still remaining true to it's core principles. I think the binge release model has really hidden the importance of episodes in recent years. When a show is released and watched in a very short period of time, the distinction of the episode becomes blurry. it becomes easier to overlook the faults in the structure if you are drinking from the firehose of content instead of letting it sit and marinate between episodes. Even miniseries, a format that hasn't seen a lot of success recently, historically released one episode a night. Roots is the typical example, a miniseries that took a popular novel and turned it into a ground breaking miniseries with one episode released per day over a week. I typically don't watch shows that get dropped all at once all at once. I usually space them out to at most one or two a week. But even then I find myself less attracted to the binge released shows because they tend to be muddy and unfocused and full of filler trying to meet the time limit they've assigned to themselves. One last complaint: I occasionally see people say "I won't try new shows until they're over" because what if they get cancelled," and that just makes me sad. A good show can be good from episode one, and the best shows are made from episodes that work. Stuff I'm playing: I bought a bundle of 6 Yakuza games from GOG a couple weeks ago and I installed Yakuza 0, the prequel to the main series, but apparently a good jumping on point. I didn't really know what to expect, other than the games are quite popular. What they turn out to be is actually three types of games in one. The first game is a pretty fun action brawler where you fight large groups of mooks with just your fists and any random objects you can find lying around. The second game is not a game at all actually, but a series of surprisingly long cutscenes telling a melodramatic crime story of betrayal with twists and turns aplenty. The third and final game is actually a series of minigames where you can do all sorts of stuff like playing claw machines to win prizes, sing kareoke, play darts and even play other video games inside this one. I don't know if the three different games inside this one game of Yakuza 0 are all great, but the wild swings in tone between each one is surprisingly fun. Sure I've got to go fight a crime boss and monologue dramatically about it afterwards, but first I need to win the best toy in this claw machine. This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the week is Cold Showers lead to Drugs Here's a picture of a cat

I'd like to say sorry for missing a post last week, but I'm not quite sorry enough to just do it. So instead you get this half apology from the space in between. The reason I didn't post last week is because I was traveling. I wen back home to visit my family. For a variety of reasons we do our Christmas celebrations in the first week of the year instead of the actual week of Christmas. This allows up to be more low key about the whole thing, which I really appreciate. The flight itself was not particularly interesting, and just barely tolerable. Flying on a airplane is one of those things that should be magical, but instead has had all the fun squeezed out of it through things like unnecessary security theater, price gouging, and the still ongoing pandemic. No matter what is going on in your life outside of the airport, everything becomes a little worse once you are inside of one. While in my hometown, I did take the opportunity to visit a MeowWolf exhibition. If you're not familiar, MeowWolf is an art collective that focuses on interactive and inhabitable spaces where the art is part of a larger world they are crafting. They're also incredibly instagram friendly, which would be cooler if I hadn't mostly stopped using the 'gram sometime in the middle of last year. But it was still a cool experience, and unlike anything else I've been to. Part of the fun is the fact that any given doorway can (and usually is) a portal to somewhere else. You can move from a living room to a nexus of refrigerators, to an alien back-alley, to a trailer in the desert, to a room that contains a slimy rainbow waterfall frozen in time. The place is frankly overwhelming, because around every corner is something new and different. Or more likely fifteen new and different things. I could tell that a lot of work had gone into crafting this experience, so I was also a little disappointed in how there was an unintentional pressure to experience everything quickly then move on to something else. Part of this is the design of the space, where discovery is part of the top billing, but also because it was crowded inside. Many of the art pieces were interactive, but not meant to be interacted with by more than one person at a time. So if you spend very much time at all interacting with and experiencing a particular artwork there's likely to be other people waiting to do the same. I spent two hours wandering through the place and I was never alone (or with just my group) for more than a minute or two at a time. It felt like I was experiencing a weird novel on fast forward. And there was clearly a lot of work put into everything, and things that were meant to be experienced for more than 30 seconds at a time. I found a journal in someone's bedroom that was easily 50 pages of written material. It would take a significant chunk of time for me to sit down and read it on the owner's bed. And I tried to do that, but every page I turned was met by someone else entering the bedroom to look around. I felt like I was taking away from the other patrons' experience every extra moment that I took with even this one corner of the experience. The whole thing was clearly a labor of love for the artists involved in making it, and I'm so happy I got to spend time there. But by the very nature of the exhibition it felt like the work itself was being undercut. In addition, by being an "Immersive" experience all the credit was unavailable inside the exhibit itself. There was an interactive information kiosk on the outside, but I felt a little bad for the hundreds of artists who didn't get recognition for their work inside the work itself. And how many people attending actually take the time to read everything in the kiosk? I only looked at it for a few minutes to pull up a few pieces. I could have easily spent at least half as long again looking at the information as I did looking at the art. If anything it reminded me of the culture of the internet where things get reposted and shared without attribution, or "credit to the artist" instead of actually looking for who created the thing being shared in the first place. It might seem like I didn't enjoy myself based on what I have written above, so I do want to make it clear I had fun and I am glad I went. I might even go to one of the other exhibitions they have across the US if given the opportunity. But If I go back I'll certainly need to plan how I want to experience it more. We'll get back to a more traditional format next week. Probably. But here's this week's Crazy Ex Girlfriend Song of the Week: Textmergency Here's a picture of a cat

Deck the halls with boughs of holly fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la Teenage mutant ninja turtles fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la I hope that gets stuck in your head for a while. A thing in my possession: A phone running a linux distribution in my continuing quest to do simple things harder than is necessary, I now have a phone running linux. Specifically I have the Google Pixel 3a, which is a roughly 5 year old phone, and it is running Ubuntu Touch, the fork of the (relatively) popular linux distro designed specifically for smart phones. The pixel 3a, while certainly not designed for lunix happens to be one of the most compatible phones for the operating system. After switching to Linux for my daily driver home computer a year or two ago, I thought it would be interesting to try it on my phone too. But let me tell you, this phone won't be replacing my equally old iphone any time soon. Getting the OS wasn't particularly difficult for me, but that is mostly because I have unlocked a bootloader on an android phone previously. Before switching to ios and the iphone, I had installed CyanogenMod on my then current android phone. Android, the operating system does technically allow you to install other OSes instead of it on most of their phones, but they don't make it obvious or easy. The fact that I had done it before made it slightly easier, but I still had to watch or read multiple tutorials, and the process failed at least twice. Once I did get it up and running, the core OS works pretty well! The problem is everything else. There is an app store that can download apps specifically for the OS, but the selection is pretty bare. There are  some key utilities but a lot of the stuff I would want to us is either not there or a homebrew webapp. My original thought would be that most of the apps I could want to us also have web interfaces, which is true, but also the developers have tried harder and harder to make their respective mobile web experiences worse to push people to using an app instead. Which only works if there is an app to download. At least with Cyanogen which I had used perviously, I could download and install andorid apps ands they would be almost 100% compatible. No such luck here. Instead if I want to run an android app, I have to completely emulate an android phone inside my phone as the equivalent of a virtual machine. Which I can do! I did! I gopt it set up, but frankly the thing that broke me was that I couldn't copy and paste between the core Linux OS and my VM-android OS. Copy and paste is such a basic functionality that is actually really complicated. But it needs to work. Who knows, maybe I'll install LineageOS, the successor to Cyanogen and play with that for a while. Poorly Organized Thoughts on Arbitrage Arbitrage, if you are unfamiliar, is the practice of buying something at one price with the intent of (nearly) simultaneously selling it for a higher price somewhere else. It's ostensibly the purest way to make a profit, but economists will tell you it's kind of impossible to actualy pull off at any scale. But I did find an example of someone doing just that while I was browsing ebay not too long ago. But first I have to talk about Magic The Gathering. Sorry. MtG is a collectible trading card game where a player mostly collects cards in two ways: randomized packs purchased directly from the publisher, or from other players who already have the cards you want (which originally came from randomized packs.) This means there is an incredibly large secondary market for the cards where the common ones can be picked up for a few cents and the rarest ones can fetch hundreds or thousands of dollars. It's a daunting game because if you want to really get competitive you have to pour a lot of money into the game. I've played it a bit over the years, but always extremely casually. I just didn't have the effort or money to put into getting good. But there are other ways to play magic for a lot cheaper. One of the most common is through what is called a Cube, or a carefully collected set of cards that can be used for casual games between friends. The idea is that you're only ever playing against the other games in the set, which means you don't have to always be on the chase for the latest and greatest and most powerful cards or metagame. Instead you treat it more like a board game with a limited scope. Cubes can be pretty expensive to build, but the cheaper ones are on the scale of $50-$150 depending on the cards and the size of it. Plus the effort of tracking down and purchasing all those cards individually. Or, you could just buy a premade cube from someone else. So I was browsing ebay to see if anybody had cubes for sale, and to my surprise there were a few. Most of them were "Chaos cubes" with the idea that they were just a pile of mostly random cards for cheap just to make the count. These feel like a waste, because the whole point of a cube is that it is crafted to have a fair amount of compatibility between the cards. But the other cubes caught my eye were ones with actual card lists. These tended to be more expensive, probably because you knew what was going to be in them. But the flip side of the card list is that I could price out what those individual cards would cost if I bought them elsewhere. So I did. There are some online magic stores that let you upload a list of cards and buy them from a bunch of individual sellers. The sellers are a mix of game stores with huge inventories and individuals just buying and selling from their personal collections. It's a cool system! And the sort of thing that makes a community successful. So I uploaded the card list and priced out one of the prebuilt cubes I found on ebay. Unsurprisingly it was cheaper. A lot cheaper. Like half the price, including shipping from 15 different stores. So it occured to me this would be a (theoretically) easy way to make money on Magic. Buy a bunch of specific cheap cards on the open marketplaces, then bundle them together for rubes who don't know any better on ebay and make money. This was arbitrage in action! The real problem, as it always is, is scale. Sure  one could make $75 bucks per cube sold, but how many cubes can you seriously expect to sell? The volume isn't likely to be particularly high, even as the cost to get started is so low. Stuff I'm Watching Godzilla Minus One is pretty good. The US godzilla movies have been more spectacle than anything for a long while. But this Japanese Import from Toho, the original studio to make Godzilla movies works really well. It's a giant monster movie, sure, but also a meditation on postwar PTSD, where the monster is a metaphor. I saw this in the theaters and it was absolutly worth it. I also made an episode of my podcast about it (full of spoilers.) On the opposite end of the spectrum I watched Round and Round, a Hallmark Hanukkah movie about a young woman who gets stuck in a time loop on the 7th night of Hanukkah. Like all Hallmark movies it is patently silly and doesn't take anything too seriously. It's full of coincidence and contrivance and takes the premise of a time loop about as unseriously as I can imagine a movie about a time loop doing. And I've seen a lot of movies about time loops. I mostly watched this because it stars Vic Michaelis, who is a comedian I really like from their work on Dropout, and they bring a lot to the lead role here. Is it a good movie? Probably not. Is it a fun way to spend 90 minutes? Why not. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is California Christmastime Here's a picture of a cat

If everything is working correctly, you should be receiving this from my new newsletter page, Postcard. If it's not going correctly, you probably won't see this. A thing in my possession: A New Notebook I bought a new notebook this week. For the past few years I've been doing a variant on bullet journaling in a series of blank notebooks. I say it is a variation of bullet journaling, but the very nature of a bullet journal is that it's meant to be adjustable to your needs. But I've slowly cast off the various tools in the bullet journal toolbox, and I don't know that what I do can really be called that anymore. The key features of a bullet journal, as I understand it are: the index, spreads, monthly/weekly/daily logs. When one is setting up a bullet journal you're supposed to start with the index, which you complete as you fill up the journal. You add page numbers that relevant things show up on. Then there are spreads, which are composed of two consecutive pages, and meant to serve as a project worskspace, these can be spread throughout the entire journal and you use the index to keep track of them. finally there are the logs, typically monthly, and daily, with the option for weekly. I used all of these at one point or another, but as time has gone on my journal has more and more just become a daily log. So I'm going to try something new. Bullet Journals are by their very nature very free form. That's fine, good even. But it means it's very easy for me to fall out of using it. So I dtopped using it as intended. But this week I bought a new notebook based on the Theme System. This is an idea coined by CPG Grey, has a whole video about it, so I'm not going to explain it here. But I have a problem. And that's timing. My current notebook is going to run out of space at my current rate by the end of the year, and I don't really want to start the Theme Journal until the start of the year. This isn't huge as far as problems go, but I now feel like I have to ration pages in my existing notebook. I keep asking myself, is this worth putting down? It feels like going on a journaling fast before jumping into a new system. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: Showrunners  I've been thinking about showrunners a lot lately. In particular, how the ideas of a showrunner on modern TV shows has started to shape the way we talk about those shows. Or at least the way I think about them. I first really became aware of the position of showrunner in the common usage during the 90s. This was the period of the early internet intersecting with pop culture. And two of the shows that dominated the discussions I saw were The X-Files and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Both of these shows were revolutionary in their time, for a variety of reasons. The most well known, is probably the idea of interspersing serialized episodes telling a larger story with episodic standalone adventures. These episodes even became known as Monster-Of-The-Week stories in the broader conversation because of Buffy and the X-Files. The X-Files had a slightly larger differentiation between it's "arc" episodes and MotW episodes, while Buffy would often blend them a little more closely together, while telling a story that spanned the entire season. I could go on a tangent about how the pendulum has often swung to far towards serialization in most TV making these days (sometimes the strongest praise I can give a show is "It knows what an episode is") but I'm not here to rant about 10-hour-movie-itis, I've done that before. What I want to think about instead today is how both of these shows had a mythological being at their center: the showrunner. Joss Whedon on Buffy and Chris Carter on X-Files were both elevated by the fandom to the sole creative force behind everything that happened on these shows. These shows were created by a large group of writers, directors, actors and other crew, but everything that happened good or bad was laid at the feet of the showrunner. TV Tropes, a website that started life as a Buffy Fan Page (really) even has a name for when the showrunner clarifies something ambiguous or unknown about a TV show: Word of God. In the years since these shows became behemoths of media, reshaping the entire media landscape, it has also become clear that Carter and Whedon are both, well, assholes. Carter had actually been sued in the 90s for sexual harassment (among other things) and Whedon's reputation as someone unsafe for women to be around has only grown with time. Their behavior was inexcusable, even if it wasn't actually unusual. And I think, part of the reason they were able to get away with it is because they were seen as irreplaceable by the fandom. Even now those two shows are inexorably tied to those two men. But making a TV dhow is a lot of work, and it's never the work of a single person. Buffy had 20+ writers and a similar number of directors over the course of seven seasons. And while Joss Whedon was the most common among both categories, it's not by a wide margin. And I certainly don't know the names James Contner or Rebecca Kirshner who come in at number 2 for directing and writing respectively. And the thing is, this trend has continued to this day. I can list off 30+ TV shows where I know the name of the showrunner, but nobody else on staff either directing or writing. This way of thinking about showrunners as the auteur, or final authority, has flattened the way we think about the way TV shows are made. This only serves the ones who are being centered in the conversations, and further protects them from consequences to their terrible behavior. There are some instances of this changing. Justin Roiland got fired from two shows he created after credible allegations of sexual assault came to light, and marvel fired Jonathan Majors, who was slated to be the next Thanos level villain in their film series, fater similar allegations. But how many others are still out there, being protected by their status as the most important part of making a tv show? If I could wave a magic wand and change anything about about TV Criticism in the 90s, it would be to treat creative teams on TV shows like rock bands, instead of pop stars. Sure Taylor Swift writes her own music, but she also has a group of others that help her create the final product. But contrast that with the Beatles or They Might Be Giants, where there might be a driving creative at the center (John and Paul, or John and John respectively) the rest of the band is equally known to the fans, and it's understood that all the work is a collaborative endeavor. I don't think this would solve everything wrong with fandoms and toxic men abusing their powers, but I do think it would be an improvement. This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Season 1 Theme Here's a picture of a cat