The Friday Article Roundup
Skate into the weekend with a selection of great pop culture writing
Do the locomotion and resist your corporate overlords with:
Join the team and send articles throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!
At Screen Slate, Cat Beckstrand finds some unpleasant parallels between 70s sports dystopia Rollerball and the present day:
The game was designed to publicly demonstrate the futility of individualism, yet Jonathan’s skill in the rink allowed him to rise above his teammates, skyrocketing in popularity and making the Committee nervous. His stardom challenges the disposability of workers and athletes within a profit-driven system, tossed to the side when they’re no longer useful to those in power. His refusal to comply with the Committee’s demands and retire gracefully exposes their playbook: when persuasion fails they rig the game, using the audience’s bloodlust to disguise the purge of a dissident. Just as modern oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel blur the lines between corporations and politicians, the Committee uses Rollerball as a tool to maintain order, demonstrating the inevitable slide of unchecked corporate power into authoritarianism.
Grace Benfell reviews the videogame Date Everything at Endless Mode and finds an empty experience:
Every one of Date Everything’s characters (or “dateables” as the game calls them) is an island unto themselves. Though the game goes to great pains to turn its house into a little town, each one is activated on your whim. You mostly talk to them one at a time. Sometimes a false word or a poorly-solved puzzle will cause one to hate you, but there are no real frictions. No “dateable” will drift apart from you through no fault of your own. Few will judge you preemptively with anything but glowing admiration. Everything in the game has to be able to love and desire you. There are exceptions, but you would have to deliberately hurt most of the game’s characters to get a “hate” ending with them. The game sets you up as isolated (you start with one [1] non-object friend), but getting over that is as easy as wearing the right headgear and saying the right catchphrase. Nothing like scores of colorful mascot characters to get you out of your comfort zone.
At her substack The Late Review, Kate Wagner ponders the sublime as offered by Wikipedia:
What exactly is this desirable yet negative feeling we get when going down the roster of worst floods in history or the grim details of nuclear radiation? Speaking as someone primarily devoted to aesthetics, the most useful framework for understanding this “negative affect” is the Romantic-era notion of the sublime — the sense of overwhelm, awe, and existential threat induced by objects or subjects that are vast, moody, infinite, laborious to produce, or otherwise magnificent… The sublime is very useful in our discussion of grim knowledge for a number of reasons: it describes the affect itself, the necessity of distance in order to experience and understand that affect, and an aesthetic framework that can be applied to Wikipedia in both structure and form.
For Crimereads, Michael Gonzales muses on a Richard Stark novel’s echoes in the life of his old neighbor:
The table top was covered with binders and coins encased in cardboard holders and plastic. Picking up the coins, Mr. Lawson looked at them through a magnifying glass and jotted notes in a log. As someone who had a few hobbies that included a steadily growing comic book collection and buying records on a regular, I understood the collector sensibility…. Fascinated, I made my way to the table, sat down and just watched as Mr. Lawson proceeded through his process as through them no one else was in the room.
Indeed, he was completely absorbed, just as I would’ve been had I been reading the latest Jack Kirby comic. “Fellow hobbyists share something important to them which the outside world considers unimportant and frivolous, so that in a small all hobbyists are social outcasts,” Stark wrote in The Rare Coin Score. I couldn’t agree more.
Brianna Zigler interviews Matt Farley and Charlie Roxburgh about their latest microbudget movie and happily accepting what their actors are bringing:
CR: We don’t have to coach them too much. The theory is sort of like, regular people can be movie stars too, or regular people can be in movies too. So, they bring their own “what they’re doing,” and if you tell them to do it a different way, they might just do it again the same way because it’s not in their wheelhouse to do variations. And then you’re like, well, that’s the way that person does it, and that could be cool. And maybe at the moment, you don’t really know exactly if everyone’s going to love it or if it’s going to fit. But that’s what they’re giving us, and we’re going to roll with it. We vouch for that person because they stepped up and came out this day.
Tags for this article
More articles by Dave Shutton
The Friday Article Roundup
Going on the record with the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
A cowardly and superstitious lot? No, the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
No kings, of pop or otherwise, just the best pop culture writing of the week
The Friday Article Roundup
Out of the mists of history, the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
Hold the phone for the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Threw on the Justice League two-parter “Injustice for All” with a friend. I primarily like it for the fun of Batman being chained up and still manipulating all the villains* and the somewhat sympathetic depiction of Ultra-Humanite, who ultimately doesn’t want money as much as the fine arts. However, as much as the animation’s really expressive, the digital look is a big step down from Superman and BTAS’ more hand-drawn quality. That and the obvious mandate from Cartoon Network to only feature laser guns.
*Think I’d agree with Son of Griff – I can’t identify with the Dad-like Superman’s relative invulnerability and pure goodness whereas I have been nearly as obsessive, gruff, and hyperfocused as Bats. (Cue the numerous Superman defenders. I LIKE Superman, shut up you DFW wannabes, I just like the angry brooding human more, sue me.)
I say this often: I love Superman. I want to be as good as Superman. There are great Superman stories. And Batman is just the more interesting character and there have been something like ten times as many memorable Batman comics. And STAS just wasn’t as good as BTAS. Though there are a few really good Superman moments in JLU.
Same! I want to be as good as Superman but Batman is more interesting and I relate deeply to the intelligence and stoicism. The best JLU Superman moment I think comes in the last episode when Superman joyfully explains to Darkseid that he is constantly having to hold himself back due to his own strength, and he sure as hell doesn’t have to do that with him.
Yes, that! Also the only time I felt like George Newbern matched Tim Daly’s intensity in the role. Though this is one of the places that I felt like Andrea Romano didn’t nail the casting either time. (I am not as into JLU as many, but the series finale is a high point across the board. Luthor and Clancy Brown really shine here.)
I think Big Blue is a more interesting character psychologically, but I agree that the story potential is more limited.
Today’s accidental theme is “women with sexual agency.”
Something Wild – Wild child Melanie Griffith more or less kidnaps Jeff Daniels for a night of wild sex, and he decides to let her take him on further adventures, which are all fun and games till sociopath hubby Ray Liotta shows up. Took me a while to get into this because Melanie is not the sort of Bad Girl I easily like – the sex and robbery are okay, the drinking while driving is not! – and because Jeff seems to be cheating big time on his wife. But it occurred to me after the fact that the movie does not entirely turn from raunchy comedy to thriller because the underlying sadness and desperation of both Jeff and Melanie was always there under her Louise Brooks wig and his suit. Not, mind you, that we don’t have a huge tonal shift or a few slow patches, but Demme’s direction and all three leads are excellent. And shout-out to Tak Fujimoto, whose cinematography is great throughout, and who has worked on a lot of movies I really like without me paying attention. He’s pretty much Demme’s man behind the camera.
Frasier, “Frasier Gotta Have It” – Our man starts a purely physical fling with conceptual artist Lisa Edelstein, and just can’t break it off since he wants more than the physical. And for once, Frasier just goes with it. Edelstein’s character is clearly a woman in control of her sexuality, and it’s to the writers’ credit that there’s no judgment from them or even ultimately from Frasier. And hey, it’s also written so that the two both know this is a fling. A rare instance where the audience need not be subjected to a painful Frasier breakup. Of course, thinking on it, way back when on Cheers, there was a time Frasier said it was a relief to not have to think and to date at the same time. But that was another show and in some ways a less uptight Frasier.
The Practice, “Search and Seizure” – This is not the main plot, but Helen asks Bobby to a Halloween party, and in order to get him to be less uptight – are all Bostonian men such pills? – she gropes him. Later, when he decides he’s okay with this and asks her to dinner, she initiates a first kiss. Is Helen a man’s idea of a liberated woman, or an actual woman of the 90s? Your guess is as good as mine. Meanwhile, Lindsay has a crisis of conscience when her success getting drug dealers off the hook leads to a hefty retainer in cash. And the main story is about a husband trying to force his wife to undergo a c-section to save a baby who will be strangled by natural birthing. It’s a messy case, with an ugly ending as their doctor does the surgery without her permission even though the court ruled you cannot make her undergo surgery. Kelley seems at first to be doing something vaguely like an abortion story, even though the particulars are nothing like that. But I think he just wanted to do more with ethical dillemas, in the law and in medicine and in life. And it’s a valiant effort but not a success. Guests include Donal Logue once more and Paul Ben-Victor as a drug dealer, and John Carroll Lynch (Marge’s husband in Fargo) as the obstetrician.
I love the shift in tone with Liotta’s entrance signaled by color and lighting, and Liotta is so scary, charismatic, and deeply human (as he’d be in many movies, including my personal favorite ever). It’s key that Demme told him that awful as he is, he needs to see himself as the hero of this story, right down to his final look of surprise and betrayal.
“are all Bostonian men such pills?” As a Yankee, I’m going to allow it. But I’d say Kelley has very, very weird ideas of what women are and how they act, though this is a lot better in Big Little Lies, which I’d credit to the woman the work is based on.
What is your favorite ever? Can’t be Field of Dreams. Goodfellas?
Bingo. Never liked Field of Dreams – don’t hate it, just don’t really like it.
I like that we’ve all reached a point where we can immediately rule out possibilities for somebody’s favorite movies. Conor? Can’t be Field of Dreams.
I was secretly hoping for Heartbreakers or Observe and Report.
Observe and Report is up there!
Norm Gunderson, Arthur Leigh Allen, Drew Carey’s brother… Off the top of my head.
Huh, didn’t make the connection to Drew Carey. I guess i remember him more in drag. (He appeared in menswear and without a wig rarely, right?)
Yeah, that’s right. And I think he ends up dating Mimi.
I could look it up, but it’s easier just to say, based on a far from complete watch of the show, that Mimi and Drew’s brother marry much to Drew’s horror. She at some point has a baby – the latest episode I saw had Drew in a coma and apparently his soul transmigrates to the baby? – and the marriage is a flameout. (I watched enough of the show to basically have no desire to rewatch it. Talented cast, though. Two good comics, a great voice actor, a good talk show host.)
Not that you could if you wanted to anyway.
The gaping holes in what is available streaming are just incredible.
It hasn’t been in syndication or released on home media, either. I’ve heard it’s because they used a lot of music and the rights issues are a real thorny knot to untangle, but I’m not sure if it’s only that.
Football (soccer) – England vs Sweden, Women’s Euro 2025 – kind of a crazy match. England were absolutely not at the races in the first half and conceded two goals without putting up much of a fight. I drifted away from the match in the second half only for the balance to completely shift, and then got hooked back in as the match moved closer to penalties… and then the shootout was a very entertaining mix of terrible spot kicks and a few moments of excellence, and somehow England prevailed.
“somehow England prevailed”
Story of the last 400 years.
Italy have improved mightily since the last Euros (not just at the national team level) and will be boosted by finally winning a playoff game (if you ever needed more proof that Norway isn’t what it once was, there you have it). But I think England will be too tall an order for them, same as Spain for Switzerland today. It looks like the Lionesses will be in the final, though Sweden was already something of a final for them.
This was the first match I’ve watched this tournament but I’ll probably check out a few more of the remaining matches if things line up OK with holiday commitments! It feels like Sweden probably should have won that one but I know England have been a little hot and cold so if they made it through this one while not playing their best then it could be a good omen. Spain sound very strong though!
Inside No. 9, “To Have and to Hold” and “The Last Weekend”
Since I couldn’t do X-Files last night, I unintentionally created a double-feature of “Steve Pemberton co-leads a tale of a long-term relationship … oh, fuck, it’s gone full horror.” Inside No. 9 apparently has a lot of tonal variety, so it amuses me that I wound up with two episodes that explore similar territory.
“To Have and to Hold” is, if anything, grimmer and harder to take when it’s sticking strictly to the gray, miserabilist domestic drama it starts out as: there’s something so dispiriting about watching Harriet batter herself against her husband’s absolute indifference (and the lack of sexual response–and eventual rejection–isn’t nearly as bad as the gutting moment when she reads what she’s written for their vow renewal ceremony and he reads the bureaucratic form response he got online, complete with “insert name here”). When we get a dark major reveal–in a very well-composed shot–it’s almost a relief to know that the problems here, while horrific, aren’t so intimately dispiriting. But the ending is a bit weak.
“The Last Weekend” is the better of the two episodes, with long-time lovers Joe (Pemberton) and Chas (Reece Shearsmith) visiting their rural cottage for what may be the last time: Joe’s spent years dealing with cancer (and Chas has consequently spent years dealing with it on his behalf, showing–as he almost points out–a surprising amount of adoration and self-sacrifice for a failed boy band member and one-time internet troll), and now he’s dropping hints that it may be close to the end.
Can’t talk about this one without spoilers, so:
SPOILERS
Their entire nine-year relationship has been an elaborate revenge plot on Joe’s part (and also, he doesn’t have cancer). After Chas’s musical career fell apart, he took to bullying random aspiring musicians on MySpace, and one of them was Joe’s teenage daughter–who had actually been a huge fan of his. His suicide-baiting resulted in a suicide attempt, though she was on life support for–wait for it–nine years. When Joe and his then-ex-wife finally had to pull the plug, Joe committed himself to wasting nine years of Chas’s life in return–“spent loving someone who despised you”–before revealing all this to him and murdering him in the slowest, most gruesome way possible with a riff on the (apocryphal) idea of scaphism. The trapped Chas, with a trail of honey leading straight to him, will be slowly eaten alive over the course of days by insects. Killer last line here, as Joe returns to his quiche: “I’ll have mine cold.” Yeah, no shit.
This is all obviously ridiculous–nine years of weekends devoted pretending to be in a loving partnership with someone you’ve planned on brutally murdering from the start? I’m a fan of a long-term revenge scheme, but there’s such a thing as taking it too far! And the cruelty of the execution method is so awful that it feels like it unbalances everything else, especially since–unlike the nine-year deception–it’s not tied to Joe’s specific grievance. But the acting is great, and the way the reveal recalibrates so many of their previous scenes, changing how I read Joe in those interactions, is really well-done.
I’ll have to try to watch some more of these before my BritBox free trial runs out.
The Last of the Mohicans
One of the gaps in my Mann knowledge! This is sublime, especially when it comes to the cinematography and the score. The biggest downside here was that my Hulu didn’t want to show me subtitles for the English dialogue, and, what with the A/C and my desire not to deafen my downstairs neighbors, I missed more lines than I’d like. Still got enough to feel how classically Mann this is, though, even when it looks like it’s on a radically different playing field.
I keep meaning to properly get into Inside No. 9, I think I watched the first full season and then occasional episodes here and there but it feels like there are classics scattered throughout and it’d be a good one to run through as a whole body of work.
I found a top episodes list that looked promising, so I may at least be able to knock those out soon. But I’d like to go through the whole series–I love anthology shows, and this is obviously a really well-crafted one. I just wish BritBox were a little cheaper.
Wasn’t “To Have and To Hold” the name of one of the soap operas Megan works on in Mad Men? Is the expression in common use outside of TV episode titles?
It’s in some traditional wedding vows (which is what it’s referencing here), so that’s usually the context I hear it in.
Mohicans is an atypical Mann movie in that it has a girl in there who is not exclusively an object.
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Eighteen, “Confessions and Lamentations”
Good-assed episode with a delightfully cynical ending. The premise is killer (ignore the pun), with a straightforward practical problem that has both immediate and long-term political consequences, making really compelling television. The political problems are really people either trying to either dodge or impose blame, wrongfully so in both cases; the targeting of the aliens is obvious, but the aliens immediately assuming they’ll be blamed for the problem and making it worse through denial is a really canny observation, working off the idea that people feel that problems and inconveniences are punishments and reflections of poor character rather than, you know, obstacles (wish I didn’t recognise that in myself).
Meanwhile, Delenn and Lennier are quietly the coolest characters of the episode; the opening scene is really funny, but it also plays into their sense of moral responsibility and willingness to face tremendous risk to help others. Lennier, as usual, is the more practical example whilst Delenn manages to convey the philosophy behind it. All life is transitory, risk is just facing the inevitable anyway.
Randy Feltface: First Banana Tour
Live comedy! I dunno if that requires a woo. This is the puppet comedian, and a great time was had by all; things that would bother me in any other context, like his heavy reliance on current events and even political lectures were fine in the context of an ephemeral experience, especially one as tightly worked out as this (it helped that he could quickly sense when the audience wasn’t responding to something and could go in another direction). Randy’s comedy involves a series of extreme expressions (both verbally and visually) and sudden movements, tied together into a coherent narrative. Best moment was when he ended up playing with a giant banana prop, discovering the audience would woo whenever it was brought up and teasing us with it; I was also a fan of his various riffs on Hobart’s notoriously poor traffic. Climactic story was this incredibly funny story of his failed audition for the xenomorph in Alien: Covenant.
Jordan Peele’s Twilighty Show About That Zone
More of this. Really hit and miss. John Cho helping an eleven year old become President was a dumb premise with dumb dialogue and a great central performance. The Mission to Mars one was great, especially for seeming to dive into the incredibly obvious twist only to have an even better one waiting at the end.
I’ll go for a wooo, live comedy!
That John Cho episode is one of the major examples of what does and doesn’t work about Peele’s version for me: the show attracted incredible actors, and they turn in stellar performances–Cho is fantastic–but the ideas feel half-baked. I feel like Nath has talked about comedians not working out their jokes enough, and this feels like screenwriters not working out their allegories and satires enough. I think this one in particular falls apart because it doesn’t engage enough with the substance to its own reality; it concentrates too much on the thing it’s standing in for. (And that means it’s also more of a venting of rage rather than an attempt to understand/describe from a different angle, which doesn’t work as well for me, though that’s more of a personal thing.)
My favorite one is S2’s “Among the Untrodden,” for what it’s worth. (“Downtime” feels like it could vaguely prefigure I Saw the TV Glow, even if it doesn’t do enough with it, so that gets some points too.) “Replay” probably does the best job of capturing the classic TZ feel, but the very end taints it for me.
Yeah, every story choice of the Cho episode feels like a first idea that came to the writers’ heads, and it ends up feeling as childish and impulsive as the main villain – like, it seems to me that most people wouldn’t interpret mere difference of opinion as ‘treason’.
Woo! Live… puppetry? This cannot be unwooed.
Woooooo-l live puppetry!
This made so much more sense when I finally saw it in a font that differentiated lowercase L and uppercase I.
Thank God, because honestly I felt like I really hit it out of the park with this one.
28 Years Later – My choice of legacy sequel offered in this dire movie summer, and it feels good to be in the hands of a real director who still has imagination and vitality to spare. This is good! The highest compliment I can pay is when it finished I thought we had another 30-60 minutes to go and wouldn’t have minded. Instead it’s a pretty great final line and some enthusiasm for next year’s chapter.
The ending definitely left me with a big grin on my face and very curious for the next one. Happy for any franchise to return after a long break if it has as many wild ideas as this one seems to!
SHORT CUTS and THE NIGHT OF THE COMET– Two versions of L.A. Apocraphylia linked by entropy, the former more built on a fusion of Raymond Carver (not Chandler) and John Coltrane, and the other welding Pynchon to a Cannon films aesthetic. The former is one of the most dazzling anthology films I’ve ever seen, the other is, well, worthy of discussion as an artifact of its time and place.
I’m sorry to miss film club, but it sounds like you’ll be able to represent my opinion well.
I did not care for Short Cuts when I saw it when it was first out on home video. I haven’t revisited it. I just — like, honestly, life isn’t that crappy, Ray!
I have not seen Short Cuts in forever but I remember liking it quite a bit. Night Of The Comet mops the floor with it. Astonishing look and killer vibe, Repo Man meets Romy and Michelle. I will not blame Altman for failing to do something he can’t, but Comet is exactly what MASH was, a piss in the eye from an unexpected pisser, and being outside that realm makes it great.
What did we read?
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam – Makes me have racist/sexist thoughts towards fellow straight white men, though more specifically Ivy League elitists and centrists. Speaking of, did you think centrists weren’t a problem before? Read about the Kennedy Administration! About halfway through and it’s a superb piece of non-fiction, with nearly as many damning and seemingly objective sentences as The Power Broker. There’s one moment here early in the book where one Kennedy admin, one more liberal than the others, suggests that even the European wealthy have more joy and character to their faces than Americans, and there’s something materially vacuous and wrong with the country that we could focus on instead of invading other countries. The WASPS and elitists in the room look at him like he just spoke a foreign language.
Cultish by Amanda Montell – Really good so far and Montell has real insight about how leaders of cults and other sects tend to downplay dissent, with Jim Jones going so far as to edit the Jonestown tapes by cutting out any objections to his plans or denouncements. This results in the media and common portrayals assuming any followers are merely brainwashed and unable to have free will or beliefs of their own.
MacArthur Reconsidered: General Douglas MacArthur as a Wartime Commander by James Ellman – Ellman is an amateur historian, so I take a lot of what is here with a grain of salt. And his approach is entirely hostile, which is understandable after half a century of love for Big Man by people like William Manchester. But so far, he is backing up many of his arguments about MacArthur’s incompetence with facts and with quotes from other war leaders of the time like Ike (who hated Mac). I think he might overplay the case sometimes, such as saying any time MacArthur succeeded in WWII, it was more because the US broke Japan’s codes and Japan never caught on, but fair to say that Mac failed miserably in the Philippines and overplayed his successes before the battles were over. Waiting to see how Ellman addresses the Inchon invasion, something even most of Mac’s detractors think was an achievement.
Sweat, by Lynn Nottage
Nottage is an excellent playwright, but my goodness, this was depressing. I did eventually realize that this had a semi-sequel in the form of the more upbeat Clyde’s, which I got to actually see live, and which offers at least one character some hope, but otherwise, this is a well-reasoned and empathetic but grim play about grinding economic pressure, bosses turning workers against each other, how easily and quickly white resentment can bubble up, and–for everyone involved–how easily and quickly your life can go to shit. Not sure my will to live was strong enough to face this down right now! A great play and all, but fuck.
Atlas Shrugged
The worst book I’ve ever read. More to come.
The things you do to yourself for our collective edification.
Part of my essay will dig into the fact that everyone I’ve told about this project thinks I’ve lost my mind, and rightfully so.
Tristan is the horror-movie protagonist ignoring everyone’s warnings at the beginning of the film not to go to the cursed place where everyone dies.
“Don’t go that way, young man! It’s cursed! And Anthem will give you a sense of Rand’s thinking in a fraction of the page count!”
I was just re-reading an essay by Mike Davis on the lierary destruction of Los Angeles, and it’s amazing how much AS plagiarized from much of the cheesiest apocalyptic literature of the late 19th and early twnetieth centuries.
What a tease!
I tried reading it once, but I got laid off and decided not to continue. I like trains and skyscrapers, so maybe someday.
What’s up?
And so, as I expected, the Trump Regime and its GOP supporters in Congress are taking back public media funding. And for all the lobbying we did, I don’t think we changed one vote. Any more than Big Medical did. While there are no doubt a few Republicans left who might have voted the interests of their constituents in other times, those people are scared to now. And most always wanted to defund Medicaid and public media, and to hell with what the voters want. Anyway, it will not be till October when the money is gone from everyone’s coffers, so there is time to go to the doomsday plans. And where I work is not going out of business any time soon (unless the FCC takes our license, which could happen). But who knows where we end up. Where I end up. Time to rejigger my resume. (And I will add without saying much that I have heard enough things internally that make me think the industry, despite having months to plan for this, is not ready and that key players are still looking out for themselves instead of the whole system.)
Meanwhile, my father in law is getting his gall bladder removed. Cue the obvious jokes! (Yes, he of the 50s public school education and a very good teacher for a father quoted Caesar in Latin.) This is actually a relief as when he went for tests, they weren’t sure what was causing him to feel sick, his gall bladder or his liver. But he’s 79 so while gall bladder surgery is relatively minor, it’s still a stress to a body that already has a pacemaker and diabetes.
And at the other end of the age spectrum, my grand-niece and grand-nephew both asks me to read to them last weekend. Each wanted a different book, so i tried to switch off. Girl-child eventually went to “read” on her own so I go to re-read Brown Bear, Brown Bear multiple times. I think I have it memorized.
Heh, I’ll be reading to my nephew at the end of the month! That’ll be nice. Sorry to hear about your job and public funding, this just sucks all around.
At least fundraising has been at ten year highs so that cushions the blow a bit. (If you are a fan of American public media and have some money not earmarked for Planned Parenthood or the ACLU or other equally worthy causes, please consider giving.)
All gall is divided into three parts?
Sorry about the funding. Absolutely indefensible.
Yup. It’s that and more stand jokes about having gall.
I did everything I could which of course meant absolute fuck-all in the end. To stay on two themes, the number of things being done by the government that the vast, vast majority of Americans do not want is galling. I got into a minor scrape with my (public broadcast-supporting Republican) parents about their culpability in all this, and the line with right-centers is “you can’t say we voted for this, we don’t want this.” This isn’t a bait-and-switch, all this was promised during the campaign, you vote for a tyrant who hates your family when you had other options, you are willingly against your own family to at least some degree. You’re concerned about the environment and education? Fucking vote like it, words after the fact mean nothing.
Sorry you have to deal with that. Your vitriol is righteous. Don’t feel bad about it.
Last weekend was one of the best weekends I’ve ever had, I reckon. I’ve already mentioned parts of it in the daily threads since there was live music and cinema scattered throughout but the thread woven through most of that was just spending as much time as possible with my new girlfriend and having the most wonderful time together. It kinda feels crazy now how much anxiety I brought with me to the concept of dating again in my 40s and how quickly we’ve managed to breeze past all of it thanks to honest communication and great chemistry (and I guess the therapy I’ve been trying can’t have hurt). I’ve never really had a massive crush develop into an actual relationship before (my only serious previous relationship was more of a “hey we kinda have fun drinking together” mid-20s thing that miraculously lasted over a decade) and damn it feels absolutely incredible to have those feelings reciprocated and to talk about those feelings and make each other smile.
Off on a family holiday tomorrow which should be nice even if it puts a temporary break on the aforementioned romantic fun – I feel like it might be a slightly fraught one as my mum hasn’t been well, my sister is 8 months pregnant and the weather forecast isn’t amazing, but it’ll still be nice to get away for a week and I hope they’re fully prepared for me to spend the entire week gushing about how happy I am, hahahahahaha I am insufferable.
You happy bastard. I hope you drown in joy.
(And I hope you’re familiar enough with my voice to recognize the genuine happiness I feel for you.)
Doing fine but need to figure out how to get my cat not to wake me up so early. I have also started meditating for twenty minutes a day. Joined up with a few groups I will not discuss further on here but at least in the future, I can confidently tell people I was not compliant with the growing/sort of growing fascist forces. (I’m not sure how many of these people are truly loyal or are just hopping on a bandwagon, and Epstein is rapidly dividing them.) On a more fun note, I went to a public pool yesterday which was fun! Going to a reading tonight.
The opposite side of the coin from my response to Simon: no difference between loyal and bandwagoning if they show up and do the work. Stay safe, and I advise peace.
Public pools are fun.
On vacation with the family and about to go (semi) off the grid, so I will either be quite present next week (because of the free time) or not present at all (because of the forest). In one of many recent changes in our duties, my wife shared the driving duties on the way so I could get ahead on school work, made the time go quite fast! For me, anyway.
The reality of starting my job in less than a month is starting to set in and I waffle between panicking because I feel unprepared and channeling Li Jun Li in Sinners
. Not sure I’ll be in the mood to relax this week, but not sure I’ve been in the mood to relax for a while, so we’ll see.
“On vacation…”
Wooooo!!
“…with the family…”
Oh no…
One of my oldest and best, probably best taking the last 25 years into account, friends is coming for a three-day visit in… A little over an hour. See you later!
A couple bonuses!
The aptly named Obscure Sony discusses the Sony PD-150 prosumer camera that is being auctioned with the effects of the late David Lynch:
For Lynch, it wasn’t just proof of concept. It was a door swinging open. He started using the PD150 for personal projects, short videos, and experiments. The camera’s quick startup, long tape time, and no-fuss playback matched how he thought. There were no processing labs, no film stock, and no waiting. By 2006, he went all in. His next film, Inland Empire, was shot entirely using the PD150 and a few similar DV models. No film, no high-end digital cameras, no 24p conversion. Just raw DV, captured straight to tape. The result was a deeply unsettling, nonlinear, three-hour-long film full of paranoia and emotional fragmentation. It was shot without a complete script and assembled from scattered pieces. The DV aesthetic, with its blown-out whites, muddy blacks, and scanline artifacts, was part of the language. It didn’t imitate cinema but rejected it. Some critics found it unwatchable, while others called it a masterpiece. But no one could ignore how radically different it looked.
https://obsoletesony.substack.com/p/david-lynchs-favorite-sony-camcorder
Polygon’s Oli Welsh sees the influence of Nintendo’s latest hits in its newest Donkey Kong incarnation:
This is another key tenet of Breath of the Wild and, even more so, its sequel Tears of the Kingdom: An anti-unlock decree that the player should be given all the tools they need right at the start. Player freedom to improvise and find solutions is venerated, even within the intricate confines of Nintendo’s typically careful design. Bananza follows through on this, up to a point. Just like the Zeldas, Bananza allows you to climb virtually any surface — tantamount to heresy in a platform game. DK’s destructive skills also grant a lot of flexibility when it comes to exploration and finding secrets. But when charging along the game’s critical path, they’re played more for impact than for player-first problem solving (so far, in my limited experience). Switches, structures, and materials fit with particular punches and slams like locks to their keys.
https://www.polygon.com/impressions/613650/donkey-kong-bananza-switch-2-launch-day-impressions
These are not so much bonuses as “I left early on vacation and didn’t check the FAR email to put them in” articles. The FAR supports all things Donkey Kong!