I think Arkham Asylum was one of his worst books – it was pretty but very overrated.
That’s certainly what Moore said about it, too :)
Still thought it was quite good for what it was though.
Man, those were the days in the nineties. Getting to read new issues of Invisibles, Shade the Changing Man, Sandman and Preacher every month.
I stumbled across The Dollhouse Family, a Mike Carey/Peter Gross book from a few years ago that I’d never heard about before. Which is what you get when you destroy an imprint like Vertigo, create a new one with Black Label and then a sub-imprint focused on one guy (Joe Hill) publishing horror fare. Stuff gets buried.
Anyway, it was great to see those two working together again, and it was a really good creepy story. Well worth reading.
Right now, they’ll do anything at all as long as it means they can send the refugees back.
Ah ha ha. Completely wrong though:
Note how little that “import” bar is.
Wind power was once again the most important source of electricity in 2023, contributing 139.8 terawatt hours (TWh) or 32% to public net electricity generation. This was 14.1% higher than the previous year’s production.
So, you know, wherever you got that cartoon, you can tell them to stick their bullshit fake facts up their arse.
I’ll be picking up book 2 and then I guess I need to face up and read the Invisibles (or Doom Patrol).
(Can I avoid the massive tomes and get Deluxe editions for those?)
Jesus, you’ve never read either?!!
I’d go chronologically and start with DP, you can see him evolve as a writer as time goes by.
What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.
In other words, Spotify has gone to war against musicians and record labels.
At Spotify they call this the “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC) program. Musicians who provide PFC tracks “must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative.”
Jesus. This kind of thing desperately needs to be legislated in some way.
And I want to thank these bosses for giving us all employment as well as wonderful products.
It’s wonderful that they keep doing this for us for such meagre compensation.
The Lorca plot was the thing that really drove Disco season 1 and made it work for me. After he was gone, the show went down the toilet as far as I am concerned.
Seems like their definition is that it can replace a human at the workplace, more or less. Which, yeah, that thing is probably going to happen.
I read “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk on trauma and the nervous system. It’s an informative book, but since he wrote it, he has been removed as the main director in the Boston health center. There were reports of his attitude, some misconduct and overall being a d*ck to everybody. Still it got me into other books on the subject. Very interesting how major trauma conditions the mind and nervous system, making in so hard wired that the victim not only gets flashbacks but is broken and becomes incapable of standing up or fighting back in life. The therapies of retraining the mind and re configuring the nervous system are very interesting. So trauma generally doesn’t make you grow up to be Batman or Vito Corleone irl. (Some comic relief)
Heh. Back at uni, I wrote a paper about trauma (examining the literary depiction of which was a bit of a fad at the time in anglistics) and comics. It was of course titled “Blood in the Gutters: Trauma and Sequential Art”. I focused on the depiction of Rorschach’s trauma (because structurally, the depiction emulated a lot of the elements of how trauma works in the brain) and I also compared it to a depiction of a character in a Virginia Wolf novel whose war trauma made him see the world in a completely different way (similar to Rorschach’s traumatic epiphany when he realises what happened to the girl). I also brought in Shade the Changing Man’s Kathy, who keeps flashing back to the moment her parents are killed by a serial killer.
I haven’t seen a Simpsons episodes in like a decade, I expect there’ll be a few good ones if I ever decide to catch up. But it’s just crazy how long they’ve kept this going.
Police are investigating after a Tesla Cybertruck filled with fuel canisters and firework mortars exploded outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The driver was killed and seven people were injured, police said without naming any of the individuals involved. Officials said all injuries were minor.
The truck was rented in Colorado and arrived in the city on Wednesday morning, less than two hours before the detonation, police said. Parked in front of the hotel near a glass entrance, the vehicle started to smoke, then exploded.
Jesus. Looks like we’re in for a violent year.
The FBI has identified the suspect as a 42-year-old Texas man and Army veteran.
In the recordings the suspect makes reference to his divorce and how he had at first planned to gather his family for a “celebration” with the intention of killing them, two officials who had been briefed on the material in the recordings said. The suspect also talked about how he changed his plans and said that he joined ISIS. He referenced several dreams that he had about why he should be joining ISIS.
Sounds like the ISIS thing was incidental to a personal journey of mental breakdown.
Man. As if New Orleans hadn’t gone through enough in recent years…
Still I am not that pessimistic. The world has gotten about 1.5 degree warmer, and it’s pretty much business as usual. I mean there are extremes in temperature, but those scientists like Paul Ehrlich said billions would be starving, coastal cities would be wiped off the map etc. We should probably trry to keep temperatures in check somewhat, I especially think we should use a lot more nuclear energy to stop nonsense like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute, but I don’t see our current course as an end-of-the-world scenario.
Problem is, you’re talking as if this was a linear process. Which it isn’t. The rising temperatures cause things to happen that in turn increase the speed of rising temperatures. Just read a bit about tipping points if you haven’t yet. The next few years really are our last shot at this, in all probability.
Oh, and quoting Paul Ehrlich isn’t very helpful in this context, as he isn’t a climate scientist. The change in global temperature has actually happened faster than most predictions expected.
So I succumbed and bought a Meta 3. I know this isn’t proper proper gaming and whatever, but fuck you, I’ve got cyberspace now.
These cunts want to enslave the people.
They always have. That’s why Amazon workers have to piss in bottles at work to make quotas.
Amazon wants AI and robots to replace the workers.
I am sure they’ll postpone those plans if the workers are sensible enough and agree to work a mere 160 hours a week.
It has gotten quite a bit warmer already, and the effects aren’t catastrophic. Maybe a few more natural disasters, but nothing we can’t handle. And if things get worse, we can always move to colder areas. Paul Ehrlich etc have an almost perfect record of being wrong all the time.
Jesus, Arjan, I don’t want to pile on here, but there is so much wrong with those statements that I don’t even know where to begin. I don’t really want to, either, the facts are out there after all and me explaining them again probably won’t help. I just hope that you’re in the kind of mood that makes you say nonsensical things and that this isn’t really what you believe deep down.
If it is, well, it’s pretty much a perfect example why humanity probably isn’t equipped to survive.
Kinda like there suddenly weren’t any nazis in post-war Germany, only people who went along because they were fearing for their lives or who just didn’t know any of the bad stuff was going on. Funy how that happens.
They said he wears goggles and has a ‘U’ on the chest, can’t make out who it is (I would fucking love it to be Cavill).
That would be quite a coup. Too good to be true though.
Rumour mill says Ultraman is a genetic copy of Superman created by Lex. Which’d be a bit of a shame because I would’ve loved to see an Earth-3 at some point.
I am binge-watching Ted Lasso. Second season isn’t as good as the first one, though. There’s not enough emphasis on football, or on Lasso as a coach. I don’t particularly care about Nathan turning into an arse, or Rebecca’s lovestory with what turns out to be Sam. I do like the addition of the psychotherapist, and the further exploration of Ted’s character that goes with it, but apart from that… It’s still a pretty good watch, but it’s definitely weaker than the first season.
I still need to watch Crimes of the Future. Very much looking forward to that one.
That’s a big question, innit?
The craziest and most impressive instinct that we as humans have is the language instinct. At an age when he can’t even count to ten, my kid is forming sentences that if you decode them would show a nightmarish complexity. It’s really insane. There’s a software installed in our brains that allows us to learn languages at a crazy speed while we’re very small, and at some point that software self-destructs and we can’t do it anymore.
Sounds like a hell of a nervous breakdown. Not that anybody will care about the actual background of what made him snap.
Ah fuck. This has been our nightmare ever since the Berlin attack at the Breitscheidplatz christmas markets a few years ago. They’ve been really trying to make those Christmas markets more secure in the wake of that one, but in the end, there’ll always be a point where you can drive your car into a crowd if that’s what you want.
Fucking hell. If this turns out to be another IS-related attack, this might well mean that the whole election we’re about to have will be about terrorism and migration after all. Things started out with those topics well at the back, which would have been a great relief. But now… well, this might well give the AfD fascists a huge push.
Looks like Elon is going to get his wish. He tweeted:
“Only the AfD can save Germany”
Wow, that sounds even dumber than you’d think it would. Especially the random magic power-giving potion stuff. (Which is pretty close to the comics, of course, but even dumber.)
I’ve watched the first two episodes of The Silo, which is pretty good. Not everything makes sense, but it’s all done well enough that that’s okay.
Also watched the first episodes of Ted Lasso, which is really utterly charming. It’s a good series to watch around Christmas, really, with the way it’s oozing with kindness and the belief that everything will be alright if you’re nice enough to people.
It’s stuff like the Pelicot case that makes me wonder whether we shouldn’t just get rid of men altogether.
I mean, with genetic engineering and artificial insemination and everything, we don’t really need them for much longer anymore, do we? Maybe we should just strive to be the last generation of humans with a Y-chromosome and with that fucking testosterone coming out our ears.
I think it looks great. Hits a lot of the right notes. Also, the most comics accurate Superman ever.
I think that Gunn gets Superman in a way that we haven’t seen before. And the trailer seems to affirm this.
Personally, I think they missed a step by not properly teasing this teaser for the teaser by releasing a teaser after the first pre-teaser that teases more of the second pre-teaser.
It’s also such a great example of an idea being revived/extended properly and in the best way possible, with the original creators of an indie movie going back to their concept and breathing new life into it with the help of different actors.
(Could’ve sworn the original movie was older though, it was released only ten years ago…)
Guess the full trailer is later this week.
Thursday.
I am actually a tiny bit excited for this.
Well well well. Seems like doing a series of movies starring B-list Spiderman villains in which Spiderman doesn’t appear wasn’t the formula for success that everybody thought it would be. What a crazy world.
(It’s really funny in retrospect that Venom’s unpredictable and weird success made Sony think they’d struck gold and really put some money behind those movies.)
Becoming? I got news for you, Bernie: we’re already there.
At least Sanders is calling it out.
Also, I’d say that the way Trump is doing it has a new quality to it. Randomly handing ministires to billoinaire friends is kinda different from what went before.
That’s a poignant picture, but even just the ad in itself – and that does seem to be real – is incredibly cynical and tells you everything about the way AI is going to go.
On the one hand, yikes. On the other hand, the Scots say that kind of thing about being lumped in with the English all the time.
And I have to say I kinda get it. In contrast to the Scots and the English, the Nigerian Civil War between the Yoruba and the Igbo wasn’t so long ago – just a little over fifty years. And there were terrible, genocidal massacres on both sides during that time. Those wounds haven’t healed by a long shot. (Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun” is a great novel to read about this time in Nigeria.)
On the other hand, you’d expect a professional politician to also understand that lumping in everybody in a region with Boko Haram and declare them enemies is the same kind of thing that she’s complaining about. But if she had a lot of self-awareness, she wouldn’t be a Tory, I suppose.
I can beat that – two years earlier than The Hole, I saw her in this little indie arthouse film called The Phantom Menace.
Nah you didn’t, you just saw somebody in Natalie Portman makeup.
Sounds about right!
Judging from my social media, it seems to be becoming a thing that Keira Knightley was only 17 when she was doing Love Actually and playing a girl being somewhat creepily wooed by then-thirty-year-old Andrew Lincoln.
On the other hand, this also shows again just how crazily fast she blew up after Bend It Like Beckham (and before that, The Hole which I’ll proudly tell you I saw at the time and thought she was very good in it). Pirates of the Caribbean came out in the same year. She’s got ten film credits for 2002-2003. She was nineteen when she was doing Pride and Prejudice and Domino. Jesus Christ.
What were you doing when you were nineteen?
Heh. Yeah, well. I’ll keep maintaining he did some very good work on other stuff. Which I can’t really say for Abrams.
Abrams has created for the most part very mediocre fare. That goes for all of his movies, really, and for everything he’s written or directed himself on TV, as well. Lost is a big exception, but that’s presumably because Lindeloff is a really good writer. Why anybody would think of Abrams as the next Spielberg is beyond me.
Bad Robot did produce some very good shows, especially the Jonathan Nolan ones.
There seems to be a couple of beliefs that run deep on the US that don’t over here:
I kinda get that when it comes to the US, because it’s so deeply connected to the American Dream and the vision Americans have of themselves. But how did this work so well over here? Look at the French, even after all these years of Macron’s neo-liberalism, they still aren’t really turning to the left (the left coalition’s success in the recent election is due to the election process, they lost the popular vote) and instead they’re about to succumb to LePen’s fascism. These are the people who invented the guilloutine, for God’s sake!
It’s a simpler narrative that has a bunch of stuff you can physically point to – all the foreign people working in visible sapces, more diversity on TV, and those are why things are bad, somehow.
I don’t know, man, I mean, what’s easier to point to than “Look! A handful of super-rich guys have all the money!!!”
It’s hard to understand for me that they somehow managed to steer the discourse in a way that makes sure nobody talks about wealth disparity and re-distribution.
The thing is that Trump is a symptom, not the problem. The US as a society has never really come to terms with race relations, which basically broke the Republicans when Obama got elected. Combine that with a refusal to properly support public services, the hollowing out of the middle class, the deliberate destruction of public education… You have a combination of an increasingly dysfunctional political system and people who are primed to flock to basically anything that offers a way out.
Yeah, the latter points are the same reason why Le Pen has been so successful in France, and the AfD in parts of Germany. If people feel like the system isn’t working for them anymore, why should they give a fuck about keeping it in place. It’s a bit of a mystery to me though why this hasn’t led to the rise of a new left wing the way it has to a new right. I mean, it’s not a mystery in the US, for the reasons described above, but in Europe it’s more inexplicable. People seem to be entirely wrapped up in the narrative that it’s the unemployed and migrants fucking everything up, instead of turning to class warfare. ‘s weird.
Trump showed that there is no depth the Republicans won’t plumb if they can win an election – and the person who comes after him will be as bad, if not worse. Because there are no consequences for it.
After this? Yes, very much so. That’s another reason why him winning is way worse than just any Republican candidate winning.
As for Republicans leaving no depths unplumbed… let’s not ignore that the Republican establishment is terrified of Trump. He’s the genie they summoned without realising it, and they have no way of putting him back in the bottle. The Christian right is happy as a pig in the mud right now, yes, but I there’s big parts of the GOP quaking in their boots.
More broadly, and to move it away from the personalised back-and-forth, I think what we’re really talking about here is an absolutist approach to policitcs rather than a consensus approach.
If I decided that I was only going to vote for a party that represented my interests and policy preferences precisely, I would probably never find that party (unless I started one myself) because large political groups don’t work like that – they end up agreeing policy through wider consensus.
Similarly, if legislators decided that they could only vote for legislation if it 100% represented their preferences, in every line and paragraph, then no legislation would ever get passed, because you couldn’t ever draft legislation that would fully satisfy everybody at the same time.
Those voters and legislators might feel proud that they had stuck to their principles, but nothing would get done.
Politics, when it works, tends to work through consensus rather than everybody feeling they’ve got exactly what they wanted. Does that mean you don’t always get everything you want? Of course. Does it mean you occasionally have to “hold your nose” and vote for the lesser of two evils? Yes, if you want the preferable outcome. But that’s a sensible decision if you want to have any influence over the direction in which politics moves.
Progressive voters deciding to withhold their vote and opt-out of the Democratic process absolutely plays into the hands of the other side, and allows politics to move in the opposite direction.
To be fair, I do understand Lorcan’s argument on a general level – that by supporting a supposedly-left party even when it moves away from everything it should represent, you encourage the direction they’re taking. There are fights about the directions of parties that will and should have an effect on elections. And I think generally, you can make the argument that sometimes, parties need to be made to understand that they’re going the wrong way by losing an election even when they still would’ve been the better alternative.
I think this argument could more easily be made in a US context if Trump wasn’t the alternative. With a “normal” Republican, as far as that’s a thing, it would’ve been more easily justifiable. It’d also make more sense if there was any hope of the Democrats getting the message and finally nominating one of their more leftist politicians in the future. But that is unfortunately very unlikely.
The whole thing is exascarbated by the two-party system. In Germany (and the UK, etc.), if I think the pabour party (SPD) sucks, I can either go further left (Die Linke), focus on ecological matters (Green Party), or now go even left-right-populist (Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht). And my vote will still matter because that party will be in parliament, and quite possibly in a government coalition. In the US, you don’t get that alternative.
Based on what? Seriously, is there any evidence that they’d even try to do anything?
Well, she announced this very clearly, and it’s not like it’d go against her record up to this point. There is no reason to believe she wouldn’t have tried to go for it. She’s tried to push for a bill like this before, after all.
As a U.S. senator, Harris opposed anti-abortion bills that would have conferred personhood rights on fetuses. None of them ultimately passed.
Conversely, Harris championed various bills that would have protected and advanced reproductive rights. In 2019, for example, Harris was a co-sponsor of the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have enacted a federal statutory right to abortion. It also did not pass.
They could try looking down-ballot where, to keep things on the topic of reproductive care, more people voted in favour of protecting abortion rights in states where it was on the ballot than they did for Harris. Polling shows time and again that policies the Democrats either downplay or ignore are popular with the people. But they won’t, say actually implement socialised helathcare because the political donor class doesn’t want it and the Democrats are fine with losing power so long as the money keeps rolling in.
I don’t think all Democrats are fine with it, but I also can’t say I entirely disagree. I think I would defend the Democratic Party to some extent here, but I don’t feel that’s necessary because the point is that while the Dems may not be what they should be, they at least don’t seek to actively punish and harm people who seek to end a pregnancy, or who are LGBT+ – and others. Voting for the lesser evil isn’t exactly inspiring, but not doing it when the actual evil is coming for you with sharpened knives is just… well, it’s not good for your own self-preservation, and none of the arguments you’ve been making has been able to see the logic of it, sorry.
Serious question Dave: If Harris had gotten in, what do you think she would have done about the state of abortion access in the US?
There is every reason to believe she would have done her best to reinstate a Roe-v-Wade kind of protection with legislation, as she’s said she would. Whether she would’ve been able to get that done is a different question, of course.
And nobody who refused to vote is fine with Trump being president. They’re checking out of the political system entirely because they realise neither side will help them.
Well, one side will do their best to really fuck them up though. And you can’t really check out of that. I mean, yeah, like you said, you can leave the US. But it’s not like the way the US goes doesn’t influence the rest of the world.
The Democrat policy for decades has been to not care about left-wing votes. Chuck Schumer literally said “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia” in 2016… you know, just before Clinton lost the election while pandering to the right. Not only did fewer of the Democrat base vote for Harris, but a whopping 4% of registered Republicans voted for her, down from 5% for Biden in 2020. If your voter base rejects your arguments and policies, I don’t see how that’s the voters’ faults and not the fault of the party’s arguments and policies.
Democrats do keep making that mistake, and I’m afraid they’ll once again take the wrong lesson from this election. But then again, what lesson are they supposed to take from it? When there’s a huge majority supporting Trump and his policies, including restricting access to abortion, deportations and anti-trans activism?
A lot of random action shots and very little sense of what the show will actually be about.
I wonder if the people who chose not to vote Democrat to send them a message this year are happy with the outcome that resulted from their choice. I would guess not, but who knows – maybe they think four more years of Trump is a price worth paying to send their message.
There’s also the questions of whether that message will be received, of course. Given that immensity of Trump’s win, the Democrats may well decide they need to move further to the right.
Meanwhile, in Germany, after the dissolution of our labour/green/neo-liberal government coalition, we are going to have an election in February and then a pretty right-wing CDU (conservative party) chancellor who accused refugees of only coming to Germany to get their teeth fixed and who twenty years ago introduced the term “Leitkultur” (lead culture – the idea that there is a true German cultural core that immigrants need to adapt to) into the political discourse.
Jim Abrahams, Comedy Writer-Director for ‘Airplane!’ & ‘Naked Gun’ Dies at 80
Oh wow, that’s a big one. Kentucky Fried movie and Airplane! were works of comedic genius at their time, and incredibly influential. Not necessarily in a good way – most movies that try to spoof the way those did in later years are really, really terrible. But that doesn’t change how good those originals were.
To be honest, I don’t think Biden pardoning Hunter is that big a problem.
There’s a number of problems with it really, but the most important one is: Biden demonstrated that he’s fine with some people – those in power – breaking the law and suffering no consequences whatsoever. In that, he is now no different than Trump. Which plays into the hands of those who already see the two big parties as interchangable and want someone like Trump to shake things up. And it also means that once again, people have been shown that “politicians are all the same” and they needn’t bother going out to vote at all.
As he said, the plea deal Hunter agreed to was torpedoed
Ah well, when a plea deal doesn’t work out obviously all you can do is just not prosecute somebody further. I bet there’s a lot of convicted people in the US who wish they’d had that choice.
I’d have pardoned him to avoid that too.
Right, because you’re fine with somebody stealing 1.4 million dollars from the people.
Well, like Tobias said, this is why separation of powers is a really good idea.
Interesting sidenote: The pardon doesn’t just cover the crimes he’s being accused of, but any and all he may have comitted in the year 2014. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it.
Interesting that he’s the one to say this. I mean most people probably knew, but it’s impossible to say it.
I wonder why you would think that. All over Europe, parties are trying to capitalise on strong anti-immigration stances; there’s pretty much nobody who isn’t suggesting tougher and tougher anti-immigration policies, trying to top each other, including the supposedly political left.
Anyway: It all seems like a bunch of nonsense because it’s being connected to the cost of the asylum system while the aspect that Labour actually is taking aim at is businesses importing cheap labour (which the Tories apparently made very easy for them indeed) and keeping salaries low in that way.
In a week in which the Labour government clashed with business leaders over the national insurance increase, which has been dubbed a “jobs tax”, and the difficulties of getting people on benefits back into work, Sir Keir sent them a strong warning that he would not allow companies to continue to rely on cheap foreign labour.
He told reporters: “For too long we’ve had this over-reliance on the easy answer of recruiting from abroad, and that’s got to change. And it’s a two-way street.
Which, you know, fair enough, it’s pretty crazy how much UK immigration rose after Brexit. On the other hand, it’s mostly bullshit:
ONS estimates show two main explanations for the 660,000 increase in non-EU immigration that took place between 2019 and 2023 (Figure 3):
Work visas. Almost half of the increase in non-EU immigration from 2019 to 2023 resulted from those arriving for work purposes (21%) and their dependants (27%). Health and care was the main industry driving the growth, including care workers who received access to the immigration system in February 2022. There was also higher demand for some workers who were already eligible for visas under the old system, such as doctors and nurses. Early data for 2024 suggest that health and care work visas had fallen substantially, however.
International students and their dependants accounted for a further 39% of the increase in non-EU immigration. The UK has an explicit strategy of increasing and diversifying foreign student recruitment, and it is also likely that the reintroduction of post-study work rights post-Brexit made the UK more attractive to international students. The 2023 figures do not yet reflect the impact of restrictions on students’ family members, introduced in January 2024.
So a big part of the immigrants are in health labour, and if the UK is anything at all like Germany, they probably need nurses and healthcare workers desperately, and the other part of it are highly qualified workers who are also desperately needed by all European countries at the moment.
So yeah, apart from a legitimate point about social dumping somewhere in there, this is also the usual populism suggesting that Jonny Foreigner is leeching off the Great British society while it’s actually the people coming in keeping it all going while the native population is growing too old to do so anymore. But everybody else is doing it, so why shouldn’t Labour.
This has made national news over here recently: There is, it turns out, a tradition on the small island of Borkum that consists of a big celebration in which three men (who are decided by having a big fight or something) roam the streets at night in cow costumes and who hunt and then spank women (pretty violently) cow horns while being cheered on by the crowds.
Here’s the TV report with auto-translated subtitles. Around the 10-minute-mark you can see the video of the whole thing, and it’s exceedingly weird, like something from a folk horror movie.
Then there’s the whole matter of WW raping the guy Steve possessed.
Well, there’s also still the possibility that Steve actually took over his body permanently and kinda extinguished his soul, and when Steve leaves, all that remains is a braindead husk. In that case it wouldn’t be rape, it’d just be murder. That any better?
On the other hand, I saw The Substance yesterday and that was absolutely glorious. It’s a fucking amazing movie and if you haven’t seen it yet, bloody well go out and do so.
It’s Cronenbergian body horror meets media world satire, and it’s very secure in its aesthetics; the whole movie is shot beautifully disgustingly. It also does the Cronenberg approach very well. The story is a Darian-Gray-ish concept in which Demi Moore creates a younger version of herself who is still bound to the old body because she needs to take a fluid from it, and they have to switch every seven days and the other body kind of just lies around during that time. And if you’re not on time switching, well, terrible things start to happen.
The whole movie works fantastically well and I was quite happy with it, but in the last act (non plot-specific light spoiler, but I’ll blot it just in case) it switches gears and goes full Troma, which was utterly brilliant and unexpected.
So, yeah, watching how confidently and boldly that movies took on its themes of fading beauty and ageing women in a patriarchal society and turned it into something wonderful and stomach-turning was an absolutely great night out. Much recommended.
I saw Wonder Woman 1984 last week. It was bafflingly bad. They managed to make a movie in which nothing works. The dialogues are terrible, the characters are unconvincing, the CGI is bad (every time she uses the lasso it looks so bad it takes you right out of the movie), and the overall feel of the movie is more like a throwback to the kind of over-the-top silly superhero movies they tended to make in the eighties, which, yes, might be the point here, but the thing is, those weren’t very good and they certainly aren’t when you make one today. Also, the whole make-a-wish plot device is a horrible idea and Max is a 2D panto villain who for some reason then gets a whole dumb backstory and a son, but only so he can then go on to panto villain some more. And the one thing the movie should have going for it, which is that Gal Gadot was a pretty good Wonder Woman in some other movies and is absolutely beautiful of course, turns out to not matter because the movie exposes her as a very much less than good actress.
Pine and Pascal do the best they can with what they’re given, but man does that not make a difference. Wow. What an utter and complete failure of a movie.
Former Florida attorney general? She seems wildly overqualified for a Trump pick. We can only hope she makes up for it by being a truly horrible human being.
In 2018, Bondi joined with 19 other Republican-led states in a lawsuit to overturn the ACA’s bans on health insurance companies charging people with pre-existing conditions higher premiums or denying them coverage outright.[16]
…
Bondi opposed same-sex marriage and other LGBTQ rights issues on behalf of the state.[17]
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In August 2018, while still serving as Florida Attorney General, Bondi co-hosted The Five on Fox News three days in a row while also appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.[20] Fox News claimed that the Florida Commission on Ethics had approved Bondi’s appearance on the program; however, the spokeswoman for the commission denied that, telling the Tampa Bay Times that no decision was made by the commission and that the commission’s general counsel did not make a determination whether or not Bondi’s appearance as a host violated the Florida Code of Ethics. The Tampa Bay Times described it as “unprecedented” for a sitting elected official to host a TV show.[20]
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In 2011, Bondi also pressured two attorneys to resign who were investigating Lender Processing Services, a financial services company now known as Black Knight, following the robosigning scandal, as part of their work for Florida’s Economic Crime Division. After the resignations, Bondi received campaign contributions from Lender Processing Services, though she denied any quid pro quo.[24]
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In 2013, Bondi also received criticism following a campaign donation from Donald Trump.[28] Prior to the donation, Bondi had received at least 22 fraud complaints regarding Trump University. A spokesperson for Bondi announced that her office was considering joining a lawsuit initiated by Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General of New York, regarding tax fraud potential charges against Trump.[29][30] Four days later, a political action committee established by Bondi to support her re-election, And Justice for All, received a $25,000 donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Bondi subsequently declined to join the lawsuit against Trump University. Both Bondi and Trump defended the propriety of the donation.[31][32]
Right, thumps up on that front, it seems. For a second there I was worried he’d nominated someone for Attorney General who wasn’t a criminal, but we’re good here.
Well, yes. But it’s interesting that there’s enough power left in the non-Trump GOP that they can touch any of Trump’s choices at all. Up to this point, I’d have thought he could’ve nominated an ape in a suit and they’d swallow it.
The weird thing is that there’s so much good Star Wars content out there. If they’d gone the Marvel route of just taking the best of the comics, novels, games etc. and loosely adapt them, they would’ve been fine.
Still, I’ll take a look at Skeleton Crew.
I mean, if that’s what this season of America is going to be, alright. Let’s get the popcorn out.
Well fuck, I’ve been invited to meetings where they’ll explain how the world copied itself and we’re living in an alternate timeline (my words, I’m not fucking going) and on it goes.
Ohhhhh I kinda want to go to that!
Honestly, I think the best you can do is, if you like them, to keep engaging these people on other levels so they won’t become isolated from mainstream society. That’s when the true descent into madness begins. As long as you’re not going there, I don’t know man. Personally, believing in religions doesn’t seem any less crazy to me than the other shit.
“Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System. […]
The announcement comes as Trump has called for retribution against numerous adversaries, calling for the arrest of figures like special counsel Jack Smith and suggesting others should be prosecuted.
That is so, so funny.
