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I appreciated the "don't skip or the skipping ghost will visit you tonight at 3:13 am" warning in the credits. I'm also glad they are explicitly pivoting back from psychic powers to religious visions for David's situation. And I thought Kristen's look of confusion right after the kid was born was a great bit of acting, I thought it was very affecting without trying to go big with it at all.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:35 PM on June 10, 2024

I'm still enthusiastic about this show's maximalist "throw everything at the wall and see what's interesting" approach to plot development, but giving David psychic powers feels like maybe a loose thread too far to me, like are you really going to introduce that and tie it up in the one remaining season? (Although, FWIW this season will have 14 episodes, so maybe they've got time to do it.) I just feel like there's already a lot of stuff going on with David that's interesting and ties… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:14 AM on June 6, 2024

I follow baseball at all, but that oral history is a gold mine.

“I wasn’t concerned, but the Cleveland PR guy said, ‘Lock the damn door and nobody gets in,’” Galloway recalls.

We walked to home plate about five minutes before game time, and there was kind of a cloud over home plate. I had no idea what it was. Two of the younger umpires said, “Don’t you know what that is? That’s marijuana.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:09 PM on June 5, 2024

It seems like Buzbee was for sure getting a demotion, from overseeing news and editorial to "service journalism:" social media, like video storytelling, as well as service journalism, including wellness and lifestyle coverage. This seems like it would be a serious blow to anyone interested in working in, y'know, journalism, versus thinly-veiled product placement and clickbait.

Here's an interesting background story about the Post's new… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:43 PM on June 5, 2024

Delmore Schwartz has a pretty hilarious, but totally made up, anecdote about Wallace Stevens which is related in his biography. In it he claims to have gone to the Hartford insurance company and got to talking to one of the other lawyers there. "I bet you didn't know that your colleague Wallace Stevens is one of the foremost working poets in America." The other guy replies "Stevens? Worst lawyer I've ever met! We would have fired him long ago if not for his poetry!"
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:45 PM on June 5, 2024

Robinson Jeffers comes close.

I have love in my heart for Robinson Jeffers, but I'm not sure you can count rolling boulders out of the sea to build a house as a profession, exactly.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:49 PM on June 5, 2024

Ok, so I know Star Wars is space fantasy and I don't expect or need it to be exceedingly realistic when it comes to like, the laws of physics. But a space fire extinguisher? Really?
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:27 PM on June 4, 2024

I went into this with low expectations and was pleasantly surprised, especially by the imaginative cinematography. I'm still a little baffled by the Charles Dance prologue, though Charles Dance popping up in something is always welcome. I sort of remember some kind of scaffolding bit from the first movie (that is, the first Omen, not The First Omen), was it a reference to that?
posted to FanFare by whir at 12:22 PM on June 2, 2024

Seriously, why go through all of this kludgy stuff? Just use DuckDuckGo, it works just as well or better for 95% of your web searches and it's set up so you can add !g to the end of your query and it redirects you to Google with the same query.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:19 PM on May 22, 2024

I also thought yo, too much.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 7:12 PM on May 20, 2024

I dunno, I'm conflicted about this show. I feel like it never quite managed to hit the tone it was going for, but partly I'm confused about what tone it thought it was going for. Sugar's reference points are all noirs and neo-noirs, but his dog-lovin', homeless-money-givin' character is much too angelic to ever credibly appear in one of those. Meanwhile the present-day case he's solving really has more in common with late 90's serial killer flicks and straight-to-video human trafficking… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:36 AM on May 20, 2024

I feel like this one is a little underrated too. The Kinect imagery is some of the creepiest in the whole series, the creepy kid is creepy, and we get a lot more lore. I didn't much care for the end but it does have some great details, like how all the windows in the house next door are newspapered over.
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:20 AM on May 20, 2024

These are amazing. I love the surprised face of Saturn, and the fact that the depiction of Christina from Christina's World is a little less butt-centric than the real thing.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 3:45 PM on May 14, 2024

Damn.

.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:04 PM on May 8, 2024

I was twice contacted by recruiters to apply for a position that was reporting to me

Triple your salary with this trick HR hates!
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 3:22 PM on May 7, 2024

I also got my start on an Apple ][+ (there were two versions, I had the cheaper one where it could only print uppercase characters, not lowercase ones). I had a magazine with code for a little game in it where you were a submarine (represented by an O) that was fighting sharks (represented by > and < characters), and then I would also write a lot of my own Choose Your Own Adventure style text games. But at some point the disk drive totally died, so I would only be able to play the games… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:36 PM on May 3, 2024

I've been thinking aliens with a Prime Directive to follow or possibly time travelers who are trying to prevent something but not mess up the time stream too badly. The reference to The Thing last week would seem to point towards aliens, I guess.

I'm a lot more interested in the meta-story than the frankly kind of tepid surface detective story, though I'm enjoying the cast a lot.
posted to FanFare by whir at 5:46 PM on May 3, 2024

.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:00 PM on May 3, 2024

Oh, here's a trailer.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:54 PM on May 2, 2024

In all my years reading comics, I don't think I've ever seen somebody take Cap's shield and hurl it off into the distance purely to be a dick about it (and keep him busy for a while).
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:09 PM on May 2, 2024

and then they did Dark Phoenix again, and blew it again

Yeah, because they hired the same writer who had previously botched the same story in X-Men 3, and also invited him to direct it as well! I guess in fairness, he also did the screenplay for Days of Future Past which was way better than I expected it to be for what is a pretty esoteric and lore-heavy little corner of the comics. Then again, he wrote Apocalypse as well, so he's one for four.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:51 PM on April 27, 2024

I'll stand up for ClickHole, not to say they land every joke or that I always think what they're going for is particularly funny, but I've admired their willingness to stick by their brand of vaguely anti-comedy weirdness even after being consumed by a soulless capitalistic money-printing machine. I think they excel at creating weird little surrealist scenarios like this one. Maybe they'll be able to afford bylines now.

I'm excited about the AV Club under its new… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:20 PM on April 25, 2024

My all-time favorite ONN bit is probably 'Just Give Me The Damn Sepak Takraw Ball', which I often think of when a coworker starts getting into the minutiae of football.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:51 AM on April 26, 2024

Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps, two film critics from the AV Club's glory days and subsequently The Dissolve, have a joint substack, The Reveal. Much of it is paywalled, but reviews of current movies are generally free, and I find the writing to be generally pretty high-quality.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:10 PM on April 26, 2024

I didn't make it very far in the first book, so maybe this is explained better there, but if the aliens see everything that's happening on Earth and they can prevent scientists from completing experiments and thus advancing science, why don't they just start putting the countdown thing on every character we see in the show who is making plans to resist the invasion? I don't get why they focus on humankind's theoretical advances when it's really advances in engineering they should be wary of,… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 4:39 AM on April 1, 2024

Well, I did it. I watched all 30 episodes of the Tencent adaptation. I think it would have been faster to just read the first book, and I had some trouble staying awake watching it late at night, because it mostly consists of various characters talking to each other in calm tones.

There are several marked differences from the Netflix adaptation, which I won't spoil, but it goes into a lot more detail about the inner workings of the ETO in a way that the Netflix… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:27 AM on April 26, 2024

I didn't realize this existed until now. Is it any good? The trailers don't give me a lot of hope, but I actually kind of liked the 2016 Exorcist TV show, and that was a show similarly designed to cash in on an iconic horror movie.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:24 AM on April 12, 2024

Just saw this and really liked it. I agree that it's very skillful at setting up the general comfy feeling of a 70s late-night talk show, which works tremendously to it's benefit once the spookiness starts to creep in. The kind of faux-documentary interstitials were definitely on the clunky side, but they did what they were supposed to do and kept the rest of the movie well paced. I found the exorcism stuff a little old hat, but the climax was awesome and exceeded my expectations. This is… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:57 PM on March 21, 2024

Suuuuure it did. I bet a lot of people also fainted from fright during the initial screenings.
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:11 AM on March 29, 2024

I'm another person who bounced off the first book, mostly because I found the writing style kind of dull and the characters poorly fleshed-out, but I also have friends who liked it a lot and have wanted to give it another shot. I guess getting the story through the series first might make me more inclined to give rereading it another go, assuming I like the story.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:14 PM on March 22, 2024

I'm wondering if the Dune civilization's emphasis on developing superhuman memory techniques post-Butlerian Jihad would slow down language change at all.

That seems like it would be a factor, and also you have the Bene Gesserit who can literally remember their ancestor's memories and so would retain knowledge of the spoken language as well, and who culturally have their claws into everything in the universe.

Chaksoba is a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:50 PM on February 28, 2024

this is an exceptionally poorly-written piece

I couldn't agree more, and honestly if it didn't have the "segway" typo in it I would think it was LLM output.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:48 AM on February 28, 2024

I didn't get the impression that the people were jumping back and forth constantly between the different timelines, just that they had switched the one time, after the experiment happened, so Rapace's character is now suddenly in the timeline where her daughter doesn't speak Swedish and she's apparently been on the verge of dumping her husband for the project lead or whatever at NASA (or wherever). Presumably the dead cosmonaut also switched over at this moment and caused the accident. But I… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:05 PM on February 27, 2024

I admired the ambition this had in marrying a "spooky bartender from The Shining turns you against your family" scenario with a near-future conservative red-state dystopia, but ultimately didn't think it succeeded. Like, the racist ghost and the racist government obviously have things in common, but I'm not sure that either aspect really comments on the other in any meaningful way.

I think part of the problem is that we don't really get to… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 1:05 AM on February 26, 2024

I really liked this, having not seen the earlier movie. It's very sweet and has a kind of homemade feeling, along with a healthy helping of classic Japanese themes about work and the role of individual goals in society. The Vaseline-lens cinematography bugged me at first, but it works for the feeling of the film and I grew to enjoy it. Highlights for me were the protagonist's date and the sweded-out practical effects in the last act when we get a sort of explanation of why all this is happening
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:19 PM on February 20, 2024

I thought this was quite well-acted, for being basically a one-actor movie, and it touches on some themes I like a lot (doubles, unreliable memory, Pontypool-style mimetic shenanigans, etc). Once it got to the last act it was hard to see it as anything other than a metaphor for colonialism, though, and it started to seem a little didactic to me. I'm not sure whether that's the movie's fault or mine. Certainly things aren't spelled out in explicitly allegorical terms, I just… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:04 PM on February 20, 2024

This was great, much more well-written and interesting than I was expecting it to be, though I have to admit I'm a sucker for a "movie within a movie within a movie" premise. I agree it didn't totally stick the landing, and actually I thought the actual horror bits were kind of the least interesting parts of the movie. Still, I thought it was kind of thematically unified by how the obsession sort of got passed from subject to documentarian every ten years.
posted to FanFare by whir at 12:17 PM on February 6, 2024

This show really took off at the end
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:32 PM on January 16, 2024

Here's Fielder and Safdie in conversation with Christopher Nolan about this show. They seem to be speaking fairly early in the season aired and so don't discuss the finale.

Some tidbits:
Part of the genesis of the show was that Fielder was asked for money in front of a supermarket and didn't have any, and the woman who asked him said "I curse you."
Fielder: when you have the tone right, everything falls into place.
The… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:47 AM on January 28, 2024

It's too bad they weren't given more antipsychotics
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:32 AM on January 24, 2024

Maximum Rocknroll is still going strong, FWIW, and is far less doctrinaire about what types of music it covers than it was back in the days of Tim Yohannon and the print edition.

I had an intense, intense dislike of Pitchfork and its "Lester Bangs for the Starbucks set" posturing during its heyday, but I have to say I'll miss it now that it's going away. Part of the problem is that at the time there was a wealth of written music reviews,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:03 PM on January 19, 2024

The article indiexy linked is a very cogent (and infuriating) analysis of the financial resoning behind this move.

...both corporate alt rock radio and Conde Nast turn towards men as the audience that will supposedly rescue their tanking media format or vertical not because men are empirically a more reliable media audience, but because investors are more likely to buy it. The audience in question here isn’t listeners or readers, it’s INVESTORS (shareholders, VCs, etc.).

posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:19 PM on January 19, 2024

This was fantastic, thanks. I actually just bought a copy of Lerner's latest book, The Lights, though I haven't cracked it open yet.

I think the reviewer's conclusion about the significance of the "ChatGPT" ending is wrong though.

I agree, it seems pretty obvious (to me) that Lerner is taking a dig at ChatGPT here and we aren't meant to take this section at face value. When ChatGPT (or rather,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:54 PM on January 19, 2024

I liked this season a lot, but I also felt the "forgiveness of debts" epilog was heavily undercut by all the prison rape innuendo in the immediately preceding scene.
posted to FanFare by whir at 5:02 PM on January 19, 2024

I really like this so far. One thing occurred to me about the Ferris Bueller thing: it's a little odd that the movie is stuck on repeat but we only ever see/hear the Twist and Shout scene. I'm fine with that just being movie magic, though, I guess.
posted to FanFare by whir at 4:55 PM on January 19, 2024

This prequel series is ok, but the writing gets a lot better in The Expanse season 1.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:44 PM on January 12, 2024

the country which by decree of apple cannot be mentioned

I assume you mean China here - I know about how Apple dropped John Stewart's show when they learned he was going to do some stuff about China, but is there something more concrete than this in regards to mentioning China on For All Mankind?
posted to FanFare by whir at 3:13 PM on December 11, 2023

Yeah, everyone should act like Cynics, that's going to turn out great
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:53 PM on December 7, 2023

I really admired this, but it was hard to watch. Nathan Fielder seems to be going for the Michael Hanneke miserablist niche of Adult Swim alt-comedy. Slow closeups of the producer silently weeping alone?

I did think the bit at the end where Asher and Whitney have an honest moment of fun and then proceed to suck all of the life out of it by trying to recreate it for the 'gram was pretty inspired, especially with the subsequent mask-slipping descent into all-out… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:27 PM on November 30, 2023

I just binged through the whole series (it's available to watch, ah, for the resourceful) and I enjoyed season 2. They are definitely going deep into timey-wimey territory, and I'm here for it, but I appreciate that all the time-travel stuff is explicitly tied to character beats.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:11 PM on November 20, 2023