i love how piers morgan’s debate show is just daytime television but the guests aren’t in the same room to physically fight each other. if jerry springer doesn’t exist, society must invent him again.

imo the kardashian family should buy tiktok. they understand social media arguably better than anyone else.

“what will happen to the politics on the app, though?” well, with a transgender republican lesbian who doesn’t support gay marriage on the board of trustees, anything could happen. pull out a chair, grab a snack, crack a beer open, and enjoy the fireworks.

come to think about it, that early 00s era of cartoon network (billy and mandy, courage, ed edd n eddy) is something that mostly gets left out of the conversation entirely when people talk about nostalgia. possibly because nickelodeon really had a monopoly on kids’ entertainment at the time. and i remember a lot of kids i knew in elementary school who would tell me “my mom says I’m not allowed to watch ed edd n eddy”. i couldn’t tell you, though.

but if I revisited those cn shows now, I’d probably laugh at the jokes in them much harder than I would at 2003 era spongebob or fairly odd parents. you get the sense that the former creative environment gave the people more room to be sort of abstract and weird, which produced better comedy. the latter… um…

yknow, something that surprises me is how the grim adventures of billy and mandy never really got the cultural re-appraisal it probably deserves in cartoon circles. so many of the scenes in it are comedy dynamite.

there’s one scene where grim walks in on billy staring at a wall. he asks him what he’s doing. he says “watching paint dry.” there’s a few second long pause, and then he points at the wall and says “this is the best part”.

it’s the sort of exaggerated, goofy, slapstick-y writing that’s very much at home in animation.

I saw a snippet of a poll today about “most regretted majors” and someone commenting “how could anyone regret studying math or physics? it’s like regretting climbing a mountain :’(”

i can give you. um. a lot of potential explanations.

the big one is that there isn’t a lot you can do with an undergraduate physics degree. unless you go to grad school and specialize, you’ll wind up in data analytics or something. great recipe right there for feeling like you’ve wasted your effort.

the other one is that even if you do go down the specialization route, the ratio of cost of education to pay is sort of dreary. it really has to be a labor of love, or else.

anyone know why, on the title screen for the sonic games, he’s wagging his finger at you like you’re a cat who won’t stop hopping on the dinner table? like damn what did I do?

since I was talking about alex garland today, I strongly recommend devs, the miniseries he did for fx on hulu. it’s incredibly underrated, partially because it was airing during feb-march 2020 and uh. understandable that people had bigger things on their minds back then. understandable they missed that one. but it’s worth your time either way.

also, since I finally watched civil war, i finally have license to roast this insanely dumb polygon article that’s been sitting in my notes app for four months. it’s basically a long, whiny, rage post about the map that was released as promotional material for the film. which was not out yet.

the sub-genre of article that sprung up in the clickbait era that’s basically “here’s a review of something i didn’t watch” really is striking. but you’d think that if you’re paid to write about, you’d have a bit more working literacy about this stuff. if you have a loose familiarity with alex garland’s work, you wouldn’t write an angry rant about how he didn’t make this hypothetical movie that would be incredibly out of character for him to write.

i finally got around to seeing alex garland’s civil war and I didnt dislike it, but I was admittedly a bit frustrated with it. I really love alex garland’s work, so maybe I just went in with my expectations in a certain place. it was very visually striking, but the dialogue is kind of… really bad. especially in the first half hour. i think what he was going for with this was invoking cliches about journalists, but I don’t think it worked. but can i forgive it on the basis of how powerful the imagery is? I don’t know. i just know that it hasn’t wormed its way out of my brain.

a lot of the discourse around this movie has been about garland’s decision to keep the contours of the war vague. it’s not that it’s an apolitical movie. it’s very explicitly anti war, but it doesn’t go about this in a way where you cleanly can map it onto us politics. I could go either way on that as an artistic decision. i think garland chose to do this for a few reasons. one of them being that he doesn’t want the movie to be turned into a political football. another probably being that Very Topical media has a tendency to age poorly. I think the main one, though, is that garland is most interested in telling stories about how people behave in a world where rules and expectations we take for granted have been suspended. he plays with this in 28 days later, devs, and annihilation, although these are all very different takes on that idea. that’s his obsession as a writer, and things like policy planks are ultimately secondary to what he’s trying to do.

at the same time, i do think it’s a bit of a dodge. putting california and texas together is intentionally meant to be jarring, but it does sort of beg the “how did that happen” question. it makes it sort of a difficult movie to discuss.

and, as a side note: a24 does this thing I hate in how they advertise the films they distribute, where the trailers are just completely unfaithful representations of the movies they’re for. their horror movie trailers are sooooo bad with this lmfao. they’ll make something like the vvitch look like a conventional horror movie, and then someone will yell in the theater when the credits roll “what the hell was that arthouse piece of garbage! i want my money back!” they did this with civil war as well, so you get an audience of moviegoers who seemed to be expecting Op-Ed: The Movie and are mad they didn’t get that. and imo a24 doesn’t get nearly enough shit for facilitating this.

uh, anyway. i don’t know how i felt about it. and i kind of love that I don’t know how I felt about it. alex garland has a way of getting your into your head in a way that a lot of writer-directors can’t.

there’s a type of vocal affectation you hear often in talk radio and podcasting that I think is modeled after ira glass, but I’m not sure. I’m picturing that scene in rise of skywalker with all the snoke clones floating in pickle juice, but with ira glass.

I’ve always sort of mentally classified this as radio thing exclusively, but every so often i meet someone who just speaks like this in person. i will never find it any less jarring. the conversation feels like you’re trying not to wake up a baby.

my data is probably the most useless commodity in the world. my search history is just insanely stupid questions rife with typos, like, “do squireels hiss?”

I’ve never understood why hotels & motels stuff a bible in the nightstand, but it gets weird when they throw a book of mormon in there for good measure. “good measure” is incredibly debatable here because this happened to me in new jersey, not salt lake city or something.

I’ve never understood why hotels & motels stuff a bible in the nightstand, but it gets weird when they throw a book of mormon in there for good measure. “good measure” is incredibly debatable here because this happened to me in new jersey, not salt lake city or something.

I want to know how they’re doing now, as an empath

the history of people’s relationships with using and abusing substances is such an underrated aspect of history, in my opinion. imagine how much fun that would be to study as a historian.

Russia and vodka is the ur example, but there are also many areas of English history where bizarre political decisions conclude with the general populace drinking loads and loads of bathtub gin. and the temperance movement in the United States. And that’s just alcohol. We haven’t even scratched the surface of intoxicants here.

the history of people’s relationships with using and abusing substances is such an underrated aspect of history, in my opinion. imagine how much fun that would be to study as a historian.

Russia and vodka is the ur example, but there are also many areas of English history where bizarre political decisions conclude with the general populace drinking loads and loads of bathtub gin. and the temperance movement in the United States. And that’s just alcohol. We haven’t even scratched the surface of intoxicants here.

I hate how I always get one of those “if you or someone you know needs help” pop ups when I tap on the r/drugs subreddit. yes, I need help finding out how popular cocaine actually is on Wall Street, which is why I went to read a post about this. sheesh man, pay attention.