Do you think that if you were falling in space... that you would slow down after a while, or go faster and faster?

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992) dir. David Lynch

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds "Subspace Rhapsody" & Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Once More, With Feeling", requested by @thecaptainoutoftime

When they first announced that the two movies we're going to open on the same day, I got a chill down my spine, because, what's the phrase, the Kabbalistic implications are immense? The first thing we knew about Oppenheimer is that they were doing a "real" batter-my heart-three-personed-God nuclear explosion because Nolan needed to get it practically. The first thing we knew about Barbie is that the opening of 2001 a space Odyssey was important enough of a reference point to place it front and center in the first trailer. Both of these things smack of the fall of man. One of the great mimetic moments of the last decade is the sequence in Twin Peaks the Return part eight where the Trinity event is depicted, following which there is a unleashing of certain elements on the world, including a coarsening of the masculine spirit, a perversion of the feminine spirit, and the putting of some intrinsic American soul to sleep. There is a clear indication of the event as some sort of Jack Parsons style rite ripping open the veil between dimensions, and allowing some taint in. On the one hand this is about the postwar years as a slide into something somehow less noble, more base, distracted, and narcissistic. But part of it is envisioning the coming of age of the boomers as weaning on the fruit of this time specific "tree of smoke," the produce section of the knowledge of good and evil. Both these two movies are probably going to do something similar, imagine an symbolic order derived from the postwar period, our ideas of "the 50s" when we think of positive (America at the top of the world! modern design! nostalgia for cool progress!) and negative (alienation! conformity! disposability!) of the era, and both of them are going to be deeply gnostically indebted to a moment of "waking up" into the chaotic world that has been unleashed by stealing fire from the gods. Wait that's another metaphor, but you can throw Pandora in there too.

Oppenheimer centralizes the event, and I'm assuming they're going to ignore his communist party flirtations in the 20s and 30s at the beginning of the movie, and focus on will and achievement against the odds in the black-and-white world of da' Nazis, and then something bad creeping into the American psyche in its aftermath: J Edgar Hoover, the military industrial complex getting out of control due to Truman having the management style of boss baby, the general atmosphere of fear and distrust, etc. Meanwhile Barbie, keeping that 2001 intro in mind, is going to be about a version of the garden of Eden (one where Adam was created from the rib of Eve) where there dawns a kind of consciousness that this paradise is a demiurgic illusion. Ticky tacky, pink and purple boxes, all the same. This results in a journey out into the American desert southwest (of the real) which is somehow the heart of our collective 20th century fall from grace (too much to go into there).

The idea that Barbie is going this way is supported by many interview quotes and comparason points from people who have seen some of it, but it remains to be seen whether that whole thing will wash or not. I disagree that Oppenheimer is intrinsically uninteresting to a broad audience, as I'm old enough to remember when that shit was still really vital in the American consciousness (and I'm not that old), plus I think there's a good number of people that have read the Pulitzer Prize winning American Prometheus biography and see something in it that lines the horizons of Oppenheimer to something in our culture today (whether it's something is pedantic as global warming, or deep-seated like neoliberalism, the idea that a principled man is essentially powerless against the prevailing winds of how everything just is at the moment, and the futility of trying to turn the boat around before it goes over the waterfall).

Anyway, Kitty Oppenheimer didn't dress like that, but I assume they're going to touch on some of his habitual womanizing and her alcoholism, so i t's got some of that biopic juice to it, and it's not like anybody cared about John Nash. The focus is pretty squarely on the fact that it's a Nolan movie where he gets to do Nolany stuff.

can anyone explain all the buzz around Oppenheimer? why is a biopic about a theoretical physicist (!) generating this much interest, I’m confused

I nominate Alistair E. Haywood. Kevin Bacon is a single white real actor that most people know, cinematically active into the present, characterized by a large number of "connections" with other actors such that the average "jumps" necessary to get to any other person in a movie is low (3.098). Given this definition, there are 583 actors that are more Kevin Bacon than Kevin Bacon, and the best Kevin Bacon is Samuel L Jackson (2.898). Nonwithstanding, Alistair E Haywood is not real, not white, and he represents multiple people that are not actors, standing in as a symbolic name representing the number of people that most people don't know (even in the historical record), active only in the earliest pre-history of cinema, characterized by zero "connections" with other actors (Bacon number effectively infinite).

If you don't like the non-real part of this, you can substitute Charles Marvin or Gilbert Domm, real people who are the only named figures we can find associated with the series of horse jockey still shots strung together to make rotoscoped "films" (the original photos where rough so the published as stills series were traced out) by acquitted cuck murderer Eadweard Muybride (this is a quite a rabbit hole - the Wikipedia page of "the Horse in Motion" has a lot of information and at least some of it is wrong, but the Muybride trial and aftermath are good reading). Charles Marvin was the person in the first of these published ("Abe Eddington" - all the series are named after the horses) apparently, although there were previous unpublished ones. The rider of Sally Gardner, another rotoscoped series, is known to be G Domm who is only known to be Gilbert Domm of Ohio due to believable but tenuous internet sleuthing. The only series that exists in photographic form that we can find (again, as far as I can tell, this is a shit show) is "Annie G.," which is the image most often shown, the one that has an identifiable black jockey, and one which we absolutely do not know who the rider is. The time honored tradition is to use the photographic one, and attribute names of other ones to it and pretend like it's the only one to simplify what's going on. There's some indication that the actual first one ever shot was one with a horse and buggy and a white non-jockey rider so I think we can all agree the narrative is probably better if we just don't pay any attention to the details and just cook it down. Alistair E Haywood seems like a reasonable way to round everything into a just so narrative, print the legend, etc.

I still haven't figured out the elusive "who has the highest defined Bacon number (11.604)." I spent an awful long time looking through all the William McKinley connections because he seems to be the Kevin Bacon of the late 1800s. Never got to an absolute conclusion.

to find the opposite of Kevin Bacon we must first determine what the opposite of something is, and we define that two objects can be considered opposites if they are connected by a relationship and by the inverse of that relationship:

opposite(x, y) ← ∃p, q. inverse(p, q) ∧ p(x, y) ∧ q(y, x)

one such relationship is “X starred in a movie directed by Y”, which is its own inverse, and we find that Kevin Bacon starred in Story of a Girl, a 2017 TV movie directed by his wife Kyra Sedgwick, who starred in Loverboy, a 2005 film directed by Kevin Bacon.

thus the opposite of Kevin Bacon is his wife.

I've not not been thinking this.

You Don't Know Me, Ray Charles, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962).

ATTENTION

If you see this you are OBLIGATED to reblog w/ the song currently stuck in your head :)

It's Bloomsday again, innit.

An essay on Ulysses by Sally Rooney.

Online direct information of Brian Michael Bendis' decision to name Miles Morales' father Jefferson Davis is not easily obtainable. You figure he's probably been asked that question a million times during interviews, so it must be something he routinely declines to answer. The stuff that leaks around the edges seems to suggest that Bendis had a childhood friend with that name and didn't take into account any of the associations. It's more likely that he realized the thorniness but thought presenting an element of reality in all its ironies and little tensions would be a good thing to explore. But the cultural E/M field at the transition between the aughts and the 2010s didn't remain static, and the charged elements involved started to react very differently after a couple of years.

The Watsonian version is that the father was a contrast to Miles, as smart kid that got sucked into some dumb stuff that set the course of his life as an informant under Nick Fury trying to take down the superhero criminal underworld, and his son follows a somewhat similar but "ultimate"ly vastly different path. This created a situation where, for the safety of his loved ones, it was decided that he would walk and Miles would take his mother's name as she was the one of the parents who wasn't an undercover cop working with very dangerous people. Note that the name gets increasingly critiqued in text, gets changed to Jeff in the PS game, and eventually gets changed in the universe (after the 616 transition which "sticks" as the movie version) to Jeff Morales, with him taking his wife's name as his family stabilized.

The Doyleist version is Bendis wanted to set up a bunch of subversions of expectation and make some bold choices to confront prior sterotypes but, like everyone was limited by experience, fallback archetypal forms (cliches), and lack of being able to tell the future. He wanted to set up a mixed race nontraditional family, depict a son having his mother's name, have a father with a name suggesting a fact-of-life unpleasant association, and create a conflict between what path is Miles going to take in life versus what he discovers his father has done. Note, if the decision was different, his name would've been Miles Davis, and I don't think this joke has absolutely nothing to do with why the names are what they are. But (as KM says above) the alliteration of the initial letters is pretty important, let's be honest.

A lot of decisions in how they frame the story are in an effort to "reclaim" various aspects of urban and ethnic New York popular image of the central park 5 era (which means depicting them) but then the character became really big, cultural preferences changed, there were pressures to deproblematize the story, and we are talking about comic book creators who have to write a lot under conditions that limit how thought out everything can be (with a lot of post hoc editorial refiguring). In fact, Miles now lives in a different universe with presumed to be basically the same family (unless they need to pull something) except they are from the this new one. Note how different the story adaptations are at every specific time period (e.g. the changes in the PS games' story) and the movies' need to translocate 100% of the shadow stuff onto an uncle so that his dad (who, remember, is named Morales now) can be the positive role model he doesn't realize he has in his always-been-stable family.

"Why is he Miles Morales when that's his mom's last name?"

Because the Peter Parker-like alliteration and the non-whitebread "Morales" make it clear from the name alone this wasn't another Ben Reilly, but growing up Black in NYC in the crack era was a more interesting background for his cop dad.

"Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair."

Yeah, sure. No shipping of Ishmael and Queequeg at all.

Just read what has to be the worst Marvel fanfic of all time - EVERY character was one of the author’s OC’s and the only “ships” in the entire thing were the ones they spent like 600 pages in trying to find some whale called Moby Dick

Michael E. Brown grew up in Huntsville and went to "Gus" Grissom High School. Reality needs better editors (at least better than Mangas) to say "come on, no one's going to buy that." "Is there porn of it" is not a bad possibility for a planetary criteria, though.

I think most people just don’t like how “dwarf planet” is a separate categorization from planets instead of a subtype like Gas Giants, Rogue Planets, etc etc

this is demonstrably not what people are saying they dislike most of the time. it is mostly people saying they think pluto shouldn't be considered a dwarf planet, or that dwarf planet shouldn't be a category at all

Sure, but the education system is not doing that bad of a job of incorporating new types of knowledge into what was the evolving concept that started as "those objects that have weird paths in the sky with respect to the other things we call stars" to "oh, they're doing that because everything is revolving around the sun, which earth does too, it's a name that means thing that goes around the sun" to "there's lots of things that go around the sun, it just needs to be big and round." This isn't challenged effectively for a long time due to the nature of discovery of the objects, so if you only add three in a century and a half (the first such additions since before we can remember, and replacing other formerly conceptualized planetary bodies such as moon) you can kind of naturally add those to the bin and teach that. My point is it is a matter of allowing the evolution of what we call these things to take place over time, and evolving school curricula have a place in this, but when the PR campaign is "Pluto is not a planet, and if you believe different you're a moron and an asshole" it makes sense that morons and assholes will be the ones who react. It doesn't help that the intra-discipline controversy continues behind the scenes, and the current sorting system that they moved to replaces one problem with a bunch of other problems and is probably worse.

I think most people just don’t like how “dwarf planet” is a separate categorization from planets instead of a subtype like Gas Giants, Rogue Planets, etc etc

this is demonstrably not what people are saying they dislike most of the time. it is mostly people saying they think pluto shouldn't be considered a dwarf planet, or that dwarf planet shouldn't be a category at all

You can skip to about 20 minutes in as most of what's valuable is in the last third, unless you want to hear the word capitalism a bunch. Still, I think this topic is interesting to look back on as the primary problem was not that the IAU decision was illegitimate (it was - conference held in Prague, vote at the end of the last day when most people had left, 4% voting, planetary scientists not well represented, come on they had email back then - but that's a thing that has to do with the politics of a body within a field of science and who is interested in that) but that we were at the end of a phase where people were crowned as the legitimate spokesman for science, and the person who was designated in that role had this tendency to attempt to devalue other majesteria and act like scientific decisions are an inherit property of the universe that only rubes and stupid people would not accept as the natural law that had been rendered from on high. Also, philosophers are losers, we have no need for any other type of thinking.

This person then went on to gloat about how he "drove the getaway car" on popping a cap in Pluto's ass for years which I don't think he understood how apt the analogy was. There should've been some linguistic humility, more of an approach of "we're doing this for this reason because science needs words that are agreed-upon, but those concerned with the popular imagination, you do you." I think there was an active resistance to acknowledging that this was an ongoing controversy and the matter was far from settled internally (and the definition was, as in the video, pretty sucky for a number of reasons), but the person I'm talking about did have a very "culture war" approach to science versus all other fields of human endeavor. It almost didn't matter what the matter at hand was, a scientific body had said something, and there is a general non-acceptance of this something, so we have to wade out there and call anyone who pushes back anti-enlightenment. Dangerous approach to the subject of what is true.

I think most people just don’t like how “dwarf planet” is a separate categorization from planets instead of a subtype like Gas Giants, Rogue Planets, etc etc

this is demonstrably not what people are saying they dislike most of the time. it is mostly people saying they think pluto shouldn't be considered a dwarf planet, or that dwarf planet shouldn't be a category at all

How the hell is William Henry Harrison at 1%? That's the obvious answer. Even the other military men that saw direct combat (didn't go straight to officer school or start in command positions) weren't involved in ground raids intermittently over 20 years. Were there other presidents who was campaign-nicknamed after a battle they actually fought in (Roosevelt is the only comparison, but that was like 2 weeks in country to address identity dissonance not a career)?

This is off by just enough to completely frustrate me into writing something. There’s a bunch of little iffy details but the main thing is that it misplaces the real historical roots of Fox's rights to the X-Men, although the information around the impact of this and the looming ret-ret-con are largely correct. Variant covers are a blight, but they only became truly industry health threatening in and of themselves in the 2000s, especially starting 2010-12; before then they were one facet of the event minded beanie baby-mentality - get-cher multimillion-seller, speculator driven pumped up numbers and leave retailers holding the bag.

One notable detail: the meme itself mentions 1986 Marvel variant covers, when the 1986 thing it is referencing is DC’s Man of Steel number one (Marvel didn’t start doing this until 1990), the pertinence of which was being the first comic printed with more than one distinct cover solely aimed at moving more product. That is selling it short, though, as it is maybe more important as an event comic that is part of a broader push in which upselling units by leveraging the in-a-bind retailer's relationship to FOMO addled customers, not variant covers specifically, is what makes it the progenitor of what tanked the market in 1995.

Forget that, though.  If you want root cause analysis that goes back to this historical level, I think you have to start with the nature of Marvel to begin with.

Marvel/Timely/Atlas has always been particularly thirsty, cringingly so. It was not unusual in the 30s for all the teeming numbers of comic companies formed by hustlers just trying to make a buck to be in the mode of making money however they can, grabbing for quick attention. However, all the other ones (besides killer instinct National and the related companies that eventually wound up being DC) cashed out at some point, or went bankrupt and mostly folded into DC itself (not only due to the nature of the market, but due to DC’s killer instinct of lawyering and backstabbing its way to dominance… the story of Max Gaines being liberated of All American comics is really quite incredible), leaving Timely as the last thirsty jackal alone with the Lion. This ethos stayed with Marvel into the 70s and 80s (due in no small part to Stan Lee being the perfect guy to embody this kind of short-view shucking and jiving) in the form of lame and low rent merchandising efforts, to the extent that their big initiative for decades was having some shop on 36th and 7th or something make cheap looking outfits that they could aggressively market to people’s birthday parties. Their mass media was cheaply made (e.g. cut up "cartoons") and their handling of the movie properties was really ill considered. Even before the events of 2 below, they were already swimming in bad-deal options they were waiting on to expire, only to have the holders make something really bad to keep the rights.  The company was always trying to get out from under some or other bad deal in order to make another bad deal, usually with the company involved in the first bad deal making more money than Marvel. They didn’t seem to think about trying to find people to work with who would make something worthwhile, or just make something at all. The bluebook value on my five-year-old car is greater than the amount of money they eventually made from the first Blade movie.

The company gets acquired by Ron Perlman at the end of the 80s. You can think of him as a junk-bond king, etc., but the nature of him at Marvel was one of a protracted pump and dump scheme where he loaded the company with trust-emulating assets in an effort to make it a look a much bigger affair, acquiring Toy Biz and a distributor, to make the company look like it was worth a lot when he eventually flipped it. One thing that is poorly understood is that the company did not need to go bankrupt - they were not in great financial shape, but the bankruptcy was initiated by Perlman so that he could override the board of directors because Ike Perlmutter and the members aligned with him were already trying to wrestle control away. It was during this period where the X-Men movie rights were being dithered with, as Fox had an option stemming from the cartoon that was going to make it difficult not only for Marvel to seek other options, but for them to get significant financial windfall from the project even if it was completed and made money. It was in this environment that a deal was struck that, to honor Marvel’s other options, the other rights holders could use the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, but that they could not be used “as X-Men” which meant they could not be mutants, the concept of which was from then contractually obliged to be a function of the Fox held X-Men property.

There’s not enough emphasis here on the sour grapes aspect of attempting to will the Inhumans into replacing the X-Men in the popular consciousness, and how poorly this went. The idea in the comics was to minimize the X-Men, and promoting the Inhumans as way more important, while using the characters in their televisual produced entertainment to outcompete Fox. The ret-cons are particularly ugly, no one bit on this at all not even a little, and the TV efforts have not exactly aged into a fond memory. However, there is a lot of residua from this lying around the comics including a “white event” like thing where they tried to create a bunch of new mutants–that–weren’t–actually–mutants in a single event to replace the population, and maybe show Fox who’s boss.

The Merrill Lynch deal that allowed them to use 10 characters as collateral for a loan to start Marvel Studios in earnest (it already technically had been around for eight or nine years) was after Marvel entered a phase of aggressively trying to buy back the rights of as many characters as possible. Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow, etc. had already been optioned out when the plan was hatched and had to be re-acquired before that deal closed. It’s no doubt that the reason this was doable was that by focusing on the Avengers as a bigger thing than the sum of its parts, the use of the less recognizable characters made it easier to recover rights piecemeal, but it's not like Tony Stark was just laying there.

I'm so tired

The tale of Fisher Stevens has taken many weird turns over the years, but it is interesting this (3rd? 4th?) stage of his career has been so reliable if low key for him, playing essentially the same character in the Blacklist and Succession, while being a Wes Anderson rep player (the little Grand Budapest Hotel part was the spark that started this stage), in Hail Cesar, etc. I have thought about his neck for many years and, although the Hodgkin's lymphoma at 15 thing seems difficult to corroborate completely and his more recent hair choices/challenges make it easier to see now, I believe the golf-ball-on-tee thing has been there even when he was presaging the Apu accent in unfortunate makeup and cheating on Michelle Pfeiffer with a reported 17 year old on the set of the Super Mario Bros Movie (maybe even got him cast as a humanoid lizard, there). Early Edition was the beginning of his affable but grousingly critical side character work, but I don't think we got to kinda sus neurotic suit until Blacklist (I can't remember his Lost character that well).

that pencil necked old dude in succession will be looming, perched up in the set decoration like nose foratu

Did Liz Holmes just do gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss in the wrong order?