I think everyone should see the 2019 Cats. I was not bored, and I had a strong emotional reaction to the movie. Was it shit? Oh absolutely, in ways that I didn't even know movies could be shit. But it was not boring! So if I were going to recommend a movie to someone who hadn't seen it yet, Cats would be near the top of that list.
Movies that I actually love despite them having poor ratings...
Event Horizon - 6.6 IMDB / 35% RT - Haunted house in space. Great performances from a great cast. Properly fucked up. Love seeing blue collar workers in scifi.
Death to Smoochy - 6.3 IMDB / 42% RT - See Robin Williams go hard on the R-rating playing a children's show host on a downward spiral. One of my favorite Williams performances.
Legend (1985) - 6.3 IMDB / 41% RT - Shot entirely inside of a huge bag of cocaine. All vibes, don't question any of it, logic has no place here. Watch the theatrical cut with Tangerine Dream, because the director's cut with Jerry Goldsmith is honestly just vague fantasy noodling, and the 80s power jams are at least 40% of the charm.
The entirety of Holy Grail, for starters. My high school history teacher said that it was one of the most realistic depictions of life in the Middle Ages ever put on film.
After that...
"What have the Romans ever done for us?"
"The roads!"
"Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads--"
...and...
"Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got removed up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh."
I only just learned about it today, myself. I work that day, but I might be able to shift things around.
I really wish that these protests were more widely shared in advance. I want to be involved, but only getting a couple of days advance warning makes it really hard. I know that sometimes you have to act fast, but if you want your movement to succeed then you've got to try to consider the real lives of all of the people who want to help, but are also really limited in their time. Plan protests on weekends, and if you've got to protest on a weekday, then plan it way ahead of time and give everyone a chance to plan to be there. I'm sure it looks better to have one big protest with 10X people there than ten protests with 1X people attending.
!Prompt: Cinematic low angle closeup of a middle-aged black man with Jerry curl hairstyle mustache and sideburns wearing a black suit white shirt and black tie standing in a crummy apartment eating biting a hamburger while looking down and to the right with an intense menacing confident look on his face Warm, Saturated Tones !<
I can't believe that companies don't have a deal with RedRubble or TeeFury or whatever to make shirts of any achievement for any game on their system. My wife big-time wants a shirt commemorating the fact that she fucked The Emperor in BG3.
Honestly, watching and thinking about the Pixar movie Inside Out helped me understand my anger a lot better. In the movie, Anger is kind of a joke character. But there's a line when he's introduced where Joy says "Anger wants things to be fair."
I think a lot about how when I'm angry, most of the time there's some imbalance that I want balanced, and I'm looking to inflict pain, either physical or emotional, in order to balance it out. The vast majority of times, that's not actually a winning strategy, either in terms of long or short term goals.
It doesn't always work, but trying to think in terms of what I actually want, why I want it, and what impulses and aims are leading to my feelings, has been a lot of help to not feeling so much like I'm being helplessly driven by my anger.
I personally know a person with a child who was born with profound physical and mental disabilities. She's a dear sweet caring person, and she shared an emotionally devastating story about how she had her first "conversation" with her daughter when said daughter was in her early twenties, which took the form of the daughter being able to indicate, through extraordinary effort, that she preferred to be read one story instead of another.
For her, this was a deeply rewarding moment, the ability to have any kind of deliberate interaction with her daughter, after nearly two decades of struggle and effort. She clearly loves her daughter. I would never try to take anything away from her in that regard.
However. When my wife got pregnant we had very serious conversations about the potential for birth defects and how we were prepared for her to have an abortion if serious defects were found. We talked about the quality of life of a human being we were bringing into existence, and how no one should ever have to feel trapped by their own body, and what our experience of being parents was going to be like.
Our daughter was born without any issues at all. In fact she's bright and friendly and less destructive than we might have expected... and still being a parent is easily the most intense and difficult project of my entire life, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Nobody should ever have any reservations about being a parent for any reason at all, and if there are factors that you can control to make that decision easier one way or the other, then you should absolutely take control of them.
All of which is to say, no there is absolutely no moral issue with choosing not to deliberately create a person with genetic birth defects. The choice to become a parent is the most important and consequential choice anyone can make. Make it in exactly the way that you would want to make it, and in no other way whatsoever.
I've only ever found one zip-up hoodie with decent insulation and pockets deep enough that my phone won't fall out of them if I'm not careful, and you better believe I'm taking good care of it.
Adam Smith does pretty well. I'd say it's Marxism, mushroom guides, and beekeeping that remain consistently at the top of the rankings. Then you've got whatever fiction is currently hot. For a while there it was Where the Crawdads Sing or Demon Copperhead. Sarah J. Maas is currently enjoying an extended streak of very strong sales. The Twilight series went through a bit of a low ebb for a while there but for some reason it's been selling quite well again lately. Harry Potter used to be a rock solid seller, but one can see that J. K.'s attempts to alienate her fan base have been at least partially successful. It's interesting to see the trends develop over time.
I work at a used book store. Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto is a great seller, one of the best selling titles we ever get in, in fact. As a result, we keep raising the resale price on the thing each time a new one comes in, and it keeps selling. I've never had to mark down a Communist Manifesto for sitting on the shelf for too long. It's a textbook example of supply and demand in action... and I think that Karl would kind of hate that.
I got some of these that clip on to my glasses for miniature painting, and they were very nice for being able to flip on and off as needed. Looks like these come in different magnification powers, which sounds handy, depending on one's needs.
I think everyone should see the 2019 Cats. I was not bored, and I had a strong emotional reaction to the movie. Was it shit? Oh absolutely, in ways that I didn't even know movies could be shit. But it was not boring! So if I were going to recommend a movie to someone who hadn't seen it yet, Cats would be near the top of that list.
Movies that I actually love despite them having poor ratings...