The difference is that Zuckerberg is pretending to be a Totally Cool Dude^TM, whereas Trump is authentically a psychopath manbaby moron. People are very good at detecting inauthenticity.

Can you identify a pitbull?

“She’s just one of the girls, she is not one of those one-in-a-million. As if to have and to hold would be holding me down with love and addiction. I think I’ve found someone, I’ve found someone to help me work it out…”

Kind of a soft alternative pop song from the mid-90s. I grew up in the northeast and listened to a lot of TMBG, Violent Femmes, and Talking Heads, so it’s possible that it’s from someone slightly adjacent to them, but it also might have just been on the pop radio station. It’s not “One In A Million” by Bosson, Ne-Yo, Aaliyah, or Trixter. I’m pretty sure I didn’t dream its existence.

“Our jobs are hard! We deserve the occasional murder, as a treat!”

complaining about jellicle in Cats would be a lot like walking out of a Smurfs movie complaining about “Man, they sure do say ‘Smurf’ a lot.”

Thing is, there’s a lot about the source material that, if you’re not there for it, then you shouldn’t even be in the theatre. No plot, sexy cat monsters, absurd lyrics, that’s all there from the beginning. No, the 2019 movie is fucked up in ways that have nothing to do with T. S. Eliot or Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Post-production

Scott’s first cut of Legend ran 125 minutes long. He then believed there were minor plot points that could be trimmed and cut the film down to 113 minutes, so he tested this version for an audience in Orange County. However, it was decided that the audience had to work too much to be entertained, and another 20 minutes was cut. The 95-minute version was shown in Great Britain and then the film was cut down even further to 89 minutes for North America.

At the time, Scott said, “European audiences are more sophisticated. They accepted preambles and subtleties whereas the U.S. goes for a much broader stroke.” He and Universal delayed the North American theatrical release until 1986 so that they could replace Jerry Goldsmith’s score with music by Tangerine Dream, Yes lead singer Jon Anderson, and Bryan Ferry.

Scott allowed Goldsmith’s score to remain on European prints and the composer said, “that this dreamy, bucolic setting is suddenly to be scored by a techno-pop group seems sort of strange to me”. Normally, Goldsmith would spend 6–10 weeks on a film score, but for Legend, he spent six months writing songs and dance sequences ahead of time.

The Goldsmith score is… fine, I guess, but it doesn’t convey the intense 80s-ness of the movie as well as Tangerine Dream. It’s like Flash Gordon or Highlander without the Queen songs.

On 1 March 1815, Napoleon and his followers landed on the French mainland at Golfe-Juan and headed for Grenoble through the foothills of the Alps, taking the route now known as Route Napoléon. The 5th Regiment intercepted him just south of Grenoble on 7 March. Napoleon approached the battalion alone and called to them, “Here I am. Kill your Emperor, if you wish!” The soldiers responded with, “Vive l’empereur!” and joined Napoleon’s men. Six days later, 5,000 troops under Michel Ney, who had boasted that he would bring Napoleon to Paris in an iron cage, also joined Napoleon.

I rather doubt Trump has the kind of personal magnetism and courage that would get him to go face to face with armed troops and recruit them to his own side.

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.

“I feel all sleepy,” she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

Roald Dahl, pleading with people to vaccinate their children against measles.

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.

And nobody thought to install some glass breakers on the bottom of their boots?

Edit: Hell, I’d even consider wedging a nice sharp piece of quartz into the tread of a boot.

“I don’t know what’s scarier, that it’s happened, or that it happens often enough that there’s a word for it.”

He’s spent his entire life falling up the stairs.

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 woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.”

You ever watch Gabby’s Dollhouse?

She stays in her room, full-time. She never interacts with anyone outside of her room. She receives deliveries from an unseen outside force, via a cart and ramp system that makes interaction between inside and outside impossible. She then uses her anomalous abilities to shrink down inside of her dollhouse and have adventures in a pocket universe.

She’s happily protected, in a contained, secure area which she never leaves.

Gabby is a comparatively benign SCP.

America First, by Dr Seuss (1941)

There’s a quote from a Heinlein book where he talks about how Communists can only exist in places where there are real, not imagined, ills that are not being addressed, and I feel like something similar applies for Trumpists. Their lives have gone wrong somehow, likely driven by forces beyond their control, and they’ve been promised easy answers by a vile con game. I don’t appreciate that they got hoodwinked, but I can understand how it happened.

He literally can’t.

https://i.imgur.com/ZfXN74B.jpeg

comfortable, like… like old leather.