“For the warfighter.” I suppose there’s a certain clarity of assholery, but jesus, the marketing direct to Hegseth and Trump’s 80s rom-com bully personas is nauseating.

Also, while it’s always been hypocritical to soft-pedal what the most powerful military on the planet is for, the mere act of opening yourself up to accusations of hypocrisy moves the discussion to a place that culturally asserts some level of civilian control, which also implies some limit to the barbarity. People are inherently assholes and will seek the bottom; lowering the bar in advance just encourages even worse behavior.

I was around almost at the beginning of Eternal September. In December of 1994, I posted to a newsgroup that google eventually archived on the web. Beyond that, my eBay account predates y2k. The first purchase I recall was a parallel port ethernet adapter so I could use Arachne for DOS on my 386SLC33 laptop in the university library. I mailed out a money order and hoped this “buying shit on the internet” thing wasn’t going to be a scam.

Imagine if that one fire were the series finale. All-time great show if you end it there.

Even in the heyday of Rotten Tomatoes, this only means that everyone agrees it’s not bad. Is it good, though? Seems like the answer is “yes, quite, but the bar has been lowered.”

Ahh, but which one? LOL, I’m just kiddin’, they all have serious issues.

I grew up in the suburbs of the Florida one. It’s… fine? Go Jags!

When we were not-quite engaged and doing long-distance, my wife ganked my dumbphone and quickly edited my contact from {her name} to {her name}-mywife, no spaces, no capital letters. So now, twenty+ years later, that’s what it still says, and that’s how I address greeting card envelopes to her.

This is almost exactly what happened in the US a hundred-plus years ago. The fallout vastly improved medical education overall, but also ossified the field into a modern fortress of protectionism that hurts the public by ignoring the supply part of supply and demand, but also hurts the clever (and typically already privileged in most ways) young people who manage to get med school, by saddling them with huge amounts of debt and grinding them into powder for the first decade of their career. I also subscribe to the theory that the hypercompetitive selection process results in too many doctors who are not well-rounded or particularly good at processing information outside their fields, but are told over and over again that they’re too smart to have any blind spots. If you have the right credential and especially if you’ve made enough money with it, society does the Dunning-Krugering for you.

Certainly NOT Dead Like Me. Still salty about that one.

Serenity and Star Trek as others have said are proabbly my actual favorites. The original Naked Gun movies were based on the short-lived Police Squad show and are as close to maintaining continuity as anything ZAZ could be. Then, the original Transformers animated movie gets more credit than it deserves due to nostalgia and not being a Michael Bay mess, but it had no business being even as good as it was.

But, and hear me out here, it’s also wicked cool.

Ours is more stick-shaped though, and really only good for candle wicks. If we smoked, you might be able to get a cigarette into the arc. It’d probably also work well if your grill’s or gas stove’s spark igniter was broken.

Why do you think Starfleet had to set that up in the first place? You think they WANT a huge network of oversized saltwater-flooded Jeffries tubes running alongside the constantly infiltrated and poorly electrically insulated normal ones?

Fair enough if that’s what you think, but I’ve played them all, going back to 1 and 2 on computers where I had to check the system requirements, and I find the show to be very watchable and fun. Have you given it a chance?

Yeah, I don’t know what they’re on about. I was just doing a replay of F:NV, and the Strip and Freeside sets alone are enough to satisfy most of your fan service needs. There were little nods to the lore and game mechanics all over the place in both seasons, to the point where I actually got pulled out of the story a couple of times.

I get why they didn’t focus on feral ghouls, because this isn’t The Walking Dead, but…

Deep cut here, but the old Rocky and Bullwinkle had a “Fractured Fairy Tales” that was often pretty fun.

LOL.

…The general manager of the Lake Theater & Cafe has claimed the corporation cancelled future screenings of Brett Ratner’s authorised study of the first lady after being alerted to promotional pushes such as: “To defeat your enemy. You must know them. Melania” and “Does Melania wear Prada? Find out on Friday!..”

…Perry wrote that his overriding instinct was that the programming “would be funny”. There was also a financial imperative, he added: “The film marketplace this week and next were a desert … So, to fill a screen, why not get this inexplicable vanity piece from the current president’s wife? I mean, it just seems so weird that it even exists (who wants a movie about Melania lol?), and wouldn’t it then be exponentially weirder, to the point of being funny, to show it here, at your obviously anti-establishment, occasionally troublemaking, neighbourhood cinema?”

It’s funny… In some ways, I think he adored the stories they were telling, and particularly the potential the characters and the setting held, but he really seemed to dislike the production environment and many of the specific decisions that were made. He is an artist with a very specific voice (lol, literally even) and mindset that was maybe poorly suited to making Star Trek his “thing.”

God though, can you imagine if the brooding-to-manic Sisko acting roller coaster had become iconic in the broader culture like Shatner’s staccato shouting and dramatic pauses?

Also the best answer for Avery in particular to not to have to lie to anybody.

Naaah, fill it up with weird saber-tooth deer meat. We already know that shit’s irresistible to Wookiees.

It’s an interesting phenomenon. I think it really hit a family-pleasing sweet spot where it’s some kids’ favorite, including more boys that one might assume because stabby-stabby, but generally it’s a pretty good “introductory text” for exploring intergenerational conflict, self-acceptance, and squaring the circle of conformity vs individualism. The visuals are very of the moment and professionally done; it reminds me a tiny bit of the spider-verse movies in that sense. It’s all done well enough for most parents to tolerate replays. Then the songs are legitimately very catchy and sort of took over the role of the “summer jam” this year, prompting yet more rewatches, and finally Netflix in general has leaned into a lot of Korean media, meaning that aspect, watered down though it may be, probably helped with global popularity.

I dunno, kind of like some of the second- and third-tier Pixar and mainline Disney stuff, it’s not that it’s great, but a huge number of potential audience members collectively agreed it was very good. You can certainly argue it’s not even as good as that, but it did the numbers it did, even faced with the fact that it launched sort of semi-quietly, to the point where they had no merch ready for months and had to slap together the singalong to get it a quick theatrical run.

I looked into his worldview a bit when the San Francisco lecture happened, and it is deeply, deeply fucked up.

There is a certain allure because it’s based on a well-known philosophal thread of “mimetic theory” (filtered through a then-contemporary Nazi apologist, and Silicon Valley hubris) and for all it’s “Anti-Christ” talk, it doesn’t even 100% require a supernatural belief system, just the commitment to one as an outward-facing and socially enforceable ideology. What makes it so fucked up and dangerous is the almost Foundation-like orthopraxy that it demands.

The gist, IIRC, is that humans want and need something stable to copy from to know what they want, and that modernish (like in the last 300 years) interpretations of major religions, but particularly Christianity, have landed on a perfect balance of giving people boundaries, aspirations, and just enough freedom to keep society going. Therefore, the only way to avoid falling back onto outmoded and dangerous practices like mass scape-goating is to get huge blocks of people invested in that worldview. Ideally it would be the whole world in one ideology, but their nod to reality is to concede that three or four could survive in tension if they’re geographically insulated.

So moving onto the Antichrist, anyone or (importantly for the Thiel version specifically) anything that poses an existential threat to this orderly control of society risks chaos and a descent into destruction and with a Christian context can therefore be comfortably called the/an “Antichrist.” If Palantir watching literally everyone and everything means the enforcement of “western” values on western populations, then opposing that is dangerous to humanity and therefore a threat. Fighting that threat is a crusade, and even justifies the interim use of tactics that will ultimately be rendered moot by the imposition of a religio-philosophical order, such as mass scaepgoating and pogroms (coughjdvancecough).

Then, just as the classist cherry on top, remember that the supernatural part of this is all just to make sure that the stupids buy into the same worldview as the elites who will preserve society by controlling it and directing it towards self-sustaining power structures. So a Thiel can be gay, and a Thiel acolyte like Vance (we’ll look past Musk for now, as I think they probably view him more as a lucky and useful idiot) can marry a Hindu woman from one of the viable global powerbases (though we’re seeing cracks in that as current political realities weigh on him), and he doesn’t even really have to believe any of the specifically dominionist nonsense he preaches, as long as the MAGA rubes do. What it does give them is a handhold where they can legitimately believe that they’re doing what’s best for the world by trying to dominate it, and that is fucking terrifying.

As an aside, Thiel’s philosophical mentor would have been very nearly as horrified as most of us are by the conclusions he’s reached, and this is why you don’t let the software engineers think they’re the only ones who are smart, simply because it’s harder to do calculus than write a B+ Freshman essay. If Girard is “love each other or we all face ruin,” Thiel is “love each other, or we all face ruin, but you’re too stupid to love each other unless a brutal technostate surveillance apparatus enforces adherence to a love-based religion.”

Obviously not all of it, but I would just about bet that it’s at least 75% of this thing will be set on Earth. This is almost always a logistic/budget compromise move when a franchise is normally high-fantasy and/or space-based.

Either that, or the filmmakers don’t believe in the property, which is even worse. Despite Jo being a hack and an awful person, Harry Potter grabbed people’s imagination because it was built around being low-fantasy with Harry serving as an audience insert. The Matrix inverted the trope, but narratively it worked on the same idea. He-Man, IIRC, has some winks and nods to Earth existing, but it’s basically high-fantasy, where Eternia and its galaxy are the universe. OG Star Wars, among others, is the model for how you structure something similarly without bailing on your high-fantasy setting. You need you naive hero to refuse the guide’s call to action until they have been taught lessons about the broader world, possibly by flambeing their aunt and uncle, but you can do it by starting in a corner of the setting that’s more prosaic and “down to earth” without literally being Earth.

This one feels like they wanted Minecraft kitsch, callbacks to the Dolph Lundgren movie, lifting story beats from She-Ra, and limiting how much of the world they had to build/dress/animate, particularly sets and extras. All this for a second- or third-tier memberberries property. I could be wrong, but I think it’s going to land with a thud.