- after years of saying we would, Jeff and I are finally rewatching Robot Chicken to make a goodies reel. Jeff, we need to include the danceoff, I changed my mind.
- Picture if you will a man who lies for a living. After 9/11, he fused the internet as we mostly now know it to lies about how 9/11 was a ‘false flag’ operation. Many people mostly on the right decided that there was no way 9/11 could have happened UNLESS high government officials and the standard issue global cabal had CAUSED it to happen; this man made money selling dietary supplements (which are also bunkum) to the people who took comfort in this worldview. Many millions of dollars of income later, he said that the shooting deaths of a bunch of children in a school shooting (Sandy Hook) was a false flag operation. That those kids didn’t die. Now, those kids did die, and even though the man who lies for a living knew they didn’t die, and said they didn’t die because people who are against the right to carry guns wanted to change the laws, his attitude toward the truth was not all that great, so the parents sued him for defamation.
- he lost. Total amounts owing along the lines of $50 million. Two more lawsuits in a similar vein are coming. His total net worth is in the vicinity of $150 Mil.
- perhaps he lost but he’s still very popular, as per “What does the Internet Think” website.
- and in case you think this is bullshit, I give you Lee Pace’s results from the same website, BECAUSE NO ONE IS INDIFFERENT TO LEE PACE (ALSO I DO NOT APPEAR ON THIS WEBSITE LOL I CHECKED):
- while he was losing his lawyer’s employee accidentally (OR DID SHE LOL) sent two years’ worth of text and email messages from his phone to the plaintiffs’ lawyers. The lawyers promptly asked the January 6 committee if they wanted the messages, which was truly inconvenient for the man who lies for a living.
- and his ex wife Kelly probably will be getting them too. She is – quite rightly – in a custody battle, and now his utter unfitness to have access to his children will soon be a matter of public record. She calls him “truly mentally ill” and a danger to society but what the hell else can you expect from an ex wife hunh?
- to recap, Alex Jones is a foam-flecked liar, and now he will be paying for it. It won’t stop him, and he’ll fundraise on it, but at least someone slowed him down for two seconds and between his wife, his involvement with the January 6 traitors and the Sandy Hook parents his wealth will get a shellacking.
- Watched ‘Prey’ which is a new film in the Predator franchise GODDAMN I LOVED IT. It’s set in Comanche territory in 1719. The French are the bad guys, just like life’s supposed to be (this is a family joke, not reality.)
- That dog was not trained. They had to use that dog because it’s very close to what an Indigenous dog would have looked like at the time, so holy shit the director had to put up with a lot from that dog.
- A version completely in Comanche is available.
- Watched the new Minions movie. It had a few good laughs and was about standard for the franchise.
- I’m feeling quite a bit better, but the weather’s gone hot again so the next couple of days will probably be uncomfortable.
- There’s a cat rescue outfit in Vancouver which would rather EUTHANIZE a cat that adopt it out to a transgender person. Infuriating, like it’s a REASON.
- 1207 words on new section, still going very slow also worked on fanfic ‘landslide’
- Watched the Frontline about the people living in Kharkiv for the first three months after the Russian invasion. Very scary, moving and the people there seem admirable in their resolve. The impact of the war on the elderly and disabled is just gross.
- For settler saturday consider a donation to Indigenous language revitalization.
Category: Film
not much to report
sent some moar words on ‘totally boned’ to mOm, watched SLASH BACK which is an INUIT TEENAGERS VS ALIEN movie and I HIGHLY HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT I loved it to bits and Kristian Bruun’s 30 seconds as ‘the first white guy who dies’ is wonderful.
If you’re into horror YOU MUST SEE IT. It’s also funny and beautiful.
Buster bit Jeff after he got home
What the hell, cat. You showed every sign of missing him terribly while he was gone. Not a hard bite but a visible one. He has since been fine.
He went to stand at the back door twenty minutes before Jeff arrived, so much so that I opened the door.
What a cat.
We watched the new Downton movie. FIVE COUPLES were formed or reunited over the course of the last twenty minutes, it was quite a demonstration of the reunification of the couple that Zizek goes on about, and there was a gay couple in there too. Fellowes the showrunner scriptwriter really likes happy endings. And someone dies, but it’s er okay.
Dr. Appt Tomorrow
Today another day of loafing and lazing in lower lalaland.
Ate my leftovers for breakfast, so nommy.
Mike and Jeff and I watched The King’s Man and HOLY JEEZ Rhys Ifans as Rasputin is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. He fights while doing cossack style ballet kicks (obvs not him, some poor body double sod) and the whole ‘he was very hard to kill’ story gets THE FULL TREATMENT like shitbag he was extremely hard to kill. Anyway I think I had to be in the right mood to watch it and I was, because despite it being ahistorical and goofy as anything it was very entertaining and surprisingly well written and didn’t fall down in the fourth act.
Also the montage ‘once there were three cousins who ended up being the leading rulers in Europe’ really makes you think about the Great War in different terms.
There is a lot of fighting and there is a goat. Jeff called the goat’s behaviour well in advance, but that wasn’t too hard. There’s also a sequence that will not leave you feeling great about the safety of elevators that go by hand crank up a massive cliff side (the dialogue of the poor schmo stuck in it is classic).
This is a graphic of the Peacemaker dance. If you don’t know what that is or why it’s important to the ‘me’, relax. It’s just a dance.
Anna May Wong’s dress in Limehouse Blues
SLINNNNKY!
Matrix Resurrections
It’s a full tilt commercial movie which bites off cultural excess and spits out commentary.
Portions of it are completely impossible to understand. There are many levels of reality and the people in them move smoothly through them but … it’s hard, and noisy, and perspective spinning. I didn’t like those parts because when the movie was more discursive – or just plain HERE’S A FIGHT have FUN – it was more enjoyable for me.
The basic premise hasn’t changed; but people have moved through their lives- or what they think is their lives. Everyone is older. Under the kick ass and the high tech and the gloss design and striking palettes, there is an elegaic tone that is impossible to miss, and so, of course, appears to have been missed by every cultural commentator under 40. This is not a movie for young people. Many will go, but it’s not emotionally aimed at them.
It’s also, very candidly, a movie about mental health, and how everything they give you to make you feel better can be wrong on a cellular level.
To me, the movie addressed almost all of the cultural skew (the pull of it, the magical achievement of it, the visual thrill of it) of the first movie and the horror of what happened to the red pill/blue pill takeover of the ideas of the movie by misogynists and repulsigans. It addressed the FOREVER HOWL of MAKE IT EXACTLY THE SAME BUT BETTER which is Hollywood. It addressed how in terms of story logic, Neo and Trinity being separated was sad, and had to be fixed. It raised some really interesting ideas about what constitutes a partnership, why we help people who are going to get us killed, and how the hero feels, being worshipped, when he feels grossly inadequate, tiny and possibly not hoeing the next row in consensus reality.
It gave us multiple villains, some of whom have multiple agendas.
We see what happens when you trade freedom of scope for security of the person. We see what happens when you think HEY WE BEAT FASCISM everything’s GREAT NOW not realizing that fascism reconstitutes itself in every generation and has to be fought again. For all the people thinking this is exactly the same through line as the first movie LOL try again, midges. All of the callbacks had a specific purpose. We were being pushed into an emotional killzone, and asked to question all of the mechanics that got us there.
We see what happens when you make your idea of who is ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ based in the present, not in the past.
We see AIs incorporated into the body politic. The revolution is domesticated because it becomes routine and non-destructive of the overarching enemy (any aspect of society antithetical to creativity); the revolution is made wild because it must address current conditions, which suck, and demand sacrifice to be overthrown.
All we ever want is someone who can see us, believe in us, literally hold us up, and it’s the driver of everything. It doesn’t have to be sexual, it doesn’t have to be procreative, but it does have to have meaning and reciprocity, and the ending in the light of that hypothesis – for me – was quite satisfying.
Graeber quote
I downloaded a spectactularly useful (to me) and clearly written work about anarchism entitled Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and have done up this quote:
Also, I made mac and two cheeses with basil and capers yesterday. Jeff devoured some of the salmon Mike cooked.
We watched the new Bond film, No Time to Die, which, from its Eilish opening song (the film has a cold open that lasts like 25 minutes before you get it) to its final frame is actually very good (with plot holes, I don’t think the Broccoli enterprise does anything else).
Katie came over and we had a nice conversation about the computer she and I are going to subsidize so Alex has a gaming machine.
I have almost two hundred hits on my most recently posted fanfic and one incredibly sweet comment. I have a couple more planned and three more almost finished.
quiet day
I don’t think I did anything about house today besides make tea and a salad and take my pills and a nice long nap. (I’m allowed to be tired when I’m tired, I’ve got Daim Branage. I worked on about half a dozen destiel fics, tidying mostly, getting names consistent, that kind of editable stuff. 9 words on one fic 318 on another, that kind of thing.
THEN around 6 the THUNDER started … for about an hour, every ten minutes or so there was the longest, most histrionical, excessive, over-the-top, can’t-stop-won’t-stop thunderclap you could imagine. Long pause and then explosion noise-overlaid with a helicopter landing on the house noise – overlaid with brO’s apparently epic fart from yesterday – and then cannonades in the distance fading to a repetitive coda. Jeff and I were impressed as hell.
Watched Cry Macho, had no expectations of it being great, and enjoyed it because to my mind it was entertaining. Some of Eastwood’s reaction shots will live as memes long after he’s dead, I predict.
where the fuck is the mailbox
The mailbox that used to be one block from here is GONE. One day it had a sad yellow paper sign -handwritten- saying it was out of order, and the next day it had been completely removed.
I have no idea where the next closest one is AND THERE IS NO PLACE ON THE CANADAPOST.CA website where you can search for the closest mailbox. I suspect it will be a while before I find it.
All I want to do is stay in touch with my friends and be prosocial, and now I’ll be waiting a week to run errands before I post letters. Heavy sigh.
Time to get up, hydrate, and start supper (I had a nice long nap… and why not.)
Jeff and I watched the Green Knight with Dev Patel. While it labours under an awkward script and a set decoration philosophy which screams theft from a thousand millennia of design choices (all over the map is kind), Dev Patel is pretty and as vacant as a hero from a 50’s costume epic; Alicia Vikander is wasted in a role that a cardboard cutout of Elizabeth Taylor could have performed; and they use a fuckin’ years’ supply of fake ground fog. ZERO UNDERSTANDING of the up down and sideways hype this film received; it’s not quick on its feet enough to be camp and it isn’t good enough to be this fucking slow. In the end the jerk runs away and it was all a dream; profoundly underwhelmed. I ripped myself off; I should have turned to Jeff and bailed at 10 minutes but a powerful desire to just finish it to say that I had overwhelmed me.
Italy in the fifties & Merpeople
What could be finer as a backdrop for a wholesome family animated film.
The movie is called Luca, and I think I know a mOm and a pOp who would very much enjoy it. Everything about it harkens back to a simpler and less jam packed life. That’s a good thing, in my view. A less fraught life would be so lovely.
From Audrey to Zappa
It’s interesting to compare and contrast (lightly) the doccos about Audrey Hepburn and Frank Zappa. Both of them were financed / directed / driven by surviving family members; both are … er …. hagiographic.
One can argue that Zappa is the greater artist, that he gave more to the world, but he was a raging dick, he hurt his wife and kids with his endless groupie groping and his ineffable attitude of perpetual superiority must have been absolutely hateful to live with.
Whereas Hepburn was a delightful actress who brought the things she’d survived into every role, and really I think the world’s happier for having had her in it. Was Zappa a genius? Arguably no; a fine technician yes, but he did not expand the limits of music, he merely explored them with more deftness than your average Frank. Was Hepburn a genius? Nope. but we love her anyway.
To change the subject. When your kid asks this question:
The list is long
That’s a quote from Eric Frank Russell’s “WASP”.
Anyway, today:
11149 words so far on Best Roommate
Jeff cleaned 25 gigs of crap off my hard disk, so I can reinstall Finale FINALLY.
Isn’t English hilarious?
I will also try to update my OS PRAY FOR ME NOW SINNERS
I drank coffee. I POOOOOOOOOOPED and pooped again. I feel so light and free although I should probably put up a biohazard sign.
And I trained Buster, who was not having any. He has his little ways to let me know he’d prefer to run and chase treats than beg for them.
I wrote a letter to my pOp and one to Alex. There’s a little card with artwork on it in pOp’s letter, and Alex’s letter is covered in garish watercolour pencil art. Tomorrow I’ll write a letter to Mary and send some fabric from mOm’s stash along to Jan Maxwell, who already has a ton of fabric BUT DOES NOT HAVE the last little bit of sexy raygun SF fabric and will likely turn it into comfy masks in the fullness of time, whereas I won’t, likely. Although I do have a fabric project for the spring – I’m going to put a floor length door drape on my bedroom door, with black lace fabric at the bottom to let the cold air in from the air con.
Last night:
Composed three instrumentals (soundtrack style stuff) on the Kaossilator. With luck I will record them on the 1st with Anthony. One of the instrumentals is entitled: Unicorn Farts. It’s plausible….
Slept 8 hours solid. Haven’t done that in an age. No recollection of waking up until I had to pee at 4:30. Amazing how a little exercise gives me better rest, surprise surprise.
Yesterday:
Jeff dropped me off at Planet Bachelor that was (Keith is teasing me to come up with a new name, which will be some variant on “The Bachelor System” or “Bachelor Villa” or “Villa Planet” or “Larval Harpi” which is an anagram of what it says out front… yup, the house has a name. “Planet Bachelor II – The Rehoming” is also in play. We shall find out soon enough.) I helped Keith and Katie clean for a couple of hours (polishing chrome in the bathroom, taking a duster to all the cobwebs, a little bit with counters in the kitchen, throwing stuff in the trash), then mailed some letters and walked to the butcher shop and got meat and a couple of blueberry handpies for Jeff. Walking home nearly killed me. I had to stop to catch my breath three times, although I didn’t get into that heart pounding thing. (later…. Caspell Junction it is, according to K&K)
Much pedicurage, following a nice warming bath. I have to keep an eye on my left great toe, I trimmed the nail too much and I’m looking at much pain if I don’t manage how it grows out.
Recently:
Preposted 15 songs. Most are in January and February but I’ve posted well into the year when the song is associated with a particular date. I’m now up to the middle of February and so I have a little breathing room before I have to really start shaking out the oeuvre to keep up the numbers. Still have more MP3s sitting on the media drive, but now the real pressure is to record more. And more yet. I’m one tenth done. This is a bastarding huge project.
Watched Ammonite. Loved it. If you don’t like the idea of watching Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet make out at night in a miniscule bed while collecting and cleaning fossils during the day in Victorian costume including a magnificent rendition of full mourning, stay the hell away from this movie.
Rewatched King Arthur (Owen/Knightley version) again, after watching the King Arthur Time Team Special. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed that movie. It’s not the best historical movie ever made, but it’s so good hearted and solid and there are so many wonderful actors in it that it’s just a treat. It’s going on the ‘watch anytime’ list.
Most recent episode of the Expanse has one of the best human vs space sequences I’ve ever seen. Dominique Tipper is absolutely amazing as she battles time, vacuum, gravity, CO2, betrayal, her own physical weakness after a trauma, and the complete sabotage of her ship, in order to prevent the death of her loved ones. The sequence went on for so long I started crying along with her frustration.
Continue to feed crows in the morning if they sit in the dogwood and caw at me. 1 to 4 birds usually show up. Watched them chase off a raven yesterday. The rest of the day it’s canoodly crow couples pitching woo in the tree, it’s quite funny…
It was supposed to start snowing last night. Nada. It’s bucketing snow down now; the world’s gone quiet because it’s Sunday morning and snowing. Now, if I really loved my brother I’d get off my ass, clear the kitchen counters and make him some whole wheat flower rolls. And I’m thinking of making little pork meatballs in spaghetti sauce for hot sammiches using those rolls.
Christmas is coming, Die Hard too
LOL I did a search and replace on a fanfic and all of a sudden I had a Caserole.
Shopping this am; we’re out of milk. I think I’m going to take a break from writing letters for a couple of days until I actually have some news; I’m to the point I’m making stuff up or talking about the news on the telly (which I don’t watch, it’s just an expression)
goddamn this is rich
saturday has no meaning
Media drive is acting weird; Jeff is on it.
Normally I’d be hearing from Katie for breakfast today but all of our habits are shot and besides she has a boyfriend.
Chadwick Boseman’s death (he was the Black Panther) is really ruining a lot of Black people’s weekends right now. The outpouring of grief, of feeling cheated, of feeling that anything good is immediately ripped away, is palpable. See how other black creators held him up on his way to the stars.
6.7 times sillier
John Cleese, genius of physical comedy!
Rewatched Contagion yesterday. Remarkably prescient and science oriented for a work of fiction.
I had my mammogram yesterday, we’ll get results in 2-3 weeks. To treat myself I went to a Japanese restaurant, Kiku, and oh my god their sushi is so much better than our local I nearly screeched in ecstasy while I was eating it.
You can’t socially distance yourself from somebody jammin’ yer tit in between two sides of a vice….
The latest Capilano review is FANTASTIC, as always, there’s a series of photographs that’s pure fire and also BEAU DICK‘S MASKS omg omg omg they are so frickin gorgeous and … anyway…..
Coughing in public is considered gauche now.