Give him one made of chocolate. See how long it takes for him to notice.

Smith: Things have changed. The market’s tough. I’m sure you can understand why our beloved parent company, Warner Brothers, has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.

Neo: What?

Smith: They informed me they’re gonna to do it with or without us.

Neo: I thought they couldn’t do that?

Smith: Oh, they can, and they made it clear they would kill our contract if we didn’t cooperate.

Everything you need to know about the movie. I strongly suspect that Lana Wachowski deliberately made the movie as dogshit as she could plausibly get away with so as to properly kill the franchise once and for all, or at least until she’s dead and someone else can try to pick up the pieces and reboot the whole thing in a few decades.

A. The Princess Bride. More likely a spinoff with Inigo becoming the dead pirate Roberts

Counterpoint:

This video makes some great points about how movies don’t feel real anymore. Digital color grading is part of it, but the very short version is that movies don’t give us the sensory information or speak to us in the visual language that we need to feel like the movie is real. Watching the video gave me a whole vocabulary for how to critique failings in modern movies.

How paraphrased are we talking, here? Because I’m pretty sure laws like “Don’t murder” and “Don’t rape” and the ability to punish people who break those laws aren’t just an expression of one socio-economic ethnic group maintaining violent occupation over another.

🥁✨

OPEC managed to fuck United States up pretty bad back in the 70s.

“Evolution?”

The irony of this being Soviet anti-war propaganda is not lost on me.

Phil Spector produced some of the best music of the twentieth century, including one of a handful of bearable Christmas albums in existence. Also he’s a fucking murderer. So… bit of a mixed bag, there.

I kind of think that Lovecraft was doing about the least-worst thing he could with his absolutely massive trove of neuroses and phobias, which definitely included racism and xenophobia.

He was convinced that the universe was chaotic and horrifying and that the only thing we could hold on to for stability was racial purity, and that’s pretty fucked up, but he turned those feelings into spooky stories about interdimensional space monsters, which is certainly a lot better than writing political tracts or trying to convince everyone that the Armenians are actually to blame for all of our problems.

Therapy would have been even better, but writing spooky stories was better than some of the very real alternatives that other people were exploring in the 19-teens and twenties.

Hades is a great example of this. You start out as the son of Hades, lord of the underworld. You want to escape his realm, so you try to fight your way out. Along the way, you will die and fail, and you just get sent back down to your father’s house, and he gives you a bit of a hard time about how weak and ineffectual you are.

The plot unfolds as you interact with various gods and other figures in the underworld, over the course of your many attempts. Saving and reloading isn’t really a thing, as such, but the plot continues to unfold, even as you die over and over over and over.

Edit:

This is a great time for me to rave about how much I love the storytelling in Hades. In a book or in a totally linear game, the story looks like this:

You start at the beginning, you proceed directly to the end. You have no choices in how the plot progresses. This is fine in a book, and I’m sure there are some games where it works okay, too.

Most games with “choices” go like this:

You might make a few choices, but a lot of them either end in a false ending or take you right back to the ending that the writers planned all along. It can give the illusion of meaningful choice, but it can also start to feel hollow once you see where the railroad tracks are.

Hades works like this:

All of the characters in the game (and there are a lot of them) have their own linear plot that is unfolding as you play the game, and you are learning about any one of them at any given time. You don’t have many meaningful choices to make, but it still reads as a very compelling plot because all of your interactions deepen your relationship with each character in turn. It saves us all from the fake choices that a lot of games stick us with. It’s genius.

Goku was burning through a Type II Kardshev civilization’s worth of energy. He was hongry. Flavor was definitely secondary.

Make a Home Alone sequel with grown up Kevin gaining access to a time machine and running through the events of the first two movies, Back to the Future Part II style.

This dude should be in big fucking trouble for either not knowing or not caring what the Posse Comitatus is.

“I need you to prove that you’re bi.”

[produces ticket stub]

“Fuck, that’s good proof.”

Edit: