I made the featured image on this post a stock photo of a panda (thanks Depositphotos) because I’m grumpy and it’s harder to be grumpy around pandas.
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Yesterday I thought I was calling Dean Phillips stupid on Bluesky, only to realize it was only a mechanical turk shilling for him. Then I felt really bad calling a mechanical turk stupid and I felt especially clueless for forgetting nobody ever stands somewhere they can catch the mud they deserve.
One thing I hate about Reality is the layers of protection between the people who deserve to get cussed at and me, the person who wants to cuss at them. I have a very narrow strip of humanity that I believe truly, in my soul, deserve to be cussed at, and yet another empty suit running an ego parade to agitate the base against the incumbent (who i don’t. even. like.) is someone who absolutely deserves to be cussed at.
But he’s not even doing his own dirty work, of course. I always suspect a blowhard like Dean Phillips (I hope he has a google alert on his name) is a bad actor benefiting from outside governments’ funding knowingly or otherwise. Knowingly or otherwise, the man is stupid, and goddammit I want to be standing somewhere I can tell him directly. I want to look that man in the eye (through my phone screen ideally because the outdoors? yikes) and say, “You are wasting everyone’s time and money and you are BAD FOR THE COUNTRY, stupid.”
Telling the ruling class that they suck is actually a really important civic duty.
Which is why they hire people to stand around and get told *they* suck instead.
I always know there’s a reason I keep myself reined in on my natural levels of grumpiness, and it’s because I always regret taking out my grumpiness on anyone. I like being a bit of a grumpy person. I just really don’t think the vast majority of humanity has earned it. Everyone (who isn’t Dean Phillips) is a potential friend and current neighbor.
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I finally posted my review for Lucy. I had to edit it a few times before posting because I have *really* strong feelings about older men taking advantage of younger women, to the point I wrote entire fiction series about it. I managed to make things less rageful I think? Well, less expletive riddled.
I once knew an author whose fetish was transparently abuse against women; he often spoke of how much he loved seeing their strength by how they prevailed. How their bodies could be liquefied by the abuse, yet they would keep going.
This was an author I knew through a professional space. I looked around at his online presence and the fact his fetish was beating women was very obvious. It was in his art, his books, everything. Worse, he tried to involve everyone in his fetish. He always tried to turn forum discussions toward this violence and how hot it is for powerful women to stand through it.
I made him my personal project. I rallied support on the board and I wouldn’t stop commenting on everything he posted. I made such a public stink about this man fetishizing abuse of women, and trying to abuse women on the internet, that an extremely complacent white dude admin finally banned him.
And that admin then scolded me publicly because he didn’t like I’d put him in a position where he was forced to act. I told him he should be grateful I forced him to act like a decent human. And then I threw a forum party for the women who were safer *despite* the actions of *extremely whiny and complacent* men who were happy to enable this shit.
I have zero room in my heart for men like that. No patience. No quarter. They deserve to retreat in shame.
So I kinda gotta avoid that stuff when I can’t go flaming sword about it? Because I *want* to go flaming sword, but the forum situation was one place where I could actually be effective. I have no power against Hollywood directors. I am just some guy.
Hence Lucy is simply a bad movie by an uncreative fool who hates women and that’s gotta be where I leave it.
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A review of Rebel Moon from Variety isn’t exactly enthusiastic. I don’t trust Variety to know genre well enough to tell the difference between a stale trope and an old trope executed in a new way. I’m gonna have to watch it and see what I think.
Zack Snyder is kind of an odd duck. I don’t think I’ve seen a movie of his I would necessarily call “good,” and I think we have vastly different opinions about humanity that leave us little room for overlap in taste. But his movies are interesting, if nothing else. I usually enjoy trying to figure out wtf he was thinking enough to watch em twice.
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The Marginalian talks about being thin-skinned as a kind of permeable membrane that means we feel the amount of universe inside of us more. This is my kind of drug logic, I love it. Yesss just call me a walking biphospholipid membrane why don’t you
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We, culturally, lost our dear parasocial friend Andre Braugher to aggressive lung cancer. Love for the Braugher family. Sooo much love.
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A noteworthy portion of pandemic relief funding went to the arts. (NPR) I would be interested to know how much of that funding reached the working class.
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I blogged about alloparents in a previous Sara Reads the Feed, and here NPR shares lots of heartwarming alloparenting stories from people patiently indulging white americans who didn’t know it takes a village.
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NPR also reports that Prince Harry has won one of his cases against the British media.
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This Tor dot Com review of A Study in Drowning sounds interesting, so I’m putting the review here to come back around and try the book later. I’m way more interested in books that have a supportive story about the artist and methodology, tbh. I’m way more interested in methodology than hooks.
That said, doesn’t it kinda suck how many of us have to put lipstick on our trauma and then market it to other people so we can make a living?
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The Eyewall has the funnest read about blowing up tornadoes.
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More from Carmack about classic Doom. (Ars Technica) He’s had a lot to say the last couple years, so if these insights are valuable to you beyond nostalgia, definitely do a googlin.
As for the nostalgia element? Listening to Carmack talk is like sitting down with an old computer guy who was programming using punch cards. If you haven’t had the privilege, I’ll tell you that you can indeed get grains of interesting information out of them, around an overwhelming onslaught of happy old nerd man just kinda…talking. The nostalgia is never enough to get me through it, lol. I say this with *enormous* love for happy old nerd men, several of which alloparented me from 18-24 years old.
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Federal regulators might crack down on Starbucks’s union busting. (NYT)
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Articles about an A24 Death Stranding movie keep coming across my timeline. I don’t think I’ve mentioned on Egregious that this is one of my all-time favorite video games against *incredibly* steep competition, like Doom. The cutscenes of Death Stranding alone form an outstanding flick, and they know it, so this will be an original story in the same universe. I’m totally open to it, but apprehensively so, as any elder video game fan approaches movie adaptations of the games we like.
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Tor dot Com actually has a lotta good reviewers on board. I loved this read about Gene Wilder’s Wonka as one of the fey.
