I’m working on a couple reviews right now that feel a little too big for my normal review format. Plus, they aren’t romcoms, so it doesn’t feel urgent.

Birds of Prey: The Fabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn was the last movie I saw in the theaters before the 2020 pandemic shutdowns, and for that reason alone, I hadn’t revisited it in ages. There was just a big flip in my life shortly after it came out. Now I feel like I can’t review it without talking about Suicide Squad, The Suicide Squad, and Barbie, because the four movies are all part of Margo Robbie’s search for a big IP girlboss feminism outlet.

Lucy (2014) is another movie I saw in theaters. This one comes from the days where I would watch anything in the theater, and I didn’t know Luc Besson married a fucking child, so I thought seeing another action movie from the guy who made The Fifth Element would be interesting. Lucy completely baffled me in 2014. Even knowing I would hate it, I wanted to know what I missed, so I watched again.

I’ve now taken enough drugs and encountered enough rapist abusers to parse the movie, and I have a *real* angry review to write about it. I just don’t know where to start when I’m this disgusted.

Anyhoo those reviews will be coming at *some* point.

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My mood is really negative today because I’m having health problems. I need to take time to reorient myself in love and peace because I’m also deciding to withdraw on Substances (namely mood-boosters cannabis and caffeine) so it’s going to be a lotta feeling real crappy for a minute. Right now, you’re getting the crabbiest read of the news possible.

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Balloon Juice has a current covid news roundup. The tl;dr is that you should be masking again if you stopped.

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Variety rounds up tributes to Andre Braugher from Brooklyn 99 cast members. My heart hurts, so I’m glad I got to laugh at this story.

“Insecure” showrunner Prentice Penny, who also wrote for “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” recalled an on-set memory between himself, Crews and Braugher: “He was so warm with us and then when a white person would walk by, he’d look serious again. He then leaned in and said ‘Gotta keep ‘em on they toes.’”

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Brian Cox reads a poem by Palestinian teacher Refaat Alareer. Sorry for the twt link.

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Guttation is one of my favorite things my plants do, and I don’t actually love this art. (Colossal) It feels meant to evoke gross-out feelings with the drippy look of the statues, and the amount of guttation depicted.

To me, guttation is a graceful thing, a happy thing my plants do when I’m tending them well. I have occasionally reached out my tongue to take a tiny drop of guttation off a philodendron leaf. I don’t poison my plants with pesticides or anything, and a tiny drop has a lot of flavors from something inedible, and it feels precious to be able to taste it. Or I will take the guttation on my finger and see how it streaks like a tear. Guttation feels sweet and intimate to me, but these sculptures feel loud, gross, and visceral–something I’d enjoy, probably, if framed by anything besides guttation.

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Extremely rich man James Cameron is talking about his jerk-off project to people who just can’t wait to hear what extremely rich man is doing to waste money next. (Variety) Apparently Avatar 3 is going to be more complex. I assume that means he’s going to double down on being racist and tell an even worse story about it.

If you’d like to hear about how he wasted money in the past, there’s also an article about hiring short people to make his Titanic set look bigger. I feel like there’s a dirty joke waiting to happen here. I’ll get back to you later.

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This article about ChatGPT getting “lazy” (Ars Technical) is thought-provoking to me, because marketing really, really wants us to attribute humanlike qualities to ChatGPT and it’s succeeding. We talk about large language models hallucinating, we conveniently like to pretend it isn’t stealing from everyone, and people keep acting like these things learn.

It’s similar to the fallacies that lead us to compare human brains to computers, when they don’t work similarly even a little bit. Psychological pareidolia is natural to us; we humanize everything instinctively. It’s adorable. Marketing is taking advantage of it, and we’re just letting them do it.

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Variety again: Anne Hathaway is right to say that she couldn’t have done Barbie instead of Margot Robbie, though I think Hathaway does have the look/charm. She’s simply not on the girlboss feminist arc Margot Robbie has been. Literally only Margot Robbie, coming out of her experiences with WB as Harley Quinn, could have made Barbie the way it turned out, and people seem really happy with its level of engagement with gender issues.

They also note that Hathaway would have been Black Cat in Raimi’s Spider-Man 4, which means there’s no universe where we don’t get subjected to an extremely shallow portrayal of a feline-themed comic book character by extremely flat Hathaway, who is much more Barbie Comics than DC Comics. (No insult.)

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Chain pharmacies are bootlickers who will give cops anything they want without a warrant. (Engadget)

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“Ew, animal sacrifice from ancient cultures!” says the title of a blog published within a culture that lives off meaningless mass death. (Ars Technica)

It’s a good read after the title, though.

Ancient writings describe equid sacrifices in the Mediterranean, sometimes involving hundreds of animals, but there had previously not been much evidence to back this up. There were far fewer than a hundred at Casas del Turuñuelo, although most were equids. The ages of all sacrifices at their time of death were estimated by signs of wear on their teeth. Most were found to have been male working animals in the prime of life, and eight of them had wear caused by iron bits found in their mouths. This provides further evidence for them having been used for war, transportation, or agricultural work.

Something that stood out in Phase 1 was that the equids in that phase had evidently been sacrificed in pairs or at least positioned that way postmortem. The archaeologists suggest they might have pulled carts together before death. There was also an instance in Phase 2 where the necks of two skeletons were crossed in the center of what was once a courtyard. Whether this was part of a ritual associated with either a deity or the afterlife of a deceased owner is unknown.

Why horses, in particular, were sacrificed remains an open question. The researchers think there is a possibility that they were used in a funerary sacrifice so the deceased could enter the afterlife alongside their loyal companions. This has been evidenced in other ancient cultures, such as the Scythians of what is now Russia and Ukraine, who would sacrifice horses at a funeral. Whether this was the case for at least some of the equids at Casas del Turuñuelo is still a mystery.

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The New Yorker spends more time reviewing Wonka than I would bother, and it sounds like what it looked like in the trailers.

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My absolute favorite read of the week was this article about a mother helping her local addict community with harm reduction. It’s wonderful, meaningful work, and NPR handled it with great sensitivity.

Renae occasionally monitors illegal drug use at her home for Christina and a few dozen other people she’s grown close to over the years. It’s an informal, rarely discussed version of the controversial overdose prevention centers, also known as supervised consumption sites, where trained staff supervise people using drugs. Those clinics are endorsed by the American Medical Association and other leading medical groups but condemned by critics who say they sanction, even endorse, drug use.

Heavy but good read. Very human. Very loving.

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Fun photos over here on Al Jazeera English: A new kind of quinceañera celebration — for Mexico’s elderly

A migraine has set in right behind my left eye. This looks to be the third day with the migraine in residence. I am grumpy, I don’t like anything, if you touch me I might bite you.

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People are mad, but Sophie Coppola claims she tried not to make Elvis the villain in Priscilla. (Variety)

Well, if Elvis didn’t want a legacy as an abuser, maybe he shouldn’t have groomed and abused an underaged woman.

Maybe folks should be mad that culture has put us in a place to lionize abusers so that we feel compelled to take up defense of abusers when we learn they are abusers, instead of turning to embrace the survivors.

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This day in labor history… (Lawyers, Guns, & Money)

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Captive in a chicken coop: The plight of debt bondage workers (NPR)

Note that bonded labor is illegal in India, but persists.

Although the Indian parliament banned bonded labor in 1976 for infringing on human rights, it was never fully eliminated. Bodies like the International Labour Organization documented a reduction in the prevalence of bonded labor but found that it continued in various forms in rural areas, often targeting people from communities that were marginalized by India’s caste system.

…Earth’s changing climate forced more people to seek these “debt bondage” jobs, researchers say. When local harvests fail due to drought, workers on these farms may feel they have no option other than to travel to places where they can earn a living, even if that means they must agree to forced labor conditions.

And paying back the contractors is more difficult now as well. Record levels of heat may mean the bonded laborers can’t put in as many outdoor hours or may have to work at a slower pace… The sugar industry – India was the leading global sugar producer until last year – has been hit by an increasing number of droughts that have taken a toll on a crop that consumes a lot of water.

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A Sinhala family drama called “Tentigo” is getting a Tamil remake in India, and the concept sounds amazing. You had me at dead guy penis family shenanigans. (Variety)

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Verizon fell for a fake search warrant and gave a woman’s stalker her info. He traveled several states to get arrested outside her home with a knife.

I’m sure Verizon will respond with new bureaucracy and red tape, but none of that will matter. Cops are domestic abusers too, and everyone has an agenda of their own. Nobody should have access to this information. Privacy is critical.

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Julia Roberts turned down “You’ve Got Mail.” She thinks that “My Best Friend’s Wedding” deserves a sequel. (Variety)

I don’t know that Roberts could have done YGM. She’s so charismatic and charming, but in a different way than Meg Ryan. I’d rather watch Meg Ryan performing mostly alone. She’s got this powerful physicality. Roberts is better when she’s opposite someone, imo.

MBFW could have a sequel that is an actual romcom, sure. Because MBFW was a black comedy taking a perspective on a villainous female archetype, not a romcom.

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The FDA approved a CRISPR treatment for sickle cell, which is soooo cool. (Ars Technica)

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Digby’s Hullabaloo brings very important news to our feed readers with the birth of this new baby monkey.

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This Malaysian Oscar submission sounds rad. Puberty body horror? Gimme. (Variety)

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Sorry for the link to Twitter, but having one’s funeral with people dancing in the aisles and Nick Cave performing is the only church funeral aesthetic I’ll accept.

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Forced to become British: How Brexit created a new European diaspora (AJE)

The traditional view of naturalisation, the process by which an immigrant becomes a full citizen, is that it’s the final step in the journey to integration. “But in the case of Brexit and Europeans in the UK, the opposite happened,” says Nando Sigona, co-lead of the Rebordering Britain & Britons after Brexit (MIGZEN) research project. “People hadn’t felt the need to naturalise because they felt safe and comfortable as Europeans in Britain. Now they were forced to naturalise to defend themselves.”

The act of naturalisation, therefore, made people feel less “British” – or at least less “included” in the UK – rather than more.

Instead of citizenship being a celebration of belonging, many Europeans have naturalised in a state of resentment and have felt even like they’re doing it under duress. “[Our interviews with Europeans] have found a complete lack of trust in the British state,” Sigona says.

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China is turning COVID quarantine centers into apartments for workers. (NPR) Even though China’s got a lot of *serious* issues as a state, I’m jealous of how they pull together massive public works and then have *something* to work with afterward. These flawed but tangible creations. It doesn’t feel like my government is even capable.

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Ars Technica talks using sisal as a fiber for homemade menstrual products. You know sisal rope: we wrap it around the cat trees because kitties love to claw it. I imagine it’s not as scrapey when repurposed for application to the cooterial region.

Plus sisal is an invasive plant, so this is a good use.

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Alas, Chuck E. Cheese is eliminating the animatronic team in all but 1-2 locations. (NPR) It makes sense, but it’s weird how they didn’t even mention FNAF in the article. There’s just a huge chunk of culture that explicitly associates the animatronics with horror now, and there seems to be zero engagement with that. I guess they don’t have to consider it a part of their brand identity if they don’t want to, but kids’ horror is huge, and I think they’re missing out by not tucking away the robot mouse for use in the Halloween season.

Yesterday was mostly a fun variation of my normal-of-late routine where I watch at least one movie and write a review about it.

I actually spend November/December every year watching comedies, especially romcoms, even if this is the first year where I’ve put a sincere effort into reviewing the stuff I watch. Usually I do more genre — SF, horror, and fantasy — in August through October. Yesterday a short film kinda fell in my lap which is more of a September watch, if you ask me.

The John Experiment‘s premise is near-future science fiction, and its impact is ultimately psychological horror. So, you know, September stuff.

This one is special because I know the creator and I got to chat movies with her a bit. It was a lot of fun!

Also, I reviewed Much Ado About Nothing, but I otherwise didn’t watch movies. I’m trying to take a break consciously every day or two. It feels kinda *too* good to slam movies and reviews all day. Like, overstimulating? Instead, I did a bunch of drawing, some essay writing, and then I under-stimulated myself by playing more Baldur’s Gate III with Rory.

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I’ve been avoiding the doctor for a couple years. I go in a couple times a year, mind you. I’ve got asthma and psychiatric needs which absolutely *cannot* be ignored. But I’m doing my best to ignore everything else because I hate it and I don’t wanna. It feels like if I’m seeing my doctor a few times a year already, that’s enough, and my body isn’t allowed to do anything else.

Of course that’s not how it works and not how it ever has worked.

I had a big blood sugar crash yesterday. I’ve always had reactive hypoglycemia from taking an SSRI – basically, my body over-produces insulin. If I eat properly, it’s not a problem, but I struggle to eat “properly” because of an eating disorder. So yesterday, big crash.

I feel so shaken after things like that. Probably because it’s massively depleting, but it’s also just scary. I don’t love the idea of trying to hash this out with my doctor. I hate running around for appointments.

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The makers of No Man’s Sky are promising a game where they generate an Earth-sized planet. I am benignly skeptical. I was there when they marketed NMS with a whole long list of features which never materialized and watched it turn into a base building game. I like NMS. I just won’t listen to a thing Hello Games says until I can see the game itself.

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This article about fungi encouraging ice formation is the most mind-blowing thing I’ve read in a while. (Ars Technica) I’d always heard that ice forms at lower temperatures with “pure” and undisturbed water, because impurities permit ice to form quicker, but never thought further than that. I guess I assumed it was a surface area thing?

Organisms such as bacteria, insects, and fungi produce proteins known as ice nucleators (non-protein nucleators can also be of abiotic origin). These proteins can kick-start the formation, or nucleation, of ice at higher temperatures than pure water would freeze at.

This is one of those things where I read it and I just wanted to throw my pen to the desk and pace around the room thinking FURIOUSLY about everything new-to-me I just glimpsed.

ICE NUCLEATORS?

Shit that’s so COOL.

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Speaking of cool stuff, researchers seem to be developing these sorta…synthetic mini-organs? (Engadget) to help people with diabetes produce insulin properly, with fewer external devices involved.

First, the scientists figured out a way to insert nylon catheters under the skin, where they remain for up to six weeks. After insertion, blood vessels form around the catheters which structurally support the islet devices that are placed in the space when the catheter gets removed. The newly implanted 10-centimeter-long islet devices secrete insulin via islet cells that form around it, while also receiving nutrients and oxygen from blood vessels to stay alive.

Medical symbiosis? Shit that is ALSO so COOL. And this is one humans are coming up with!

Often, when I learn about science and medicine, I’m surprised how basic our understanding remains. A lot of the stuff we use on a practical level day-to-day isn’t necessarily more complicated than, say, a medicine that just adds a single molecule to your body and then your body does the work because it has the molecule. This “islet device” seems something else entirely.

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BookRiot rounds up romances without the third-act breakup.

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Hugh Grant hates Wonka. (Cosmopolitan) Like, I get it. I hate it and I haven’t even seen it, much less performed in it. I don’t expect anyone to love their job, either. But I’m sick of this miserable lipless man being miserable and lipless and everyone tittering like that’s a personality.

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Yes, we are talking about Avatar 3 (Variety) even though we didn’t want Avatar 2 and Avatar 1 was forgettable if not for the fact the franchise bafflingly continues.