The first time I watched Falling for Christmas, I was surprised to enjoy such a corny Lindsay Lohan Christmas comedy. Since I’ve spent this year watching a whole breadth of…
The permeability of the membrane between reality and folk myth was punctured by The Blair Witch Project and culture has been streaming through that hole ever since.
I have only ever seen this movie the way God intended it: on two VHS tapes that are so tight in their printed cardboard box that they give a gently vibrating vwoop sliding out of the case, along with a puff of plastic smell.
The second tape got mangled in a VHS player when we were trying to do a speedy rewind, but it’s okay. Mostly because I held up the tape to the light and sort of absorbed the second half via light osmosis. But also because the second half is all Action Movie Titanic (or so I’m told) and that’s very stressful for me.
Luckily of course the first VHS is the Good VHS and that’s the only one we must regard for this viewing.
It is amazing how gorgeous the costuming is, as far as I can tell on my CRT television. Sometimes I get close enough that the static tickles my nose and I can smell ozone but I see more details. The embroidery on Rose’s dresses are amazing. The Titanic sets are incredibly realistic to history.
That boy who plays Jack seems a little arrogant but I am sure that such a lush period piece centering his beauty will do nothing to his ego over the course of his career. Maybe I should check in on him?
The love affair with the pretty redheaded actress is very good and sweet. Boy, does their charisma work. That Leonardo Dicaprio sure knew how to have chemistry with a 22-year-old woman! He’s surely grown out of that more than twenty-five years later.
The obvious greatest performance comes from Billy Zane, who I am SO CONFIDENT will be the major breakout star of the film. His anger is incandescent. He looks like he wants to eat Jack half the time. He knows how to wear a suit. Yes, Billy Zane is going places, even if he has to eat a bit of crow right at the Actual End of the Movie when he realizes Jack and Rose are together.
Also the ship bumps into a big chunk of ice at the end of Titanic, but right before it cuts off, they’re looking at some blueprints, so it’s probably fine. I bet they spend the last hour and a half fixing it. Maybe they reunite Old Rose with Old Jack? That’s the only thing that makes sense really.
I forgot how the day vanishes when I make myself leave the house. I’ve hardly crocheted a thing. A shame, but I went to the Nevada Museum of Art, and that helped reinvigorate me. I felt so creative after seeing such great exhibits.
Do you ever feel like you’ve got no control over what comes out of your mouth? I know I’ve always had a hard time with it, but I’ve gotten worse since I started isolating in the pandemic and continued maintaining it. Going to the museum is one of many efforts to get me out of the house. I’m trying to practice.
But there is my mouth, just saying things like I am a robot, while the little human pilot in my brain screams “Noooo!” ineffectually.
All it takes is saying one thing I meant to keep locked behind my teeth and then I’m a bundle of quiet neuroses all chained up on the inside, terrified I will say something inappropriate again.
I’d rather battle my silly impulses somewhere with interesting art. I took nine-year-old Sunshine and he had fascinating observations. I wouldn’t trade it for a thing. But I would like to go again, maybe alone, and spend a while actually reading the exhibits, and doing some sketching. ~
If being buried alive for the bleeding cancer that is Mr. Beast’s viral machine is a metaphor, it’s way too on-the-nose. I wouldn’t bother writing that into a book.
Hodin started the captive breeding program at Friday Harbor because he saw a potential solution in the remaining pycnos that demonstrated resilience against the disease.
“We lost somewhere around 90% of the sunflower stars, which is hundreds of millions of animals,” Hodin said. “As horrible as that is, what that suggests is that the ones that didn’t die probably had a little bit of resistance. And if two of those stars breed, we think that their offspring are likely to be even more fit in response to the disease.”
The goal of the program is to raise multiple generations of stars that are more resistant to wasting. Many of the stars will eventually be released into the wild and begin a gradual process of rebuilding their populations.
This is an interesting remedy for a terrible problem. The article is a great read about sea star husbandry, if that kind of thing rustles your jimmies.
Renard was impressed at how much the general public paid attention to Hollywood’s summer of strikes. “I’d tweet, ‘We need water’ and we’d get five deliveries of water just from people who lived in L.A.,” she said.
This strike was successful thanks to the kind of community action we’ll need moving through the next few years of the labor movement…and beyond, I hope.
~
Huffpost reports that boat-pummeling orcas won’t be deterred by heavy metal. TBH that usually gets me in more of a smashy mood, too.
I know they’re walking a tight rope here. I can wish for better while understanding there might not be better in this situation. Speaking loudly against such asymmetric warfare seems obvious from where I stand, but boy do I stand a long way from the crux of it. I’m doing a lot of reading and trying to learn and understand.
I woke up in almost as much pain as yesterday, but at least I figured out what hurt me. Apparently dropping it to the floor and trying to twerk like Megan Thee Stallion without a warmup, or a recent history of exercise, or her glorious butt, is a really good way to flare up old injuries I KNOW THAT I HAVE. Yet I really thought I could do that.
My worry at first was that I was getting sick (the pain was in so many regions, I thought it was inflammation ache), but no…my arms just hurt from vigorous crochet, and I broke my hips because I’m not Megan Thee Stallion, STILL. The hot girl life is brutal. Clearly this means I should twerk on the floor more, not less.
The pain makes it really difficult to work at my standing desk, but at this point, I’ve made it near-impossible to convert from standing to sitting. I make myself sit somewhere else in the house so I’m incapable of hiding in my office for hours at a time.
Still, I might have enough tolerance in these creaky thirty-something hips to get through reading my feed. I did it twice yesterday so it’s only 100-something articles to filter through. Let’s take a look…
There’s a new book talking about science which tries to decenter it from Europe.
Poskett waits all of one paragraph before declaring it a “myth” that science’s origin involved figures like Copernicus and Galileo. Instead, he places it not so much elsewhere as nearly everywhere—in astronomical observatories along the Silk Road and in Arabic countries, in catalogs of Western Hemisphere plants by the Aztecs, and in other efforts that were made to record what people had seen of the natural world.
Some of those efforts, as Poskett makes clear, required the organized production of information that we see in modern science. Early astronomical observatories boosted accuracy by constructing enormous buildings structured to enable the measurement of the position of heavenly bodies—hugely expensive projects that often required some form of royal patronage. Records were kept over time and were disseminated to other countries and cultures, another commonality with modern science. Some of this activity dates back all the way to Babylon.
The author of the article seems skeptical that anything before European Science is Actual Science.
His definition of science is even broader (and probably on even weaker ground) when he refers to things like an Aztec herbalism manual as science. Is there any evidence that the herbs it described were effective against the maladies they were used to treat? Finding that out is definitely something science could do. Yet it would require scientific staples like experiments and controls, and there is no indication that the Aztecs ever considered those approaches. Poskett’s choice of using it as an example seems to highlight how organized knowledge on its own isn’t enough to qualify as science.
You heard it here first, guys. If modernish European guys couldn’t rationalize their way through it, then the things the Aztecs knew where wrong. Ok buddy.
~
A nuanced review of Alan Wake II from Jessica Conditt on Engadget. I found the first game clunky enough, but I did finish it. I’d rather play a shooter than a mystery game, honestly. Trying to balance the two of them in my head doesn’t sound interesting.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Wallace’s ruling is that she found, over and over, that Trump’s side did not present evidence to fight the claim of insurrection. Trump’s legal expert, Robert Delahunty (who contributed to some of the most outrageous War on Terror OLC opinions), presented no definition of insurrection that wouldn’t include January 6. Kash Patel presented no evidence to back his claim that Trump intended to call out 10,000 members of the National Guard. Trump presented no evidence that criminal conviction was required before disqualification. There was no evidence presented that Trump did not support the mob’s purpose.
This feels like “no shit” territory, but nothing about the obviousness of Trump’s fascist movement prevented him from reaching the insurrection itself. So. This is why I could never be an actual journalist or fancy legal brain person: I see things with my eyes and I just get annoyed we have to prove the thing we know. Society, man.
~
This comic about bouldering from The New Yorker is cute. It accurately catches the effect of picking up a rock climbing hobby, too: you will alarm everyone by trying to climb on a lot of things.
“I don’t want to focus on something that’s not even in my control, because what’s the point? That’s for Bob Iger. [The box office] has nothing to do with me. I’m happy with the finished product, and the people that I care about enjoyed the film.”
I get such Annoying Baby Sister energy from her, and I’m speaking as the Annoying Baby Sister. Her interview with Seth Meyers was adorable.
Is any movie more 1995 than Clueless? With a movie as witty, colorful, and fashionable as the nineties themselves, Clueless is one of those movies that I doubt will ever age.
Normally something so anachronistic would age, and badly, but Clueless taps into the same essential core of human existence as Emma by Jane Austen with an extremely effective modernized adaptation. I don’t think Jane Austen adaptations will ever die either (I sure hope they won’t).
Young women have always been something magical, which is really one of the many delightful things that Jane Austen captures in her stories. Girls can be smart, observant, funny, feisty, and opinionated, when the circumstances and adults in the vicinity allow them to be, and she’s so good at giving us women who have been indulged by a loving parent to the point where they blossom into their fullest selves.
That’s Cher here, indulged by her dad, born into a position of privilege (a lawyer’s daughter can afford to be fancy). Is she spoiled? Maybe a little bit, but Cher has such principles that you have to respect it. She will argue her way to getting anything she want. She isn’t afraid of making demands. And her demands are kind because she is kind. Try being Paul Rudd and *not* falling for your adorable sister with spicy social justice aspirations.
Wait, did I mention Paul Rudd? The man who gave an entire generation a fetish for the hot older step-brother we never had?
It’s so cute to see him here, looking only slightly shinier-faced than he does thirty years later. He’s supposed to be the kinda cool college guy. Paul Rudd is a lot of things, including adorable, but I don’t think coolguy stayed in his brand as an actor, and that’s why we love him. Well, and because the faces he makes when he’s falling for Cher are to-die-for, and we all want Paul Rudd to make those faces at us.
I guess it says a lot more about me, and where I am in my life, that my main reaction to *this* watch of Clueless was, “Oh my God everyone is so cute.” Because that’s my reaction to everyone and everything! It’s so cute!
Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd? OBVIOUSLY cute.
Donald Faison? So! Cute!
The grand Nagus marrying his nerdy teacher colleague? CUTE!
I can’t talk about how cute Brittany Murphy is without breaking into tears!
The fashion? Cuuuuuute.
Speaking of fashion, let’s talk 1995. What a year for cinema! I didn’t realize Clueless was the same year as Sabrina at first. It’s funny because I referenced the hot older step brother in my review for Sabrina. I thought that Linus should have been cast to feel like an older brother figure to Sabrina, and failing that, the script rewritten. What was in the water in 1995? Hot brother/daddy figures? I guess that explains where all my weird fetishes came from. Thanks 1995!
Anyhoo, 1995 also gave us Strange Days (very notable if not a GREAT movie), To Wong Foo, While You Were Sleeping (it’s on my to-watch list), Showgirls, Braveheart, and one of the disappointing favorites of my childhood, Pocahontas. What a vibrant year for memorable media.
Clueless stands apart from its release-year peers by being an especially wholesome embrace of girlhood and friendship and hot stepbrothers. May it never lose its shine.
My whole body hurts. What did I do this time? I’m thirty-five years old. For all I know, I committed the cardinal sin of turning the wrong direction too quickly.
I’ve been taking it easy on my hands/arms by limiting crochet for a few days and mostly just starting to weave a strap for a bag. I got stuff to do leatherworking, which I’m excited to start on, but I wanna finish this one slow detailed bag I’ve got going first.
I’m going to curl up and turn off after this. Hopefully my hips will forgive me for whatever sin I committed after I pray to saint tylenol.
The new round of Madison Avenue exits comes as the White House and the European Commission also took a hard stance against X on Friday. “We have seen an alarming increase in disinformation and hate speech on several social media platforms in recent weeks, and X is certainly quite effective of that,” the Commission said in a statement. A White House statement on Friday said that “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.”
Much less significantly, I’ve stopped posting personal content on X and now do my train-of-thoughts elsewhere, like here and Bluesky.
~
The USDA adjusted the plant hardiness map. I’m not in an area that has seen significant change between 2012 and 2023. How about you?
The shifts in the Midwest and Northeast are jarring. And Florida. And Texas. Okay, I guess it’s most of the country. Oof.
Didn’t this surge around 2014 too? I remember that specifically because that’s when my second baby was born. I can’t imagine vaccine resistance has improved since then, unfortunately.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes takes an unfathomable amount of time setting up key points of relation to the originating trilogy, often in a manner so obvious that it winds up comical. There are mockingjays all over District 12, and Snow doesn’t seem to like them. Lucy Gray sings “The Hanging Tree” at several portentous moments in the film, and possibly also wrote it? Look at all the imagery and symbolism!
It’s not that I don’t want people to discuss what an authoritarian he is. I do. I’ve just seen so many people mention this language usage, yet I can think of a million authoritarian actions he actually performed during his presidency, and we don’t talk about most of them. Avoidance as a symptom of shared trauma? Too overwhelmed by the sheer volume of nonsense we suffered to pick it apart?
We already know the majority of people don’t want this guy. But enough want him to jump on the system’s cracks until they snap. I’m not sure what we’ve done to bolster the integrity of our elections. We still have that electoral college. We’re going to see how rugged American democracy is in 2024.
But okay, yes, let’s talk about his authoritarian language.
I don’t often love movies, TV, or books earnestly. It does happen occasionally – my obsession over Scavengers Reign is intense – but I’m someone who gets the most enjoyment out of critical dissection.
I’ve grown up in an era of American anti-intellectualism where I can’t go five steps without meeting disdain for anything with literary aspirations, and people often defend stuff *for* being brainless rather than despite it. Sympathy for the palliative effects of mindless media should subsume other concerns. Hence, folks have always said that if you don’t like the popular thing, you are [insert various insults here]. Elitist? Sexist? A jerk? Whatever.
With these influences, I used to think my preference to engage with media critically is because I’m a big snooty crank who doesn’t want people to have fun.
The experience is a little more complicated.
With recent autism diagnoses in the family, and seeing neuropsychologist analyses of the exact pathology of our brain miswiring, it’s become obvious how much of my disability is social. Humans are social animals, so disrupting social functions (like emotional regulation, filtering one’s language to be appropriate, and bonding with a social group) is kind of a big deal, and it manifests in multitude ways.
You might have already noticed my vocabulary trends over-formal or -complicated on one end of the spectrum; on the other end, I can get extremely crass, un-punctuated, and messy. I switch based on the tone in which I intend to speak rather than situational appropriateness, which I find difficult to meter.
It also means that I struggle to “hook into” popular things. Something that is very popular socially (say, Taylor Swift) will generally clear a bar on quality where there’s no big criticisms to be made on craft, so it’s easy to fall in love with the work because everyone you know loves it. It’s fun! Everyone’s having a good time!
Because my personal tastes skew esoteric, and I can’t feel part of any in-group, I don’t get pulled into the fervor. And then I get frustrated because everyone is talking about something I can’t genuinely enjoy.
With repeated exposures to something popular – Barbenheimer, the TikTok book du jour, American football – I find it difficult to avoid having *any* opinion about something that was not intended for me, does not appeal to me, and sometimes is overtly offensive. Billions in advertising dollars have been spent to make sure that certain things remain in my face.
Likewise, the conversations are omni-present. The internet water cooler always wants to talk about something I don’t like, and I live on the internet water cooler. Nobody likes having something they love criticized. But as a social animal, any sort of social interaction is better than none, even if it’s a bit antipathetic.
I’d live and let live if all that stuff would let me go. There are fewer places to escape these advertising machines than ever. It makes me wonder if I belong on the internet at all anymore, sometimes.
~
Another fun feature of autism is moral rigidity. Also, a rigid adherence to rules, which may or may not be rules that anyone other than the autistic individual is familiar with.
One of my Special Interests is the intersection of media analysis with social justice. I believe fiercely that stories are one of the oldest social technologies that humans have, and must be wielded consciously for the good of humanity; I take my art very seriously. I’d prefer to think of myself alongside the likes of radical author-activists of previous generations than think of myself as a content creator for the internet.
While I want to entertain foremost (since that’s core to the technology), I also have a whole lot to say, and I find that I say it best in fiction. I like people. Humans are my favorite animals. I hate systems and hierarchies. I want to help other people see how the problem is always a ruling class, not the individuals, and how working together can save us.
I receive negativity expressing these ambitions, too. Because every feisty opinion I share *feels* like it’s In Defense of Humans, Opposed to Hierarchies, I’m always baffled and wounded by the reactions and find myself incapable of communicating context effectively.
Somehow, this does nothing to discourage me. My brain has welded together art and morality. I’m wired to love this much more than I would love acceptance.
It also means I have a negative reaction to media with lower ambitions, sometimes. I don’t mean that the project aspires to be simpler. I mean lower ambitions, like making a project so bland as to appease a fascist model. I mean putting no hint of soul into something humans spent hours of their lives creating, and will spend hours more consuming.
When people are Just Having Fun with the Popular Thing, it’s pretty offensive that I would be Mister Buzzkillington about it because I think the creator has (say) a painfully white heteronormative lens in subservience to the capitalist machine of advertising.
I get why people don’t like that I do that! I don’t love it either.
And yet here we are.
~
These priorities have put me into a place where I can sometimes *love* media that is badly made, in poor taste, and broadly disliked, but somehow interesting to me. But might have nothing good to say about something very popular that treads extremely dull ground.
Sometimes, I can jump in on bandwagons by engaging critically. It allows me to pick apart a given piece of media and say, “These parts work for me. These parts don’t. This is why.”
The effort it requires to tease apart creator intent and execution, meaning and impact, and all those other elements that go into a finished product–that can be fascinating to me regardless of the finished product. Every single story has a story behind it. No movie is produced in total isolation; no book is published without cultural influence and without responding to some call from another book.
Which might help answer the question nobody was asking: “Why do you have such developed opinions on something you don’t like?”
Because reaching the opinion is the entertaining part. Sometimes the *only* entertaining part.
But hey, I’m enjoying the thing you’re enjoying, too. Just from a different angle. Isn’t that kinda nice?
~
The cover of the book Twilight, for no particular reason.
Sometimes something I find terrible for xyz reasons will be *so* interesting that I’ll get hooked and become a Hate-Fan.
I could write essays about the terrible things I’ve loved before.
Hate-fanning might not be ideal, but I see no harm in the practice with healthy boundaries. Getting wrapped up in the criticism is no good if the criticism makes you feel bad.
We’ve got a toxic outrage culture surrounding pseudo-criticism right now, especially on YouTube. If you want to talk about places that eviscerate low-intensity media in bad faith, you can go type the name of any movie starring a woman and “review” into the search bar and catapult yourself into algorithmic Hell.
Toxicity is great for clicks. It’s really bad for your soul.
Well, my soul anyway. I’m basically just a weird lil crochet mummy these days. I don’t want anything but good vibes in my zone.
I defend the ability to find joy in dissecting media. I don’t defend being aggressive about it, or any part of the algorithm machines to which the internet is enslaved, but I defend the value in taking an intellectual approach to all the art we engage with. An intellectual approach should never delegitimize the emotional approach; we don’t harsh others’ mellows, kinkshame, or diminish folks for enjoying something no matter how problematic it might be.
There is a difference between “this is a terrible, racist movie” and “everyone who loves this movie is terrible and racist,” and we’ve completely lost that nuance in the clickbait era of the internet.
There is room for grouchy, snooty, intellectualist cranks like me.
Having an opinion isn’t a big deal. You know, with boundaries.
The year is 2145. Neflixxar releases The Princess Switch 30X: Princesses In The Tenth Dimension. You can only view it by downloading it into your processor and the processor of your seven clones, which will allow you to act out the plot in real-time. Such is the Prophecy of the Switching Princesses: As the Switches gain more episodes, so too must the convolution of the Switches intensify.
Sounds good to you? Then I’m sad to say the third movie in this franchise will disappoint you.
The third Princess Switch actually gives us zero new princesses and I *think* there is less mistaken identity than in the second one.
I thought our over-the-top villainess Hudgens in PS2 might have been like the thunder before a real camp storm. Sure, my ideal logarithmic growth of Hudgens isn’t realistic, but shouldn’t TPS3 have included at least *one* more Vanessa Hudgens? I mean, really pushing this concept of a family that squirts out Vanessa Hudgens clones into the next century.
Instead, PS3 is a very low-temperature and low-stakes romantic suspense story about Villainess Hudgens slowly losing her camp potential to the march of heteronormativity and the hivemind-like placidity of the Hudgens Multiverse Family.
I wish that they would lean into the fun, fanciful elements of the franchise rather than trying to give us Emotions over the complicated childhood a wealthy, never-sees-prison villain feels toward her mom. The silly accent doesn’t offer much room for a nuanced performance, though Hudgens tries. My God does this woman try.
The element of this whole Switchery franchise to which Netflix committed is the fact that they evade anything interesting, giving us no more than the barest glimpse of more exciting ideas. If you’re on medically mandated bed rest, this is the franchise to keep that heart rate low.
It almost frustrates me *more* to have a fun sequence like Third Hudgens dodging lasers paralleling Second Hudgens doing the tango. She/they is so hot. And the easy cuts between scenes to create a simple visual metaphor reminds me that there are actually talented people making these movies, who totally know what they’re doing, but someone from Netflix is standing over them with a sandblaster ready to fire if they start enjoying themselves too much. “No! We saw her thigh! Someone’s eyes widened when she wore a wig! We have met our sexuality cap!”
I get impatient with movies that are *almost* good because I kinda wish they’d either commit to batshittery (hence: more fun) or shoot lower (like A Christmas Prince, which gave me almost no emotions whatsoever).
Everything in this franchise would be redeemed by making up one excuse for two Vanessa Hudgens making out. That’s my Christmas Wish.
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