very tight script that has a lot of fun playing with the conventions of a Predator film. i think my biggest complaint is that the heavy use of CGI often leaves scenes looking pretty flat. very little pops out of the frame.

One thing that researching this really drove home is that NYC mayors have always been weird, weird guys.

the historian stephen ambrose claims in his Nixon series that Richard Nixon helped popularize the flag pin because his aide H.R. Haldeman saw Robert Redford wearing a flag pin in "The Candidate" and thought Redford looked so good with it that he encouraged Nixon to do the same

finally someone is talking about mayor john lindsay's extremely overt self-insert fic

fascinating.

wow, i wonder who dies

did you hear they want to build a data center in silent hill? they’re going to use the water from toluca lake. it’s gonna help people generate glossy, high res images of your dead wife.

silent hillification is just something that happens to small towns after so many years of deferred maintenance. you stop paying for road repairs and then suddenly *boom* scary dogs leaping out of you from the fog.

stranger things kids don't look like kids, but they don't look old either. they look strangely ageless. you could tell me they're anywhere from their early 20s to their late 30s and i would believe you.

kiss my ass, wallace

pretty close to canon for me. RFK leaves Vietnam, passes a supercharged version of Unruh's FAP while doing integration, and then just obliterates Reagan and Rockefeller as political forces. Entire Dixiecrat movement rendered pointless when George Wallace finishes third in his home state of Alabama.

this ad feels portentous

gorsuch, roberts, and ACB all sound skeptical if not outright hostile to the government's arguments on trump's tariff power.

the executive cheesecake factory

the vice president attempted to do de-ba’athification of the federal workforce and now federal workers are acting like they’re riding in pick-up trucks about to capture mosul

the concept of watching your party shit itself violently and then trying to move forward with bombing caracas

gerdy troost—one of hitler’s favorite interior designers and architects—defends herself by insisting she did not see anything outside her studio except “bright and shining eyes and […] the most touching scenes.” however, she was well-paid, influential. she benefited from concentration camp labor.

reading about adolf hitler’s renovation of the German Chancellory, which he claimed was decrepit and ill-suited for a Great Power and whose renovations he would pay for out of pocket, without burdening the German taxpayer

Orphan Annie: Hardcore conservative, pro-Business Plot Popeye: Lifelong Democrat aligned with the party's labor wing Dick Tracy: Thomas Dewey Republican The Shadow: Conservative but internationalist. FDR voter thru 44 Dagwood Bumstead: Largely apolitical, votes for whomever his wife tells him to.

Heartbreaking: Little Orphan Annie Arrested in Connection to Business Plot Director Hoover Thanks Agents for Apprehending America’s ‘Littlest Seditionist’ Ringleader Oliver ‘Daddy’ Warbucks Remains At Large

Will Lewis gets up every day asking: How can I get more suburban DC readers to cancel their subscriptions? It's called grindset and you wouldn't understand.

What’s it like inside your head?

unfortunately, for the vast majority of people, the answer to "how do i get good at X" or "how do i make X less unpleasant" is just to keep doing that thing until it becomes second nature. how do i build a gym routine? keep going to the gym. how do i become a good writer? keep writing.

good piece and captures my growing frustration with the entire “cozy” cottage industry across not just video games but books, ttrpgs, television, etc.

there’s a very surreal “through the looking glass” quality to Biden’s Office when you realize it was designed to mimic the Oval of The West Wing, which was itself an idealized version of the Clinton Oval Office

i shouldn’t be attached to this but just very sad

i do continue to find it funny how almost US president expects the public to do elaborate kremlinology on their interior design choices and, thus, they fill the space with portraits of prominent figures they want to be associated with meanwhile jfk filled the oval with boats because he liked boats

doing a tour of Boston with family and the guide just described John Hancock as the “Jeffrey Epstein—. I’m sorry. Jeff Bezos of his time.”

every musical that originates on the West End feels extremely over the top, arch. the comedy is often smarmy, with the underlying joke being “isn’t it so silly that we’re doing a musical rn?” broadway feels much more comfortable with itself. even movie-based musicals sit longer with pathos & drama

A not insignificant number of people knew the demolition was coming, including people at the White House Historical Association, and did nothing to stop it.

just realizing they blew up the white house theater lol

i cannot get over being this level of cowed by a 1.5% PV win silicon valley meekly acquiescing as trump goes after their talent pools. the pharmaceutical industry dousing themselves in kerosene as RFK Jr tries to light them on fire. media enthusiastically demolishing their own newsrooms.

“The Flight 93 Election”

the corporations financing the wanton destruction of america’s historical sites should be punished. severely.

well, it's about what i expected from a west end musical, which is intensely smarmy but only intermittently entertaining. there are some fun gags and one or two moments of gravitas, but the show is so fucking broad and scattershot. book in desperately in need of a good editor to give it focus

about to watch. going to be honest, I don’t like much of what originates on the West End but hoping to be pleasantly surprised

i absolutely cannot stand the deluge of pseudo-influencer/psuedo-vlogger ads that now appear before every video now it’s always some fucking actor eating chipotle in their car or some shit, pressing their nasty fucking burrito close to the camera as they overzealously drizzle bland sauce

east wing groverhaus

just saying the slur would have cut a dozen words off this post

speaking of dungeons and dragons, i am amazed by how strong of a film the actual dungeons and dragons movie is not perfect (it drags quite a bit during the underdark sequence) but filled with a dozen clever little scenes that do the mechanics of a heist film better than many serious heist films

there's a point in almost every D&D comedy podcast where you can tell that the hosts hate one another but have based their professional image and revenue stream on their continued interactions with their "friends", so they keep forcing themselves to do bits even as they turn more toxic and cruel

i find the term “isolationism” a bit of a misnomer because while the term conjures images of monastic sacrifice and seclusion, the adherents of isolationist foreign policy are not arguing *for* sacrifice they are arguing for a withdrawing from an international system of norms, an unvarnished empire

The French new wave director who got himself kicked out of new wave, Jean Melville Pierre hated how Nazis were depicted in movies saying that's not how the Nazis he fought looked like and everyone was reproducing Nazi propaganda

NEW: After The Washington Post reported Monday on the demolition of the "East Wing facade," a new picture obtained by Law Dork that was taken on Tuesday shows that a substantial portion of the entirety of the East Wing has been demolished.

some phrasing i’d change now but, well,

im sorry, he has a tattoo of what? for how long?

one of the more fun things in writing the Biden 1992 scenario was having Joe rely more and more on political cliches and other people's words as the scenario advances, to the point where if you actually read the options you realize he's saying nothing. it's just filling dead air.

probably the first time in history since the 18th century where the leaders of all the major powers -- trump, xi, putin, modi, erdogan etc -- are all personalist regimes. not sure what this means but worth noting

as the story notes, this is happening as the jobs market has sagged and the number of affordable units in many cities has *shrunk* hard not to view the refusal to build affordable units and the continued conversion of affordable units into luxury accommodations as a huge crisis

the year is 2050. you use your VPN to get around state censors and log onto Xiaohongshu. the first thing you see is chinese netizens producing "aesthetic" edits of 1/6 and the white house demolition. it is overlaid with the distorted vocals of sabrina carpenter's espresso. this is your life forever.