I feel overwhelming tenderness for Violet Bick (and her being a single 35 year old still slutting around in 1946 at the end).

Annual check to see if the line "a toast to my big brother George, the richest man in town" still makes me burst into tears every time: yup.

Muppet Christmas Carol is a movie about all frogs are boys and all pigs are girls

The phone scene in It's A Wonderful Life is the sexiest scene in film history.

damn, It's A Wonderful Life and Terry Pratchett really make up the entirety of my value system.

sequel to The Thing that's just Kurt Russell and Keith David fist fighting for ninety minutes. you never find out if either of them is the thing

This is an almost shockingly wise essay. I'm glad I've finally read it.

Alt text version

Fallout season 2 is good because walton goggins now has an excuse to say “daddy”every two minutes

I’m sorry, but it is disgraceful to be an academic who uses this technology to conduct research. It should be prohibited in all of our scholarly institutions, including universities and journals.

It might be faster to just pull a list of every author @ifbookspod.bsky.social has covered at this point

I have caught covid from my downstairs neighbours via central air for the 2nd time in one year. I am so glad that I mask religiously, because you are contagious before symptoms appear and I just spent 3 days indoors with a dude who has an asthmatic kid. Wearing an N95 protects everyone around you.

one thing that is important to know is that BIRTH OF A NATION is so racist that people at the *time*, in 1915, were like, “holy shit this is racist”

Do The Straights appreciate how face-meltingly hot Cherry Jones is in that one scene in Ocean's Twelve?

Jesus christ this sample size was a lot bigger than I assumed it would be.

When we had society wide covid mitigations, we eliminated an entire strain of flu. Now we’re in the “you do you” era and seeing an aggressive and early start to flu season. Three children in Ottawa have died. Wear a mask, ideally an N95. Get your vaccines. Clean the air. Stay home when sick:

Pregnant women who develop COVID-19 after vaccination are much less likely to be hospitalised, need intensive care, or deliver early. A Canadian study of nearly 20,000 pregnant women found vaccination cut hospitalisation risk by 62% and critical care risk by 90% compared with unvaccinated women.

It's awful that any grieving person should be put in the position of HAVING TO write about it. Wil Wheaton has crafted a profoundly beautiful love letter to Rob Reiner's life here.

Treat kids this way and you will lead such a life of fullness and be remembered for all of your days and many more beyond.

Rob Reiner was responsible for my single favourite change in a book-to-movie adaption in all of film: it was his idea to change the axe to a sledgehammer in Misery. Immaculate storytelling instincts, iconic thriller instincts, and an incredible sense of how to keep a movie as watchable as possible.

.....does Time think the workers in the original photo were the architects of that building?

I’ll just go ahead and leave this right here. #OnPoli

It's so fascinating to arrive in the future and discover that no amount of dystopian scifi could act as a deterrent. It can be so insightful and horrifying, and still we've read and watched it for decades and wound up as the Arthur meme

We really need to double down on outwardly stating our work does not contain AI. We're seeing it in movie credits and books, we have to start putting it on things we make and pressuring others to label their work as human made, and normalize that as much as we can, I think. stuff like this maybe

A baby in my extended family is days old, and unwell… There is nothing I can do about it, because if it was important, the government would have told them. My advice, of course, is ludicrous. As it is, the dirty air in daycare means the siblings will bring it all home.

We're half a decade into studies finding that improving airflow in classrooms will reduce disease transmission enormously, and that bleaching surfaces etc. does very little. And yet nothing changes. Waves of flu and colds wash over schools, and the schools pretend it's an act of God.

This is common with subs, it sucks. When I streamed Killers Of The Flower Moon, every scene in Osage I had to rewind & toggle my subs off to check if the scene was translated or not (Scorsese chose to only translate some scenes), which is a dogshit way to watch a movie for anyone who needs captions.

Started season 3 of Breaking Bad, and I desperately need a time machine to go back and personally fistfight every dude I ever saw shit-talking Skyler White online before I watched this show.

Want to honor Alice Wong and her work? Stop saying "during Covid" or "post-pandemic!"

It's presented as 'look at these poor old gay dears who have had their nice bars taken over by crazy blue haired kids'... and it's patronising rubbish, whipped up by non-queer agitators, that is intentionally causing generational mistrust within our own community. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it.

Something I'd like to address. There's this idea that TQ+ folk are all 21 year-old art students... and all the 'normal' old school folk are LGB and entirely left behind and confused by 'pronouns'... Every talk I give, know who the most outspoken trans allies are? Queer folk in their 70s!!

I applied to be on the local climate action plan committee. There were seven people for six seats. By just showing up, I kept a conservative conspiracy theorist from getting on. 18mo ago, I noticed she & cronies were against a new elementary school. I joined up with the pro-school voices. We won.

"My dog is friendly.” “My dog listens to me.” “My dog doesn’t like leashes” We’ve heard these excuses from dog owners after a dog attack. Just keep your dog on a leash to keep everyone safe. Be a responsible dog owner. Learn the rules: toronto.ca/LeashYourDog

2 top climate advisers quit saying Carney government is ignoring its experts www.cbc.ca/news/science...

I was so surprised to hear @podcastlikeits.bsky.social talk about The Silent Partner (1978) as obscure, because so many people I follow have also seen it... then I remembered that I follow mostly Torontonians, and we have a disease that makes us SO LOUD about the rare times Toronto plays itself.

I GASPED. Pushing Daisies was the most devastated I've ever been about a show cancelation... do I dare dream?

It was an honor to have so many conversations w Leslie Lee on his podcast & mine. His being out about his LC status on every platform was extremely brave. There’s a social cost to being out about chronic illness & “salting the vibe”. Whether talking TV or pandemic, he was incisive & a truth teller

Spotify has laid off thousands in recent years, while reportedly paying artists $0.003 per stream. Spotify profits rose 28% in Q3. Its CEO is worth $9.8 billion. It's making money off ICE recruitment ads. Don't you think it's time put a wrap on corporate greed and exploitation?

Big business opportunity just kinda hanging out and waiting for anybody willing to make "Etsy, but no AI allowed."

I've posted about this before but one of the most memorable lessons I learned in grad school was about how IQ tests are not a very good indicator of overall intelligence because you can just train for the test - we did this by taking weekly IQ tests and getting better at it over time

Kaden went into toxic shock syndrome after getting the flu & strep throat. He had heart, liver and kidney failure, resulting in his legs having to be amputated Listen to the kids. Many of them take infectious disease more seriously than adults 💔 people.com/7-year-old-b...

Wearing an N95 or KN95 (not a baggy surgical mask) is incredibly effective-- protecting yourself and even moreso protecting others when you're sick. And who can afford to be knocked out with covid/flu for 3 weeks? Masks on public transit and in public spaces like grocery stores save lives!

I will keep banging on this drum: if we want to fight fascism, we're going to have to normalize masking because no one is coming to save us

At long last we have created the Gattaca from classic sci-fi film Don’t Do the Gattaca Thing

A friend with a new baby asked guests to mask in order to hold her baby. A relative refused to mask & broke down in tears about her "restrictions" As a reminder, babies <6 months have the 2nd highest hospitalization rate from Covid after adults 75+ & are too young to be vaxxed

🧠 Daily Feed of Brain Damage 🧠 Tell me again that Cövid doesn't effect children 🤬‼️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bleak.

A long time ago, I gave the analogy that the immune system is not like a muscle. It’s more like a cleansing fire. And here we see that fuel spent, and misdirected. I said “don’t keep burning down your house”.