I really liked Wonder Man. It takes place in the MCU, but it's about an actor trying to get his dream role and ending up also forming a bond of friendship and learning how to be a better person. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgox...

Here you go Smackdown October 17th 2002

Spotted at a Mexican supermarket

There are a lot of people who seemingly can’t accept the possibility of anyone sincerely disagreeing with them.

I think you can guess which current events have had this SOAD song running through my head a lot lately. Pushing little children With their fully automatics They like to push the weak around www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xD2...

Working on that essay about AI, and I remembered how Joe Rogan loves retro AI song covers, when there are actual artists like Robyn Adele Anderson and Postmodern Jukebox doing it for real with amazing results. www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_AU...

Kinda annoyed that I can't find a clip of that time when the movie The Ring (2002, as in the American remake of the Japanese horror film) was sponsoring the WWE, so they'd have Tazz saying, "Before ya' die, ya' see the ring!"

Looking for ideas for a villain organization name, and I love how DC's Captain Carrot went up against A.C.R.O.S.T.I.C. (A Cabal Recently Organized Solely To Instigate Crimes).

So like there apparently was an era of the comics that the Adam West Batman series captured perfectly.

I totally forgot to mention, but my essay about The Matrix franchise is now available for free (I did an early release thing for Patreon members), you know, if you want to hear me go on about the Wachowskis' critique of messiahs and singular heroes. www.patreon.com/posts/may-th...

Gonna made a character named Amber Jade Diamond just to annoy people, and she has sisters named Ruby, Pearl, and wait did this just become Steven Universe? You have to tell us if it's Steven Universe.

The one thing I liked about A Working Man (the Jason Statham movie) is that at the end the head of the Russian mobsters tell a subordinate (paraphrasing) "That guy left a mountain of corpses of our guys. We are not going to mess with him anymore."

Still finding Jorp's deliberate inability to respect the normal definitions of words infuriating, but also I remembered that for Christians, being willing to say you're Christian is kind of a big deal, like you're literally supposed to even under threat of death. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m1D...

I had the dumb thought that Jack Black and Jack White should do something together, and it turns out they did collab, and jokingly called the team up “Jack Gray.” youtu.be/jLveEwEd3vs?...

Sure I could ask ChatGPT for advice on what to do with a scene in my novel, or I could sit down with a notebook and think it through for five minutes, or ask friends for ideas, or pull out my story dice, or get into drugs or something. Lots of options is my point.

Maggie Mae Fish's video is really good if you want to be depressed about the reality of policing in America. www.youtube.com/watch?v=shhu...

I dunno if I can do it better than Mr. Freedom (or that one scene in Austin Powers) but I kinda want to write something that really drives home the utter disregard for the lives of "bad guys" in American heroic fiction. That tendency has horrifying results when applied to real life after all.

I'm enjoying Starfleet Academy so far! They went with the far-future setting from later Discovery seasons, so the Federations is still in the process of rebuilding. The show also really embraces the diversity of both the setting and real life. There's an Exocomp named Almond Basket!

There are too many ethical concerns for me to use genAI, but if I were to set those aside I'd have to adopt a rather damning rule: You must NEVER use LLM output verbatim. Between hallucinations, plagiarism, and bland prose, it's incapable of producing text I'd actually use.

Apparently companies that do Christmas decorations are expanding their product lines in a really weird way.

Clearly the problem with newer Trek is that it lacks the creative mind that produced TekWar and Star Trek V.

I started on an essay about generative AI, and I already ended up including that one quote from Sartre about antisemites.

Back to the Future reboot: "Okay future boy, who's president in 2025?" "Uh... Donald Trump." "Trump? The real estate guy? Who's vice president, Lee Iaccoca?"

Marvel really needs to not let writers make more more new details about how the multiverse works. It's not impossible for "anchor beings" to work as a concept, but I'd want to understand how e.g. Earth-10005 existed for billions of years without a Wolverine.

Watching @flintdibble.bsky.social's video about the mess with Rogan put a lot of pseudoarcheaology debunking videos into my recs, and I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea of claiming the pyramids weren't tombs when there was a strange period of Europeans eating bits of mummies as "medicine."

Looking through deleted scenes and other extras from superhero movies, and I missed that they did two tourism ads for Wakanda, from before and after the events of the Black Panther Movie. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YTL... www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcLT...

I disagreed with Scott Adams on practically everything and found him truly obnoxious, but I don’t at all feel like gloating. (Though I have a hard time faulting anyone who does.) The last decade or so of his life was a bizarre postmodern tragedy.

This sounds amazing and apparently Boots Riley is going to be doing a film version: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Bur...

I try to hold myself to a higher standard, but remembering that Ernest Cline is a bestselling author helps a lot when I start to get impostor syndrome. It's also a little depressing, but still.

Trump Administration Announces New Initiative To Harm Americans (again)

In The Lego Batman Movie, Barbara Gordon announces her initiative to finally rid Gotham of crime, with the slogan "It takes a village, not a Batman," which is casually devastating to Batman as a lone hero working outside the law.

I went to see if I could find any info about why my HomePods started malfunctioning, and apparently "randomly blasting music" happens to a fair number of people, for a variety of reasons. One guy opened his up (which is NOT easy) and found ants had gotten inside and damaged a ribbon cable!

"This afternoon when I picked my daughter up from school, she got in the car, buckled up, and whispered, 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nis

Today in tiny things I wish I'd learned a decade or more ago: you can pan-fry or roast frozen veggies with seasonings and the results can be pretty great.

I should probably look for a new job, but I wound up doing adversarial testing on LLMs for my day job, and while they inherently can't 100% guarantee it won't produce bad content, you can cut off a lot by giving it a plain English instruction not to do a given thing. So... Musk can't be bothered.

I don't feel happy about Scott Adams' passing, but with my dad in the hospital (his pacemaker surgery went fine but he needs physical therapy) and one of my closest friends mourning his mother's passing, I don't have a lot of sympathy left over for Dilbert Guy and his brainworms.

Love how people defend not taxing the rich more by inadvertently telling us that the rich have absolutely no loyalty to their city/state/country and will flee if they have to pay 5% more to the society that made their wealth possible.

Finally getting a copy of what AFAICT is the only book ever published about Mr. Freedom (1969), by Tyler Sage and published by Liverpool University Press, part of the Constellations series of books analyzing various science fiction works. www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/topic/book-s...

If anyone cares about that kind of thing, I started using Letterboxd: letterboxd.com/nekoewen/

Watching Thelma (2024), which is basically "What if the little old lady from The Beekeeper who got scammed, lacking a Statham type to fight for her, decided to take matters into her own hands?" Not much action so far, but it's full of the tragedy, absurdity, and beauty of old age.

I'm not holding my breath when it comes to the quality of MCU projects these days, but I really like the premise of Wonder Man, and how it's apparently going to explore the setting in places outside of superheroes punching bad guys. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHuW...

I have gotten a lot of use out of the Apple HomePods in my living room, but now I pretty much have to retire them because they've developed an issue where they randomly start blasting music and won't respond to commands to stop. If I wanted to put up with crap like that I'd have bought an Alexa.

Not sure what purpose it serves, but for Xeroverse I wrote a deleted scene of a comedy routine about going to a movie premiere and meeting Captain Eagle (and also running into the Konings, the tech guys who helps superheroes and who look just like the comedian).

I was in the mood for a dumb action movie, and A Working Man fits the bill, though I'm extremely aware of how it plays out the American monomyth exactly. Good people under attack, cops are worse than useless, a lone hero has to save the day with redemptive violence.

Superhero setting where earth’s greatest champion is a guy whose power to control peanut butter is so potent that nothing can stop him.

“Napkin” is such a weird word if you think about it, sounds like a little guy from folklore who hides in your cupboards and takes naps all the time.

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When it comes to art, capitalism is cowardly.

I could not tell you why it is that I find Twin Peaks: The Return so comforting. #twinpeaks

Realizing that one of the themes of my Xeroverse novels--that real change requires collective effort--did appear in one existing superhero movie, and that movie is The Lego Batman Movie.