Ash when the Alien bursts out of Kane's chest

Checking the stats for @certifiedforgot.bsky.social: we saw a 52% increase in page views and a 56% increase in unique users between September and October, including our first month with over 10,000 page views since we migrated to Lede. A site built around essays isn't sexy, but it gets the job done.

The incredible testimony to the excellence of Aimee Mann is that I love every track on this list of her 20 best songs and I do not believe that most of them should be on the list. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/n...

what a headline www.404media.co/nancy-pelosi...

"You lost the election, so you have a moral obligation to meet me where I am." "You won the election, so you have a moral obligation to meet me where I am."

SAINT MAUD.

I'm not a tarot person, but I have an image in my head of a tattoo of The Devil, but the image on the card is the furnace from THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER, and I think that might just happen sometime soon.

On a side note--I have been reading @404media.co more and more and they do some really fantastic reporting on issues that I find really important (AI in particular). Just became a subscriber. Check them out if you have time: www.404media.co

This is not a dunk, I'm quoting bc this sentiment comes up a lot: If your goal is to support the workers, never, ever, ever start boycotting or pull funding from a product or company until the union asks you to. It is a VERY powerful tool that is unintentionally undermined by early cancellations.

The comic book shop in Germantown is donating a portion of their sales today to the local food bank, so I popped in to grab a few things that aren't on my pull list elsewhere. One of them was ALIEN VS CAPTAIN AMERICA, which I'm honor-bound to collect but quietly rather annoyed by.

"The investment pays for itself within days through productivity gains, Riegert claimed, and he mandates employees use AI at least an hour daily." Say it again with me, folks - if you have to mandate the use of a productivity tool, it's not a tool that actually increases productivity.

If only there was an entire essay written by @williambibbiani.bsky.social about the importance of proto-slasher HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS! But what oft-overlooked horror publication could have possibly published th-

If this doesn’t get you excited about women in horror, I don’t know what will. This film is so gorgeous. Look out for my review from Horror Movie Blog soon. Still from Mārama (2025): a Māori gothic story, written and directed by Taratoa Stappard. Watched for Imagine Film Festival.

Just bought a Saturday pass to PAX Unplugged in the hope that I can play a few games and try to bump into BlueSky mutuals like @friede.bsky.social and @charliehall.bsky.social. I am also told that doing things like this is how you make friends as an adult in a new city? Let's see if that's true.

I'm very excited for this one. Also, how cool is it that a movie by a female director is getting the 70mm treatment? ("Very cool" is the answer you're looking for)

It seems that one of the drivers behind American exceptionalism is the notion that anything we don't already do just can't be done - so we are encouraged to ignore when other countries do things like, say, switch to solar or nationalize healthcare.

Was scheduled to fly to Austin today for a meeting with some vendors, but that trip has been cancelled (with the blessing of my boss). I'm a nervous flyer during the best of times, and baby, this is far, far from the best of times.

"Now that Mamdani has won with a historic share of the vote, it is time for him to ignore the people who elected him and appeal to me, a guy who does not live in New York and hates him."

Something is wrong, and now we all know what it is. You owe something to the Apocalypse.

As a kid who grew up on cheap ALIEN V PREDATOR paperbacks from the used book store, it's wild to have a big-budget film like PREDATOR: BADLANDS dive deep into the culture of the Yautja. It's kind of charming when a movie franchise doubles back to include its own expanded universe lore.

Still the only tattoo I have is Boyd jumping off the cliff. RAVENOUS is S-tier.

Dream casting alert - Genre favorites Jane Levy (Evil Dead) and Jessica Rothe (Happy Death Day) will face off against a masked killer in RIVER:

PREDATOR: BADLANDS (2025): So it turns out synthetics are my favorite part of the PREDATOR franchise, too. BADLANDS is so (sometimes too) unapologetically silly, but Elle Fanning has never been more locked in. It’s just fucking fun, man. It’s fun. Plus, the Mongolian metal-inspired soundtrack? Mwah.

PREY (2022): There’s still some elements of this movie that don’t quite work for me — at times, it feels more like a retread of the 1987 story beats than its own thing — but none of that is the fault of Amber Midthunder or the killer Indigenous cast. And it really sings on the big screen, too.

If at least 26 billionaires can waste at least $27 million trying to defeat Zohran Mamdani, then those same billionaires can afford to pay an extra 2% on their income over $1 million to make New York a better, thriving city for everyone — including themselves.

Anyways, I'm using PTO today so I can go watch PREY and PREDATOR: BADLANDS on the big screen, and that's about as big a personal win as I could hope for in 2025.

Sometimes I wonder if talking more on BlueSky about the books, comics, and board games I'm enjoying, and less about movies, means that I'm slowly losing the audience I grew as a film critic without making any inroads into the other communities, but then I remember ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I never felt Fincher's THE KILLER got much of a shake before slipping to Netflix two years ago. So for The Reveal, I wrote about how the world's fussiest director made a film about human fallibility. thereveal.film/david-finche...

TRANSITION CO-CHAIR LINA KHAN!?!?!??!

Of all the right-wing remora fish swimming in politics, I think Matt Walsh is the one that gets most under my skin. He stands for a specific brand of American Catholicism, one built on intolerance and ideological imperialism, that I've lost several family members to. That, plus the transphobia.

Wow, I'm surprised he heard this happened

- Philabundance - @southphlfridge.bsky.social - People’s Kitchen Philly - @asianfoodco.bsky.social - @foodnotbombs.bsky.social - Homies Helping Homies - South Philly Punks with Lunch - Old Pine Community Center

As I work to become a more informed resident of Philadelphia, I'm looking forward to watching PHILLY D.A., a docuseries from PBS that follows the first term of District Attorney Larry Krasner. Krasner won (again) in a landslide last night, and I'd love to learn more about how he drives reform here.

In 2024, I started a new annual tradition in our household: a complete rewatch of STATION ELEVEN on 11/11. In just a few days, we'll celebrate the second annual STATION ELEVEN marathon on November 11. Things will kick off at 11:00 AM ET, of course. Gotta embrace the gimmick.

ah, perhaps instead of pumping millions into endless factional infighting Dem donors could invest in making local Dem organizations genuine civic spaces that can reach people during and between elections

I keep checking, and it keeps being true: if you give Cuomo EVERY Sliwa vote, he still loses to Mamdani. That’ll save us from some exhausting Monday morning quarterbacking.

“Through it all, Krasner has positioned himself as the city's chief antagonist of President Donald Trump, referring to the Republican administration as "fascist" and vowing to prosecute federal law enforcement agents if he believes they break the law in Philadelphia.”

(to the tune of Eleanor Rigby) 🎶socialist muslim🎶

Referendum in Maine that would have made absentee voting nearly impossible has failed. Yay!

The only explanation I can imagine for the entirety of Cuomo’s campaign is that he has some kind of humiliation fetish. If true, I want to congratulate him on what I assume will be an epic nut tonight

Bill Ackman gotta be on the third draft of a tweet longer than Middlemarch right now

this genuinely feels like a moment history books will look back on where the Democratic Party was forced to either fix its hearts or die

Alright Dave Portnoy and Bill Ackman time to leave New York City and never return like you promised

I am… joy…. scrolling?

More good news out of Philadelphia.

Associated Press calls it for Mamdani.

Normal People Don’t Want This Shit is running away with the vote tonight

I’m just a small-town political scientist, & it’s still relatively early, but it appears that The Actual Democrats did not Need To Do any of the Things or Learn any of the Obvious Lessons that Ezra Douthglesias said they Must Do & Learn.