My wife is beautiful and brilliant and I’ve never deserved her, but also her shopping lists, usually written on random envelopes, look like they’re torn from House of Leaves.
Trump is intentionally and unapologetically empowering child predators. And, by extension, so is every person who voted for him. That is not an opinion. It is an irrefutable fact.
The Electric State, 2025 - ★★★
Note: The phrase “sad weirdos” is aimed, with love, at fellow users of Letterboxd, where this review was originally published.
I know I’m supposed to shit on this movie with the rest of you sad weirdos who watch things we hate for two straight hours.
And sure, you could have done much better giving Neal Blomkamp $10 million and a long weekend to make this.
And sure, I could have written better dialogue, especially for the sibling interactions at the supposed heart of the movie, on an all-night instant coffee bender.
And sure, it was a mistake to give Chris Pratt the only direction he obviously received, which was “Starlord, but less good.”
And sure, hiring Giancarlo Esposito and Colman Domingo to be low-res faces was a profound waste of profound talents.
But, I am not sorry to say, I enjoyed the movie. It could have, should have, been much, much, much better, given the quiet, transcendent horror-nostalgia of the source material. But as stuff-I-watched-while-folding-laundry goes, it could very easily have been worse.
Also published at: Letterboxd and Trakt
Disc golf dino
Perplexity ❤️ Ben Shapiro, I 🗑️ Perplexity
Trishla Ostwal, writing for AdWeek about Perplexity’s sponsorship of right-wing jackass Ben Shapiro:
The deal, structured as an annual partnership for 2025, marks Perplexity’s first native ad integration with a media outlet.
It’s not just that Perplexity chose to advertise with one of the loudest anti-American voices in the country, it’s that they chose to make this their first native ad integration with any media outlet.
I wondered, after reading the AdWeek piece, what Perplexity would have to say about Shapiro. It… did not go well for him:
There is evidence suggesting that Ben Shapiro frequently employs rhetorical techniques that can be characterized as deceptive or misleading. […] While Shapiro’s style resonates with his audience and is effective in certain contexts, these patterns suggest a reliance on rhetorical strategies that may prioritize winning debates over substantive engagement with complex issues.
While it’s nice that Perplexity is, at least as of this writing, honest about Shapiro’s intellectual chicanery, I deleted my Perplexity accounts and removed the app from my devices. I’m trying to be more proactive about listening to people—and companies—when they tell the world who they are.
It will take a while, for example, to excise Google from my digital life, but the process is underway, and I don’t want to start incurring that kind of techno-ethical debt with any new companies with demonstrably flimsy standards if I can help it.
(Via Mediagazer)
Gin Blossoms can still rock it out, and Follow You Down was one of the first songs I recorded from the radio to make a mix tape.
I hope Facebook’s executive team are investing in some quality knee pads… 🔗 bloomberg.com
Craig Ferguson: I’m So Happy, 2024 - ★★★½ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
The big laughs come and go, but I’m just a sucker for Craig Ferguson so I was smiling the whole time I watched I’m So Happy, available in full on his YouTube channel. I thought his mini-rant about context and not filming on phones was well done, especially because, in context, his “attack” on young millennials lands well in that context (though, at 41, I'm an elder millennial, so who really knows), and he extends a few olive branches qualifying the more critical stuff. He always knows when he is a bit too close to any given line for audience’s comfort and, like Bill Burr, seems to revel in it.
If anything, the special just makes me miss his show.
ProPublica is keeping track of the Musk lackeys systematically dismantling much of the undeniably flawed but unmistakably necessary federal bureaucracy. (via Heidi Li Feldman)
🔗 Ben Nacar is an incredible pianist who, I recently learned, does an annual video surveying the classical music that left copyright protection that year. The video he did this year features music from 1929, all of which is now in the public domain.
Kagi Search’s new Fair Pricing feature
The purveyor of Kagi, the indie search engine, on a new pricing feature:
In months where you don’t utilize any searches on your plan, we will automatically apply a full credit to your account for that month. This credit will be applied to your next billing cycle, effectively covering your subsequent month’s subscription at no additional cost.
I used the base plan in the past, and after I exhausted my 300-search monthly allowance in about three weeks, I swapped all my default search engines, with some frustration, back to Startpage.
I then proceeded to basically forget about it for the next month. I suspect I’m not the only one, and that’s probably what catalyzed this feature.
I have vacillated for a while between Kagi, Startpage, DuckDuckGo, and Brave Search – search engine comparison is the new to-do app comparison for my dopamine-starved brain. Kagi feels superior to the others, but even at $5, I’m just not sure the value sufficiently exceeds what I can do with the others, given the right ad blockers and keyboard incantations.
Akshay Kulkarni, Shaurya Kshatri and William Burr reporting at Canada’s CBC News:
B.C. Premier David Eby has announced immediate countermeasures in response to incoming U.S. tariffs, saying the province will take action to protect B.C. workers and businesses. […] As an initial response, Eby said he has directed the B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch to immediately stop purchasing American liquor from Republican-led “red states” and remove the top-selling brands from public liquor store shelves.
You love to see it.
Rusty Foster at Today in Tabs (https://www.todayintabs.com/p/illegal-and-separately-unconstitutional) has some good advice on how to approach what I refer to as the malevolent-jackass express.
https://joeross.me/2025/01/29/rusty-foster-at-today-in.html
Rusty Foster at Today in Tabs has some good advice on how to approach what I refer to as the malevolent-jackass express:
First, deny this regime your compliance whenever and wherever you can, in ways as large or as small as you are able. Defend your communities, especially the most vulnerable—trans people, queer people, the chronically ill, immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities. And above all, seek to depose any officeholder, political appointee, bureaucrat, or business leader who cooperates with this criminal administration, as well as any who fail to effectively oppose it, by any means available to you.
🔗 Mike Masnick is always a must-read, but his recent piece calling bullshit on Zuckerberg’s “move” of Meta’s moderation teams just proves how important his voice is as we all buckle up for a four-year ride on the malevolent-jackass express…
🔗 Mike Masnick is always a must-read, but his recent piece calling bullshit on Zuckerberg's "move" of Meta's moderation teams (https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/21/the-emptiness-of-zucks-promise-to-move-biased-trust-safety-from-california-) just proves how important his voice is as we all buckle up for a four-year ride on the malevolent-jackass express…
Revealing yourself to be a bigoted billionaire incel MAGA puppet is not the display of masculinity Zuckerberg thinks it is…
James Factora, quoting Zuckerberg at Them:
“Both of these things are good. You want feminine energy. You want masculine energy. You’re gonna have parts of society that have more of one or the other. I think that that’s all good. But I do think the corporate culture had swung toward being this somewhat more neutered thing.” And it’s not just the corporate world. The CEO also said that society “has become very, like, neutered, or emasculated.”
Ann Telnaes explains why she quit the Washington Post after more than fifteen years as an editorial cartoonist at the now-Bezos-owned newspaper:
The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.
Democracy ain’t dead yet, but it sure is starting to look under the weather…
▶️ I reviewed our digital subscriptions in preparation for the new year and one of the services I let go (at least for now) is YouTube Premium. It’s wild to me how shitty the ads are on YouTube. Google is probably the largest advertising provider in the world and YouTube ads are just pure garbage.
⁂▶️ I reviewed our digital subscriptions in preparation for the new year and one of the services I let go (at least for now) is YouTube Premium. It’s wild to me how shitty the ads are on YouTube. Google is probably the largest advertising provider in the world and YouTube ads are just pure garbage.