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You Can See Everything (2026)

It's true that this documentary managed to stay compelling - mostly - through its long running time. And it's certainly got interesting subjects. But the hype around it has gotten out of hand. To discuss it I'm going to wander into spoiler territory from the get-go, so if you plan to see it I strongly recommend you stop here at the rating:

6 eerily wide blue eyes out of 10

It was a brilliant move bringing Amanda Seyfried in. She added a whole second layer to the film, because years ago she acted as the lead character in a TV series about Elizabeth. There was a scene most of the way through this movie where she felt compelled to defend herself: She had just been told that Elizabeth resented her for portraying her the way she did, and her initial response was “You did that to yourself.” Being an actress is how she earns a living and defines herself, and that involves a certain amount of life in the public eye, which Elizabeth also appeared to embrace. To Amanda - who has taken her share of knocks in the public sphere - Elizabeth is a fellow public figure attempting to blame someone else for their reputation.

But then she falters a bit, showing some guilt over the idea that many people who saw the show believed it was the complete truth, and formed their opinions about Elizabeth through it. I get the impression she hasn't played many "fictionalized" roles based on living people, or she would have had a more holistic response for this. You can feel sympathy for the fate of someone, and understand how you might need to assert some creative control over how your performance of them is framed, while also sticking firmly to the point that you are a storyteller by trade and that fact is baked into your entire industry and goes without saying.

As a viewer, my own feelings about whether she bears any responsibility are influenced by the documentary's efforts to frame Elizabeth as a sympathetic character. It would be ridiculous to blame the television show for the public perception of Elizabeth, but it did add fuel to the fire by increasing her visibility, and in this documentary she conveys at best an indifference to being a public figure, and mostly despair over it. Perhaps just because it went so terribly for her, but perhaps - as the documentary implies - because she considered a public persona a distasteful necessity of her job, and trusted people around her to build it, and she and believes that (obviously naïve) trust was betrayed.

You can't outsource personal responsibility. That's not how it works.

Amanda makes another interesting point. She clearly dislikes Elizabeth’s husband, I think for the same reasons I do: He's a cold and emotionally twisted guy who is probably taking advantage of his partner's present weakness to enforce her commitment to him.

And yet, I feel like I can also understand why someone like Elizabeth would commit to this jerk. I get the sense that her inner life is in a constant turmoil and involves suppressing a great deal of fear. Maybe this turmoil is just present circumstances: She’s a convicted criminal, she owes more money than she could ever work to repay, and it seems like the entire planet has a rock bottom opinion of her. A decade of impending jail time and the idea of being torn away from your kids during their formative years is terrifying. I believe on one level she knows that she promoted ideas that were fraudulent, but it’s mixed in with a hundred other pieces of her identity swirling around in her head.

From her point of view, a very physically attractive and wealthy man who offers to champion and protect her, as well as start a family with her, despite the maelstrom in her head and the one roiling in the outside world, clearly presents as a very different prospect to her than to someone like me, and like Amanda Seyfried. Personally I'm more like Amanda: I have money, time, and self respect, and I can take care of myself. Protection from someone else holds very little appeal to me. But someone in Elizabeth's position? He probably looks like the only bright spot in a dark world.

There's also another thing to consider here: The possibility that this inner turmoil is something more consistent. She has more than a little sense of undiagnosed autism about her. She is also - let’s be frank - a very physically attractive woman who - regardless of whether she is entirely aware of it - is extremely used to captivating the attention of the people around her, especially men. If you're very pretty and you're prone to just smile and wordlessly stare straight into the eyes of whatever man is talking to you, you don't get a lot of negative feedback for that in the moment. Men like that. So as long as you're lucky or privileged enough to keep wandering amongst chivalrous or at least harmless men, you'll do fine, even if your social wiring is a little loopy.

Right up until something unspeakable happens to you...

Tron: Ares (2025)

I have a soft spot for Tron. Lots of people do. He fights for the users!

But none of the sequels have the tone of the first movie. They dive headfirst into being an arty computer graphics showcase, which is kind of redundant because the state of the art has raced ahead of the first film and stayed ahead ever since. As a kid, the visual effects really did impress me, but as an adult, the only reason I think about Tron is the main character and the way Jeff Bridges played him.

Kevin Flynn is not an action hero. He's a nerd, with a goofy sense of humor, and an extreme distrust of authority. When he gets dropped into the system, his response is to immediately mouth off at the fascistic enforcers around him in a mild and sarcastic way, and then bravely refuse to fight his fellow prisoners. When he escapes, there's a bit of dialogue with him and the characters - the "programs" - he's escaped with:

Flynn: It's time I leveled with you. I'm what you guys call a User.
Program: You're a User?
Flynn: I took a wrong turn somewhere.
Program: If you are a User... Then everything you've done has been according to a plan!
Flynn: Ha! You wish! Well, you know what it's like. You just keep doin' what it looks like what you're supposed to be doin', no matter how crazy it seems.
Program: Well, that's the way it is for programs, yes.
Flynn: I hate to disappoint you, pal, but most of the time, that's the way it is for Users too.
Program: Stranger and stranger.

This is everything I love about Tron. First, Flynn's saucy humor. Second, he believes the "real" world outside is just as crazy as the electronic one he's trapped in. Third, even without a plan, he wants to do the right thing. And then we tie it all up with a reference to Alice In Wonderland. ("Curiouser and curiouser...") Since the Grid is a system of insane rules, full of characters who are either following them or being crushed trying to defy them, the only right thing to do is ... be a hacker. And while you're subverting the system, and being all existentialist, don't forget to cop some attitude.

"Hey! Who you callin' program, program?!"

I say all this to make an unfavorable comparison. The protagonist in "Tron Legacy" (2005) was a humorless hunk, and the protagonist in "Tron Ares" is ... dang I don't even remember the protagonist. Like, at all. I wasn't expecting much more than a cool light snow and some nice new Nine Inch Nails music to underscore it, but even that got weird when there was an extended chase scene and Trent Reznor decided to start singing halfway through it. Look, bruh, you don't do that. Maybe you could get away with it, if the song ecomes a mega-hit independent of the movie, but otherwise it's too distracting because nobody in the audience knows the lyrics. That means it's effectively dialogue like in a musical -- but your lyrics don't make any sense, bruh.

Oh now I remember, it was sort of an ensemble thing, and one of the protagonists was a program trying to escape, played by Jared Leto. In a way, the main character was the program, but that makes the mistake the same as in Tron Legacy: Instead of a hunk, we've got a crash test dummy, but we get no emotions either way.

At least there were lots of chunks of legit-looking UNIX shell code visible on screens. Too bad there were no jokes. Perhaps in another 20 years we'll get another sequel that fails again to learn the right lesson...

*Sigh*. Four bits up out of ten.

Resident Evil (2026)

You could approach this as an entry in a long series, spanning many games and films, but you honestly shouldn't. Knowing the "lore" only serves to spoil the surprise. You'll be happy as long as you like your splattery horror survival movies seasoned with humor, like I do.

It's interesting that the main character freely admits he only knows about guns by playing video games, while appearing in a movie that deliberately switches to a roaming first-person camera at key moments, blending his point of view directly with that of the audience like first-person-shooters have done since their beginning 50+ years ago (see "Maze War", circa 1973.) The roots of "Resident Evil" almost demand something like this, but thankfully the director integrates the shots naturally with the story, instead of making some kind of "first person gaming mode" showcase sequence like that weird "Doom" movie from 2005. Dang that was ... weird. And not very good.

This movie is great though. It gets 7.5 wavy tentacles up out of ten!

Lee Cronins The Mummy (2026)

A weird mashup of "mummy" pop culture and a child abduction drama that's not smart enough to succeed. The trauma of the abduction is central to the story so it makes sense the director would get it on screen, but the audience is already two steps ahead, turning the first part of the film into an uncomfortable waiting game: We spend time learning to like some people, knowing they're due to be traumatized. Unless something else is happening at the same time it's the movie equivalent of doing chores.

In the next third, the audience is still ahead: We know the newly recovered kidnapping victim has something seriously wrong with her, but the family doesn't. So again, we watch some nice parents and children get tortured by something they don't see coming, with little else going on. Toenails get ripped off and skin gets flayed and other icky things happen and some sound engineers have fun cranking knobs. The husband does some flat-footed investigating but it goes nowhere. It's still a waiting game.

As an aside, why would a demon capable of summoning sandstorms in the middle of New Mexico, turning people into zombies, controlling the minds of all animal life for miles around, taking remote possession of people, and flying through the air like freaking Superman spend the first half of the film comatose in a chair?

In the third act the entire family is finally aware that the child is possessed, but the waiting continues: As the audience, all we've learned is that the only way to contain the monster is to have it jump into another innocent victim. So as blood spills and people stumble around in a magical dust-storm, we're waiting for the only thing that can happen: One of them will be claimed as the next vessel. The only logical choice is the husband. And suddenly we've waited for the entire stupid film to be over.

3 gooey toenails up out of 10.

Backrooms (2026)

It's cool that a shoddy mass-produced interior decoration trend from my youth has been turned into source material for uncanny horror fiction. It fits. Those spaces really were weird and wrong. And they were definitely most present in cheap furniture stores, so the setting for this movie is perfect.

I like that the movie did well, and I was mostly entertained all the way through, but also a bit disappointed. It's not avant-garde enough in its structure. I would have been much more impressed and entertained by something like a near-plotless first-person wandering through the increasingly twisted realm of the backrooms, running for a full 90 minutes, with the ideas just getting more and more insane. A deconstruction of the movie experience into something else. Or like, four 15-minute segments, with three breaks separating them, and each break is just a black screen with "DISCUSS" on it, plus a 2-minute timer. I know the director was probably thinking up all kinds of ways to screw with the experience but the studio system's money also came with lots of friendly but firm advice.

I look forward to their next project.

4.5 glitchy NTSC scanlines up out of 10. (Yeah, five is my threshold for "worth watching", and this movie just isn't quite.)

Spoiler territory:

The confrontational monologue at the end made no sense at all. It was like, “Your relationship with your wife has hollowed out to the point where you don’t want to be around each other anymore, but you’re still playing the male provider role for her because that’s too deeply ingrained in your personality, even though there are no kids involved and you owe her absolutely nothing. But the problem isn’t that you don’t have the guts to just ask her to leave, the problem is... You whine too much. If you didn't whine so much she would still like you. So man up.”

The only sensible statement that scene made, is that therapists have no idea what they’re doing.

Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

I enjoyed the first one, and the reviews promised more of the same, so I went looking for that. If you want the same, you'll find it.

The "estranged sisters" subplot was decently executed and there were a few inventive action moments, but the amoral rich antagonists were too cartoonish to work as satire while not quite skilled enough as comedians to be funny. In the end it barely cleared the bar for watchable, which is enough for me to give it:

5 extremely stained wedding gowns up out of 10.

The Housemaid (2025)

More of a thriller than a horror film, but who's counting?

Are you a fan of sexy people getting deranged and possibly murdered onscreen? Come right in! You spend the first half knowing there's another shoe ready to drop, and the director and actors manage to make such an impressive tap-dance with that first shoe that you don't feel like you're waiting.

Amanda Seyfried devours the scenery, apparently daring Sydney Sweeney to rise to the same pitch, and eventually she does. Meanwhile Brendon Sklenar ticks the box as "hunk" but never quite finds a way to lead us inside his character's head. We know he's a reference point for some fancy discussions about patriarchy but he doesn't really get to say anything for himself. A good performance nevertheless.

Oh and did I mention they're all sexy? I can't remember.

7 bug-eyed manic close-up shots out of 10.

(A note on perspective: I'm a "gen-X"-aged person from the Bay Area, raised on a diet of Monty Python, Stephen King, and Ducktales. Your own tastes may vary.)

Carrie (2026)

Mike Flanagan is a brilliant architect of horror on the medium-size screen, especially when he's re-interpreting other people's work. His "Haunting Of Hill House" series was a high water mark; hard to beat. This series comes in a solid second.

He does a good job building a contemporary story about social media around the bones of the Stephen King tale, drawing a lot of lines between the original story elements - religious austerity, the viciousness of young people, parents and kids fighting over independence - and a more expanded modern-day world, with room in it for other protagonists besides Carrie. In the middle you get a really nifty "witch trials" riff for example. Across eight episodes it does repeat itself a little, but by the end you're grateful for the extra time and are even interested in the larger picture the series starts to draw.

Personally, I was most impressed by the end of the seventh episode. You know there's a whole additional episode left where a lot of stuff is going to go down, but Flanagan draws all the lines together so elegantly with some unexpectedly aggressive editing that the last scene of the episode practically dares you to stop watching right there and just imagine the rest of the story for yourself, because you mostly know how it's going to go, and you know from the previous episodes that he was definitely not given a budget big enough to satisfy your appetite for action and mayhem.

So yes, when I continued to the eighth episode I was a bit disappointed. I wanted more action. It's painful for me to admit because I really admire Flanagan's understanding of horror direction, but he is just not a director of action. Rhythmic, emotionally engaging, and coherent action - especially with complex visual effects - is very hard to construct, and he's not the guy for the job even if they gave him the budget. So he went another way, and we're left pining for the glorious mayhem that could have been.

I still definitely recommend this series. And I'll drop in a parting thought here: For all the pain it's bringing, and will bring in the future, the rise of AI-generated digital slop is having one positive effect: It's teaching people all over the world that anything they see on their social media feed can be an utter fabrication, no matter how real and personal it looks. Everyone needs to learn this lesson, but especially young people. This is going to force them all to take their feeds a lot less seriously, and maybe even drive a few back into the real, physical world.

Seven rocks falling strangely slowly out of the sky out of ten.

Widows Bay (2026)

This show is weird for a couple of reasons. The biggest one being, you genuinely appreciate it more when you watch it a second time.

The first time through, the eccentricity of the comedic performances doesn't really register. The characters are well crafted and the script is often quite funny, but you're mostly following the plot and savoring the horror elements and atmosphere, so you don't notice. Then you come back and watch a scene again, and it strikes you: That was really, really silly.

The other weird thing is, the show follows a monster-of-the-week style, or more accurately horror-trope-of-the-week, while trying hard to knit an overall story in the end, and the two approaches get tangled instead of meshing. It's not a disaster, and either way it stays interesting, except for the last episode.

Keen-eyed watchers will figure out what the "big reveal" is well before then, and then sit around bored while the last episode teases it and dances around it like a soap opera revealing the results of a paternity test. It's a real letdown and it feels like the writers had a way to wrap up the entire plot but cut 20 pages out of the original script in order to make a hole for a second season instead.

I'll watch it when it arrives, but it better have more monsters-of-the-week, and good ones, or I'm bailing a few episodes in.

Six scribbled pages of genealogical research up out of ten.

Star City (2026)

This series exists because there's a nice opportunity to tell a complementary story to the alternate "space race" history presented in "For All Mankind", and also because the Soviet era has been having a cultural moment for a while, partly due to current geopolitical events and partly because the people who grew up in the 80's now have the spooky and inscrutable USSR tangled up with their sense of nostalgia for the pre-internet American suburbs. They - we - find it weirdly comforting to imagine fighting against an oppressive government that does all its oppression with typewriters, tape decks, stalking people on foot, and good old-fashioned physical threats and torture, instead of depressingly muscular and modern technologies like facial recognition on stoplight cameras and data mining our internet traffic.

It's also an underdog story, and a chance to tell a story about space exploration with a much stronger horror element, because our heroes are doing things on a shoestring budget and being forced into terrifyingly dangerous situations, compelled either by legitimate patriotism or - much more often - the heartless politics of the communist state.

At first the series tries pretty hard to stay realistic with the spaceflight technology, and tries hard to make us care about the various people being ground in the gears of the Soviet machine. Up in space it builds some truly lovely moments of tension and wonder. But the action on the ground strains credulity and then completely abandons it by the final episodes, and I confess I did do a little yelling at the screen.

Nevertheless, I'm on board for another season, because I really want more of those horror elements. I want to see the plucky and doomed cosmonauts who launched that insane Soviet mission to Mars, and find out how they battled a radiation leak and lost, leading to that humiliating rescue we saw in "For All Mankind". It would be like that novel "The Martian" except they don't actually science the crap out of everything -- they try their best and it doesn't work, and they wither and die in the harrowing emptiness of space.

("Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.")

Six and a half tiny spy microphones up out of ten.

Sherlock (2026)

A young Sherlock Holmes can be screwed up a whole lot more ways than it can be done right. It could be stagey and slow. It could be tangled in anachronisms. It could mistake chase scenes for detective work. It could do nothing to address the basic unbelievability of the original stories. It could present Sherlock as a complete person running around in a young body, rather than growing into the role. With so many ways to fail, I had low expectations for this.

It turned out to be a lot of fun. There were some confusing plot holes and the motivations of some key characters are either unclear or really stupid, but these flaws are easy to forgive because the show has the energy of an old swashbuckling pirate epic. It has élan.

It was hard to keep from binging the whole series in a day, but I'm glad I waited a while between episodes to puzzle over them, because the middle is frankly a lot better than the end, which dives into "evil mastermind" and "secret lab" tropes and makes no sense at all.

Still, I do recommend this. Don't think too hard about it, and enjoy the various references to the classic stories.

Six deerstalker hats up out of ten.

Pluribus (2025)

This series turned out to be a classic sci-fi interrogation of our up-to-the-moment distaste for AI, done in a stealthy manner using an only sort-of related premise. I don't want to spoil it for any potential viewers so I won't even describe the premise. It's worth seeing.

There is something that bothers me though: The episodic structure is not very good. The first episode is very snappy, and directed more like a film than a show, and sets a pretty high bar that none of the remaining episodes reach. In fact the effort keeps decreasing, until the writers are barely walking forward in each episode, let alone jumping over a bar. You keep watching because you want to know how the heck it turns out, or at least get more detail about the situation the characters are in, but dang -- episodes five through eight could have been sandwiched down into one, easily. That's annoying.

Five and a half mysterious radio signals up out of ten.

Gen V (2023)

This is a spinoff of "The Boys" -- a series I enjoyed for its whole seven year run, even if the payoff at the end was way too quick. The premise of that show is "What if there are superheroes but they're bad, and corporations are involved?" which is straight-up Gen-X catnip, and the premise of this spinoff is an equally easy sell: "What if the same thing, except the superheroes are horny and hapless college students instead?"

So you get various plot threads about challenging authority, building your own identity versus parents and idols, mastering your immature impulses (e.g. powers you can't control), and all that other young person stuff, plus lots of nifty visual effects conveying super-powered violence and horniness. It's pretty consistently entertaining.

There was some talk of continuing it past the second season, but the show wrote itself out of its own premise (the characters are all no longer in college) and with the conclusion of "The Boys" it seemed like the shared universe got smaller and less interesting. I'd love to have a good series continue forever, but two seasons of this show made a pretty good beginning and end.

Six-and-a-half size-changing women being tossed into drink cups or filling entire swimming pools out of ten.

Spriggan (2019)

I watched this because there is an older movie by the same name, based on the same run of comics, and I dug the character designs and the action in the movie. More of that, please!

It was nice to see so much more of the story, but it's like they took the same amount of quality and smeared it out across three times as many minutes. At the same time, it probably took way fewer hours to produce, given how much more of the effects and environments were obviously modeled by computer. Why pay an artist an hourly wage to draw dramatic swirls of cloud, rushing smoke, zippy arcs of electricity, explosions, et cetera, when you can do a few mouse-clicks instead? Well, because an artist tends to imbue them with feeling, if for no other reason than to make their own task less of a slog, and makes them interact meaningfully with the rest of the scene. That's not what happens here.

The artists who did this adaptation made choices that were consistently less interesting. Less interesting character designs, less interesting action, less interesting edits and framing... I was hoping for something more like the grounded movement and proportions of Akira, but instead I got big helpings of One Piece: Characters looking, moving, and talking in exaggerated ironic post-anime anime styles.

I admit, I haven't read the source comic, but -- did the characters in that loudly announce the name of the "special move" they are known for and about to perform, before performing it? Did they pause and deliver expository Wikipedia-style introduction monologues to their enemies before engaging in combat? Did they throw pouty temper tantrums and act brainless in one scene and then suddenly have human wits in the next, and get absolutely no blowback for this from anyone around them?

The best example of "less interesting" is Colonel McDougal, the telekinetic child. In the movie he actually looks like a child, with very menacing twitches to his expression that combine heartless malice with a child's sense of play.

In this series he looks like ... well, like Sonic The Hedgehog in human clothes.

The dialogue absolutely does not help either. His motivation seems to be "I'm a big meanie", and you don't even care enough to ask why.

Four out of ten loudly announced super punches up.

Hokum (2026)

I knew nothing going in, except the pedigree of the writer/director, which was enough. Interesting main character, and an interesting twist early in the film. Midway through I started asking myself a lot of incredulous questions about the architecture of the place where most of the story happens, but the rest of my brain said "shut up, I'm having a good time!"

A nicely contained ghost and murder story - not unique enough to be legendary but still very worthwhile - that manages to build a couple intervals of almost unbearable tension, from a director with a strong grasp of the language of horror cinema. Absolutely my cup of tea. I went back and re-watched about half of it as soon as the credits finished.

Seven-and-a-half creepy mechanical clock decorations up out of ten.

Send Help (2026)

It's all over the movie trailer: The main character washes up on an island with a man she hates, and they try to get along. With everyone knowing that going in, Sam Raimi needed to work hard to make the lead-up worth watching, and he knew it. Imagine the rumble of 200 people in the theater simultaneously tapping their feet with impatience as they wait for the island part to start.

He did a pretty good job editing it down to just the necessary pieces of character development, and to my delight, he started throwing in the kind of playful camera acrobatics and gross-out flourishes that I loved in his Evil Dead films, and kept using them through the whole movie. (Fountains of vomit and snot in real life would be harrowing. On a theater screen? Comedy gold.)

I liked how this wasn't just a rote "wronged woman gets revenge on shitty men" story. The men are definitely shitty, but there's more going on. It's a good time at the cinema and I look forward to Sam getting even more playful in the future.

Seven jets of lime-green vomit up out of ten.

M3gan (2023)

Better than I expected. I was figuring it was a jump-scare creepy doll schlock-o-rama, but the central conflict about parenting and developmental psychology was a surprise. I had no idea it was written by the same screenwriter as Malignant.

In fact, though the tin is labeled "horror", this is more like a high-concept sci-fi treatment, and it's only gotten more relevant in the two years since it came out.

Seven trips into the uncanny valley up out of ten.

M3gan 2.0 (2025)

From the opening frame you can tell it's a completely different kind of movie. Instead of a dark house, or a lab, or even the face of some main character, you get an exterior shot zooming over a desert and the subtitle: "SOMEWHERE NEAR THE TURKISH / IRANIAN BORDER".

Yeah, it's pretty disorienting. This is no longer horror at all, but an action movie, wearing the skins of the previous movie's antagonist and main characters. I assume it's a victory lap by the studio, based on the popularity of M3gan. The philosophizing is muddled, the plot is composed of holes, and halfway through there's a heel turn that makes so little sense it goes below zero into negative quantities of sense, pulling everything around it into a vortex of confusion.

But we get to see M3gan do some more dancing, so, yay? Also there's one joke that happens at the end of a ventilation shaft that actually made me laugh out loud. One laugh is better than zero!

Four fake CGI sets claiming to be in Palo Alto up out of ten.

V/H/S Halloween (2025)

Another entry in the found-footage anthology horror series, giving unknown directors and writers a chance to strut their stuff on the medium-size screen. It's been diminishing returns for years now, but I gave it a curious look.

The stories feel as though they were designed in a 4chan comment thread: Lots of "and then this crazy thing happens, for no reason!" Some of my favorite horror-comedy films could be described like that: The first two Evil Dead films, Poltergeist, Gremlins II... But the difference here is the direction. It's hard to keep track of what you're building so it turns into "gross in a fun way" instead of just "gross", and without a good story to tell, you've got to hit that "fun" target squarely.

But hey! Lots of action and camera shake and cheap horror gross-out moments! None of these directors had the command of pacing and visual grammar that a true horror film needs, though Paco Plaza gets closest in his segment "Ut Supra Sic Infra."

4 suspiciously labeled candies up out of 10.

Frankenstein (2025)

It's got frozen wastes, fairy-tale forest, a big stone Art Deco castle, winged angels, plenty of blood and lace, and the usual Guillermo del Toro touches of sadness and madness. I enjoyed it, especially when it tried to be intimate rather than expansive, but I could tell the director was pulling his punches with the horror elements in order to please a Netflix four-quadrant audience. Del Toro has made other films that are way more visceral and dreamlike. But, I'm glad he's getting buckets of money and having fun.

Five battery terminals sticking out of a neck, out of ten.

Freaky Tales (2024)

The first 30 minutes are a love letter to the Oakland music scene in the 80's. It's always fun to see pieces of your childhood culture lionized on the big screen, so I stayed engaged even though both those early chapters didn't have interesting conflicts or stakes. I mean, some cartoonish nazis get beat up: Wow? Some underdogs enter a competition and everything goes really well for them: Wow?

I do regret, though, that I didn't catch this when it was screening near my house. It was playing for a while at the Grand Lake theater. The crowd inside must have been electric. Too much work recently...

The second half of the film continues with the conventional drama, but the stakes are higher. Eventually you reach a point where you're waiting for a grand finale of some kind that will tie it all up, and getting worried it will never arrive. Thankfully it does, and the action and bloodshed almost overcompensate. I mean, I would show the first half of this movie to my non-horror-fan friends, confident they would enjoy it and not be too disturbed. But they wouldn't like the last 20 minutes.

On a more personal level: I didn't expect the movie to rise to this, but it would have been amazing if the actors and the dialogue actually reflected my memory of the way young people were in the 1980's in the Bay Area. They didn't quite. The writers managed to filter out all the modern slang and behavioral tics from the dialogue but they didn't manage to introduce relevant slang to replace it, and the young actors - bless their modern hearts - were uniformly not quite ... what's the word I need here? Not quite scrappy enough? Not outwardly profane, sarcastic, and bitter enough? We were living in a time when the Baby Boomers owned everything, no one cared about our fates, and no one was watching -- including our peers. That meant we were much more comfortable talking like complete and total bastards to each other in public, in a casual way that a modern young audience would probably find very uncomfortable or even disturbing. To get a little spoilery, the hip-hop battle scene with its brutal and unapologetic misogyny was period-appropriate, but the rest of the screenplay was curiously denuded.

But that's fine, really. The film would have cleared a very high bar if it had actually rung true to me as a portal into the souls of 1980's youth.

Worth seeing! Six punk wristbands up out of ten.

Non-horror sidebar

Avatar: Fire And Ash

How is it, as entertainment? Pretty good. Certainly exciting, though very little gets resolved. The action is staged beautifully. The visual effects are absolutely impeccable. There's a weird middle segment where we learn about a new villain character, and that part feels like its own thing, but the two hours that surround it are more of what we got in the second movie: "Gaia: The Ride."

There's something about this mash-up of biocomputing, big grey Tonka-truck vehicles, people connecting with cables, and the fascistic merging of military and corporate culture that feels eerily familiar. It all fits together ... in the sci-fi universe of the 1970's. I'm hard to impress, and the visual effects certainly impress me, but this is an action film at heart, not sci-fi. So I guess it's okay that I'm not impressed by the sci-fi elements, because those feel downright stale.

And since I live partly online, I guess I should say something now about how this film - and series - are received there.

It’s strange to me that hip intellectual types are still (after 15 years) accusing James Cameron of reinforcing a racist stereotype by creating an anti-colonialist story. I recently read one self-important essayist who claimed that because James Cameron is a "boomer" (a term that didn't exist when the first Avatar film came out), his mind is stuck in old western stereotypes about Native Americans. But it’s a story about humans displacing aliens, and the humans are clearly the villains, and they lose. If the audience is keying into some physical traits of the aliens and concluding that they are coded to represent a specific ethnicity, then it's worth asking: What's the movie saying about this ethnicity?

What would the internet have thought if the flat-nosed dreads-having Na'vi had invaded Earth, and a mostly-white human cast had bravely fought them off and won? Would the pounding of keyboards be louder? I don't know, and that's why I'm skeptical of that take. Is the lesson here that, if you're going to portray humanoid aliens from another place, you'd better make sure they're coded as white people underneath the latex and makeup, because otherwise you're equating "non-white" with "other"? The result of that would be ... non-white actors hiding their ethnicity in order to work in sci-fi. Is that really a corrective, or even progressive move?

Or perhaps the lesson is, if aliens are going to be portrayed on screen as resembling a certain ethnicity - whether good aliens or evil aliens - they better be portrayed by actors, writers, and a director of the implied ethnicity. (Stay in your lane, people.) If so, well ... the Na'vi are blue. Are they Native Americans, or are they Black people, or is it somehow worse that James Cameron is not being specific in which ethnicity he is "othering", because then we don't know who to expect in the cast list?

After swirling around in that for a while, I've ended up with a different lesson: The real problem is, most Americans have a very Euro-centric idea of what ethnicity even is, and their own worldview is too limited to comfortably embrace something that is not clearly Black or Asian or Hispanic or Indian - or even "white" - as they understand it, so when you blur those lines in fictional representation, it makes them uncomfortable. Then they write virtue-signaling essays online, trying to kick James Cameron in the balls.

Meanwhile everyone else goes to the theater and watches another 3-hour episode of "Gaia: The Movie" to the tune of another 2 billion dollars, and then three hours after that, they forget completely about it.

I'm pretty sure James Cameron's balls have been removed and sealed inside a chamber with walls 300 feet thick, made entirely of MONEY. We can kick all we want. He absolutely does not care.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Five wavy organic networking cables up out of ten.

At Apple's latest "developer conference" keynote (which is not really a keynote for the event anymore but a slick, scripted, focus-grouped and effects-laden mini-movie made primarily for recorded consumption later) the company extolled their upcoming feature: A digital assistant integrated with your phone that allows you to compose emails and messages that "sound like" you but actually aren't you.

Here's the scene: A relentlessly cheerful and affluent bro in a polo shirt asks Siri to "compose a message" to his friend, inviting him to a party, and casually mentions that it "examines all my previous messages and generates one that matches my style."

(It's the offhand delivery that really gets me. "Oh, by the way, we’re poisoning the whole idea of communication between humans being distinguishable from machines. Just completely poisoning it, right before your eyes. And it's mandatory.")

Cut to the next scene: Some other guy is busily eating a sandwich. His phone is sitting next to him. Nothing happens.

Cut back to the first guy. His phone dings. “... And it looks like my friend has read my message and replied with a nice note saying he’s busy but we should catch up soon. Great!”

Cut to second guy again. He scowls, and stops chewing long enough to say to the camera: “I told my phone to ignore that bastard Chad. I hate that guy. He's always throwing stupid parties.”

Okay, so that's not how the scene goes. But it's how it should.

We are now walking into a realm where everything on the smartphone, including pictures of ourselves, including images taken of us by others at private events we just attended or are even still attending, could trivially be edited or fabricated. The promise the device delivered - that we can rely on it to archive our collective lives with fidelity - has been broken.

We all knew subconsciously that we never had a way to truly prove that photos, message history, voice notes, or other records in the digital realm were accurate representations of real-world history, and we relied on sheer volume of data to create a sense of truth: Fabricated things could stick out because angles, timestamps, shadows, voices, writing styles, or other small details would be inconsistent with the larger digital record. Now we are all being invited to dismember that consistency in real-time.

The Russian state keeps its people subdued into a state of apathy and helplessness by drowning every truth in a sea of alternate interpretations. Even if the alternates are easily debunked, there are just too many for a sensible skeptic to deal with. When you accept the idea that you can never know the truth, you are forced to live life without it.

The phone in your pocket is the digital window you rely on, for seeing pieces of reality separated from you by distance or time. How will life change for you, as those pieces - political, historical, scientific, personal - get more melted and twisted for you personally, based on what the machine - or the company driving it - believes you want to see? Or just what the highest bidder wants you to see?

Once you're thoroughly used to talking to machines with faces and voices, how long before you answer a video call from someone you know, and have a whole conversation with their talking face on the screen, only to discover later that the actual person is off doing something else, or even asleep, and the only interaction they got from you was a two-line text summary of the conversation, which they ignored?

How many times does something like that need to happen before you take a serious step back from living a digital lifestyle?

This is all right on time, from my point of view.

This sort of mechanism will be generalized in the coming years. It will give rise to a new kind of plumbing between computer systems that is based on LLMs constantly parsing the output of other LLMs. Imagine the internet being a series of tubes, and now instead of data in small, well-defined packets moving through them as machines talk to each other, the traffic is chunks of semi-human-readable dialogue.

This gives rise to a new kind of software development, where APIs with discrete endpoints are shoved down into the substrate and made invisible, and instead developers will mostly use dialogue to draft procedures that output data in the form of documents, which are then exchanged between agents.

Software development as a concept will become a more vague and flexible thing. It will simultaneously become accessible to many, many more people, and also much more prone to error. The proportion of careers in the software industry will change: The number of people who are the equivalent of car designers and manufacturers will stagnate, and the number of people who are the equivalent of car mechanics and fleet maintenance workers will increase. You won't hire someone to build you a car, you'll hire someone to tune up and repair the car you built for yourself with the help of LLM-based tools and agents, and then set loose on your information or into your digital ecosystem, where it has somehow gone slightly wrong. Time to call in some experts.

That's how my career will change shape, over the next five years or so. Since I already know a lot about the stuff happening under the hood of the "car", I'll be fine as long as I'm willing to adapt. I don't think I'll be out-competed before my retirement age, because the amount of detail I know also has a limited shelf life. There's no reason for most up-and-coming software developers to learn it. It will be irrelevant to most of them. The industry treadmill will roll on.

(A note on perspective: I'm a "gen-X"-aged person from the Bay Area, raised on a diet of Monty Python, Stephen King, and Ducktales. Your own tastes may vary.)

It: Welcome To Derry

Autumn was a good season for this show but instead I binged it all in January. (I struggle with waiting a week between episodes. So instead, I wait much longer!)

The theme of a mid-20th-century white American town slowly revealing its rotten racist and sexist core has gotten pretty tired at this point. Back when I was a child in the 80's I was already surrounded by Baby Boomers who would happily talk about the state of open rebellion they lived in. The good news here is that the show's writers seem to be aware their setting is a sort of double throwback - a memory of a memory - and have deliberately ripped out a lot of the broader context (external events, other places) compelling viewers to take all the anachronisms, unreal lighting, and CGI wide shots that mimic 1962 as set-dressing for what is really a fairytale. So if people don't act quite right and things seem unreal, it's all part of the show.

I rolled with it, and none of the episodes dragged, though it was sometimes frustrating to wonder if a particular episode was going to spend more time mucking about with scary one-off encounters or push the overall plot forward. I like a "monster of the week" format. (Anyone raised on the animated Ghostbusters cartoon would.) But if you have questions at the end it's nice to know whether they'll be answered. For example, the first episode unveils a scary looking demon baby creature and a bunch of callbacks to the movie The Music Man, establishing an interesting theme, and I was looking forward to some kind of explanation or elaboration on both. Neither appeared.

I also confess I might have an unreasonable dislike for writing that establishes rules and then ignores them. The monster in this series apparently causes people to hallucinate their worst fears, in order to feed off their reaction. It can do this from any distance, and at any time that’s convenient for the plot. But it can also decide to climb out of the sewer system and walk around in person, gouging out eyeballs and tearing off heads and cutting people in half, while also changing shape and teleporting randomly around the environment. It can have its head blasted clean off by gunfire at close range, and it will simply grow a new head. It has powers like a Greek god. And at the same time ... it is apparently also extremely stupid.

(I'm at the edge of real spoiler territory here, so be warned that now I'm walking right in...)

This monster has been confined for at least 300 years, and the instant it realizes it can break free from its prison, it doesn’t go running for the gap in the fence, but instead collects a long slow wagon train of children. Then at the end of the same episode, it becomes clear that the creature can grow wings and fly, rather than loping along the ground like a slowpoke. Why didn’t it sprout the damn wings from the beginning? Because the writers thought the end was kinda boring and wanted a Dragonball-Z-style "final form" I suppose?

Still, I was engaged through all eight episodes, and that's pretty good. Six creepy red balloons up out of ten.

Alien Earth (2025)

The titular Alien - the one we associate with the franchise anyway - is almost an accessory to the story here. You could potentially swap out some other alien creature with an entirely different lore, and it would be the same story. But that's always been the case with the franchise: From the first sequel onward, it's been "X but the Alien is involved", where X is some new genre exercise. Which is good, because aside from a cool aesthetic and a sneaky reproduction cycle, there isn't much to the creature itself.

To be specific: When Alien became Aliens, the style and story went from slow-burn horror to action adventure. Alien III jumped a track onto apocalyptic survival. Alien Resurrection told a Frankenstein story, Alien Covenant was Lovecraftian muck-about in the ruins of the elder gods, and recently Alien: Romulus looped back to horror (after waiting an acceptable 45 years), which I suppose is a repeat, but it's pretty well done so fans don't care. (I know I didn't. In particular I enjoyed the sound design, so much so that I made a mostly dialogue-free remix of it for use as background while writing.)

But we're talking about Alien Earth here, the recent television series. And I know it's supposed to be this show's cool new genre flavor, giving it a reason to exist next to the other Alien stuff, but I find the Peter Pan and Lost Boys angle with this particular Ripley to be ... kind of a snooze. Apparently each Alien/Prometheus gig always needs to find a vaguely French fairytale pixie lady as a Sigourney Weaver replacement, and was that really necessary here? I suppose it attracts eyeballs...

Speaking of eyeballs, the Alien is not really the most compelling monster here. That would be a new, smaller alien, little more than an eyeball with legs. Mega-creepy. I would definitely watch a show built around that thing. Also in play is Vyvyan Basterd as an avuncular butler, buttle-ing for a "tech CEO who is actually a sociopath child" stereotype. And, in the middle of the series, you get a self-contained episode aboard a spaceship that is a delicious throwback to the original Alien. So if you're not into Wendy and the Lost Boys, skip to episode five.

Like I said above, I enjoy a "monster of the week" kind of show, and if this show was built that way I would rate it higher. Watching Wendy explore her relationship with the other androids and the Alien was a lot less interesting than the writers thought.

Six creepy creeeeeeepy eyeballs up out of ten.

The Residence (2025)

The most emphatic thing I can say about this series is that the film editors went absolutely bananas, and happily, it works. Sometimes you get a hundred cuts in a single minute of screen time, but there is enough thought behind them to make the barrage worthwhile.

The Residence is a drawn-out cozy murder mystery, scripted like a farce, full of rat-a-tat dialogue and broad acting, and it manages a sustained energy over eight episodes without getting overwhelming. Before I started watching it I was concerned that a single mystery wouldn't be enough material to work with, when other detective shows finish a new case every hour, but the complexity of the semi-historical setting and the wide array of interconnected characters drawn from the source novel fills the running time admirably. Someone is always arriving, arguing, lying, looking shifty, explaining their whereabouts, et cetera, and the detective has an audience surrogate sidekick to explain things to when the plot gets thick, so you never feel like you need a break.

In fact, when it does slow down to take a few character-building detours, you'd expect those scenes to be a welcome rest, letting you recover your breath before the investigation plunges forward again ... but instead I found myself just waiting impatiently for each detour to finish so I could gather more clues. That might seem like a strike against this show but I have a hard time saying so. It's not that the asides are boring exactly, it's that you know something more interesting is waiting for you afterward. Like ordering dinner at Fenton's Ice Cream parlor.

Partway though the mystery you will grow suspicious that you're being led into a "Murder On The Orient Express" situation, and the thought will annoy you. Thankfully the writer doesn't go that way. This series will drift out of your head quickly when it's done, but you'll have a good time watching it.

Seven-and-a-half pairs of binoculars out of ten.

Creature commandos (2024)

James Gunn jumped his own shark way back in 2006, with the movie Slither. That movie is an amazing mash-up of practical gore, dumb action fun, and a surprisingly effective exploration of multiple deeply uncomfortable topics - for example, addiction and eating disorders - in fine horror tradition.

After that he started making the same thing over and over: A ragtag group of smart-mouthed anti-heroes must fight through their differences while facing down one or more depressingly one-dimensional villains. And so, Guardians Of The Galaxy (1, 2, and 3), The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker, and now Creature Commandos. In fact, if you count Scooby-Doo and Scooby-Doo 2, he was doing this before Slither, so perhaps it's just his niche and he likes being in it.

This series has the same flippant approach to dramatic stakes, and the same selective disregard for basic physics in the action scenes like everything else he's written and directed in the last 20-ish years. I watched it and it mostly held my attention and I could tell there were things happening that were supposed to be jokes, so it was good while I was on the couch recovering from getting five vaccinations at once, but eh, I dunno. Go watch Ducktales or The Venture Brothers instead.

4.5 out of ten super-duper-duper radioactive limbs that can melt stone but otherwise have no effect on living things up.

Fallout (2024)

Game-to-series adaptations are rare, and it's fun to see how they make the leap from interactive fiction to screenplay. What's too awkward or nuanced to bring across? What's going to alienate viewers who haven't played the game? Is there even enough drama in the source material to work with?

That last dilemma is why (in my opinion) the Halo and Castlevania adaptations feel simultaneously arbitrary and lacking in depth: The games they draw from are all about action, and the lore is window-dressing, meant to be dismissed between rounds of shooting and jumping. This is awful source material for writers, whose job is to tell a story with dramatic conflict and neat ideas, with the action as the window-dressing instead. Beyond the title card, the existing fan base is actually a disadvantage: What do players of the game want, going in? Probably nonstop action, but if that's all they get, they'll be dissatisfied. By the end of the first episode they'll say "I'd rather just be playing the game."

Games in the role-playing category have a better chance. There's plenty of drama and lore, and players aren't expecting an actiontastic explodaganza. Fallout seems like a great choice. So why doesn't it hold together? Because it has the opposite problem: There's too dang much drama and lore to cover!

This is obvious from the first episode, which kicks off four separate stories with four (almost) entirely different sets of characters. When the episode finished I was immediately worried that I would be splitting time across four separate histories that didn't intersect, like I was playing various sequels of the game Fallout, even though I was only interested in two of them. (The vault story felt like great satire, and the ghoul was a badass. The knights made no sense and seemed like a downer.)

Thank goodness they all did intersect in due time. Yeah, it felt really contrived how they did, but it was interesting, and that always matters more than anything else. From there it was a bunch of episodes combining a MacGuffin hunt, a mysterious tragedy, and lots more vault-centered satire. Sometimes the series is playing the apocalyptic survival straight, sometimes it's mocking the whole idea, as well as the idea of it being appealing. Either way it stays sharp, and thankfully it resolves enough conflict by the end that I didn't feel cheated by the cliffhanger.

As I post this, I just finished season 2, and I'm glad it came back for another round. After shoving too many parts onto the workbench in the first season, the second season takes time fitting them together.

Seven and a half radioactive axolotl up.

Outlaw Star (1998)

I missed this anime back in 1998 when it appeared. At the time it sounded like a knockoff of Robotech, and a less stylish version of Cowboy Bebop, so I didn't put much effort into finding it.

It got a Bluray release a while back, so it looks way better than any version I could have seen in 1998, which would have been a second-hand VHS dub played in a cluttered dorm room. The transfer is top-notch and you can really get into the whole hand-drawn pastel 70's space aesthetic. But really, what's interesting is how a goofy sci-fi anime from 27 years ago stands up as viewing today.

Not very well. To a modern eye it's composed entirely of tropes that have been so exercised they can only be interesting when they're subverted, or done with obvious self-awareness. The young male hero with an attitude, the magical MacGuffin girl everyone fights over, the tight-lipped ronin companion, the OP antagonist who is Just Plain Evil, the homosexual supporting character who exists to cause gay panic in the protagonist... Catgirls, giant space robots, a Star-Wars-style transplanting of the Wild West out into the galaxy... Done to death, I'm afraid, before or after the era of this show. The sexism was also uncomfortably dated in its own era.

But those 70's-style space backgrounds! Sumptuous. And though the show is a tonal mess, there are some fun one-off episodes late in the series that almost make it worthwhile. Though alas, not enough to run the whole set.

Four spazzy catgirl tails up out of ten.

This year I am 50. That's simultaneously very old, and still young enough to get plenty done. I can feel my body really complaining on some days. The sleep apnea is the worst of my troubles. Still, on a relative scale, I'm pretty lucky.

In this milestone year I present the following:

The Apology List, Episode 1

Each of these things is something from my past that I regret and wish I could apologize for, but for some unfortunate reason an apology is out of reach. The list is partly about unburdening myself, and partly a chance just to think about how behavior and wisdom evolve over a lifetime. I do of course have other regrets, many far worse. These are the ones that I can put on a public list.

They're not in any particular order.

The Pool

Approximate year:

1985

Person:

Our next-door neighbor, one house up the street. I think her name was Jeanie. Her property had lush landscaping that had grown a bit wild, and somewhere in there was a swimming pool, which had been drained and lain empty for years. The pool was built on a hill and had a small pumphouse below, lost in foliage.

Incident:

One day I wandered into the pumphouse and discovered the pump. I was fascinated by the wires and metal bits, so I returned later on with a screwdriver and took it apart, and stole the motor and carried it home. My parents realized what happened and apologized to Jeanie. She graciously said I could keep the parts. I never spoke to her about it personally.

Reason I can't apologize:

I no longer live at that house, and she no longer lives at the one next door. No one has her contact information, and she is likely deceased.

What I would say:

"I'm sorry I destroyed your pool motor. Thank you for handling it so graciously. I've lived in a lot of neighborhoods now, and I don't think I've ever had neighbors who would respond so well to a kid sneaking onto their property and doing such vandalism. More likely it would result in a furious and threatening rant, police action, and years of resentment. You were truly a great neighbor to a weird and unpredictable kid."

The Industrial Fan

Approximate year:

1999

Person:

An adorable young lady deep into industrial music, arriving as a freshman at UCSC.

Incident:

She had short brown hair and wore a lot of black, and like many people who were in the goth/industrial scene of the time, it was clear that sweetness and cynicism were fighting an epic war inside her head, and she needed allies. She was thrilled to meet people who were into her music, and I could sense she also had a crush on me after we bonded over Skinny Puppy albums. We had friends in common and would often run into each other.

One day she ended a conversation with me by saying "Brap on".

"What?" I said, confused.

"You know ... Uh ... 'Brap', like Nivek Ogre. 'Brap on'."

"Oh! Hah! Yeah, definitely! Brap on!" I said, grinning madly. I'd been too slow to get the reference.

She looked horribly embarrassed. I could read her thoughts on her face: "Oh my god he thinks I'm absolute idiot."

I wasn't fast enough on my feet to correct the impression. She turned and walked quickly away. We never spoke again.

Reason I can't apologize:

I never got a contact email for her outside of the UCSC system, and I've forgotten her name. With luck, she's forgotten completely about me.

What I would say:

"Sorry that exchange went so badly. The truth is, I wasn't used to being in a situation where my approval mattered to anyone else. In fact, I was an idiot in general, for a bunch of reasons during that time, and you would have made a great friend and we could have had plenty of fun conversations, but it might have actually been a blessing that we never dated."

"Dud"

Approximate year:

1983

Person:

My father.

Incident:

When we would greet each other around the house, I would sometimes call him "dud" instead of "dad". In my head I thought it was a fun little tweak to the word that reminded me of Milk Duds and being a "stud" and other good things. What did not occur to me, was that "dud" had another more obvious meaning: A defective explosive. So it was like I was calling my Dad an unexploded bomb, or more generally, a failure.

I probably did it a dozen times. He never questioned me about it. Did he think I was insulting him, and he just swallowed it rather than getting angry? Or did he somehow intuit from my tone and expression that it was positive?

It never even occurred to me to ask, until many years later when I suddenly remembered it.

Reason I can't apologize:

I had opportunities to but it never came up. Now he's gone.

What I would say:

"Whoah dang, I can't believe I didn't realize how stupid and inflammatory that sounded! Thanks for taking it in stride, though I do kinda wish you'd asked me about it."

The Art Teacher

Approximate year:

1988

Person:

The nice art teacher in Santa Cruz that my parents took me to for lessons.

Incident:

I was fascinated by a transparent plastic curtain rod that she had in the back yard as a garden decoration, and at the end of a lesson she let me keep it. There were two other boys present during that session, who were brothers. We were all hanging around on the back porch waiting for our parents to pick us up, and the teacher was inside.

The boys saw the curtain rod. One of them wanted to hold it, but I said no. We argued about it. The other brother saw this, and tried to wrestle it out of my hands. I held on. The first brother got involved. I pushed the curtain rod down onto the porch and added my knee on top, trying to augment my two hands against their four. They pulled upward and yelled at me.

Fearing the curtain rod would break, I decided to run away to the other side of the garden, so I abruptly reversed my effort and pulled it upright. On the way up it smacked the first brother in the face and he let go. Crying, he ran into the house, and the other brother followed. I went to the other side of the garden and sat down, unsure what to do.

A little later it was time for our parents to pick us all up. The art teacher brought me inside and sat me down, and gave me an explanation of what was happening.

The two boys had told their parents they'd been attacked by me without provocation. Their parents had declared that they didn't want to bring their kids to art classes if I was going to be there.

The teacher was familiar enough with me to know I wasn't the kind of person to start a fight, but she hadn't seen the incident so she had no way of defending me to the parents. She said she was on a tight budget and couldn't afford to lose two clients, and the parents had also threatened to tell all the other parents about me and tell them to keep away. So she was giving in to their demands, and I could no longer take classes from her.

For a very long time after this incident I just felt sad, because I'd let the nice art teacher down by getting in trouble. I'd really enjoyed the lessons and wished they could continue. If I'd just let the brothers have the dang curtain rod, even though I was pretty sure they would keep it, that could have happened.

Eventually I saw from the perspective of an adult that she'd left me unsupervised with two kids who were strangers to me, and they were sibling boys who behaved very differently as a pair when together. Perhaps it was a recipe for conflict. Also, while those two boys had been outrageous liars, the real tragedy was that their parents had been bullies, by threatening harm unless their demands were met. The teacher had been caught in the crossfire. This is one of those incidents where I felt there was less to apologize for as time went on.

Reason I can't apologize:

I'm pretty sure the art teacher is deceased. With luck, no one else remembers this incident anyway.

What I would say:

"Sorry I was a factor in that mess. I've always had a stubborn streak, and I didn't get along with almost all the other boys my own age. If I'd been smarter I would have left the curtain rod and run inside, to get an adult back into the situation. I hope your art classes continued and you managed to make enough money that you could be more choosy, and didn't have to placate obnoxious parents any more."

At the suggestion of nephew Nick, I have consolidated all my mixes into a wee gallery.

That is all! Carry on having a good Sunday.

We found Mira in 2005.

If I hadn't been in the back yard at the right time, I wouldn't have heard her blind cries from the other side of the fence, as she dragged herself out from under the neighbor's house with failing strength.

La and I were pretty sure that without the immediate rescue, Mira wouldn't have survived the night. If a hungry animal hadn't taken her, the cold would have. She would have had one miserable day outdoors for her tiny life, and that would be it.

( Intead she got... )

In about five years, our culture will discover a new social problem, where groups of (mostly terminally-online) people socially engage with each other and the outside world the same way they engage with the AI bots they use for their hobbies and careers.

Think of it less like a communication style and more like a mental disorder. It will go beyond simple speech patterns and tactics; these people will start to see other people as chatbots, and treat them in the same disposable, exploitable way.

This will be the thing that the current crop of new parents will panic about in their children.

I'm willing to bet it will mostly be a "young man" problem, because that group is historically a combination of:

1. Cynical about social interaction.
2. Not wise.
3. Hyperfocused on their work (because they need to survive and don't know how yet.)

Treating other people like chatbots will also have an ugly resemblance to a role young men are already vulnerable to, that women are all-too-familiar with: Being a pick-up artist. Say the right things to "game the system", and the reward is yours. Then hit "delete" and move on. Or, if it's not working, retreat back into your reassuringly pliant community of robots. Real people are "hard mode." Who wants that?

Imagine a person who was born without the ability to hear. Ask yourself “what does their interior monologue sound like?”

You can tax your imagination trying to answer this, but you can also do another thought exercise that might explain why the question is a trap:

Imagine a new species of animals that communicate with each other through wireless signals, broadcast directly from one mind to the next, without anything visible or audible occurring. To be clear, this is not like using a telephone. They're not sending the sound of spoken words on some other frequency. The information that passes between them has no real equivalent in audible sound at all. You could try recording it and then playing it back as audio but it would sound like garbled hash to your ears.

Imagine that the animals call this activity “wiring”, and they can understand each other quite well using it.

Now imagine that, like you, these animals have an inner monologue -- the equivalent of what happens in your mind when you think a bunch of words, to figure something out, without actually speaking. But it's not exactly the same thing, because their primary method of communication is "wiring". So appropriately enough, when they think about sending signals without actually doing it, they call it “inner wiring”.

Now ask them what their “inner wiring” would “wire” like if they couldn’t “wire”.

The question is crazy because you don't know what the noun is, what the adjective means, or what the verb is doing. So you have to throw all that away. What you're really asking is, "how do you communicate with yourself, if you can't use the units of expression and reasoning that you need to communicate with others?"

It's obvious that you can think without "inner wiring". You yourself are proof of this. Want to know what it would be like? You have an answer: It would be like you. And yet, you can still think quite complicated things without engaging a wireless transmitter ... or opening your mouth.

You're using something adjacent to - underneath - those sensory means of communicating. It would be there, even if those means were stripped away. But here's a fun riddle for you: What would thinking be like, if all those sensory tools were stripped away? I don't mean, "what if you were suddenly struck deaf," I mean, "what if you somehow learned to think without having any senses at all?"

Give us even the faintest, most tenuous sense - anything at all - and with time and willpower we can conjure the most amazing thoughts. But what if there was nothing? I rather suspect there would be no thought either.

And so we arrive at ... "Sum, ergo cogitare possum". René Descartes would be proud?? Hmm.

In the years leading up to my father's demise, he began giving away almost all of his possessions, and over time I realized that you could separate the stuff he was getting rid of into categories, grouped by the questions you would need to ask yourself about each group. Some examples make the point:

"This ping-pong table: I have trouble just walking and holding a glass, so I am definitely done playing sports. This table needs to be with someone else."

"These books: They look nice on a shelf, but my vision's not good enough to read such small print. The most rewarding thing I can do with them now is enjoy the act of giving them away, to people who would be grateful."

"These nice clothes: They look good on me, but if I'm honest, I can't be arsed to go to fancy events that would mandate them. Besides, shoelaces, and buttons, and neckties, are a nuisance now. I'll make them into gifts."

"This truck: My wife doesn't like it, and recently the DMV said I was no longer qualified to safely drive. I'll never need it again. Time to get rid of it."

"All these tools in the garage: I use them to repair stuff. Do I want to spend my limited time repairing stuff? Especially now that my concentration and coordination are this shaky? Not ever again. Time to give them away."

The end-goal, which he never quite reached, was to have empty bookshelves, an empty garage, an empty driveway, and empty closets. It was a smart thing to do, and in his case it was complementary to what was happening in his mind, which was also being slowly emptied by dementia. One of the best things you can do to fight dementia is to engage socially, and asking the people you know if they might like some free stuff is a great excuse for it. Just about everyone likes free stuff. So come on over and let's chat for a bit while you muscle this ping-pong table into your car.

Popular culture has recently extruded a quirky little growth of books and videos about "Swedish Death Cleaning," based on the common problem that Americans have with spending too much time seeking and maintaining piles of stuff, and the quaint feeling that anything Swedish must be a clever, less-stressful alternative to anything American. We love having space and we love accumulating piles of material goods onto that space, and in multiple ways that makes America the envy of most of the world, where space or material goods - or both - are very expensive. But our typical approach to everything good, is to do it until it's so incredibly over-done it flips around and becomes evil. So what do we do when we're drowning in piles of stuff, for example, too many books? We buy a book explaining how to solve the problem. Which is why I think the opening sentence of every book and video about "Swedish Death Cleaning" should be: "First thing, return this item, and get your dang money back."

But I think of those books, when I think of what my Dad was doing. Around here, it's apparently so hard to counteract the desire for material goods that we can only succeed by invoking the finality of death itself. When you're gone, all this crap will still be here, but - and I guess this is really hard for people to internalize - you won't actually get any joy or utility from it, because your body is kind of an essential component. Physical objects are beholden to physical bodies, and no amount of mental attachment in the form of sentimentality or stubbornness can overcome that. If you apply this lesson about death to the lifetime that precedes it, you get the idea that you're are always paying a physical price, or taking on a physical debt, for every object you keep. The satisfaction you feel as you arrange and curate it, and marinate in the knowledge that it's there when you need it, gets smaller with time, but the object continues to require exactly as much space, and shelter, as always. Or if you neglect it, you eventually have to clean it up. At the same time, your own body gets harder to maintain, making the management of your stuff even more annoying. I think that's a big reason why this lesson is naturally easier for older people.

On the other hand, if you're the rebellious type, you might refuse to embrace it, and refuse harder every year, until your house and property are a grimy mausoleum of books and furniture and old letters and jars of urine...

Anyway, the point I'm trying to arrive at, is that personal experience and popular culture have both conditioned me to be very skeptical about accumulating stuff. I've found that it's very hard to get rid of, or just to let go of, and it's also hard to stop it from accumulating in the first place. There have been times in my life when I moved into a new living space and actively tried to fill it, just because I suddenly had empty rooms, or open shelves in the garage. It's fun! And plenty of times in the last decade or so, cruising around Oakland, when I've found free items and felt the urge to haul them home just because, hey, free stuff! I could re-stain this coffee table and it would look pretty good, and I could always use more plates and cups (except that honestly I couldn't.)

I'd like to sound wise and cool by saying that what I've truly embraced is experiences, rather than possessions. How mature! But no, the real motivation here is, dealing with stuff is just an absolute pain in the ass. It's the physical debt. It's inescapable. You can defer it for a very long time by, for example, buying a larger piece of property than you really need, and maintaining couple of extra rooms to heap the stuff into. Workshops and sewing rooms and libraries and personal "maker spaces" and so forth can be very pleasurable and useful as well, and if you're living with someone else, an extra private room for one or both of you can be essential. Having a hobby is one of the keys to a long life, and enjoying your older years, and I personally have two huge cabinets in the garage filled with bike parts and little electronic bits. But it is really easy to give time to the maintenance and curation, especially when it only feels like fun, and it's really hard to reclaim that time later on, when one bicycle and one shelf of parts has expanded to three - no, five - no, let's be honest, seven - bicycles and most of an entire garage of tools, spare parts, and working space. Good ol' Stephen King opined many years ago in a book about writing that art needs to be a support system for life, and if you have it the other way around, you're going to have problems. I feel like I'm constantly in danger of the same thing, except it's not art, it's just the material goods I might use to make art. Piles of it, growing organically like some malevolent compost heap.

Ironically, I never used to worry about this until I became a "property owner" (by which I mean, I took on a massive loan) and was suddenly completely responsible for maintaining an entire house. You'd think that since I could do anything I wanted with the space, I would feel free to cram it full of stuff. Well, perhaps if I didn't have that massive loan. To deal with the loan I've been renting almost all the space out to other people, and I'm being paid to maintain space for them instead of me. That means a garage full of tools, arranged into labeled boxes. And currently, it means all the rest of my materials for living part-time in Oakland are crammed into the garage as well, so I can maximize the rentable space. I guess it's not your typical "home owner" experience. I guess I've never actually had that experience. Property has meant much more responsibility than freedom, for me. But maybe that's had a positive effect overall because I've been forced to to learn the lesson about the physical debt of stuff.

This creates a cognitive dissonance sometimes. I feel like I'm expected by society around me to have a particular living space, because of my age. If you're 50 years old, shouldn't you have a house with a bunch of rooms, all your own, all deliberately furnished, with lamps and framed art, and a big dining room with seats for a whole party, and maybe a rug that really ties the place together? A den, a man-cave, a craft room? Plus a back yard, with a barbecue or a pool or both? If you have a living arrangement that's smaller, or you technically have the space but you're putting it to some other use (like renting it out), does that mean that you messed up somewhere along the way? College people and early adults can be expected to make do in apartments, living on top of each other, but by the time you're pushing out to the edge of middle-age, shouldn't you have "arrived" in a big, permanent, curated, possibly suburban, residence?

Here's the strange thing about that: I've had those things already. For like, years and years. I used to do Friday dinners with at least six people around the table like clockwork. I had a series of amazing kitchens, a series of dens, a series of man-caves, in different places. They were wonderful. I have great memories and a giant pile of photos. That all started in my late 20's and ran pretty consistently, until I began aggressively paring my stuff down. I gave away the dining room table in 2012, and downsized to one that seats four. Almost all the time, what I enjoy now is a meal with one other carefully chosen person. Almost all the time, my hobbies happen with equipment that occupies a space ranging from a table-top to about eight feet of shelving. Some external force keeps whispering to me that, if I really want to fit in with society, I need to expand that out again, and damn the expense. Kick all the tenants out and claim the den, dining room, and driveway, stock a pantry with bulk items, fill up all the walls with art, play my stereo much louder because no one is sharing any walls, and organize another series of dinner parties. Forget about being portable, and minimal. And when I hear that whisper, that expectation and the pressure behind it, something in me hisses back, "No! Shut up and go away! This is better!"

Which is odd, right? Because I really did like doing all that. When I first moved to Oakland I rented a five room flat, and my housemate and I filled all of it immediately. We both got craft rooms, and we muscled the giant table with room for eight into the dining room. Turns out the flat upstairs was a classic "punk house" though, where every single weekend was a giant party, so we didn't even need the table; we'd just walk upstairs. Either way, the space and the furniture felt essential, like we needed it to properly experience life. I hauled that table to two other houses, then at some point I can't remember, I must have decided it wasn't worth the work, and I needed to figure out what came next.

This is a kind of transition I run into, over and over: Society and culture implanted me with a bunch of long-term goals, and I spent many years chasing them down, building them up, and then having them accomplished - taking the metaphorical victory lap - and then I went skating ahead, into a place society and culture made absolutely no mention of, beyond the goal they are still, even now, stridently endorsing, and the message is so loud and constant that it makes me think the right thing to do is turn around and go back to where I was - the victory lap - and stay there, even though I don't actually want to. Just so I can stop feeling the cognitive dissonance of this loud message. When everyone around you seems to be clamoring for something you don't want, how can you help but ask, "What's wrong with me?"

I think in my case, it's the awareness of death that caused me to "go wrong", combined with an ever-increasing awareness of the much longer arc of history that created the world I grew up in. Like, when you grow up in a house with separate bedrooms and a giant dining room table, that feels like your goal; and then you learn that your longer family history involves growing up with 13 siblings jostling around in a two-room cabin on a farm, or ditching all their possessions except a couple of suitcases to board a ship for another continent. And then you start looking at that giant dining room table with a more critical eye. Is it there because you need it, to have a real life? Or because your grandparents dreamed of having one, and now you get to make your own decision? Awareness of death has taught me that the most important factor, in whatever you decide, is whether it will get you more time with the people you love, or second to that, more time doing what you love.

It bites you in the end: It's possible to spend a whole lot of your time and money managing the stuff you think you need for a hobby, or just a level of material abundance that will make you feel successful, and in the meantime the chances you get to do stuff with the people you like - the people who really know you, and get what you're about - get smaller, and shorter, and then bodies fail or accidents happen and the chance is completely gone. You'll still have that organized workshop, that amazing classic car you rebuilt by hand, that house full of extremely well-matched furniture, but you'll eventually only have enough time to start figuring out who's left that you can pass it to, aside from indifferent strangers.

Dealing with this is a challenge! Because like I said, hobbies are vital. And it's a good challenge, honestly, because it's something you get to worry about only after you've avoided starving to death, succumbing to disease, or getting run over by an oxcart. It's led me lately to ask the question, am I going to go for a big career change, like I've been contemplating the last five years or so? Maybe it's time...

A Few Good Men (2009). After a string of gory murders, the owners of Studio 54 are placed on trial for operating a secret sex dungeon in the basement of the nightclub, behind the regular sex dungeon in the basement of the nightclub. Meanwhile, a detective (Guy Pearce) finds evidence that the killer will strike again, and hires a former dominatrix (Helen Mirren) to get him 'in the right headspace' to solve the case. (R, 96 minutes, also NC-17 version at 110 minutes. Four out of five stars.)

The Hunger Games (2009). Young prison camp inmates compete to see who can make the most appealing food items out of dirt. They are discovered by the warden (Bruce Dern), who arranges a multi-prison musical bake-off, during which they plot a daring escape. (93 minutes, PG-13. Two out of five stars.)

8 Mile Island (2011). A rabbit farmer named Rabbit, living in an illegal bunker deep in the exclusion zone around Pripyat, opens a petting zoo. KGB agents arrive to shut it down, and discover that the rabbits can freestyle rap. The farmer avoids prison by training the animals to produce propaganda. 'Rabbit's Rabid Rapping Radioactive Red Rabbit Revue' becomes famous throughout the USSR, and when the Soviet Union collapses, they begin a von-Trapp-family-style secret exodus from Ukraine into Belarus to avoid slaughter, hopping through forests and hiding in basements. (PG-13, some scenes of animals in peril, 105 minutes. Three out of five stars.)

Smile (2003). While brushing his teeth one night, a young boy comes up with an idea for a new toothpaste flavor. He and his friends sell jars of toothpaste out of the family garage, prompting lawsuits from big corporations. The "Toothpaste Kid" is elected major, then runs for president. As the election results are being announced, it is revealed that the boy is actually in a coma triggered by hitting his head on the sink in the opening scene of the film, and everything else was a hallucination. (79 minutes, PG-13, zero stars.)

Twilight (1988). A high school student (Martha Plimpton) is cursed by a homeless man (Pete Murphy) after hitting him with her truck, and begins to transform into either a werewolf or a vampire any time she hears the phrase 'like, oh my god'. Most of the student body is drained or eviscerated before her father (Christopher Walken) performs a ceremony to lift the curse. (85 minutes, R. Three out of five stars.)

Note: Spawned a whole series of Twilight sequels, where the curse moved to a procession of wacky victims: The high school principal, a sex therapist, a pilot on a mission to Mars, and finally, a squirrel. Decades later, fans continue to debate over whether it was more fun to watch the staff of an auto shop be terrorized by a werewolf vampire squirrel, or watch a werewolf vampire sex therapist try to do her job.

(The last episode.)

I poked into this book about ten years ago, and posted a sort-of review on Amazon. Then much later Amazon notified me that an automated system had detected a violation of its content policy, and in response it was taking down every review I'd posted on the site, over approximately 15 years.

It never told me what it had found, and the process is left very deliberately opaque as a cover-their-ass legal policy. I had zero interest in making some kind of appeal. That was the last in a series of signals to me that contributing any meaningful content into Amazon's universe of data was utterly foolish, and frankly I should have known that from the start.

Anyhoo, the review I wrote is below, preserved for the heck of it:

If this book had any more strawmen in it, it would have to come wrapped in bailing wire.

But that's rather beside the point, isn't it, because you and I both know that the people who sit down to read this book will fall squarely into only one of two categories, and that will determine how much they enjoy the experience:

The categories are:

1. People who pride themselves on having an "open mind" about creationism, and are looking for some kind of balanced presentation.
2. People who feel personally invested in the idea of divine creation and are looking for reassurance (or ammunition).

To save time, I'm going to assume that anyone reading this review is in one of those two categories. Anyone who falls into any other category would steer away from this book just after reading the title. Now I'll explain why the category you're in is important.

If you're in category 1, you're going to choke right when you get to the end of the introduction, where the author states quite boldly that Darwin's theory describes evolution as "a purely undirected process". If you have sharp eyes you can stop right there. The author hopes you won't notice this little falsehood, because the entire book that follows depends on it completely.

He will spend 20 looong chapters building a castle in the sky, made of many bricks, each an example of how incredibly unlikely it is that any of the components of modern life would spontaneously form in various "undirected" ways. But you don't need any of that, because you have recognized the switcheroo, and you know that the cornerstone of Darwin's theory is that evolution is a very directed process indeed. It is directed by a process that had been thoroughly described in all its myriad forms since his time. That process is given the name "natural selection" and it is both ruthless and incredibly creative. And, unlike what this book claims a few chapters in, it applies just as well to the precursor molecules that formed the first living cells, as it does to the living cells that followed. That selection process changes the numbers drastically.

But even so, the numbers don't actually need to be changed that much. To you folks with open minds in category one, here's something that may interest you:

Did you know that the eukaryotic cell - the kind of cell that makes up all plants and animals, every creature you can see with the naked eye - was quite likely created "by accident", by a very specific collision of two types of bacterial cell - archaebacteria and eubacteria, a billion years ago? It was a very unlikely smashing-together that resulted in a viable, new creature. In fact, in all of the Earth's history, it happened only ONCE. (How do we know it happened just once? Because when we examine the genetic code of various cell components in plants and animals, we can trace their lineage back, and we find that all the lines everywhere converge to one single parent.)

(Don't just take my word for it, take the word of a textbook, for example: The Cell, 2nd edition, by Geoffrey M Cooper of Boston University. Very much worth reading.)

Before that one eukaryotic cell appeared, archaebacteria and eubacteria ruled the Earth, for three billion years. It took three billion years, of an entire planet sloshing around, for that "accident" to happen JUST ONCE.

Consider this entire planet. Not just your house, or the city you live in, but the whole planet. Now consider your lifespan, of about a hundred years. Consider that lifespan passing repeatedly, 30 times in a row. That's much farther back than you can trace your ancestry. Now consider a thousand intervals of that. You can't, really. Our brains just can't manage it. They go up to about a hundred years or so and just break. Think of it as a design constraint. A thousand of anything is too much. But now, in a purely numerical sense, think of a thousand of those intervals of a thousand intervals of 30 lifetimes. That's how long three billion years is. All your instinctive notions of what's "likely" to happen in the environment around you are completely destroyed by an interval that long.

You could take a few shots at calculating the odds of two fairly incompatible types of organism smashing together and surviving as a hybrid, applied to that interval, but all the numbers would be speculative, because we still don't know enough about early biochemistry to narrow them down. Nevertheless, once on a whole planet over three billion years is enough room for some very long odds. If the chances of a coin toss coming up heads is 50 percent, and you flip a coin twice, you would not be surprised at all if it came up heads at least once. If the chances of something happening in a year anywhere on the planet are one in a billion, and you wait three billion years, you shouldn't be surprised or even impressed if that thing happens.

And so, here we are to talk about it. Every other place in the universe where it could have happened, but didn't -- well, intelligent life isn't there, so it's not around to talk about how it didn't happen. That means the fact of our existence is not even evidence that anything truly mathematically unlikely has occurred. We can't really be surprised by our own existence.

All you folks in category one: Sorry, you'll be disappointed. You just bought 20 chapters full of strawmen, and the state of the art of biological sciences left all of them well behind at least 20 years ago when DNA sequencing got cheap enough to do on a large scale.

To you folks in category two: What can I say? You'll get exactly what you want, here. You won't encounter anything that will make you more informed of the science, except in broad strokes, but that doesn't matter to you, does it? Enjoy your guided tour through this castle in the sky. But, to steal a phrase from a classic game, "Sorry Mario, the truth is in another castle."

One of my absolute favorite comedy shows is The Young Ones. It first appeared in 1982 and made its way to my living room in 1985. Surreal, manic, highly destructive, puerile, kind of loathing youth culture... Basically my personality at the time.

A while back it finally, FINALLY got a Blu-ray release. In the first episode you can see a poster on the wall for a few seconds, and now it's visible enough to make out details:

The photo on the poster was taken in 1978, by a fellow named Mike Ryerson, in the Goose Hollow neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. He originally intended to make it a poster for the Venereal Disease Action Council, until a reader of The Northwest Neighbor newspaper wrote in and submitted the caption "expose yourself to art".

How in the bloody hell did a photo taken in Portland end up on the set of the first episode of The Young Ones four years later?

Weapons (2025)

If there was an ad campaign for this, it never reached me, but when I heard it was created by the director of 'Barbarian' I got interested.

I read a single review, which described it as a slow-burn exploration of how a small community deals with the sudden disappearance of a bunch of children. So I expected lots of intimate character work and conversations about grief and paranoia, with some spooky happenings and perhaps a central mystery to solve, shot with the same high-quality camerawork and pacing from Barbarian.

Turns out, the mystery was more prominent than I expected. The screenplay was carefully built to walk back-and-forth over the timeline of the disappearance and let you solve it in layers. That was cool, but with so much attention given to plot, the characters don't get as much depth as I was hoping for. No matter; the journey has lots of weirdness and humor, and the ending is so delightful and cathartic that you can't help leaving the theater satisfied.

Death Of A Unicorn (2025)

Oh my god, we get it already, rich people are assholes. Didn't need two hours to learn that.

The CGI is trying very hard to match the puppetry but feels uncanny in the action shots. Will Poulter is amusing, Paul Rudd throws his role way over into cringe -- trying to be funny I guess? Ends up just cringe. Jenna Ortega's role is absolutely thankless. I feel bad for the actress, playing a role that is basically a surly adolescent version of Cassandra from Greek myth. I get the impression that a lot of the dialogue was improvised in repeated takes.

4.5 out of 10 purple dranks up.

Nosferatu (2024)

It's refreshing for a modern director to put a vampire on screen that's much more revolting than seductive. It's got to be a harder sell for a movie studio, but I assume it was due, since Stephenie Meyer and Anne Rice have collectively dominated vampire fiction for almost fifty dang years. Lestat and Edward have cast a long shadow (har har). Meanwhile, What We Do In The Shadows has only engaged with gross vampires for comedic purposes. To see a truly disgusting bloodsucker is novel again.

Be warned, I'm going to walk into spoiler territory in the next paragraph. If you want to stop here, the take-away is this: It's like watching two teenagers with old-school braces trying to make out. It's tragic, sexually frustrated, kinda gross, and goes on too long. But on the other hand, the visual effects are brilliant. I'd give it six diseased rats out of ten.

Perhaps if I sat down and watched it a second time, I would feel properly drawn into the atmosphere. Or perhaps if I'd seen it in a theater with a horde of impressionable young viewers around me, laughing nervously at the gore while speed-munching popcorn. I tried to get ideal conditions at home: A dark room, a nice chair, good headphones, a rainstorm happening outside. But the most I could feel was a sense of respectful appreciation, for the craft in the set designs, the wonderful lighting, and gross practical gore effects.

The director Robert Eggers has thoroughly rewired the story to make it as much about Mina Harker (Ellen in this case, for whatever reasons) and her weird connection to the monster. It's all set up in a creepy prologue that, unfortunately, also sets the tone for the visual standard we're operating in: We've got great practical effects when the bodies of actors are involved, but outside that in the wider shots and the landscape, the universe is a lantern show of computer-hallucinated forests and moldering estates, populated by animals that don't quite move the way you expect. It manages to look really cool and expensive without actually looking real.

But how much should that matter, when we've got a good concept to sink our fangs into? Mina Harker's connection (yeah I'm just gonna go ahead and call her Mina, I find it less confusing) to the vampire is a much more articulated combination of non-consensual and consensual feelings here, and she struggles with it right to the end. When she's around Jonathan, the feelings are at bay and she seems genuinely happy, but as soon as he leaves her side a powerful, terrifying combination of attraction and revulsion for something alien surges up to take his place. Sometimes it's treated like manic depression, sometimes it's used to explore how Mina's social position as a woman confines and infantilizes her: When she's not denied agency outright, she is chided for pressuring the men around her to act on her behalf, as they drag everyone into disaster and then flail ineffectively trying to escape.

And we get another angle as well, one that's more subtext than the others: Mina's helpless attraction to what is socially unthinkable, discovered by herself at an early age and then subsumed out of fear and confusion, then making her miserable as it bleeds through into her adult romance... It's all distressingly familiar. Mina is in the closet. Shut hard, and dying from the inside out. This version of Mina does so much more interesting work than Meyer or Rice or Francis Ford Coppola gave her.

So, this movie doesn't work for me as atmosphere, and the action scenes are frankly bad, and the flailing and hand-wringing in the third act goes on too long, but the concept lingered for a while afterwards even as the bloody visuals drained away. And that Counts for a lot.

Smile 2 (2024)

I had such optimism for this movie. The first go-round was an exercise in style over substance, providing a series of escalating scares and twisted scenes that I enjoyed, even though it didn't have a coherent plot, or hold together as a story in the end. The reviews for the sequel claimed that it was a better film all around, but putting it bluntly: It was a retread, without a coherent plot, that didn't even hold together as a story in the end.

Just like the first film, what you get instead of a story is a series of rug-pulls and fake-outs that get worse and worse until they end, and you are left with no clue what to believe, since apparently all of the secondary characters that the protagonist interacts with for more than a few lines throughout the film - yes, ALL of them - turn out to be hallucinations or false memories or some other nonsense. And by the end it's just as brazen as the first film: The entire third act turns out to be a bullshit rug-pull. Which I would have been more upset about, except that the sequel had already wasted so much of my time with absurdly telegraphed twists and padded buildup that I was bored and starting to impulsively check my email instead of paying attention.

It's that cardinal sin, folks. It's why writing is hard. You can't waste your audience's time, even for a couple seconds.

I assume the writer/director was given the green light to make this based on the box office success of the first. And so he decided - why not - let's just do exactly the same thing, beat for beat, except with more money and longer takes. Well, good for him. Money in the bank. But shame on me, for letting this hack fool me twice.

Arcadian (2024)

This one flew under my radar for most of the year until I read about it in a review for another horror movie. It was a favorable comparison, saying that Arcadian had much more interesting creature design, and a script that did a better job building empathy for its characters.

That review built up my expectations a little too high. I'm a very jaded horror fan, so you can (and should) interpret this as praise, but ... I would place this movie just over the line into "worth watching" territory. The creature designs are indeed interesting and the characters are empathetic, but the movie is also frustrating in several ways. The big problem is, there are too many questions raised and then left unanswered. Like, in a post-apocalyptic world full of weird critters, what caused the apocalypse? In the story, it's been almost two decades since the decisive event - whatever it was - and yet no one knows what it was?

That could be plausible with specific constraints. Like, all communications suddenly stop working, and we're following the story of a community that was already isolated, and the creatures are suitably ambiguous that they could be monsters from space or some kind of plague-addled mutation or dwellers from the sea come ashore, or whatever. But the world of Arcadian is not that constrained, and the clues in the story don't fit together. So you have questions, and none of the characters are asking them. Which is natural for people jaded by twenty years of trying to survive, but unfortunately, not very interesting.

With one exception: One young man, central to the plot, who tries to trap one of the creatures in order to study it. What does he learn? It's unclear; possibly nothing. But that may be deliberate, because it turns out that instead of navigating an apocalypse, or even solving the mystery of one, this movie is mostly about something else:

The absurd angst of teenage masculinity. The way it can make young men behave like morons, and can also make them incredibly vulnerable to exploitation, to the point where it seems completely impossible that any young man would become a responsible father like we see in some of the other characters. It's actually refreshing to see a story about this unfold without pulling any punches.

If you decide to watch this, you will get a decent horror setting, but you will primarily get a platform for some interesting discussions about young men. Might even be useful in a classroom setting.

Six Sesame-Street-inspired weird critter limbs up.

Big Trouble In Little China (1986)

I pulled this one out of the vaults because it had been a very long time and I remembered it being very silly. It turned out, I only remembered a quarter of the silliness. You could say there was 300% more silliness than I was expecting.

I was a kid in 1986, so I didn't notice that this movie was released in a year where it went toe-to-toe with Aliens, Top Gun, Star Trek 6, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It held its own, and has since risen in esteem.

The director, John Carpenter, said this in an interview shortly after the film was made:

"I'm almost 40 years-old now. And since I'm getting older in my career, I thought I'd better do something nuts while I still could do it. But I think the primary reason for making Big Trouble In Little China is to see the world through the eyes of my son, who's now two years old. I can see a really ridiculous, fun world, an enormous, wondrous world."

"Rambo 2 was out, which was the template for action films. They were all patriotic," Carpenter says. "They wanted an action hero. I don't think they realized that I would make the white guy look like a blowhard John Wayne idiot who couldn't do anything."

Kurt Russel chimes in: "John and I wanted to have a guy who wasn't as sharp as he thought he was. Jack's a blustery sort of blowhard who has a lot of self-assurance. And it really is not too handy. That made playing him a lot of fun because Jack gets out of trouble in ways you wouldn't expect him to."

The immediate result was that the Fox studio execs tried to make Jack look more heroic, by forcing Carpenter to add a scene to the beginning of the film, wherein Egg Shen praises Jack's "great courage" to an attorney.

From the liner notes to the official soundtrack: "While Big Trouble In Little China referenced no end of Hong Kong and American action films on its journey, John Carpenter's most referential ode was saved for the rocking end credit song by the Coupe de Villes - a group comprised of the director and his pals Nick Castle and Tommy Lee Wallace. Carpenter had first played with Wallace in their high school band Kaleidoscope, and then jammed with Castle while both studied film at USC."

"The way I look at it, no one's ever too old for rock n' roll," Carpenter says. "I thought this was a perfect chance to do a main title. It was also something else making that music video. We shot it through the course of one night on a little sound stage. The whole idea was to get to sing and strut our stuff. No one else was going to pay us to do this. In fact, we didn't get paid to do it! The experience was ridiculous, and also a lot of fun."

Watch this weird toybox of a movie, preferably with some kids sitting around to laugh at it. A nice use of a few hours.

Non-Horror:

Thunderbolts*:

7 out of 10. Surprising thematic choices for a Marvel film. Dramatic scenes handled much more gracefully than anything James Gunn cranks out, but it's still a "ragtag group of crappy people saves the day" thing, which means it may as well be by James Gunn.

Latest Mission Impossible film

6.5 out of 10. Really cool dialogue-less underwater action sequence. Neat plane stunts. Drags at the beginning. Script is ponderous and overcooked.

Fantastic Four:

6 out of 10. A wisely skipped origin story, some glorious retro-futuristic set design, a really stirring action sequence built around a medical emergency. Good stuff. But the script really, seriously struggles with making us know these comic characters as real people. It's the Marvel formula showing its age, really: You need some greater theme or more interesting premise to explore. "What if there were people with cool fantasy-story abilities we don't see in the real world, marching around using them in the real world" as a concept has been so completely beaten into the ground at this point that you'd need mining equipment and paleontologists to recover it. But what else is Marvel going to do?

I rarely write about my work here. But today I think I will!

I've worked on many codebases, with very large numbers of contributors in some cases, and only a few in others. Generally when you make a contribution to a large codebase you need to learn the etiquette and the standards established by the people who came before you, and stick to those.

Not making waves - at least at first - is important, because along with whatever code improvements you may contribute when you join a project, you also bring a certain amount of friction along with you that the other developers must spend energy countering. Even if your code is great you may drag the project down overall by frustrating your fellow contributors. So act like a tourist at first:

Be very polite, and keen to learn.
Don't get too attached to the specific shape of your contribution because it may get refactored, deferred, or even debated out of existence.
It won't always be like this, but no matter what kind of big-shot you are on other projects, it may be like this at first for this new one.

Let me put it generally: Among supposedly anti-social computer geeks, personality matters. There's a reason many folks in my industry are fascinated by epic fantasy worlds always on the brink of war: They are actually very sensitive to matters of honor and respect.

Anyway, this is a post about code commentary.

In one codebase I contributed to, I encountered this philosophy about code comments from the lead developers: "A comment is an apology."

The idea behind it is, comments are only needed when the code you write isn't self-explanatory, so whenever you feel the need to write a comment, you should refactor your code instead.

I believe this makes two wrong assumptions:

The only purpose of a comment is to compensate for some negative aspect of the code.
Code that's easy for you to read is easy for everyone to read.

The first assumption contradicts reality and history. Code comments are obviously used for all kinds of things, and have been since the beginning of compiled languages. You live in a world teeming with other developers using them for these purposes. By ruling some of them out you are expressing a preference, not some grand truth.

Comments are used to:

Briefly summarize the operation of the current code, or the reasoning used to arrive at it.
Point out important deviations from a standard structure or practice.
Explain why an alternate, simpler-seeming implementation does not work, and link to the external factor preventing it.
Provide input for auto-generated documentation.
Leave contact information or a link to an external discussion of the code.
Make amusing puns just to brighten another coder's day.

All of these - and more - are valid and when you receive code contributed by other people you should take a light approach in policing which categories are allowed.

The second assumption is generally based in ego.

I've been writing software for over 40 years, and I haven't abandoned code comments or even reduced the volume of the ones I generate, but what I have definitely done is evolve the content of them significantly.

I've developed an instinct over time for what the next person - not me - may have slightly more trouble unraveling. That includes non-standard library choices, complex logic operations that need to be closely read to be fully understood, architectural notes to help a developer learn what influences what in the codebase, and brief summaries at the tops of classes and functions to explain intent, for a developer to keep in mind when they read the code beneath. Because hey, maybe my intent doesn't match my code and there's a bug in there, hmmm?

The reason I do this is humility. I understand that even after 40 years, I am not a master of all domains. The code I write and the choices I made may be crystal clear to me, but not others. Especially new contributors: People coming into my codebase from outside. Especially people with less experience in the realm I'm currently working in. For the survival of a project, it's better to know when newcomers need an assist and provide it, than to high-handedly assume that if they don't understand the code instinctively, then they must be unworthy developers who should be discouraged from contributing, like by explaining what's going on you are "dumbing down" your code.

Along the same lines, it's silly to believe that your own time is so very valuable that writing comments in code is an overall reduction in your productivity.

You may object, "but what if the comments fall out of sync with the code itself, and other developers are actually led astray?"

I have two responses to this, and you may not like either one: First, if your comments are out of sync with the implementation it's either because your comments are attempting to explain how it works and the implementation has drifted, or your comments are explaining the intent behind the code, and the behavior no longer matches the intent. In the first case, the comment may potentially cause a developer to introduce a bug if they're not actually understanding the code. But if they're reading the code and they can't understand it because it's complex, then the commentary was justified, and it should be repaired rather than removed. (Or, you should refactor the code so you don't need to explain "how" so much.) In the second case, someone has already introduced a bug, and the comment is a means to identify the fix.

And second, if it feels like a lot of trouble to maintain your comments, then perhaps you write great code but you're not very good at explaining it in clear language to other humans. You should work on that.

If it's your project, you can make the rules, and if it's your code, then obviously it's clear to you. But if you want to work on a team, and have that team survive - and especially if you want to form a team around your own project - then you need a broader philosophy.

By the way, I should note that there are less severe incarnations of "a comment is an apology" out there. For example, "a comment is an invitation for refactoring". That's a handy idea to consider, though it still runs afoul of the reductionist attitude about the purpose of comments.

You should indeed always consider why you think a comment is necessary because it might lead to an alternate course of action. Even if that action has no effect in the codebase itself, like filing a ticket calling for a future refactor once an important feature gets shipped, it may be a better move. But this is an exercise in flexibility, and considering what you might have missed, rather than a mandate that code be self-explanatory enough to be comment-free (and an assumption that you personally are the best judge of that.)

Here's my own guidelines for writing comments. They're a bit loose, and they stick to the basics.

Comments explain why, not how.
Unless the how is particularly complicated. Then they explain how, but not what.
Unless the what is obscure relative to the standard practice, in which case a comment explaining what might be useful.
You learn these priorities as you go, and as you learn about a given realm of software development.

Always be thinking about the next person coming in after you, looking around and trying to understand what you've done. And, try to embrace the notes they're compelled to contribute as well.

Matt: We should do a watch party some night. How about ... THE NET?

Me: Gruh, that was 1995?

(Rummaging around in digital archives.)

Me: Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen. The movie starts at 10pm. Let's go.

(0:00 in.)

Matt: Here comes the MIDI brass!
Me: Ooo! Intriguing music for such an awful movie.

(0:05 in.)

Me: Faaake! MacOS did not use "/" as a folder separator! My disbelief is throughly de-suspended.
Matt: Oh believe me, that won't be the least accurate thing in this movie.
Me: Oh yeaaah the online pizza order...
Matt: Fun fact, Sandra Bullock really was one of the earliest proponents of Internet food ordering.
Me: That was like, already a combination of really cool and really wanky, even then. Also: No one eats like that, and looks like her.

(0:15 in.)

Matt: Oh look, a small aircraft at a critical plot point, I wonder what will happen.
Me: Yeah there's no reason we'd be seeing this unless...

(KABOOOOM)

Me: Yeah there it is.
Matt: That wasn't the tower he was supposed to contact. And also that's not what we meant by contact.

(0:20 in. Sandra is on the beach, with a laptop. An older guy is nearby, also on a laptop.)

Me: This guy is a villain, right?
Matt: WHAT GAVE IT AWAY
Me: The hair.

(0:25 in.)

Me: Okay, so, uh, DOES THIS MOVIE ACTUALLY HAVE A PLOT? We're almost 25 minutes in, and so far it does not.
Matt: Maybe it's one of the special features on the DVD.

(0:29 in.)

Me: At what point does she use her super hax0r skills to not get murdered at sea?
Matt: Well... I think she plays snake on her phone with a hacked skill level to avoid getting bored out of her mind.
Me: Wait; he unloaded the gun and put it away below decks after killing that guy, but now he's going down to get it, even though the plan was to kill her the whole time?
Matt: Don't overthink it. He clearly didn't.

(0:31 in. Sandra and the creepy guy are making out.)

Me: Okay, NOW THEY'RE PLAYING "SNAKE". AM I RIGHT PEOPLE?
Matt: Looks more like Tetris to me.

(0:35 in. The camera is focusing on the villain's lips. They fill the screen as he talks.)

Me: Mr. Winkler made a dumb decision with those close-ups. That was like, "student project" directing.
Matt: Yeah, I think that editing was considered edgy for the '90s. But what it really looks like to me is somebody who mostly shot for TV.
Me: I'm enjoying the fact that I can google stuff about this movie while watching it. Me from 1995 would find that hilarious.

(0:49 in. Sandra is running from the law, and meets up with Dennis Miller.)

Matt: And there he is!
Me: You know, I kinda forgot, 1995 Sandra is not actually a very good actor. She has two modes: Slightly checked-out, or panicked motormouth.
Matt: Dialogue can be written for her, and she looks good on camera, but yeah, it's not the same thing.
Me: Dennis Miller isn't great either, but for a totally different reason. I mean, he's very natural, but that's because he's not acting. He's just being Dennis Miller.

(0:53 in.)

Me: Tell me Dennis ad-libbed that toilet line.
Matt: I feel like he either did it as a formal rewrite or ad-libbed it, yeah. Because that clearly didn't come out of the rest of these writers.
Me: AGREED. So, is he gonna get killed in like 35 seconds?

(1:00 in.)

Me: Awwww, they had to actually spell out IRL!
Matt: "You know what would help, Sandra, is if you just like read the screen out loud, because most people who go to see hacker movies can't actually read. Our focus group thinks this is what it will take."
Me: "Also, while you read it, we're going to film your lips moving. Right up close. Try not to think about it."

(1:02 in. Dennis has just been poisoned.)

Me: Okay it took longer than 35 seconds, but he is going to die, right?
Matt: I honestly can't remember.

(Sandra is using stolen hacking software to look something up in a hospital's medical records.)

Me: Hold on. You looked at a record on the internet, and used that as confirmation that the last record you saw on the internet was fake? Now that's just dumb.
Matt: IT WAS A SIMPLER TIME.

(1:07. Dennis is being poisoned again, but worse.)

Me: Awww Dennis. I knew you were gonna die as soon as you walked on-screen.

(1:15 in. Sandra has just yanked an old computer monitor off a desk. It shatters on the floor.)

Matt: Now I don't know about you, but I've dropped a few CRTs from a second floor, and those things don't shatter that easy.

(1:20 in. Sandra is being chased by cops for driving a stolen car.)

Me: Okay, so Sandra has like, 20 minutes to turn this all around. And so far she's done nothing but ask a couple of guys for help, and run from people. Now both the guys are dead and she's in jail. When are we going to see some h4x0r skills?

(1:25 in. Sandra has just crashed another car and is running from a fake FBI agent.)

Me: ... Okay now Sandra has less than 15 minutes to turn this all around.

(1:33 in. Sandra has finally decided to infiltrate the headquarters of the company pursuing her.)

Me: Cathedral, Inc! We do software security like gangbusters, but we don't lock our doors, and we don't have a front desk! No one has a badge, no one asks who you are, there are no security cameras, and we never log out of our machines when we leave!

(1:36 in. Columns of numbers are zipping around on the screen.)

Matt: Nice. A subnet octet greater than 255. I wonder if somebody was thinking that was like the "555-1212" of the internet.
Me: Yeah that was .... a whole lot of confusing.

(1:42 in.)

Matt: Oh here it is, here it is! The theme scene for the whole film! Wait fooor iiiiit...

(Sandra attempts to put a 3.5" disk into a drive but shoves it in upside down. It jams. She pulls it back out and turns it over.)

Matt: Ta daaa! Did you catch that?
Me: "That's the take we'll use!"

(1:46 in. Sandra has just restored her entire digital life by pressing one key.)

Matt: And there you go.
Me: It just ends?
Matt: What did you think?
Me: Well, to start, I'm glad I didn't watch that movie 30 years ago. Because honestly it's better as a horrendous time capsule, and by "better", what I mean is, less than completely intolerable.

(The credits are finally rolling.)

Me: "Adam Winkler" as "COMPUTER NERD". Hey, there are like 4 Winklers in this cast.
Matt: Yeah they got Winklered to hell.
Me: Very Winklery.

I just received an unsolicited email from the Social Security Administration.

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is celebrating the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill, a landmark piece of legislation that delivers long-awaited tax relief to millions of older Americans.
The bill ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits, providing meaningful and immediate relief to seniors who have spent a lifetime contributing to our nation's economy.
“This is a historic step forward for America’s seniors,” said Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano. ...

So naturally I did what any sensible citizen would, and went to https://secure.ssa.gov/oig/fraud/ and reported The Social Security Administration to The Social Security Administration for committing waste and abuse.

I'm reporting waste and abuse. The waste and abuse was perpetrated by you.
The email you just sent out to millions of people titled "Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors" was inappropriately partisan while also being a distortion of the truth about the legislation's content. It does not actually grant the tax exemption you claim it does!!
Political statements have ZERO PLACE in this office's communications. Don’t corrupt this department with empty platitudes praising ANY administration. The president is not your department's master, it's the constitution, and the American people behind that document. Your communications should NOT BE POLITICAL. I mean, dang, any eighth grader who's taken a civics class would know that. Now return the money of mine that you just wasted through your fraud and abuse of this system.

Now with any luck they'll get off my lawn.

In March of 2022 I made the following guess about the eventual outcome of Russia's Ukraine invasion:

Russia will blast Ukraine into powder, extract some concession like "we won't join NATO and those new republics are not part of Ukraine", then pull back into the republics, leaving them bristling with hardware for years. The Russian economy will burn low for a long while during which they will be at the mercy of the Chinese and whatever belt-and-road-style economic devil's bargain they care to name. Animosity between Europe and Russia, the US and Russia, will remain high for a decade, accomplishing nothing.

Ukraine will remain a depopulated ruin for at least that long. The EU will turn up its nose, sensing another debtor country like Greece. Putin will die or ""step down"" in something like five years, probably less, and his replacement will try and turn the page with the West, but without internal reforms the hands that are extended will all be those of the same old oligarchs and the Russian people will continue to be screwed for another generation, continue to be susceptible to jingoism and propaganda, and will lean even harder into the Chinese philosophy of governance: Not a government of, by, and for the people, but a people of, by, and for the government (by swordpoint if necessary).

This guess was mostly about stagnation. I figured the situation would not change for years, even as more people died and more hardware was thrown at both sides. This has come true, though there are some external consequences: NATO is re-arming and growing more independent, and Russia's ostensible allies are taking advantage of their economy being leveraged out over a financial abyss.

I set a limit of five years, which was a bit arbitrary, but I'm rolling with it. I think we're still headed for this state of affairs two years from now and there's only one thing that could realistically alter the course: Russia's economy going into a complete tailspin, before Putin's death.

If that happens, the Russian people might, maybe, get so sick of total war and sending their sons into a meat grinder that they strike Moscow hard enough to put a crack in the state oligarchy. But if I'm honest, this is unlikely. Never underestimate the capacity of Russian people to suffer.

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Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

Recent Entries

Two non-horror films that inspired some thoughts

Post-Halloween horror film update! WooOOooo!

Catching up on TV, horror and otherwise

The horror; it's too horrible to describe (so we shall describe it horribly)

You and your shadow

Shows shows shows!

The apology list, episode 1

The Apology List, Episode 1

The Pool

The Industrial Fan

"Dud"

The Art Teacher

New mix page

Mira turned 20 last year!

Thought for the day: Social problem

Thought for the day: Inner wiring

More thoughts about stuff and things

More fake movie listings

Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

Expose yourself to art

Oh boy! Horror we go again!

Code commentary

THE NET

Well this is a new low for the SSA

A three year old prediction about the Ukraine conflict

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November 2026

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