Star Wars holds a place in my heart mainly for nostalgia reasons. Seeing those original films for the first time was formative back in the day when I was a wee cunt. But yeah, they’re pretty indefensible from a film criticism standpoint.

My takes:

1. Goodfellas is fine. It’s a’ight. It’s about 900% more beloved than it deserves. Casino was better, even though it was the same damn movie.
2. On Goodfellas: Ray Liotta is fucking awful in it. He gives me second-hand embarrassment watching him. He’s been great in other roles, but he just seemed so out of his depth trying to hold his own in amongst the De Niros and Pescis of the world. I also think the actor playing Big Paulie was fucking awful, but he doesn’t have much screen time so it’s easy to forget how shit he was.
3. Also - and lastly, I swear - on Goodfellas: the editing is less “fractured and frenetic like the rapidly-imploding mind of the main character” and more like “fractured and frenetic like the coked up Parkinson’s-suffering editor during a violent bowel movement”. Unnecessarily janky and rough around every single edge, to put it mildly.
4. Nic Cage should not be allowed to be in films, full stop. Not even a documentary about Nic Cage in which he agrees with me, personally, through the camera that he’s terrible.
5. The Godfather III was good. Yeah, not as good as I and II, and the downright offensively-bad acting from Andy Garcia (you thought I was about to complain about Sofia Coppola, didn’t ya? Andy was an order of magnitude worse) definitely knocks a few stars off my IMDb rating, but the film was fine.
6. I’ve posted about this in Unpopular Opinion before, but I think remakes and reboots are great, as long as the film-makers are trying to do their best and make an honest go of it. I especially love when a film is transported from one culture into another. For example, Unforgiven - the Clint Eastwood modern classic - was remade in Japan, except instead of the gunslinging Wild West it was the samurai-sword-swingin’ Meiji period. How cool is that shit? I love it. Now I have two awesome movies where before there was only one.

Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle is an interesting one. He’s pretty fucking despicable, but when I first watched the movie as a freshly-pubescent teen, I bought into his sick view of the world and took the film at face value. That is, I thought it was a story about a weird-but-well-meaning dude who decides to take on some baddies.

It’s from 1976, but if it were made today, Travis would 100% be a violent misogynist incel posting his manifesto to 4chan instead of writing it in his diary.

Homophobia was the norm where I grew up in the '80s and '90s. Took me until the late '90s to start questioning that, and probably a year or two more to become completely cleansed of it.

When I was a kid, there was a period during which I was convinced my dad was planning to kill me (or have me killed). I’d have regular nightmares about it.

I have one [non-dream] memory in particular where we were walking through Belfast on a sunny Sunday afternoon, it was pretty much empty except for us. We were walking along a path holding hands (I was like 6 or 7), and an alleyway opened to the right of me, and I thought “this is it…” and was expecting a masked gunman to come out, and for my dad to let go of my hand and step aside, his job now complete. Genuinely thought that was about to happen and almost had a panic attack. No idea why I thought that, or why I eventually stopped thinking it.

I was later diagnosed with all sorts of neuro/psych shenanigans, so I guess it was probably that. I still have intrusive thoughts, but I’ve had therapy so I’m a bit better able to manage them. CBT might do you some good if you have access to a shrink. You can even do most of it on your own, or with a bit of guidance from someone else who’s already done it.

They’re banking on severe vendor lock-in preventing people from moving on. So many communities are solely on Discord now, it’s insane.

Would something like Stoat (previously known as Revolt) eventually have the same requirements?

be on the wrong side of history speedrun

I can’t do small talk or general chat, but I can do meta. I can talk about how awkward it is to talk to strangers, for example. That feels like information exchange, as opposed to a complex two-person dance where I don’t have rhythm or sufficiently-malleable limbs, which is what small talk feels like to me. The goal of small talk seems to be the process itself. If we’re instead ‘educating’ each other about something, and that information is the ultimate goal, I’m much more comfortable.

While I don’t think she herself had anything to do with Epstein, the fact that people in her entourage did is its own problem. If I had a member of my team who tried to hook me up with an already-convicted paedophile, I would have to wonder what sort of operation I was running and what sort of people were buzzing around me. I’d have to wonder why they thought I’d be OK with it.

I sure as fuck don’t.

At least they have an AI-free option, as annoying as it is to have to opt into it.

On a related note, it’s hilarious to me that the Ecosia search engine has AI built in. Like, I don’t think planting any number of trees is going to offset the damage AI has done and will do to the planet.

Sometimes you don’t know how good you have it until your “rock bottom” turns out to be an elevator which is now headed down a mineshaft 😭

I’m gonna get a stupidly-hot wife despite being a fat layabout piece of shit with a clear neurological condition.

I guess that’s not really physics related, so I’ll also add “gracefully float towards delicious food on a wafting scent trail”. I could toss a burger down a canyon and use the scent trail to lower myself down safely. Like a Portal gun, but for fat layabout pieces of shit with clear neurological conditions 👍

I was gonna give it a chance back when they were letting people reserve their usernames. When the site first went live (in beta, I guess?) they wanted me to pay them money to gain access. Enshittification is baked into the platform.

I so dearly wish I had these kinds of skills!

Rich humans*

Juxtaposing cattle trains with the Holocaust was all I needed to dismiss this organisation as chronically unserious. They’re the equivalent of those antiabortion activists who think showing disturbing gory photos of medical procedures is a moral argument against said procedures.

The thing that made me question my meat-eating was not images of slaughterhouses, battery farms or being harangued by tone deaf social media posts that scold me as immoral. It was watching animals playing and showing affection for each other and for other species. Gifs of cows playing with a ball, a lamb begging for pets from a human, chickens recognising their human friend and running up to them for a hug, a cat and a crow being pals; that’s the kinda shit that changes hearts and minds. PETA’s tone and behaviour makes animal rights activism look like an emotional outlet for narcissists who don’t actually have any expectation that they’ll achieve anything, but just enjoy the recreational self-righteous hectoring.

Is there like a petition or something we can all sign to show that literally no cunt wants this?

Heady times for the patient necrophile.

AI, along with crypto, is getting to the point where even oil executives are like “dudes, the planet…”

That face when you’re a millisecond away from puking in front of your high school crush.