Alice Walker and Lois Lowry?

In the last episode, especially, she reminded me of the opening description of Shasta in Inherent Vice:

"Back when they were together she could go weeks without anything more complicated than a pout. Now she was laying some heavy combination of face ingredients on Doc that he couldn't read at all."

I'll spend the rest of my life chasing the cinematic high of that night in 2017, when I realized the first *four* episodes of The Return were available to stream.

*Maybe* a silver lining of the Trump era is that, by saying the quiet parts out loud, he’s caused a rift in the white Christian church that could open opportunities for a new realignment of coalitions. I use her as an example all the time but my 80yo evangelical mother is no longer an “evangelical.”

Just had a spectacular dad home-repair crashout. Wish y’all could’ve seen it.

(I bought the wrong thickness of drywall for a ceiling repair but only realized it after spending all morning running errands, measuring, cutting, and sanding.)

I Spent $7,000 On a Broken Version of My Dream Watch YouTube video by Wristwatch Revival

My new obsession: vintage wristwatch restoration videos.

No biographer will ever do justice to Thomas. It will take a genius novelist, I think—someone with a massive creative imagination, who will need to invent a fictional character steeped in self-hatred, resentment, arrogance, paranoia, pettiness, cruelty, and insecurity.

I ran into Ice-T in the crowd after his set at Lollapalooza ‘91.

“What’s up, Ice! Great set.”

“Thanks, man. I can’t believe they’re charging y’all $5 for a bottle of water in this heat!”

And then he moved on. Perfect.

The Brink of War: Official Trailer (2026) Jeff Daniels, Jared Harris, J.K. Simmons YouTube video by IGN Movie Trailers

Very funny to me that this trailer opens with an image of Reagan staring into the distance, deep in righteous contemplation. That's very funny to me. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKXm...

I've never felt any need to watch a Kevin Smith movie. If you do a deep dive let us know if there are any worth seeing. 🤷‍♂️

I posted about Iran on FB for some reason, and a dumb guy from my evangelical past chimed in to say everything is going really well, actually, which I would understand if I stopped reading the liberal media.

Do you ever envy dumbasses? To go through life unburdened by doubt or shame ...

Filed my taxes. Please clap.

Excellent choice

Post your favorite film from the year you turned 18

Most members of my high school youth group would have confidently told you in 1989 that Catholicism was a Mary-worshipping cult. 🤷🏻‍♂️

It's a comfort to know that two-thirds of Americans are hoping it happens today.

A+ joke

Jimmy Smits gets blown up five minutes into the pilot episode of Miami Vice!

(Miami Vice is on Tubi, which means I know how I’ll be spending way too many hours in the coming weeks.)

I revisited Bonello's The Beast this weekend, so I read The Beast in the Jungle for the first time and hoo boy Henry James's prose style is almost as pleasurable as getting your teeth cleaned.

Another reason I’m happy to have shifted to programming. :)

Still Processing is the best possible version of that film. Weirdly, it’s become a comfort watch for me. You’re gonna love Blue Heron.

My dilemma is I hate those people so much, I immediately block them, which Instagram interprets as engagement for some horrible f’ing reason. So then I get more of them. Last week it was a steady stream of closeted white pastors with beards who were inviting me to celebrate the season.

And, if you want to have a giant stick up your ass while not liking the Pope, Calvinism is *right there.*

How did we not get this collaboration between Lawrence Abu Hamdan (!) and Supersilent (!!!) at Big Ears?

Robin Williams and Steve Martin are the least funny people to ever have huge careers as comedians.

I'm a few days late to this, but it seems like a pretty big deal that Anthropic is carefully managing the rollout of its new model because it's better than all humans at identifying exploitable weaknesses in code, including decades-tested operating systems and core infrastructure.

One of the few silver linings in all of this is watching my 80yo evangelical mother become an angry leftist. Over Easter dinner she rolled her eyes and started mocking all of her church friends who saw the Melania doc.

Pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve heard her voice.

Trump does not exist as a breathing, thinking, holistic human being as you or I would understand it. He is a creature of pure abstracted media that is possessing and driving the decaying body and mind of a loathsome man who is mostly already dead, and has been for a long time