I’m watching Drop and it’s a solid thriller – sort of displaced in time, because it uses the sort of broad strokes that I imagine an old school thriller would, but it’s dependent on modern technology.
Do you know I’ve never seen Rear Window? Hell, I’ve never seen Psycho. I have the DVD. I picked it up at a library sale all the way back in Arlington, but I’ve never “made the time.”
Making the time. What a concept.
Over the summer, a slew of bands began to make similar announcements on social media: They’d be pulling their music off Spotify, the largest streaming service in the world.
It started in June with indie rock quartet Deerhoof. Within weeks, groups like Xiu Xiu, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard and Hotline TNT followed suit. The wave of departures continued into September; most recently, The Mynabirds, WU LYF, Kadhja Bonet and Young Widows have all decided to leave Spotify. So why are musicians — many of them independent — removing their songs from the most popular streamer globally, which has nearly 700 million users?
All artists cite Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s ties to Helsing, an artificial intelligence defense company…. In 2021, Ek’s venture capital firm Prima Materia invested more than $100 million into the German startup. This past June, Prima Materia raised more than $700 million for Helsing, where Ek is now also chairman….The Financial Times reported that Helsing is now producing its own drones, aircraft and submarines.
From: Nintendo
Subject: “One or more items on your Wish List just went on sale”
I hope it’s something for like five dollars.
It was not.
It was Stray for $23.99.
Superman (2025)
Read on Letterboxd
It’s good! Some stray thoughts:
* David Corensweat nailed it.
* I’m on board for Gunn kind of reducing the mystique of the billionaire schemer and making Hoult’s Luthor more of his Golden/Silver Age version of a petulant flop. Certainly anyone paying attention over the past ten years would get the sense that this is how Musk or Zuckerberg would behave if anyone got in their face. Still, if there were a bit more done to build up the facade of calm-and-collected Luthor, it would have been all the more effective to see him crash out.
* A good amount of Daily Planet and Lois Being a Journalist in this, but now I have to grimace at Clark being the world’s most unethical journalist. Also, they did nothing with Cat Grant and the tertiary members of the staff. Without the source material, these characters have no business here. And then there’s the front page with Malik, a shot which would have you accept that Perry White is going to get extremely sentimental and subjective in the weeks following a major disaster for the city. Which brings me to Malik….
* Part one of the aspects that actually are kind of glaring. The Malik character feels uncomfortably underwritten. Making him a food vendor is already a red flag. And then he gets to have the one human death in a movie that otherwise seems to adhere to the kinder, gentler superhero movie wherein Superman goes out of his way to save a *squirrel.* But Malik is just an avatar for Metropolis and making a person of color hero-worship Superman and then get dispatched as a plot device is probably not the message Gunn thinks he’s telling. Which leads us to Jarhanpur.
* Yes, absolutely I want to see the story of how Superman handles having the power to save people from war and genocide while trying to hold himself accountable. We take one reasonable step into exploring that and then it becomes, once again, a mere given that Clark’s instincts are 100% correct and that he shouldn’t be confined by the shackles of diplomacy or conflict resolution. It works for a progressive audience in our current context where we’re all sick to our stomachs at what’s being done to the Palestinians. You know who else this would have worked for? People supporting the Iraq War.
Still, I’m on board for simply saying “I’m sick of dithering while innocent people are trampled like this.” But the payoff? “I’m sending Maxwell Lord’s private goons to do this in my name.” That whole third act, I was like “Okay, they’re layering the parallel conflict tension kind of thick,” but the Justice Gang did not earn the Han Solo payoff they try to give them. As it shakes out, Superman doesn’t even fly into Jarhanpur airspace during the actual events of the movie. That one cool scene happened offscreen.
* He just straight-up gave Mr. Terrific a Yondu scene.
Still, a good direction for Superman and the DC Universe overall. If Gunn can give me a Guardians Volume 2 sequel to this, it will probably rocket past the Reeve movies. We’re on a good foundation.
I suppose one of the more significant things to happen to me recently is that I got rear ended on my way to pick up my kid, leading to the car being totaled and us having to buy a new one.
The best thing I can say about our car habits is that we’re a one-car family, so I guess our emissions could be worse. But whatever car we do have, one of us drives it daily and when I do it, it’s several inefficient trips.
I suppose this would have been our opportunity to go EV, but the payout from the insurance -while generous – was $9,000, leaving us with a a total budget of about $20K. You can get like a used Nissan Leaf for under that budget, but there were just a lot of question marks regarding an EV that may have been traded in because it got damaged.
The point is, the ultimate choice of car was a compromise. It’s all gas, not even a hybrid. It’s the biggest car I’ve ever consistently had to drive, despite the fact that it’s a “subcompact” SUV. It’s struggling to get 25 mpg at the moment. It kind of feels like I got owned.
I guess I owe the planet a couple of trees or something.
Compelling enough to have me finish it in two sessions, but by the end I was feeling exasperation at the long and drawn-out sequence of psychological head-screw set pieces. Mouthwashing is entertaining in having you piece together a story across controlled time skips, but I at times I felt like there could have been more player interaction between past and present, almost like a Gerudo Temple from OOT mechanic but for the whole game. As it stands, it’s a pretty solid filmic experience, but not a great game experience for me.
I enjoyed making the cake.
You ever been frantically leaving messages and calling a dozen cousins to see if they had time to see you over the weekend?
Just me?
