Consider the cat.
Specifically, consider the cat’s drive to kill.
Now, consider this classic scene from Alien, but imagine that they’re talking about Jones, the ship’s cat, instead of the eight-foot-tall, acid-bleeding xenomorph: Continue reading
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens will never be as good as it is in this moment, as I sit in the IMAX theater at the Bob Bullock State History Museum waiting for the movie to start.
Right now, the movie is pure anticipation.
Soon, it will be real. Whether it’s good, bad, or Phantom Menace, this moment will be lost forever.
Savor moments like this, my friends.
What it’s like to live on $2 a day in the United States, Chico Harlan, Washington Post, September 11, 2015
It’s worth pondering for a moment just how difficult it is to survive on $2 per day. That’s a single gallon of gasoline. Or half a gallon of milk. If you took a D.C. bus this morning, you have 25 cents left for dinner. Among this group in extreme poverty, some get a boost from housing subsidies. Many collect food stamps — an essential part of survival. But so complete is their destitution, they have little means to climb out. (The book described one woman who scored a job interview, couldn’t afford transportation, walked 20 blocks to get there, and showed up looking haggard and drenched in sweat. She didn’t get hired.)
Edin is a professor specializing in poverty at Johns Hopkins University. Shaefer is an associate professor of social work and public policy at the University of Michigan. In several years of research that led to this book, they set up field offices both urban and rural — in Chicago, in Cleveland, in Johnson City, Tenn., in the Mississippi Delta — and tried to document this jarring form of American poverty.
Batman: Arkham Knight Has a Serious Problem With Women, Denny Connolly, Game Rant, June 2015 Continue reading
It’s easy to confuse ‘what is’ with ‘what ought to be,’ especially when ‘what is’ has worked out in your favor.
– Tyrion Lannister, “The Dance of Dragons,” Games of Thrones season 5, episode 9
© HBO / via examiner.co.uk (click image for source)
Perhaps it’s just the law nerd in me, but I love that there’s a whole land-rights subtext to the current Game of Thrones plot involving the Night’s Watch and the Wildlings. From Grantland‘s “Ask the Maester” series:
“Does Jon Snow actually have authority to give the Wildlings land south of the wall? Won’t that ruffle the Bolton’s feathers? Don’t they technically own/control those lands?” Continue reading
I wrote a post a few days ago about the instantly-infamous rape scene in the Game of Thrones episode “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” in which I basically said that I found the scene excruciating and unnecessary, but also that the incident itself served the larger narrative of the show. Having now seen the next episode, “The Gift,” I feel rather vindicated in two areas: (1) that the scene served a larger narrative, and (2) that the scene was needlessly brutal.
What “The Gift” managed to accomplish, and where “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” fell short, is in what one might call the fine art of “less is more” in filmmaking.
Via winteriscoming.net
The titular alien in the original Alien, to give one example, was scary not only because it was an eight-foot-tall creature with a retractable jaw that bled acid, but also because we barely ever saw it. Continue reading
If you somehow haven’t heard about it yet (spoiler alerts and all that), last week’s Game of Thrones episode continued the general divergence from the books’ storyline by having Sansa Stark marry Ramsay Bolton (née Snow)—possibly in order to exact vengeance on Ramsay’s father, Roose Bolton, who murdered Sansa’s brother Robb and was directly involved in the murder of her mother, Catelyn. Sansa was apparently unaware of just what a bastard (pun intended) Ramsay is, as was Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish, who brokered the arrangement with Roose Bolton.
The overall storyline of having Sansa marry Ramsay is definitely a huge difference from the books, but it makes sense in the context of a TV show. In the books, Sansa is currently still at the Eyrie with her cousin, Robert Arryn (Robin Arryn on the show), and Ramsay is married to Jeyne Poole, a friend of Sansa’s from Winterfell who is being passed off as Arya Stark. Littlefinger has plans to one day send Sansa back to Winterfell and reveal “Arya Stark” as an impostor, giving Sansa the opportunity to reclaim Winterfell for the Starks. What’s happening on the show fits that same overall scheme, and it does it with fewer characters and less plotting-while-sitting-around.
But that’s not what I really want to talk about, and I think you know that. Continue reading
All hail King Fluffykins, First of His Name, who sits on the Potassium Throne:
To send you off into the weekend with a smile! (especially fun for Game of Thrones fans!) From the creative mind of "Wallace the Mad King"! https://www.youtube.com/c/WallaceTheMadKing
Posted by The Healthy Voyager on Friday, May 8, 2015
(h/t Jason / Andy, via The Healthy Voyager)
UPDATE (05/12/2015): The video does not seem to be embedding, and I don’t know why.
I really don’t care that Jared Leto’s Joker looks more like a Juggalo than an insane criminal mastermind. I am trying very hard to resist the temptation to make negative comparisons to Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the character. I don’t even care that Leto looks more like a fan of the Joker—who got way too carried away at the tattoo shop—than like the actual Joker.
© DC Comics / Warner Bros., via Twitter / @DavidAyerMovies
Any time I think a modern-day portrayal of the Joker is in any way ridiculous or unworthy of the character, I just remember that Cesar Romero’s Joker was once the only live-action screen portrayal of the Joker in existence. Continue reading
The bloodbelly comb jelly appears to offer evidence that aliens have already arrived on Earth and found the oceans preferable to land.
