I'm a fiend for mojitos.
Do Not Listen To This Guy
Thinks Balogun's play deserves a 5-game suspension based on a screenshot. He obviously didn't even watch the game and knows nothing about the situation. I agree with the preposterousness of the entire situation. Still, the sole focus on the Balogun play and Trump's supposed involvement in overturning the situation misses the grand absurdity going on with VAR.
World Cup
VAR resulted in Balogun receiving a red card. Now, a review of VAR has taken away the suspension. Please make it make sense. Does it mean the red card was a mistake? Does it mean the original referee's non-call was correct? No, we are going to be forced to accept that the VAR call was correct, the VAR post-match review of the call was correct, and that the rules are correct even though none of them make sense.
One of my favorite Henry Miller quotes: "Consistency is the hobgoblin of simple minds." Always liked the quote because it got at the complexities of the real world. That some things are apples and oranges. I never anticipated, however, the reverse impact of this idea. That we'd reach a point where we are expected to accept that oranges are not oranges - sometimes. What is this madness we've created? VAR is designed to make less controversy. Has it? Is there any less controversy? Did anyone watch the Paraguay match against France? There were 4 yellow cards and arguably several red cards by Paraguay. Not a one was issued. In the old days, this would be on the ref. We establish VAR to help correct this. But the VAR isn't used . Then it gets used in the Balogun instance. Why? It wasn't even a dangerous play.
Wrong Wrong Wrong
Noah Smith thinks the DSA is the left-wing MAGA. Please. These lunatics on the left are 10-50x worse than Trump, who, despite his corruption and bluster, is ultimately pragmatic.
Logging
TV: Widow's Bay
First four episodes were good. Clearly, they had no clue where the story went, and so the remaining ones are just spaghetti against the wall. TV was never meant to be novelistic. A negative legacy of Sopranos, Deadwood, etc is that the TV studios think they have capability they don't.
Film: T2, extended cut
Every scene they put back into the film made it substantially worse.
Unreality
Plan crashed into China's largest building, and they scrubbed all mention of it on the internet.
Odd place.
A Modern Slave Society
From a distance, China looks to me like a high-tech slave society.
They work the coolies for pennies, sell the goods to foreigners, and keep all the money. There is no political freedom or recourse. You don't own anything. What else might you call this situation?
Matt Walsh
I know this guy seems like sort of a loony dick, but he's right about a lot of basic things.
Female led action films in general are almost always a dud. There’s no audience for it. Nobody wants to see some 105 pound girlboss action hero. It’s a comedically absurd premise, and there’s no getting around that. The studios are of course aware of this market reality. Yet they keep churning these out anyway because they’ll willingly lose money for the sake of pandering to women who want these movies to exist in principle but don’t actually care to watch them. That’s how female-centric our society has become.
I'm literally in the belly of the beast of this world and this is 100% true. In public, women all say they really want these movies and yet they never actually opt to watch them. They will argue the movies "aren't good" and will further excuse them as "male-directed" or "male-produced" or when directed and/or produced by females, they will cite "lack of prior opportunities or experience" so the female directors fail because of systemic issues. None of these reasons are true. Women will watch the most dumbass reality shows set on an island if there are relationship issues at stake. And they know it's dumb. Just like a man like me will watch the most dumbass action movie if some bad dudes get killed in a clever way by the good guy. It's just the way it is. Action movies are fundamentally for the male audience because the male brain works differently than the female brain. Good action movies will be crossover hits to female audiences because many females are not dumb and can enjoy a male-coded movie if executed well. Just like I can enjoy a little Selling Sunset or Love Island at times.
But it's even worse than all this. Because they made a great female led action movie called Furiosa and guess what? No women went to it. So if anyone ever ever complains about not making or supporting female action films...first ask them if they saw Furiosa. They didn't.
Everybody Knows Who Don Viser Is...
Best scene in Rolling Thunder is with Tommy Lee Jones's family talking about Japanese-built cars, etc. and how whites can't make cars and even the parts in American TVs are Japanese-built and TLJ and Devane and just sitting there, unable to stand it. The echoes with today...uncanny. Really well-directed scene, too, with the camera angle on TLJ, his head down the entire scene.