In Horizon Forbidden West

You know, in a sane country this would be a reasonable headline. Tax dodging is often done legally if dishonestly. By hiring someone who is particularly adept at navigating those loopholes that person could effectively shut them down without opening new ones. It takes a thief to catch a thief and so on. Unfortunately this isn’t a sane country so I have to assume he’s just going to make the loopholes just straight up holes to make things even worse

As I live in the south I hear my “how are you all doing” morphing into “howya’lldoin” and there’s nothing I can do to stop it

Bubonic Plague never went away and it doesn’t make much sense to vaccinate against it. It’s still carried primarily by fleas and other small blood drinking bugs, prairie dogs can also commonly carry it. Plague is treated relatively easily by antibiotics and isn’t usually fatal or likely to cause long term damage. As the title indicates there’re usually 7-10ish cases of plague per year in America and those are rarely fatal

I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this but 30 years ago was the mid 90s, not the 70s-80s

Do incels have some core complaints with validity? Yeah, online dating has been designed specifically to make the majority of people using it feel bad. There are genuine problems that men face in society that women don’t and they don’t get support for. However you can’t pick and choose the members of your ideology, only your choice to share it with them

The ultimate problem is that red/blue/black pill ideology is all rooted in the manosphere and incel culture. By utilizing their terminology you are associating yourself with a group of misogynists, racists, and terrorists

Which is to say someone who says “my MS makes my life difficult enough as is, so I choose not to struggle with dating on top of it” is different from “I’ve been blackpilled because these Stacys won’t consider dating below 8.5/10s”

There’re other points to be made with regards to being “too ugly to date”, why people dislike non-traditional sexualities, and modern dating culture. However, I’d bet if you went into the real world and talked to real people about specific struggles leading to deciding to no longer date without a bunch of internet words you would see a lot more support

28 Years Later 3.5/5: Man, they just decided to get weird with it huh? Look, there’s one gigantic, swinging, singular thing to talk about in this movie which is a batshit crazy choice but overall I think this might be the best in the series. I’ll have to see how they turn this into a 3 parter before I can commit to that opinion

Oh, Hi! 3/5: This was a mystery movie monday movie and I think this one is going to resonate with a lot of women. I would have liked the ending to be a little less ambiguous, which is how I’m choosing to interpret it because if I take it the way everyone else online did then the movie loses a star and a half

Prey (2022) 4.5/5: Dan Trachtenberg continues to put out the best Predator movies. It’s probably not fair that I like this more than the original because it is so clearly a love letter to the original. Still the story works really well on a re-watch when you see the formula for the movie much more clearly. I had zero expectations for Predator: Badlands and Dan has quickly moved it up my must see list

Just started with YAMS using Plex 2 months ago:

Movies: 241 TV Shows: 30

About 3.5 TB on an 8 TB drive

Looks like this was Danny Boyle week for me:

Brokeback Mountain 4.5/5: what a beautiful tragedy. It’s one of those movies where you don’t really fault anyone for their behavior despite the fact that it keeps making everyone’s lives a little more miserable

M3GAN 2.0 4/5: I know everyone is comparing this to T2 but honestly it felt like more like the Scary Movie: Mission Impossible (Movie: Impossible?) which is a compliment. Still very funny and I like them mostly ditching the horror elements

Yesterday 2.5/5: I think this had opportunity but by bailing on The Beatles music and making it a goofy love story I think it kinda loses the plot

28 Days Later 3.5/5: I got the whole “people are the real monsters” message but I still didn’t think this really nailed it

28 Weeks Later 3/5: Once again, I understand what political point it’s making, it’s just not as smart as it thinks it is

USS Callister: Into Infinity 4/5: Look, if TV shows are going to be movie length I’m going to count them as movies. Good Star Trek spin off with interesting sci-fi stuff and bullshit capitalist nonsense throughout

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. 3.5/5: I understand how you built a whole TV show around Napoleon Solo’s charisma. I imagine this would have had a future if Armie Hamer wasn’t a fucking cannibal

What a terrible website. I couldn’t even read it without it loading ads and moving my screen everywhere

I used goodreads because different editions are presented differently. It puts Dune at 658 and PHM at 476. If you want to truly go apples to apples the kindle edition of both, which I assume has consistent font/margins/spacing/etc has Dune at 883 and PHM at 482 for a 400 page difference on an eReader. Comparing the task of turning a vacation book into a movie vs adaptating a legendary book into movie (which was so difficult to do, that this is the third attempt and the first commercially successful one) is a false equivalence

Probably toggleable statistics. So I could choose to see information about people above their heads. Mood, age, name, net worth, and stuff like that. It’d be something I could turn on/off and choose what’s stats I want to see at any given time

1. No it isn’t, Hail Mary is 180 pages shorter than Dune
2. Dune is way more dense than Hail Mary, Weir very clearly writes his books to become movies. Way more dialog, much simpler problems, and clearly defined acts translate much easier to the screen
3. They’ll obviously have to cut some parts, but having read/seen The Martian I don’t think anything of major importance was lost

One thing I couldn’t agree with in Novocaine is that he didn’t like that nickname. If you can’t feel pain and people start calling you Novocaine that’s a badass nickname, I would introduce myself to my parents as Novocaine if people called me that

Drop fucking sucked, also it wasn’t even about the stupid ass Drop

Slow week for me, including two rewatches from this year:

Iron Man (2008) 2.5/5 - I wanted to see if Marvel has changed or if it has always been like this. It was better than some of the recent stuff without the “omg I recognize that!” fan service and the theme about the military industrial complex will always be timely. Unfortunately it lands on the libertarian “good guy with a gun” message and is far too long. Side-note: imagine how filthy fucking rich Terrance Howard would be if he wasn’t pants on head crazy

Predator Killer of Killers (2025) 5/5 - told my family this movie rocks so we watched it. It still rocks

Molly’s Game (2017) 3.5/5 - Man, Sorkin is really Sorkining all over this thing. I like his style and he tells really compelling stories, I just can’t believe that anything besides the core of it is true. His writing is just too neat and fantastic for real stories, which is why I think The West Wing and Newsroom are more his speed

Ocean’s Eleven (2001) 4/5 - What a great heist movie, good cast, good music, good story. My only complaint is about Don Cheadle’s character who is poorly written, poorly acted and not particularly relevant to the plot. I think there are a lot of ways you could write knocking out power from the strip without a whole sidequest to a school to steal an EMP. If they used that time to explain the heist just a little more clearly it’d be perfect

You may be interested in The Man in the High Castle it’s both a novel by Phillip K. Dick and TV show on Amazon Prime that explores exactly that premise

You could buy a top tier modern deck, a couple of competitive standard decks, or a bunch of pretty good commander decks in Magic:the Gathering

Community promised us 6 seasons and a movie. I want to hope the movie is still alive but it seems less and less likely with each passing day

Some more physics things, every planet has a limit on how high the tallest possible mountain is based off their surface gravity, the type of rocks present in the crust, and thickness of the crust. On Earth it turns out that limit is pretty close to Mt Everest’s height. Space is still about 50 miles above Everest so I don’t think humans could build this ramp with our current understanding of physics

If you want to go to space slowly then you can just do what Felix Baumgartner did and take a special type of balloon to get into space. Unfortunately, if you’re not traveling 25,000 mph relative to the surface of the planet, you’re going to fall back to the planet. Just like Felix did

So for physics reasons it doesn’t really matter what technique you’re using to leave Earth. If you’re going to try to go to space successfully, you’re going to have to go a minimum speed of 25,000 miles per hour. That’s called the escape velocity and it’s a different value for every body of mass in space