That’s a pretty slimy technicality.

Trump on immigrants in late 2023: “They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”

Kobach just last month on the Coldwater case: “It still effectively takes the vote away or cancels the vote of a U.S. citizen.”

Most town residents voted for these men. Whether they realize it or not, they’re getting what they wanted. On Election Day, they chose cruelty.

The worst part of this is that the actual guy getting deported should be the reason these yahoos see the light, but instead they just want to be special and not have their preferred “illegals” suffer the consequences they have brought down on so many others. Consequences are for the big city where the brown people are all evil and lazy drug-selling job-stealers, not Coldwater where the one brown guy is a sweetheart who makes sure to vote how his friends do. He seems like a genuinely decent, if utterly dim, person who’s simply never known anything except this shitkicker town actually being fairly nice to him, and indeed if you “know your place” and don’t present an economic threat or make them feel insecure about either of those first two things, many MAGAs will be perfectly pleasant to you.

She was his special education teacher in school [apparently he was very far behind and had poor English skills in a school that had no proper ESL program, and he was not a uniquely talented intellect who could overcome that]. This mess actually started, she said, when she took Ceballos and her other special education students to the Comanche County clerk’s office on a field trip. And there, she said, she actually played a role — which she now regrets — to get him mistakenly registered as a Kansas voter…

“That’s right,” Dennis Swayze said. “I was the one who drove him to Wichita when he was still a kid, to get him that first green card. He saw those words, ‘permanent resident,’ and thought that made him a citizen, and that was not true. So I partly blame myself. We should have brought this up and said it wasn’t enough. But there’s others who also should have been more on the ball. Where was the county clerk when he raised his hand about registering? The clerk should have asked too.”

[from the other article] After all, as Kobach pointed out: Elected officials in Kansas are required by law to be legal electors — meaning legally registered voters.

Then the guy’s lawyer is giving everyone false hope, talking about how he didn’t have intent to break the law. Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter. There are two cliches you’ll hear from Lawyer TV: “You have to have intent,” and “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” They are not in contradiction, though it turns on lawyer hairsplitting. If you push a button that says “free candy” and it instead shoots an investment banker in the face, you haven’t committed a crime, assuming the “button” wasn’t suspiciously trigger-shaped or anything. If someone tells you that it’s not murder to shoot an investment banker in the face, you still go to jail for murder if you shoot an investment banker in the face, because regardless of what you know about the law, you intended to shoot an investment banker in the face. You have other defenses, like entrapment, but that isn’t nearly as easy to claim as people like to think, and getting back to this story, it has to go way beyond somebody else being stupid and herp-derping your illegal voter registration because a white guy was with you.

I think the Kansas Reflector writer actually summed it up very well:

As sure as if every Republican voter of Coldwater lined up to cast a stone at Ceballos, their choices at the ballot box in 2024 and 2022 had the same traumatic effect. They did this to their friend. They did this to their mayor. They did this to their beloved town fixture. And until they figure this out, our country and our state is not going to get better.

Absolutely. Without “uncanceling,” the Acolyte, they need to find a way to get him back for a project. What an utter waste if they don’t. The physicality for the role and choregraphy was perfect, and he “sold” the Dark Side without an appeal to raw coercive power at a political scale, and it worked better than maybe any other approach I can recall. Even the comedic timing and “dude from Jacksonville” vibes (Go Jags!) slotted in perfectly for the (super telegraphed) reveal and the interactions with Osha and Sol. I also liked that Sol brought a lot of humanity and Qui-Gon energy despite Lee Jung-jae’s awkward line readings (the reasons for which I completely understand), and Jecki was good.

I went into that show fully ready to embrace everything about it and almost preemptively give it the grace I knew certain toxic fans wouldn’t, and I still couldn’t love it, though it has its moments and it’s not awful TV. The structure is awkward, the mystery unappealing and self-important, many of the performances unengaging, and frankly despite all the money they blew it often looks cheap. They also killed two out of the three characters I liked the best. Easy targets like the singing and the fire in space and the chubby lightsaber hilts were just people fixating on unimportant shit because they didn’t like the show but lack the ability to say why, or some of them are ashamed to say why. The whole thing needed another couple of passes through the editing process and maybe some hard discussions about why making the entire show look like Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge is not a good use of the budget.

Or, you think you lost one and get the second, but the original was tucked into some zippered sub-pouch all along.

Should’ve been with prejudice, as they were so clearly malicious prosecutions.

I believe those motions are still pending.

Yup. I’m sure Truth Social will go nuclear on Mamdani about two minutes after his next meeting with Steven Miller.

Peaked in obedience school…

The kindest thing you can say about her is that she values something more than the Trump cult. Whether she “comes by her crazy honest” or is just tired of subordinating her own ambition to his whims, that I couldn’t say. In any event, she’s quite awful and even joking that she’s welcome in the Democratic party is stupid, but the break itself should be welcome. I think we’re also going to be seeing a good bit of erosion around the edges and some pretty insane palace politics. I have no doubt that a lot of people fancy themselves Trump’s defacto heir, and the jockeying for that and people not wantingg to wait until he croaks may be the only thing that keeps him from getting significant support in testing the term limits on US presidents.

Somebody should remind Trump of how many Nobel Peace Prizes Neville Chamberlain has.

Yeah, I mean there’s not a big huge punchline, but this was clearly a bit of a general send-up, and also prodding at a very specific “Tim Tebow” type of muscular Christianity.

That type of Christian man is big and strong, but also extremely manicured and soft-spoken (even while saying the usual heinous shit) and “effeminate” by certain heteronormative standards. The look and vibe lends itself to fairly easy jokes about men who are closeted or so naive they don’t realize they’re closeted, which will needle some and maybe give others food for thought. Anybody who’s spent time in the Bible Belt will have met the dude in this comic, and maybe his wife.

Absolutely. I think there will always be room for thoughtfully filmed 1.5-3 hour storytelling, but this idea that you have to go out to a communal viewing on a screen that fills your entire filed of vision feels gatekeepery and fetishistic. Just like playhouses before them, cinemas will settle into their best use cases, and sensory spectacle seems to be the one where they offer a competitive advantage. Another one is serving dedicated cinephiles, but that market is not as big as Spielberg, Scorsese, etc. want it to to be, and they sound like old men shouting at the sky when they complain.

Now that said, I think a 65"/5.1 is much closer to a movie theater than it is to a phone screen, so I personally hope we don’t get too much stuff filmed and framed for the latter, but maybe that’s just me on my path to being an old man shouting at the sky.

Very cool, but is anything as cool as that Space Wars Computer Space cabinet in the same scene?

some of them taking home north of $250,000 for office-based shiftwork

Sucking up resources and not actually shooting and teargassing innocent people? These are the least-awful people there!

1. Spoiler tags.

2. You’re not going to get anybody to agree to “Trust me bro” on keeping the 8-figure alien VFX out of the marketing. Spoiling Rocky was pretty much a pre-condition to this being done as a big project, and…

I don’t agree about the movie being better, mostly because I think getting Mark’s inner monologue made much of the humor land so much better than the vocalized stuff in the movie. And they had to handwave a bunch of the more technical sciences and engineering that I found genuinely interesting in the book. But it was very cinematic and a pretty solid adaptation.

That’s certainly fair, and probably more common among people who’ve gone into both with an open mind. There are certain things that books simply explore better than films, and the more in-depth “Swiss Family Robinson” competence-porn and meditation on isolation did work very well. Someone who wants that particular story with more depth and different pacing can always make a good argument that the book is better," but I do sometimes like to gently push back on the notion that any book is inherently better than its adaptation, not to make you a straw man or anything. :-) Also, for the record I really liked the book a lot.

I thought Damon did a very good job with converting the monologue into video messages and very much caught the spirit of the character. I honestly didn’t miss the rover ride, which dragged and made an already constrained story positively claustrophobic, though the science and geography it showed was obviously core to what Weir wanted to do. I also just had a personal bugaboo where I struggled with the fact that every book character other than Watney was drawn thinner than thin and had clunky dialogue, so I found it a chore to wade through their scenes. The script doctors and professional actors made them much more palatable in the movie.

I think first-time-novelist Andy Weir just didn’t really have more than one character in him at the time, and that character was his “juiced” author-insert. You can see him stretching his literary wings in Artemis but it falls flat in many ways, though that setting could result in a really good project of its own if they tweaked the characterizations some. PHM was nice because it kind of took a more incremental step of giving the author insert more flaws, making genuinely excellent use of his second character, and making the “plot device humans” comfortably deliver exposition and obstacles from the sidelines without being distracting.

I actually think The Martian was better as a movie. I think I’m rare in going that far, but most people seem to think it was a pretty solid adaptation. Weir has improved as a writer, and so PHM has more to work with but it’s playing with a lot of the same techniques, so I’m optimistic this movie will be decent or better.

They clearly felt like they couldn’t even market the movie without revealing one of the major spoilable plot points, and frankly I’m sympathetic, but I’m curious how they’ll handle the other.

I liked The Mandalorian, even as the seasons got weaker and it descended into a series of backdoor pilots for moving Filoni’s projects from animation into live action. However, it always felt a little small, kind of intentionally so in the first season and increasingly more like a failure of budget and vision as it went, and the panicked Season 2.5 course correction crammed into the middle of Boba Fett was bizarre.

I just don’t know if there’s a “Star War” there for a big screen big event. It won’t be hard to improve on TRoS, minimally competent plotting and scripting will do that, but that’s a low bar.

Here’s a slightly more nuanced, but still ultimately disappointed review. Sounds like this one is old-fashioned Nov-Dec overhyped Oscar-bait.

A Dog Took My Face And Gave Me A Better Face To Change The World: The Celeste Cunningham Story

Hmmm. Skyler Gisondo plays characters who seem nice, but he’s got all the charisma of a wet paper bag.