Music writer, movie lover, professional grocery shopper
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Materialists is an interesting success story. Barely marketed domestically, yet hung around in the top 10 for 5 weeks, and made 2/3 of its money internationally. I was gonna push back on FF not being in the worldwide top 10, but it’s at #9 now, so Avatar and Wicked should finish the job.
The first COVID super spreader event in the U.S. was at a church choir rehearsal in Washington state! But you know, people forget or intentionally ignore details like that.
Oh, and for the folks who don’t know, the Tavicat duo are named Tavisha Wolfgarth and Rosearik Rikki Simons. If you had told me that Tavicat was actually a twee indie band that put out 2 albums on Polyvinyl and opened for Mates of State and Kimya Dawson, I would totally have believed you.
Their next title, the very shoujo Shutterbox, was much less manic than either of these, but also less fun? I’m not sure I ever got all 6 volumes of that or even if Tokyopop finished publishing it before they went under.
As one of the few people who actually owns this, the recap seems accurate. I was a fan of Tavicat’s comic Reality Check! about a teen who puts a virtual reality helmet on his cat and she becomes a cute cat girl in the virtual world and they have adventures. This was…less good and less fun than that.
Looks like Great Grandpa is playing at 1:50. I really liked their album from earlier this year. Mostly acoustic rock with just enough variety to keep it interesting. www.popmatters.com/great-grandp...
I’ll say it again. A good reason to tax the rich is to help pay for the billions of dollars of damages the U.S. Government is going to owe people stemming from successful lawsuits against ICE.
Remember how if a kid choked on a little plastic toy they used to stop selling the toy
Coincidentally my college age daughter and I started watching Dan Da Dan tonight on Netflix and she requested that I turn on subtitles that match the sub, so CC it is!
The Beths new album is an indie-rock gem. I highly recommend it, and you can click through for the full review. It’s out tomorrow. www.popmatters.com/the-beths-st...
A friend pointed out that the fact that Prodigy claims “We don’t know” if she’s really his sister seems like a good indication that she isn’t. “If they had created a functional duplicate of a human mind then copied the structure and impulses into the simulation, they would know they’d done that.”
I, for one, want to know when our elected officials are doing things to slow down and stop the Trump Administration, so thanks for passing this along.
The problem with bringing all these federal charges against people for mostly imaginary crimes committed in DC is that the grand juries needed to indict them are also citizens of DC, who are seeing this crap every day. Looking forward to many more failures of this type from Pirro.
Huh.
www.khou.com/article/mone...
Spent a weekend in downtown Portland in late June. Walked everywhere, from early morning to after sunset. Didn’t ever feel unsafe, even when walking past homeless folks in tents.
One of the best episodes. Not only do you get amazing footage of mid-ocean surfing, boy do you get a lot of Garrett McNamara’s particular personality disorder. I first saw footage of Cortes in the ‘03 film Step Into Liquid, so it was cool that 100-Foot Wave went there, too. youtu.be/KQugrcyGvq4
Agreed! You go over the 2:30 mark? 10-minute break. The new Avatar that will probably be like 3:15 because nobody says no to James Cameron definitely will need one.
She can but she’s been trying hard over the entire ordeal to not take things that far with regard to representatives of the federal government. Is there a danger if she jails lawyers for contempt that the whole set of cases gets appealed upwards and she ends up as no longer the judge?
One reason to tax the wealthy is to help pay for the billions of dollars the U.S. Government is going to owe people from successful lawsuits against ICE.
I hate seeing government officials gleefully embrace Trump’s mafioso tactics with a blatant disregard for actual U.S. law. “Because we say so” and “Or else” are now the guiding principles.
Other pieces from the same author indicate that maybe he’s inadvertently making the case for the opposite.
Pleeeeeaaaaase somebody do it!
I’m gonna need a little help on this one. So I shouldn’t listen to the people who are well-informed enough on a topic to be considered “experts”, because they might also be biased. But I should listen to non-experts on those same topics because they’re less informed but also, uh, less biased?
If I hadn’t fallen off on the retrospective thing over the past year, I would definitely have done a piece on Twin Cinema for @popmatters.com . I think I put it at #1 when it came time to submit our lists for Best Albums of the 00’s. An absolute monster of a power-pop record.
Album just released last Friday. A little oblique, but only if you’re just half-listening to the lyrics. youtu.be/ug9suAGHCuk?...
This is upsetting. Motorcycle accident. It sucks that he left the band on less than amiable terms earlier this year, but this is worse. loudwire.com/mastodon-bre...
Anytime that someone feels the need to clarify that something crazy Trump has said is not a joke, I feel like we need to return to this baseline.
After listening to the intro, I realized this is not a series I have or have ever read. I did start rereading the “Here, Chris Claremont, why don’t you play in this sandbox and stay out of our main continuity,” X-Men Forever series this weekend, but clearly we are not there yet.
This is for sure worse than Biden walking over to a landed paratrooper to tell him he did a good job.
The second photo in the article is credited to “Rising sophomore Yale Abernathy.”
Molly Tuttle’s new album was led by an incredibly catchy but not very bluegrassy single, “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark.” But I warmed up to that, and the rest of the record shows Tuttle to be as excellent as ever at songwriting, singing, and guitarist. Full review: www.popmatters.com/molly-tuttle...
It puts an amazing button on this mysterious recurring role and his own life and it’s incredibly poignant.
Garrett McNamara is like if Johnny Knoxville didn’t have a mean streak or an ounce of self-awareness and just wanted all of his bros to do these incredibly dangerous things with him because it was fun. And also was barely aware of the danger.
She stands around for 5 seconds and then says, “I’m not even trying!”
Texas National Guard have been dealing with this shit for 2 years now along the Texas-Mexico border, thanks to Greg Abbott. Republicans are the kings of show deployments that just waste soldiers’ time and taxpayers’ money.
If a candidate’s platform for 2026 and/or 2028 doesn’t include 1) Prosecution for crimes committed by government officials during 2025-28, 2) Expansion of the Supreme Court, and 3) Aggressive rebuilding of government functions, I’m gonna have to think long and hard about how much I can support them
This seems like a prudent strategy.
youtu.be/vaAF_GAc3Mk?...
Suddenly so many people are like,
This is so gross. I guess I’m ready for Lina to move on to whatever she’s doing next. All the insiders have been saying it for a couple months now, we just need the announcement. Lots of good other candidates for County Judge lining up on the Dem side already.
Same!
Scratch the curing diseases part, I guess.
“No concerns about the world getting warmer People thought that they were just being rewarded For treating others as they'd like to be treated For obeying stop-signs and curing diseases For mailing letters with the address of the sender Now we can swim any day in November”
Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia can’t be far behind, either.
“Should move right” sounds like a strategy proscription. But if the people Dems are trying to reach are low-information swing voters, and those voters mostly get their info from right-wing news and social media, will they even hear about Dems moving right? Seems like a wasted effort.
And I missed that he had the chance to really do some positive things as Secretary of Transportation and seemingly said, “I’ll pass.” Only so much fits into one skeet, folks, so extending the list seems worthwhile.
He’s a great communicator, but the fact that he couldn’t come out against Israel last week, after everything they’ve been doing for nearly two years now, should be disqualifying. It is for me, at least, and for a good portion of the electorate any Democratic candidate is hoping to woo in a primary.
According to plays in grocery stores, “Roam” is the B-52’s biggest hit. “Deadbeat Club” was also a major hit in the grocery store alternate music universe.
I had forgotten Sister Souljah until I saw it referenced like this last week. Talk about an event that has not resonated over time.
I do think he actually believes it. 1. Trump doesn’t care or know much in the first place. 2. He wasn’t paying any attention to world affairs when he wasn’t President. 3. His memory is Swiss cheese, anyway. 4. Putin and Trump sycophants have been telling him for months it’s Ukraine’s fault.
My job driving around the northern suburbs all day but my wife complains about her brief 20-25 minute commute all the time and says she doesn’t know how I deal with it. The secret is, by starting after 8:00 AM and usually finishing up by 5:00, I only deal with bad traffic at the end of most days.
I’ve lived here for 19 years and if Harris County, Houston, and Metro had done what voters actually approved in that time, we’d have a light rail line down Richmond and one from downtown to Hobby by now. And we’d probably be talking about extending the North Line to IAH.
Don’t forget Automan, he’s gonna get in on this competition.
Fly like a butterfly, buzz like a bee
Serial let host Susan Burton run with the idea of narrating The Retrievals Season 2 as if it was a medical drama, including descriptions of stage direction and camera shots. This provides little spikes of aggravation amid an otherwise excellent story of women’s pain during c-sections.
Ed can speak for himself, but his whole thing seems to be that 1)AI company heads are promising amazing things “soon” with no evidence that progress is being made, and 2)The amount of money being invested in these companies is categorically unsustainable unless these amazing things actually happen.
The failure of Reconstruction may be the origin point in the U.S. of people in authority going, “Oh, you’re upset? Well, we will back off on giving you consequences for the good of the country.” And it took almost a century to fix it and now their ideological descendants are breaking it again.
The U.S. gave up on Reconstruction after the Civil War when it got pushback from the former Confederates who were not held responsible for their actions. This allowed the racists to retake control across The South and keep punishing Blacks. Doesn’t mean the KKK wouldn’t have formed, anyway.
Can we send Tim Dunn on a similar trip?
It does. For example, I haven’t paid any close attention to it. I haven’t watched a video or read an article or someone’s blog post, and I certainly don’t swim in the right wing media pool. But I’m still aware that there was some controversy involving a Sydney Sweeney ad for American Eagle jeans.
Liberals unilaterally disarming in the face of a crisis has gotten us things like the KKK, The Gilded Age, the destruction of unions, George W. Bush, and a second Trump Presidency. When liberals fight we get things like the weekend, Social Security, Civil Rights, and wage increases.
Doug Ford seems really grateful for this chance to further put some distance between himself and Trump, despite modeling his political style and government after Trump.
Not a word in this piece about how Uber has systematically made it more and more difficult for their serious drivers to earn a living by creatively lowering their wages? If you’re accentuating the positives, it seems worthwhile to at least mention, even as an aside, the great big negative.
Cuomo’s job used to be following the news. Apparently he hasn’t kept up with it or he’d immediately know the Sydney Sweeney story didn’t break until after Mike Johnson shut down Congress to avoid Epstein, so this can’t possibly be real.
“If you ask an AI leading questions it will probably go where you are leading it” can be a tough concept to grasp, as it’s largely dependent on how well you understand how AI works.
The Real Tradwives of Turning Point USA.
Wish I had enjoyed it as much as you. It definitely had a lot of good jokes, but not enough of them landed for me. It was about on par with any random episode of Angie Tribeca and I wanted it to be a step above that.
This headline is SO close to a genuine, “Here’s Why That’s Bad for Biden”
@nytpitchbot.bsky.social Thank you for your attention to this matter!
If anything, this was one of the things worth pushing Manchin and Sinema on, and it just did not happen.
I managed to squeeze in watching seasons 3 and 4 with my daughter just a few weeks before Zaslav did his thing.
As a very liberal voter in a very red area of solidly blue Harris County, there’s a lot of truth to this. There are many wealthy Republican enclaves around the blue cores of our big cities that are really providing the bulwark against the state turning purple.
Ahh, okay, now I get it. Yup, lots of “music fans” out there who, it turns out, didn’t ever really pay attention to the lyrics of their favorites.
Help me understand who you are talking about, because it seems like it’s not Rage Against the Machine.
Right? As Gen X’ers I think we have to confront the sad fact that our generation is filled with more Paul Ryan-style Rage Against the Machine fans than people who actually understood the music’s point.
So much for the “gloves off for the next 10 months” version of Colbert we were going to get.
It’s probably a Steak ‘n Shake.
I think Civil War is a solid movie as a completely fictional action-drama about a war-torn country we as viewers don’t understand. But I agree that it is thematically incoherent. Eddington is a mess, but it definitely has things to say about real life, even with its surreal second half.
This was the first time Jai Courtney has ever made a real impression on me, so that was refreshing.
This morning my scale said I was the heaviest I’ve ever been. I don’t like those numbers so I’m gonna throw out the scale and get a new one. That should fix the problem, right?
Looks like the last time they were here was 2018, but they were also more or less on hiatus for quite a bit of the last 7 years.
Low info voters aren’t responding to their own research. They’re responding, for one example, to a politician claiming that they were better off the last time he was in office. And the low-info voter thinks about inflation under Biden and forgets who was in charge during COVID’s start.
So much projection.
That’s, uh, that’s unfortunately not surprising. It’s also a big, “They’ll put anything on tv these days” moment for me.
Whenever I listen to @xplainthexmen.bsky.social I get a picture of Jay-Z. Whenever I listen to @volts.wtf I get a picture of the band Son Volt.
I feel like it’s harder for people that are paying attention to continue to refer to this as anything other than a genocide. Especially since Israel has shifted tactics to murdering dozens of starving people every single day who are coming to aid sites for food.
Tommy on how the NCAA’s transfer policy has changed since he was a football coach: “This is ridiculous…they play here and they change schools, but they take everything they possibly can with them in terms of anything that they learn.”
@stevenhyden.bsky.social and @sepinwall.bsky.social can’t do it by themselves!
“It’s around the corner” and “It’s in sight” are the techbro versions of Trump’s “I’ll let you know in two weeks.”
I mean, if you move from LA, where a 90-degree day is an unusual heat wave, only to discover that Austin is above 90 degrees for roughly half the year, I can see why you’d dislike that. But, uh, do your own research before you move to be near a single comedy club and a dude who podcasts constantly
Also notice how no matter what year the show/movie takes place in, unless they show the video game onscreen, you’re hearing like, Donkey Kong/Pac-Man early 80’s bleeps and bloops.
This is cool and principled of them to do, but also it means I’m probably never catching up on their other 20 albums besides Petrodragonic Apocalypse.
Battle Damagers
I feel like I’m going to trust the man who was elected Governor in North Carolina twice to know how to campaign for statewide office in North Carolina.
Shit.
I watched two Pedro movies in theaters this weekend and really enjoyed myself. Even if I didn’t entirely buy what Eddington was selling.