Fizzzzle

Never been to Atlanta other than just passing through. Didn't know they had an aquarium, that sounds neat. Hope you're having a good time.

Me too! *high five*

You know what I'm trying to say. "Hey folks, we had a really good year last year with our current operating strategies. Let's just do that again" isn't something you'll ever hear in a corporation. Everything is about what NEW markets can you bring us.

I know I've brought it up before, but I base my ranking system on RT average scores (tomatometer is useless, IMO) 0 = Hypothetically the worst movie ever. I don't think any movie has ever scored less than 1 1 = Very, very few movies are this bad. Future World or 365 Days 2 = Still in horrible territory. Most of the movies in this category are things like Bio-Dome, Scary Movie 5, or Larry the Cable Guy's Witless Protection. Like Adam Sandler movies if they can't afford Adam Sandler's production company or schlocky spoof movies. 3 = Still bad, but we're getting into the territory of "I could watch this if I'm stuck on an airplane." Jonah Hex. The Love Guru. Speed 2. Gods and Generals (better be a long flight) 4 = Now we're getting to a point where it's not actively bad, just... forgettable. Prime "I don't know what to watch, fuck it" territory. Gone in 60 Seconds. Punisher: War Zone. Bulletproof Monk. Basically any Jason Statham movie or any Nicholas Sparks movie. 5 = The bad parts outweigh the good parts, but still enjoyable. Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Pain & Gain, Riddick (the last one), Alien 3. 6 = The good parts outweigh the bad parts, but there are bad parts. Horrible Bosses, I Am Legend, The Old Guard, Sleepy Hollow 7 = These movies are great, but we're not talking about these movies in 30 years. A Beautiful Mind, Crimson Tide, Gosford Park, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Michael Clayton. 8 = Now we're getting into deserving Oscar territory. Black Swan, Hero, Pig, City of God, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Blade Runner 2049. 9 = Very, very few movies are this good. At least from what I can look up in my spreadsheet (yes I have one, but it's not complete and even then it only goes back to 1990): Moonlight, The Tale, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Goodfellas, L.A. Confidential, Past Lives, Toy Story, Hamilton (disagree on this one), Boyhood, Pulp Fiction, Parasite. 10 = Hypothetically the best movie ever. The Godfather Part II and Citizen Kane are both 9.7.

If you're not growing, you're dying. Sustainability isn't an option, which leads to volatility by necessity.

Conservatives playing 5D chess. It's all part of the plan for... something.

I've straight up drank tap water from a rusty shower in a backwater village in southern Thailand and nothing ever happened to me, but God forbid I ever eat produce in Mexico.

Last night I realized I had 5 days off from work (not ideal, I prefer working), so I looked at what I could do for 5 days. I noticed a trip to Puerto Vallarta that was $500 round trip, which is about the cheapest it ever gets. So I booked it. Now I'm on the way. Gonna get some skin cancer, smoke shitty Mexican cigarettes, drink beer, and hopefully not get Montezuma's revenge for the next few days.

The only phone numbers I know off the top of my head are my brother's and my dad's.

I don't know who I would have e-mailed to begin with who would have her phone number. It's kind of random that I even know her e-mail.

So I woke up to my girlfriend telling me she doesn't know if we should keep seeing each other. We had a short conversation while I was still in bed, she says "okay, we'll talk later," then we said bye. I ordered a new phone which came in the mail today, and while transferring my sim card from my old phone to the new one, I dropped it on the ground. Apparently it bounced into the fucking netherrealm, because I looked for that fucking thing for like 3 hours and never found it. At some point I sent my girlfriend an e-mail (the only way I know to get in touch with her, neither of us are really on social media) explaining what happened, but by this point it was like 4pm so she's probably not checking her e-mail anymore and she never sees it. At that point, it would have been prudent to go to an AT&T store to remedy the situation - the only problem is I'm not the account holder for my phone, my brother is (reason being he used to work for AT&T so I get grandfathered into an unlimited data plan for $30/month as long as I don't change accounts). So I e-mailed my brother, asking him to give me the account information. He didn't get back to me for like 4 hours, by which point all the AT&T stores are closed. Meanwhile, this whole time my girlfriend is probably thinking that I'm ignoring her. She's probably very, very pissed right now. My brother ended up telling me that I'm not an authorized user on the account, so I couldn't have done anything anyway without either him or my dad there. He tried adding me as an authorized user on his end, but the call wait time was like 2 hours so he said 'fuck it.' At that point, I e-mailed my dad, but he goes to bed by like 8pm, so that's a non-starter. After settling in for a shitty night constantly thinking about what my girlfriend is thinking (either that I'm ignoring her or that something happened to me), I fucked around for a bit until it was time to take the recycling out. I took the recycling out, only to find that I LOCKED MYSELF OUT OF THE HOUSE. We have a spare key, but it's in a lockbox, the combination to which I keep stored in my phone... my old phone... which is inside the house... So, I've been just chilling on the porch for the last ~2 hours, waiting for my roommate to get home so I can go back inside (probably not for another ~3 hours)

Leave the World Behind - 5/10 There are some good things. Julia Roberts is a 10/10 karen. In fact, all of the performances are great. The cinematography is so up its own ass that it's distracting, though. Someone found out how to do spinning shots, drone shots, and wipes and figured "let's just do them every single fucking scene, it'll be great!" It's not great, it sucks. You can't have every note be staccato, otherwise staccato is just noise. Save your cool spinning drone shots for moments that matter, not when Bobby is taking a shit. Otherwise the cool moments don't matter as much.

To be honest, I kind of thought Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was kind of shitty until about halfway through the movie, which is when I realized it was basically a slapstick comedy. Once I reframed my mindset, I thought it was brilliant. Watch the movie imagining it's an R-rated Happy Gilmore, don't expect it to be Reservoir Dogs.

YO MOMMA

I feel like some of that is maybe due to writing but also to do with actually using unknown child actors. The actors who play Aang and Kitara have pretty much never done anything before, and their performances vary wildly in consistency (compared to Zuko and Sokka, who are consistently excellent in my opinion) I liked the first season enough that I'm excited to see what they'll build with it, especially as the actors get older and more experienced. This isn't game of thrones or Harry potter, where the young actors are protected by a wall of established thespians. There is nothing to hide behind. I feel like the first season could have suffered from it while also giving the third season that much more impact.

Spotify all but killed piracy in the music industry. How? By making basically any music you want legally available at the push of a button. Is everyone happy with the new arrangement? Fuck no! But for artists/labels, it was take 50% of something or 100% of nothing. If you want to kill piracy for digital media, make your products easily accessible for a reasonable price and the vast majority of people will pay for it. Pirating things can be a pain in the ass sometimes. Funny enough, Nintendo tried to sue Blockbuster in the 80s. Nintendo couldn't argue that the renting of games themselves was illegal (Microsoft lobbied for first-sale doctrine, meaning any copy of software/media purchased legally can be resold without royalties going to the original owner), so they went after Blockbuster for photocopying manuals. Blockbuster had to cease copying manuals (that's why you never see games with fake jackets on them at used game stores), but the right to rent out games was enshrined into law.

I played the first one and it wasn't actively bad or anything, but I pretty much have no memory of anything that happened in it. It falls into the category of games like Rage where it's like "Steam tells me I played the game for like 50 hours, but fuck me if I could tell you a single thing about it."

Thankfully that's the only episode in which she ever speaks!

The whole "not starting Zuko as a proper villain" thing bothered me for a minute, but it doesn't anymore now that I've finished it Honestly, I'm fine with the show. Is it as good as the original series? No, but the original series is literally one of the greatest shows ever made, so we're picking nits. The show is good. And I didn't see the original until I was like 25.

That would be far more what I'm worried about, though I don't think the court would go that far, even in their current makeup. Then again they are potentially about to take the teeth out of every executive regulatory body, so... The Supreme court becoming a weapon of the executive is something Andrew Jackson could have only dreamed about. (He famously ignored the supreme court when they said it was unconstitutional to bar native Americans from non-native lands and allowed them to be kicked out anyway. Jackson was the worst.)

As far as I'm aware, both the House and the Senate have to approve NATO spending/cutting in the defense budget. Cutting NATO spending would be a non-starter in any budget in the Senate. So... thank god for the Senate? ... that's a frightening sentence... Then again, maybe Trump doubles down on anti-NATO rhetoric that he's willing a complete government shutdown over NATO spending...

To be fair, so far all Trump has said is that he wouldn't help NATO allies who "didn't pay their share" (which I don't think he understands what that actually means) in the case of a Russian invasion, and every NATO ally that borders Russia/Belarus does, in fact, "pay their share." Point being, I know Trump wants to suck off vladdy daddy in every way he can, but straight up leaving NATO or stripping funding isn't possible without congressional support (at least I can't find anything that says the President can unilaterally cut off NATO funding) and not participating at all would be political suicide (even if that means no US boots on the ground). I would be more concerned if shit pops off in the Balkans again, considering Montenegro and Macedonia are members now.

Yes, he wants to, but leaving NATO would require a 2/3 majority vote from the Senate which will never happen.

One shift in tone that I loved is how they actually made you feel like they were in a world ravaged by 100 years of war. The original series never really did that.

I think there is something sacrificed by having 8 hour-long episodes vs. 24 20-minute long episodes, and that was a creative decision they had to deal with. Sometimes I think it works better, but by necessity it means tonal inconsistency since you can't just have a "silly" episode even you only have 8 episodes to work with. And before anyone compares it to One Piece, One Piece is not even remotely close to narratively coherent and nowhere near as emotionally impactful. One Piece doesn't ever *have* to feel like it's going anywhere