Fizzzzle

That reminds me - I've spent my life trying to travel and go places, I would find it weirdly ironic if, in my leave Portland for good moment, I moved to Texas of all places, which is where I was born. Like after everything I end up dying 200 miles from where I was born.

My best friend has a Puerto Rican father and a Guamanian mother. It's kind of wild that I have always thought of them as immigrants, but they're not.

I mean, WandaVision still had a conclusion. Loki did not, at all. The end of Loki stopped mid-climax The Falcon and the Winter Soldier definitely had an ending. I'm worried that they're not going to wrap everything up in an even remotely satisfying way in the last episode. I was kind of hoping this would be a standalone series since I was assuming Jeremy Renner is probably done after this. But now I'm like they've set up way too much shit to pay off in one last episode, unless it's a double episode or something.

That is something I didn't consider. If I'm the only carpenter in town and I can't get wood, I would increase the rates for my labor because I have to

For some reason I read that as "Ranma 1/2" and I was like ".... sure? I'm down."

The Last Samurai - 7/10 This movie is historically preposterous for a whole host of reasons, and the whole "white savior/noble savage" trope makes my woke libcuck feathers ruffle very much, but... it's a good movie. See? If Gettysburg didn't suck absolute ass, I wouldn't mind that it's Lost Cause bullshittery.

Yeah. (no spoilers if you've already seen up through episode 4:)

So is the last episode going to be like an hour and a half or something? If they pull a Loki and just have it stop with no ending, I'm going to be royally pissed.

"Their right to do what, exactly?" I can't stand for how we politicize the fucking Civil War in the 21st century. Almost all of my great-great-great grandfathers fought in the civil war, on both sides. Guess what? Every single fucking one of those shitstains were racist assholes, regardless of which side they fought on. Fight me about it - oh wait, they can't, they're dead. And don't get me wrong - the United States was not fighting to eliminate slavery, at least in the first couple years of the war, but the Confederacy abso-fucking-lutely was fighting to preserve and expand it. The fact that this is a political issue in 2021 makes me sad. That's not to say that every single confederate soldier was fighting to preserve slavery. Some fought to defend their home from what they saw as a foreign invader. So did some Germans by the end of WW2. That doesn't make them correct, and it doens't make your ancestors your friends. If you met your great-great-great grandfather today, you would probably hate each other. He is not your friend, nor your ally. Stop defending him. He assuredly would not defend you.

I'm not sure if we can be friends anymore Joking and politics aside, the fact that they don't even show Col. Chamberlain for almost the last hour of the movie infuriates me. I might have given the movie a positive score if they did that.

It's not a bad movie, by any means, but it feels old.

That looks delightful

I was taught the number and how to find the area of a circle and shit, yeah, but I never knew what pi actually *is*, like functionally, until much later when I got stoned and was curious. Or maybe they did teach me that and I never paid attention, who knows. were you actually taught the theory of irrational numbers in school? It's much more of a math philosophy thing that I don't think we got into until I was taking like 300-level math classes in college, because it doesn't really have much practical use. Like what is e and how do you calculate it and shit.

I think it's crazy that all of the directors that we grew up with who basically ushered in "New Hollywood" (however you want to define that) and then defined modern filmmaking - Steven Spielberg (75), Francis Ford Coppola (82), Martin Scorsese (79), Wolfgang Petersen (80), Ridley Scott (84), Clint Eastwood (91), and Brian De Palma (81), among a few others, are all getting to the "retirement or death" ages. You can definitely see a huge shift in the way movies were produced, written, and edited starting in the late 60's, but really getting into full swing by the mid-70's, when all of those directors were starting to get big projects. My favorite example is to watch "A Bridge Too Far," which came out in 1977. It was directed by Richard Attenborough, and when you watch it, it feels old. It feels like the product of another time. The way shots are composed, the way people talk, the way they move. All of it kind of feels "off." Then you watch The Deer Hunter, which came out only a year later, and it feels like that movie could have came out last Tuesday. Anyway, I'm sure I'll see this eventually.

I just watched that yesterday! I like him a lot, but he needs to get someone to speak for him. I just can't take his voice for very long.

When I was growing up, in school it was more like "it was about slavery but also blah blah blah..." No, there is no "also", it was entirely about slavery and the south trying to protect slavery.

Dont' get me wrong, it is a fine song. And Josey Wales, Ride with the Devil, and Cold Mountain are all great movies. You'll never hear me say otherwise. It just goes back to what I said about imagining if we treated WW2 in movies like we treat the Civil War. Like we can't fully commit to showing the Confederacy as evil. Individual slave owners, sure, but not our glorious Confederate army as a whole, no... that's going too far. We don't give two shits about hurting the feelings of Nazis, but a racist class of white supremacists who subjugated an entire race of people for hundreds of years and went to war specifically to continue being able to do so? ... We need to be delicate about that, we don't want to hurt their feelings.

I didn't end up meaning on writing this much about it, but... when I get on a roll... So, as some of you might have seen on here in the past, deconstructing and dismantling the Lost Cause myth is something of a hobby of mine. Mainly because I was taken in by it as a child and it took me until I was in my 20’s to unfuck my brain of that ridiculous bullshittery, so now I like to shit on it whenever I have the opportunity because it makes me feel better. In case anyone doesn’t know, the “Lost Cause” myth is a reactionary reconstruction of the narrative of the Civil War that started to get perpetrated around the end of the 1870’s and has only ever grown in strength, to the point where myself, who grew up in fucking Portland, Oregon of all places in the 1990’s, was taught a version of it in schools. Basically, it paints the Civil War as a point of moral ambiguity - the “war of Northern Aggression,” or a fight over tariffs, or states’ rights, or any other bullshit excuse to shift blame of the war away from our glorious and honorable ancestors, who never dreamed of anything other than sittin’ on their glorious porch, sipping glorious lemonade, and dreaming of freedom, gloriously. Lincoln? He was a tyrant who suspended habeas corpus and illegally confiscated southern property. The Union was covered in corruption. Our glorious Confederacy, on the other hand, was bathed in freedom. All they ever wanted was to escape the imperialist yolk of Washington. Slaves had it better under slavery, if anything! ...It’s basically a watered-down Holocaust denial. It doesn’t deny slavery existed, but it denies slavery as an actual reason anyone fought the Civil War as a way to absolve them of guilt. It’s like if Germany omitted any reference to lebensraum for why they fought WW2 and said it was about proposed tax hikes on exported lederhosens or whatever. Now that the basis of the stupidity that is the Lost Cause myth has been laid out, there’s a few points that we need to get out of the way if you want a deep dive. I didn’t intend on doing a full Lost Cause dismantling, but once I get started, I kind of can’t stop. I’m not going to completely source this because this isn’t a research paper, but I guarantee you that you can find all of this information by googling it in less than 10 minutes. Alright, I think that’s all I have to say on the Lost Cause, let’s get into the movies. I have recently watched every Civil War movie to come out in the last 50 years, at least that I’m aware of. There aren’t that many, for reasons we’ll get into. Here they are: The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) Glory (1989) Gettysburg (1993) Ride with the Devil (1999) Gangs of New York (2003) Gods and Generals (2003) Cold Mountain (2003) Lincoln (2012) Saving Lincoln (2013) Field of Lost Shoes (2014) Free State of Jones (2016) There’s something that stands out right away when I look at this list of movies. In 4 of them (Glory, Gangs of New York, Lincoln, and Saving Lincoln), they don’t depict Confederates at all. There are literally no named Confederate characters in any of those movies. 2 of those movies (the terrible Gettysburg and Gods and Generals) “both-sides” the shit out of the war. Both of those movies, if anything, paint the Confederacy as the good guys, even going so far as giving Stonewall Jackson literal Christ symbolism when he dies in Gods and Generals. I could write a whole essay on those movies, why they suck and are also Lost Cause propaganda, but Atun-Shei Films on YouTube has already done a better job of that than I ever could. In the rest of those movies (Josey Wales, Ride with the Devil, Cold Mountain, Field of Lost Shoes, and Free State of Jones), the main protagonists *are* Confederate soldiers who are all bucking the system in one way or another. Do you see the problem here? Hollywood stops short of showing the Confederacy in an unequivocally bad light. The Confederacy either isn’t shown at all, is “both-side”d, or the main character *is* a part of the Confederacy. Can you imagine if we did that with World War 2 movies? Like if the closest we ever got to showing Nazis as the bad guys was Dunkirk, where they’re never actually shown at all? In the rest of the movies we either have to give the “honorable” Nazis equal screen time or make the main protagonist a reluctant Nazi? I will say again, the Confederacy was FIGHTING TO PROTECT AND EXPAND SLAVERY. The Constitution of the Confederate States of America literally forbade individual states from abolishing slavery and required any new state to allow slavery. So much for fucking “states’ rights.” If there is any more doubt, here is an excerpt from Mississippi’s Declaration of Secession Here’s a nugget from Georgia’s Declaration of Secession Here’s a fun one from South Carolina These fuckers are not, in any way, the “good guys.” Certain films like to get around that by having the main characters be Kansas bushwhackers - Kansas/Missouri was somewhere where the fighting was a lot more morally ambiguous. Whether you wound up fighting with the Jayhawkers or the Bushwhackers usually had much more to do with personal vengeance rather than ideology, especially after the war already started. Or they make sure that their main character is from a “poor” part of the south where they can’t grow cash crops and thus are unlikely to be connected to slavery, like Matthew McConaughey in Free State of Jones or Jude Law in Cold Mountain. All that waffling aside, one needs to ask - why? Why are there no Civil War movies in which the Confederacy are actively depicted as the bad guys in a non-ambiguous way? I think it’s because they’re worried that showing the Confederacy in that light is going to alienate a significant(ly stupid) part of the American consumer base. For some fucking reason, even though the Civil War happened 160 years ago when most of our grandparents’ grandparents weren’t even alive, we still can’t admit guilt about it. 140 years of constant campaigning that it *wasn’t* about slavery has a significant portion of the American population feeling salty about it in 2021. Your ancestors were not your friends - stop feeling the need to protect them. I understand that from an economic sense. Civil War movies with big battles are expensive, and probably won’t do that well outside of America. You don’t want 40% of your American base to have their widdle feewings hurt by showing their distant Confederate ancestors as being the villains. The problem is they WERE the villains. We need to start fucking remembering that. The dancing around of the fact that the Confederate States of America were 100% fighting to protect and expand an institution that was 100% evil incarnate in movies has directly contributed to the further perpetuation of the Lost Cause myth. And it wasn’t just the rich southerners making the poor southerners go and fight (though that did happen - the Confederacy actually implemented their first draft almost an entire year before the American army implemented one), the people voted to secede in the first place because they *wanted* to keep slavery, and it’s not like they didn’t know it would likely lead to war.

I mean I could just stay there in general. I'm willing to factor in rent for work offsets, like I could tutor your kids. Someone has to teach them socialism and lost cause mythology, especially in Texas. Also I know what pi actually is, that's something that never got taught to me in school. See? Perfect tutor.

I don't know, I've never played it and I really liked it

Yeah, I watched Cold Mountain recently. It is really good. I think there are 2 reasons why big battle Civil War movies aren't made very often: 1) they would cost a lot of money and might not do very well outside of the United States, and 2) they would potentially alienate a significant(ly stupid) portion of the American population by portraying the Confederates as evil. That's why all Civil War movies are either completely about liberation (Glory, Lincoln) to the point where there isn't even a named Confederate character (they're pretty much all stormtroopers), or they hardly mention slavery at all (Gettysburg), or it's a story that doesn't have anything to do with it (Cold Mountain). A movie like 12 Years a Slave can do well because it's portraying slavery as evil, and individual slave-owners as evil, but because it's such a smaller story, it doesn't necessarily make white people feel guilty while watching it. Gods and Generals is an awful movie, but a lot of people love it because it's pretty much Lost Cause propoganda all the way through (on RT it's 8% with critics but 64% with audience) Edit: expanding on that in all modern movies about the war I can think of, 2 don't portray confederates at all (Lincoln and Glory), 2 "both sides" the shit out of the war (Gettysburg and Gods and Generals), and in the rest (Josey Wales, Ride with the Devil, Cold Mountain, and the Free State of Jones), the protagonists *are* confederate soldiers Clearly, no one wants to fund a movie where the war could be construed as anything other than morally ambiguous.

There was a big collective "uh-oh" and a lot of assumptions when people found out Rockstar was making a game that takes place in a school. A lot of it was pretty unfounded, the game plays a lot more like a teen movie than Grand Theft Auto.

Vampires could have sexual traits before Anne Rice, but she pretty much invented the sexy vampire as we know it. Some of her novels are pretty much softcore erotica. Ever since Louis and Lestat, almost all vampires in fiction are required to be sexy, unless they're a child. Being sexy is just as much of a vampire trait as needing to drink blood now.

Dude, I deal with "mentally unhinged weirdos" every single day. There's a homeless camp across the street from my house. That kind of shit doesn't bother me. Ideally I would retain a situation where I'm within walking distance of work. I've tried to maintain that for the last decade and have been mostly successful. There was a period of about a year where I had to commute to work; the rest of the time if I need a new job, I try to get close to where I live, or if I need a new place to live, I try to stick close to where I work. It's worked out for the most part so far.

She invented sexy vampires. fantasy fiction would not be the same without her.