Happy to see Sense8 on here.

No love for Y: The Last Man?

I found an old-school drafting table (the kind with adjustable angles/height) on the curb back in 2008 and walked it home (it was a bear to walk that far). Kept it in my tinybox apt for a few years, then turned it into a standing desk by adding on some lumber and a used monitor arm. Since then I’ve reconfigured it a…

I love Bogart as Marlowe, but I liked Dick Powell’s take on the character in Murder My Sweet (directed by the underrated Edward Dmytryk) just a little bit more. He’s more vulnerable, maybe even a little more romantic underneath the overt cynicism.

1993's Super Mario Bros is amazing.

How is “A Midnight Clear” (1992) not on this list?

Or the end of Phil Collin’s music video “Don’t Lose My Number.”

This is spot on. The real gangsters in NYC were and are real estate developers, who mayors past and present have often gone out of their way to accommodate, using the NYPD jackboots to do the dirty work of “sanitizing” neighborhoods prior to gentrification.

Of course, many developers have/had ties to the mob, and…

This is spot on. The real gangsters in NYC were and are real estate developers, who mayors past and present have often gone out of their way to accommodate, using the NYPD jackboots to do the dirty work of “sanitizing” neighborhoods prior to gentrification.

Of course, many developers have/had ties to the mob, and…

It might be better buzzed than either drunk or completely sober. Sometimes I’ll have a glass of wine before watching a movie, and I find it lowers my defenses a bit and I soak in more of the movie, if that makes any sense.

I’m one of five people in the world who think that Upstream Color > Primer.

I never understood the machines to be that monolithic, though you’re right, there’s no mention of multiple cities. There are disagreements between agents and programs, between the Merovingian and almost everyone else, and of course the Architect and Oracle both argued quite a bit about the fate of humans (I have no…

I stan Jupiter Ascending. The only thing bad about that movie is not enough Doona Bae and her biker mercs, but that’s because there should be more Doona Bae in everything.

The “white knuckle” approach unfortunately puts vulnerable people into harms way unnecessarily.

There’s about 49 million people who fall into one or more “vulnerable” categories, due to age, immune system issues, other underlying health conditions. If you factor in issues like congregate settings (group homes), racial…

Yeah! That was one of the highlights of the Hyperion series. AIs arguing with each other over what to do with “us.”  After the first two I didn’t have the endurance to read the next two right away (I’ll get to them at some point I guess).

Yes, I can completely see that. The agents (like Smith) don’t really like their jobs. If they realize they’ve been lied to by the machines about the real nature of Zion and the machine/human “war” they could try to fuck up the Matrix (which is what Smith eventually does). So this sort of deliberate “let’s dump the…

100% agree. The state-run institutions were terrible; many of the privately run ones weren’t much better.

Yup, as neoliberalism took hold it became clear that the $$ that had gone into running those institutions was not going to ever be poured into new programs. State funding levels vary by so much it’s ridiculous. 30-…

I figured there had to be an OG war (or several) between humans and machines, and the humans left enough gear lying around from them for Zion-ers to rebuild them, but maybe without all the original parts.

OTOH assuming the original user wore Kevlar and protective padding, those mechs would be hard to stop. As it is…

Once you’ve made all the preparations you possibly can, it’s time for a little joy. Cause you might die tomorrow. Does that make more sense?

I figure part of the is cultural - once a routine is established, it’s easier not to change it. Once they built these battery farms, it was easier to keep them going. Also I figure they use humans for recreation (“let’s go down to the Matrix and fuck with these guys”), problem solving (“what happens if we do X instead…