Smile was... enh. Too predictable to generate any real unease or uncertainty, and while that’s not necessarily fatal, there wasn’t much there on top of it. I don’t trust this director to get to the level of freaky this material requires. 

Can we call him Ray, or can we call him Jay?

Outersloth is the best news easily, this is a time when the small companies should be helping each other out and supporting each other as the big publishers scrap everything for parts.

I mean Streets of Fire has a couple issues maybe but I wouldn’t call it a bad film by any stretch of the imagination. 

Thing is it’s not JUST Fox News and the overtly-right media. It’s all the news media, basically, which is interested in the narrative of the election. So they always take everything as “What could this mean in November?” 

“Tonight is What it Means to be Young” may be Steinman repeating himself a little- you can hear a LOT of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in it- but honestly I think it’s a better song. 

The early-blockbuster era is interesting because while the studios were moving away from the New Hollywood type of risk taking, they still couldn’t really tell what was going to catch people’s attention. Star Wars and Raiders and E.T. had all been original screenplays so it wasn’t all about branding or IP, so hey,…

I mean it is worth pointing out that books have frequently been advertised via excerpts and serialization in magazines, and I would not be surprised if in some such cases there were changes between what was serialized and what was finally published.

The funny thing is how vividly I remember his saying “It’s not a purse, it’s EUROPEAN!”

Again this is why we need an equivalent to the car stereo test. You can’t count on your audiences seeing the thing in perfect conditions. And frankly even in ideal conditions I would prefer to see the people’s faces. 

It is worth being clear that “AI” basically means two things* nowadays- one, the legit sci-fi concept of a machine possessed of sentience and autonomy, and two, various apps that use weighted probabilities derived from a dataset of (usually copyrighted) prior works to generate text, visuals, or other material based on…

On that note I’d also point to John Sheridan and Ambassador Delenn on Babylon 5. It’s a very cute workplace romance where these are grown mature adults with great responsibilities but they kinda get flustered at each other for a bit. Mira Furlan in particular plays it so wonderfully, God I miss her. 

How the Hell are Niles and Daphne not on the list?

This is something I read in the YT comments- that yeah the experience was probably fine for a lot of the very rich Disney Adults and TikTok influencers and the like but you burn through those and who’s left? So they had a lot of business at first and then it fell off a cliff. 

Yeah a lot of this would be excusable but it’s six fucking grand. 

OTOH Disney World is on land that may as well be sovereign territory to them. 

Garfield and Friends was pretty solid as cartoons go. 

Love her videos.

Theoretically you could opt out of the roleplay stuff but then we get back into the THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS PER PERSON problem.

Uh Snyder is the one stanning Trump here