Patrick R

Noted. I have had good luck with El Monterey frozen taquitos in the oven, though José Olé is still the king of that world.

I've gone down a lot of trash food rabbit holes but one I've always resisted is the frozen burrito. I do not trust something that thick to be heated evenly by a microwave.

Frozen burritos?

I don't wanna rock the boat or anything, but it has to be said (and I'm not afraid to be the one to say it) that Casablanca is a pretty great movie. They play it every Valentine's Day (weekend) in Chicago now, and there's nothing better than combining romantic love with a love of Nazis getting shot. Audience cheered extra loud this year, for obvious reasons.

Full Contact. This movie is amazing.

To compare, a comedy from that year I would call a cult film would be Hot Rod. Bombed at the box office but it had a singular tone and the way it fit the SNL Digital Short sensibility (as it was written/directed by and starred members of Lonely Island) into a feature film lead to bizarre and unique comic sequences, like this: It's fanbase has grown in the past 10 years, though it's small compared to their next film, MacGruber, which is one of the bigger cult films Hollywood has produced this century.

I guess I still am not sure what this means, because aren't shock jocks only shocking in the context of FCC regulated FM radio? Does that mean they are socialists who interview strippers on the air? Who talk explicitly about sex? Who make poop jokes? Who swear? EDIT: So I read The New Yorker article and I guess "dirtbag left" is just a new word for "asshole"? These guys seem like assholes. That's a good word, I think.

I think I've asked this before (probably on Slack) and still don't understand it. What is "the dirtbag left"? My understanding of the word dirtbag is something like "the 20-something guy who cruises around the high school looking to pick up girls."

My friend is actually writing a (totally subjective) book on the 100 greatest cult films of all time. There have been many writers who have covered cult films who have many varying definitions, and his first job was to find his own (totally subjective) definition. I'm not gonna copy and paste the unpublished first draft of his manuscript here, but the conclusion he came to was that a cult film must have these one of these three elements: A devoted following, particularly among those who consider themselves outsiders A challenge to mainstream sensibilities and ideas of good and bad taste A defiance of traditional notions of cinematic storytelling, and features outrageous characters or situations. If you are interested in learning more about cult cinema, Danny Peary's Cult Movies is sort of the foundational book for the whole premise. From Wiki:

In classic Michael Curtiz form, all the context you need is (almost gracelessly) shoved into a VO info dump in the first couple minutes. I will say that the plot of Casablanca is very hard to follow if you don't pay close attention to all the dialogue in the first 10 minutes, which is part of it's very quick pace. Maybe that's why I like it more each time I see it, because at this point I've internalized all the plot points and character motivations so it's easier to appreciate what a well-oiled machine it is.

I can understand that, for most 18 year olds, enjoying any black and white movie is gonna be an uphill battle. But Casablanca has aged amazingly well. It's very fast paced, there are about a hundred really good jokes and it's gorgeous looking. I think even for people who don't find it emotionally resonant (I, on the other hand, cried multiple times during this last viewing) there's a lot to appreciate.

Rick ended up alone, and he's the hero. And then at the end, he starts a beautiful new friendship. Take a friend. It's not just a romantic film but a...b-buh....oh no...don't make me....I won't type it....bu-bu-b bromantic one.

Perfect.

I think, more than anyone else I can imagine, I trust you Thumbs to do something cool with a Patreon feed. Done!

The thing is even if Deep Blue Something chose not to rhyme "Breakfast at Tiffany's" with anything, I think for it to scan the same it needs to at least end with a "ee" sound.

Missing a syllable, unfortunately.

The financial situation for podcasts really is ridiculous and dumb. On the one hand, podcasting is one of the cheapest forms of mass broadcasting that's ever existed, but on the other the percentage of podcasts that are able to fully pay off their equipment/hosting costs (let alone compensate the podcasters for their time and work) is ridiculously low. Part of the problem is that most ads don't pay a flat rate, the money you get is based number of listeners who use your promo code and since it's the same 10 services on every podcast the chances that your listeners haven't already gotten their free Audible.com audiobook is low. I haven't really listened to a Max Fun podcast in years so maybe it's been addressed but I wish they were more transparent about what percentage of their operating budget is donations, how exactly podcasters are compensated, etc.

She said I think I remember the film

I just thought of Wes Anderson doing an Agatha Christie style English country house whodunnit murder mystery and now it is literally all I can think about. It won't leave my brain. Surely it's a genre of fiction that leans into all his strengths. Surely Anderson could attract a murderer's row of character actors for a film like that. Surely it'd be the greatest thing ever and make me so very very happy. These sorts of thoughts cross my mind sometimes and don't leave. You ever fantasy cast the perfect project for a director or actor (or fantasy case a director or actor for a certain property) and get mad that your fantasies don't come true? Except sometimes they do, kinda. After seeing Myth of the American Sleepover I thought "This was really interesting, but what I really want is for this director to take this tone and transfer it to a horror film or something like that. Something along the lines of Charles Burns' Black Hole, involving teenagers and sexual tension and a slightly surreal tone." The next film that director made was It Follows. It was awesome, I felt totally vindicated.

nevermind

It definitely made me curious to read the source material.

I skipped this in theaters because I heard enough to think it wouldn't be for me. And sure enough...

I forgot to mention this! As someone who's listened to every episode from #1 to #150 about 4 times each, any time I hear something new from that era it's like magic. I can't wait for the Progress Casts to be released.

Partially because I think it'd be an interesting project and partially because I only own an Xbox 360 and low-powered laptop, I've decided to go back 10 years to play a bunch of games released in 2007. It was the year of Super Mario Galaxy, The Witcher, Orange Box, Mass Effect, Bioshock, Modern Warfare, Gears of War, Hitman Blood Money, Halo 3, Uncharted, Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass, Rock Band...etc etc etc. It was also the year Microsoft launched Games for Windows Live, so it wasn't all good. It was also the year I fell into a bit of a gaming dark age, personally, as the PS2 I owned had more or less had it's last hurrah, and I didn't go on to pick up a 360 or PS3. The time in between 2007 and 2010 I didn't play many games at all. So doing this will be a good way to pick up on stuff I missed (though, in the interim, I have played a fair number of these games) and see it all together. This thread will probably be more interesting if people other than myself also play different 2007 games (I don't own a Wii or a PS3, so some of this stuff I won't be able to revisit, probably) but I'll do my best to keep it updated. FIRST GAME...CHALK, by Joakim Sandberg As discovered via this helpful IndieGames.com Best Freeware Arcade Games list for 2007. It's an interesting take on a bullet hell game, a different kind of twitch shooter that's entirely controlled via the mouse. You move around with the right click and draw lines with the left, dodging enemies and defeating them by either drawing lines between them and their projectiles or connecting their green weak spots. It's a very stressful game for me, as I lack both the twitch reactions and fine motor skills necessary to do well, but I was able to get past the first two levels before my hand cramped. I like the art style a lot, it reminds me of Yoshi's Island. Weirdly, as far as I can tell, Chalk never made it to the Nintendo DS in any form. Seems absolutely perfect for it. Maybe there was a DS game that ripped off this gameplay?