i jumped to the 40 minute mark and i only could stand to watch a little bit because torres just seems completely bloodless. i have never heard him speak before and it was really bizarre just how apathetic his whole affect is. it is honestly a lot more frustrating than if he actually seemed like he really gave a shit

most modern films with good DoPs look way better.

this is not a take you see every day lol. most movies coming out these days look like shit even compared to a random throwaway sunday afternoon romcom from 30 years ago. what movies from the last 5 or 10 years would you say look better than barry lyndon?

wuxia and kung fu movies tend to do well in group settings in my experience. people like watching badass stuntmen do amazing martial arts and nearly die. as far as emotional movies i think royal tenenbaums and some other wes andersons have some emotional heft without being so heavy that people won’t want to come. the holdovers is another one like that and also has a holiday theme so it might be good for later in november

i am surprised that soviet losses in wwii don’t come up more when people talking about the collapse of the ussr. obviously the war ended more than 40 years prior but i dont think any nation could suffer at the scale the ussr did and not deal with ripple effects for generations afterwards. 3,000 people died on 9/11 and look at how much that broke the average american’s brain. i think a study of the soviet collapse through the lens of the immense costs of wwii - demographic, economic, social, psychological, etc - would be really interesting

you can find the clip online but he was at some public park or outdoor gym or something and he sat on the bench and did a few reps for the camera. i couldnt tell how much he was benching but the guy spotting him looked like he was carrying most of the weight for him. fox news has spent several hours talking about it over the last couple days

my mom is convinced that the bench press thing is going to sink mamdani lol

big fan of billiards

forgot washed up psycho is from 2019, i thought that was an early trump. that and bad food restaurants are almost poetic, i love just turning them around in my mind

@acab_means_cop_Dva sounds like a good read. i got the same vibe from nixonland especially, that the right-wing in this country has basically not changed in decades and that they were doing the same culture war bullshit in the 60s that they are today. i don’t know if he does this in reaganland, but in nixonland and invisible bridge he would frequently bring up pop culture from the time and the reaction to it to illustrate a point, and part of what made me put down IB was that these references started to feel more like a way to fill up the pages or talk about his favorite movies than actual salient examples. perlstein got shit on a lot on twitter last year, rightly so, for being a blue-no-matter-who type who downplayed the genocide in Gaza to try and push biden and kamala. considering how much the books of his i have read are about how the milquetoast libs cede ground to hardline rightwingers and how it has pushed the country to the right, it felt ironic to see him pushing biden so hard. anyway i will probably try to get to reaganland and the first book in the series, about goldwater and the birth of modern conservatism in the 50s and early 60s, eventually but so many books so little time etc

eric adams should make campaign appearances wearing those weird powerlifter bench press “shirts” that force your arms out like a t-rex, to own mamdani

how are you liking reaganland? i liked nixonland a lot but felt like the wheels were kind of starting to fall off in invisible bridge, that combined with him being an insufferable lib on twitter has kept me from putting reaganland higher on my list

reading braudel’s mediterranean right now, while it is definitely outdated in some aspects it is still very interesting. splitting europe into a variety of isthmuses (russian, polish, french, and german) is a really cool way to think of early modern europe that i would never have considered before. i’m really looking forward to getting to the actual meat of his historical work in part 2 though i have gotten a lot out of part 1

had two job interviews last week that went well, one was a second round interview, both said they would let me know by the end of this week. guess who hasn’t heard jack shit from either of them as of 5pm friday

thomas pynchon character

this exact thing happened in On Cinema At The Cinema nearly 10 years ago

only one person has died in an airship accident in the 21st century so far

fun fact: long after the voyages across the atlantic, sailors in the mediterranean still usually refused to sail past sight of shore; over the centuries a network of ports had been set up ringing the med that meant that you were basically never more than a day from one, so it made sense to just restock on wood, food, water etc and sell and buy your wares every couple of days, especially when the alternative was the often-unpredictable mediterranean. voyages in the med then were less like the a-to-b trips they are today and more like travelling bazaars, buying shit in one port and selling it in the next and leapfrogging around

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVDBchX_oMk i have found a copy on youtube, but without english subtitles

to add to what other commenters have said, so many sites that used to regularly post funny or informative articles have fired most of the long-time employees and replaced them with independent contractors (if they haven’t replaced them with ai, or just gone out of business entirely).

it’s notable that they don’t actually give any examples of soviet railroads here because the USSR wasn’t a real place that actually existed to these people. if it were then you could actually examine it and see how it really did things, instead it is just a cautionary tale, a gulag amimal farm 1984 holodomor thought terminator or thought experiment that you can use to invent failures of socialism