Bless This Mess tackles Ari Aster's BEAU IS AFRAID, a strange and divisive film, a great big bubbling cauldon of mommy issues and many other things besides. Who was on board? Who was off-board? What's in the attic? And so on - tune in to find out!. Link in reply.

Andor S2's "Welcome to the Rebellion" is a marked improvement on what's come before, but it also makes me think that the season basically could have started with a rewrite of "Who Are You?". The buildup is *kinda* interesting, but only kinda.

RT @not_so_gratian: Calling Liz a religious fanatic is kind of how right wingers called Biden a communist; you just have to beg such people….

RT @Heurisk0: My long-running theory, for which I need to write a longer post, is that boys must be raised and educated differently. Males….

The etymology of "panegyric" should be "that which makes the bread spin".

RT @IrenaPumices: in the original Hellraiser (1987), an American man moves to an Englishman's idea of an American's idea of England with hi….

It's because he's pregnant.

The first stat is depressing, but OTOH, what's the point of tracking "who reads to children" if you're polling literally everybody, irrespective of whether or not they actually have or work with small children themselves.

RT @JacobAShell: Hadn't listened to Joe Rogan in ages. Figured I'd check out interview with "Ancient History Youtuber." 10 minutes in the….

Feels like this had been in the cards for years, but the timeline has been accelerated. UChicago is probably merely ahead of the curve. Less-elite institutions are gonna follow suit because of population curve, political climate, and attendant drop in foreign student enrollment.

Ultimately my issue is that S1 was a collection of fun yarns like a club remix of Battle of Algiers, but then the showrunners et al. got high on their own supply. It doesn't help that the "fomented insurrection" plot undermines itself at every turn - nothing anybody does matters.

It's a well-mounted production with good acting. It has some good bits. Ghorman is a lovely world, and I love how the Ghor language is a conlang modeled after the sounds of French. A hotel clerk makes a solid impression. Dedra and Syril are interesting characters who deserve more.

This would be fine if the tone was more brisk. I do not walk away from Andor S2 confident that Tony Gilroy understands the world any better than Tom Clancy, but it's absurd to imagine a Jack Ryan style story with this tone of "epic slowed down Casablanca 'La Marseillaise' scene".

"Mining equipment? Clearly that means the entire planet is going to explode" is his sudden reaction, with theoretically tragic results. His logical leap is a feat of inductive reasoning only possible for those who have already read the script.

Well, it's not clear if you think about it too much. (I don't suggest doing this.) Anyway, at a critical moment, the most interesting character, an Imperial double agent, suddenly and totally apprehends what is happening because he hears about mining equipment being unloaded.

We learn early on that a planet possesses an exotic valuable mineral in its crust that can only be mined through impossibly destructive techniques. The Empire has been planning for years to extract it, collapsing the planet. The plan is to foment insurrection as an excuse. to. .

Characters spend so much time doing nothing that when things finally do happen, not only does it feel rushed, but characters sometimes seemingly use psychic abilities to instantly learn plot points that the audience already knows.

The pacing is terrible. Following the Ideal Gas Law, the story leisurely spreads out to fill its 12(!) episodes, but nobody's stirred it, like dumping instant cocoa into almost-warm-enough milk, there are chunks with dry powder still inside.

Andor S2 is tolerable, but it's slow, and it suffers from comical self-reverence. Would have been better at a third the length, with a tone more in keeping with, say, Robert Ludlum. It's scarcely as deep as a Bourne movie.

RT @tracewoodgrains:

RT @nemo_patiens: Manul morning.