My Review Of The Well-made, Exceedingly Well-acted, But Long And Profoundly Unpleasant Hereditary.

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The runoff for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats is January 5th. This will decide who will control the Senate, and if Georgians deliver for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock the same way they delivered for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, they will deliver control of the Senate to the Democrats. Why does that matter? Well, if Republicans and Mitch McConnell retain control of the Senate, they will be able to effectively suffocate anything and everything that the Biden Administration is planning to do in order to heal this nation from four years of Donald Trump. Republican control of the Senate will immediately kill any hopes we have of progressive policies getting through Congress and to President Biden’s desk and will prevent the confirmation of Biden’s appointees. It means that Mitch McConnell will be rewarded for the brazen hypocrisy of filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court just days before the November election.

Georgia, we need you again. And we know that we can count on you. If you were part of the remarkable voters that flipped Georgia from red to blue and elected Joe BIden and Kamala Harris, don’t forget to vote on January 5th. If you didn’t vote because you didn’t think it would make a difference, it did. And you can still make a difference. If you live in Georgia, you have until DECEMBER 7th to register to vote in the runoff election. But don’t wait…do it now! You can do it online, right here, and it only takes two minutes. If you weren’t old enough to vote Donald Trump out of office on November 3rd but turn 18 before January 5th, you also have until DECEMBER 7th to register to vote! 

Georgia was instrumental in electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and, more importantly, evicting Donald Trump from the White House. On January 5th, America needs you one more time. Take the power of Senate control from the hands of Mitch McConnell. It will make Mitch McConnell sad. Don’t you want to make Mitch McConnell sad? VOTE on January 5th. You can still register in Georgia until DECEMBER 7th. 

We’re sorry that you have to put up with two extra months of campaign ads, but we appreciate you and we know we can count on you, Georgia. Register until December 7th. VOTE ON JANUARY 5th!

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

Assuming “Axis & Allies with roommate” and “Civ III on Deity” counts as military strategy...

which julius caesar are you???? i’m Caesar the Commentator, tag urself

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

- Jill Thomas Doyle

Could you maybe reblog this post if you think respecting trans peoples' names and identities is a basic right and not a political opinion?

No pressure. Just seeking some validation of my sentiment. Due to some. people

colors

While I kinda hate to add a giant block of text to Phil's beautiful explanation, if you want a more complex answer, here it is:

This is the box office chart on its opening weekend, new releases in bold:

1. The Expendables, $34 million

2. Eat Pray Love, $22 million

3. The Other Guys, $17 million

4. Inception, $11 million

5. Scott Pilgrim, $10 million

Different films attract different demographics, and a lot of Scott Pilgrim's were sucked away by its competition. Scott Pilgrim is a wacky, video game- and comic-book inspired romantic action comedy full of wild visual tricks, starring Michael Cera. Strangely, that doesn't appeal to everyone, but a lot of it is down to the other films.

The Expendables sounded like a spectacular idea, what with Stallone, Statham, Schwarzenegger, Willis, etc. in a violent, R-rated romp blessed with exceptional marketing; given the choice, older males flocked to that rather than the sillier, more romantic Scott Pilgram. (If you want the demographics, 61% of the audience was male, 60% over 25) Even if the movie ultimately stopped just short of delivering the goods, it had that first weekend in the bag.

Eat Pray Love was an adaptation of an incredibly popular book starring Julia Roberts, returning to the romantic comedy roots that made her so popular to begin with. In a choice between A) a romantic comedy that centered on a beloved actress, tackled relatable issues like depression and self-worth, and subtly indulged in a lot of fantasies that appeal to older women, and B) a flashy, video-game inspired fantasy about Michael Cera trying to win a girl's heart through fighting and modern indie rock The appeal for older women was naturally to Eat Pray Love. (in fact, 72% of its audience was women, 56% over 35)

As for teenager guys, the primary audience, a lot of them were showing up for the second weekend of the rather funny The Other Guys, which teamed Will Farrel with Mark Wahlberg, or finally catching up to (or watching for the second time) Inception, which was a word-of-mouth smash that, whatever its intellectual merits, was at the least a phenomenal action flick.

Finally, by the third weekend of August, most teen guys are a bit worn out from the deluge of movies targeting them through the summer and busy going back to school anyway; business really dies down around then.

On a cleaner weekend, it might have been an easier sell, but its wild genre-bending just didn't appeal to any individual audience as much as anything else.

And with the summer over, it's really hard for a non-drama release in the middle of August to catch on. There are exceptions (Superbad, Inglourious Basterds, District 9), but they're relatively rare. And with five wide releases on its second weekend, it didn't have much of a chance. For all that, $10 million does still seem a little on the low side, which suggests that the marketing couldn't figure out how to scale the cliffs it was facing.

The last piece of the puzzle is the film's quality - for all its dazzling visuals, originality, and clever comedy, it stops short of really connecting emotionally for most people, and that, more than anything, is what gets word-of-mouth going.

Which, as noted, is just too bad, because not only was it a good flick, but it should have been what launched Edgar Wright into the mainstream.

So why did the Scott Pilgrim movie flop?

Because not enough people bought tickets to see it. Which is sad, as it was pretty good.

Pls reblog if u vote :)

from The Memory Palace, by Nate DiMeo

Now you see, I’ve watched enough cartoons to know that this square of the carpet is on a separate animation cell from the background & therefore something funky will happen if I step on it. You won’t catch me making a rookie mistake like that no sir!