Jake Cole

It’s been a great touch this season to keep admin offscreen and really only felt through Al-Hashimi’s efficiency spiels, which ofc made it all the better when the CEO oafishly shambles in in golf shorts and is like “your job’s impossible now lol!”

I love that Pakula has to dial it back a bit from Klute and Parallax for a real story but he still finds way to make what could have been banal establishing shots feel electric and and unnerving

That’s what I’ve been saying to my friends too. I do think it had a bit more oomph but most of that was driven almost entirely by Robby’s COVID flashbacks. Take those out and I think the sense of it being more urgent early on fades.

I don’t disagree with a lot of the feelings that the first season was more gripping out of the gate but I think each new ep has revealed the second season to be more confidently structured and even better at tracking the ebb and flow of all the overlapping cases, and this subplot was a great example

Got a big laugh out of watching this for the first time in ages and getting to this bit where our lads get stonewalled at the Library of Congress by a smirking white guy and it cuts straight to this dude being like “oh you want the white ghouls crimes records? Gimme like two minutes”

FTR anyone who was alive then remembers the crusades rhetoric that was everywhere but only this guy, who drove his tank into the Euphrates and drowned, truly embodied it by cosplaying Barbarossa.

“But but but we WANTED it to be kayfabe!” I scream as I pay a $500 power bill to subsidize a data center and my boss announces round three of headcount cuts because our raw materials costs went up 60%

Very telling how many “wait, hang on…” Trump voters feel like they were lied to bc they assumed his nonstop violent rhetoric was just WWE promos which made them happy bc the TV was fun now. A politics of pure performative outrage that is now horrified to see he meant it and there goes retirement

Really beautiful, just a giant sign reading “abandon hope, ye rubes wi enter here” and yet it won’t stop anyone bsky.app/profile/arie...

Sorry but I love it every time that the fraud betting apps go health insurance mode and find the smallest discrepancy to justify not paying out to the inside traders who are its core customer base. Eat shit.

Desperately need a screengrab of the moment in the latest Pitt where Ogilvie reflexively answers a speech app asking for the date and in soft focus in the background Abbot’s head snaps up like a meerkat

I was born in an Iranian prison. My parents were held in their jails. My uncles lie in their mass graves. Nothing you can tell me about the crimes of the Iranian regime that I haven't lived in blood and bone. That doesn't mean I want my people bombed, maimed, killed, their homes in ruins. If your vision of liberation comes only through the destruction of innocent lives, then it's not freedom you're after. Sahar Delijani, Iranian author

I am pro Iranian people. I stand with them against their own government’s repression AND against the imperial violence in the form of bombs dropped from the sky from Israel & the US who have already killed hundreds.

I support neither imperialism or dictatorship.

Sahar Delijani said it best:

I know A Love Supreme is one of those three or four Baby’s First Jazz records that even people who hate jazz will listen to, but you know what, things reach that status for a reason and I just pushed a great many negative thoughts outside my head waking up to it.

It’s really beautiful that just about the only moral member of Congress (or one or two with Tlaib) is also an absolutely brutal bodier

Anthropic? The woke AI company?

I think about 70% of the reason that Ornette gets a flattering portrait in Burns’s Jazz is because of the story Charlie Haden has of Leonard Bernstein being so mesmerized by their legendary breakout residency at the Five Spot that he jumped on stage and put his ear to Haden’s bass.

Re-normalized celebrations of image disorders spurred by utterly garish drugs and cosmetic procedures, wars for oil now dispensing with any justification, another economic crisis. It really feels like I’m back in my early-Aughts teens but with everything pushed into total freakshow maximalism

Democracy was killed in a darkness-involved shooting

Maybe the only writer I would compare to Toni Morrison in both prose style and the impact of it.

I prob don’t need to re-read the earlier books in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series to finally read Jack, but I am anyway, and I paused getting to an early passage of Gilead where the reverend recalls the Spanish flu and muses it was God’s punishment for the waste of WWI and no one learned anything

Which of course doesn’t mean they won’t do it anyway bc the golden plan is to use AI (or the mirage of it) to destroy jobs until all that is left for humans is tilling fields and dying for ratings

News media has been gushing over footage of airstrikes (“it’s like a video game!”) since the first Gulf War but boots on the ground becomes impossible to broadcast fast bc it speeds up how much we the stupid plebs hate this.

The Iraq War AUMF vote destroyed multiple political careers and, via Hillary Clinton, helped decide at least two presidential elections. Congress’s big takeaway from that experience was to stop holding votes on wars.

This trailer was appended to seemingly every VHS of that year. I lost count of how many times I saw it before getting to whatever my mom or grandparents had rented

I had to look away from the gym TVs because I started to get so mad. They had one (1) person say that this would only complete the US’s slide into a pariah state and then every other guest was a deep state demon saying not to waste this golden opportunity for regime change.

Lear and Hamlet justly get focused on as centuries-ahead-of-the-curve psychological portraits but they are also the logical endpoint of Shakespeare’s savage political depictions of royalty as, at best, benign dictators and at most often ossified, corrupt isolatoes and addled youth waiting their turn

The day before starting a war with Iran, the Secretary of Defense was focused on removing trans scouters from the Boy Scouts.

YouTube video by M Án gel MC SOLAAR & RON CARTER - UN ANGE EN DANGER

It must have absolutely killed Marsalis and Crouch for even one passing reference to jazz’s affiliation with hip-hop to make it into Burns’ doc but props to whomever picked this clip specifically of Ron Carter laying down a simply filthy yet nimble bass for MC Solaar youtu.be/e7jR1lYllO8?...

The Mr Peanutbutter party banners gag from Bojack remains undefeated

Fitting that in America’s final form, the epicenter of evil will be a private golf resort for wealthy pedophiles.