Microcosmic God, by Theodore Sturgeon

I just wanted to mention an interesting story that I have been thinking about lately. (There are a couple of YouTube videos up of people reading it out loud, by the way). First published n 1941, it's about a scientist who creates artificial life, and accelerates its development until he has his own little artifical creatures who evolve to become intelligent, then eventually they become smarter than humans. As AI develops, I think about that story sometimes. In some ways it just helps me to imagine the dangers and problems that could arise from creating things that are more intelligent than we are, and which may or may not be essentially sympathetic to us. Had to share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmic_God

Deadwood, season 1

I think my original attempt to watch this show was a download on an old computer that eventually crapped out on me before I could finish, and I never picked it up again. Here I am finally getting past those first few episodes and I'm only mildly interested. I wasn't quite getting it until about episode 10, in which the events lead to Swearengen uttering the words, "We're forming a fucking government." Suddenly, it all comes together for me.

I loved how Farnum snapped at the chance to become mayor and suddenly thinks he's a big shot, but this is still Ian McShane's show. He's calling the shots, and he's got enough charisma to be a total asshole and still be likeable.

Brad Dourif is also fully charged as the doc, and Olyphant is always cool as that sheriff type. Solid show so far.

Pet Sematary Prequel

Supposedly this is coming out in October. Has anyone been keeping up with any kind of news reports on how it's going? Interviews, social media posts by the actors or crew, anything like that? I didn't really LOVE the 2019 one, but I would still watch a prequel, just to give it a shot. They have a pretty good cast.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14145436/

Bitch (2017)

I watched this weird drama on the Tubi earler called Bitch. A neglected and cheated on wife is hanging by a thread. Depressed and stressed out to the point of being suicidal. Her unfaithful, workaholic husband checked out a long time ago and is about as uninvolved/self-involved as a family man could be. He works and fucks co-workers and that's about it. The wife runs the family, takes care of the kids, who he may not even know the names of. This guy doesn't care about jack shit, but he's gonna have to learn how or at least pretend cuz the wife is about to go away for a while, eventually losing her identity as a human being all together. This wife and mother, more or less, reverts to that of a dog. In her mind, she is now a dog. She becomes feral and goes down into the basement to shit and piss everywhere, and possibly willing to attack anyone who bothers her. Meanwhile, the husband is automatically thrust into a world of a single parent, having 4 kids to take care of. He is quickly exposed as a clueless man child who doesn't understand how anything works.

Being the self-absorbed prick that he is, he feels sorry for himself and despises the wife for disrupting his life, but after losing his career is eventually forced to do some soul searching, coming to the conclusion that he has no real identity or personality, but also finally realizing how he has come off all these years and how damaging his lack of caring has been to everyone. This once selfish, oblivious prick makes a legit transformation into a genuinely good guy who gets enthusiastic about being around his children and desperately wants to help his wife stop being such a bitch so they can finally be a real family. 5/10

Bud Light Boycott

This is some funny shit. And when I say funny, I mean facepalmingly stupid. They partnered with some trans guy/girl/thing and they're getting a lot of backlash for it. Because bud is a man's drink! No beers for queers!

On one hand, they should have known rednecks would take offense, but on the other hand... who gives a fuck? It's still the same old shit I never bought even when I drank like a fish.

Does the dog die?

This question gets asked about pretty much every movie that has a dog in it. Nobody cares if the human dies. Kill all the people you want, but if you kill that dog, I can't watch. Not just dogs either, pretty much any animal. Or any mammal, anyway. I can't remember anybody complaining about the death of a fish or a reptile off hand.

Seems weird, doesn't it? I mean, we are humans. It feels like the death of a fellow human should upset us more, but it doesn't. Maybe it's not that way for everybody, but it certainly is for me. I get upset just seeing an animal in a horror movie, because I know there is a 95% chance it will die. I have to keep telling myself "it's just a movie" to get through it. The people though? Fuck 'em.


Why is that? In the past I may have tried to come up with excuses. But let's be real here. The reason is obviously because I like animals a lot better than people. I'm not going to deny it anymore. Now I'm not saying I hate people across the board. There are some good ones. But no animal has ever done anything to hurt me the way a human has.


Yet for some reason, I eat animals, but not humans....🤔

Dare I Say, The Marvels...

... looks kind of interesting.

I still won't watch that shit though. I can't even get excited about James Gunn's Guardians 3. Or new Daredevil. Or Deadpool 3, since they hired She-Hulk writers. Brie Larson is hot though.

Elm Street 2 and Amityville 2

There are some plot similarities between these two 80s sequels. Both are about families moving into a house with a haunted history that ends up possessing the teenage male of the bunch. Both guys hear voices and have sexual hang-ups too. Jesse is a closet homosexual and Sonny has incestuous feelings toward his sister. Also, the fathers are both assholes played by cool actors.

NoES2 is more of a haunted house movie than you might initially realize. Besides the gradual possession, it's always hot inside. The AC never works and birds explode. After this movie, I'm pretty sure the house was featured in at least 1 or 2 episodes of the show, but would quickly be deemed too haunted to live in and thus existed mostly as a decayed dream figment until Lori move in for FvJ. It was still never depicted strictly as a haunted house, considering Freddy's spread was never confined to just that house, but rather the titular Elm Street (and part 6 proves that bit isn't even a firm rule).

I guess I can sort of understand why Amityville 2 changed the DeFeo family to the Montellis. They wouldn't want to sympathize the actual killer and bank off a real family's misfortune, but I'm not sure the sequels ever really acknowledged the Montellis, nor Sonny's fate.

I was wondering what ever happened to Jesse after NoES2 also. He's never featured in any sequels outside of some non-canon comics, and the actor believes he's alive, but in what state? I guess that's another thing the two have in common: lack of closure. We never know what happened to these guys after their movies, despite there being a bunch of sequels after that could have mentioned something. Also, both movies are not set in the years they were made. And both movies were also written, directed by, and starring human beings, as far as I know.

D&D: Honor Among Thieves 2023

I was into the video games in the early 2000s. Swords and sorcery always seemed cool to me, but then I'd go and watch something like Lord of the Rings and get bored as hell. Game of Thrones didn't do it for me either, so maybe the genre just isn't meant for cinema? Suffice to say, I went in with low expectations, but what a pleasant surprise. I have no complaints about this movie.

For all the nerds out there, this movie has it all. The locations, the races, the beasts, the classes, the spells, dungeons, (fat) dragons, traps, parties, quests, undead, and probably some other stuff. They packed a lot in here and it's fun. Not long and boring like LotR. Not royalty drama like GoT. Fun.

I was actually considering skipping this one with the idea that it would be another CGI shit show, but... yeah, there is CGI, but there are some cool scenes. I loved the druid's shapeshifting escape. I also loved all the portal stuff they did, because that's also a great fuckin' game.

Chris Pine strikes me as a cool guy. He reminds me of Jack Burton here, in that he's the main guy, but he's pretty worthless in the party. He is the glue that binds the team, but everyone else is clearly better than he is, and that makes him relatable to an inept tool like myself.

Medieval fantasy finally done right.

#Review

Ain't That A Peach??



As an impressionable teenager who was eager to get high for the first time, Cheech And Chong's Up In Smoke was right up my alley. As of 1995, I had never even heard of these guys until my sister recommended I check out some of their movies. If I wasn't convinced pot smoking would be a positive experience before I watched Up In Smoke, I sure as hell would be afterwards. For the most part, I was right. Sure, becoming a regular pot smoker put a huge dent in my ambition, and I gained a pound or 50, but no more boredom! And my outlook on life became a bit less serious, which can be good for some people. My still existing love affair with marijuana can be traced back even further than my first time smoking it. In fact, it can actually be traced back slightly further, to the night I watched Cheech And Chong's film Debut. Still one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. A pretty well-made film, directed by a guy named Lou Adler. Up In Smoke would kickstart a series of movies which Adler would not be involved. A couple years later, Tommy Chong himself would try his hand at directing and make an attempt at keeping the duo's momentum going. And so Cheech And Chong's Next Movie was born.

In Up In Smoke, Cheech Marin played a guy named Pedro and Tommy Chong played some random guy whose name we never learn and identity is a bit of a head scratcher. In this sequel, they are more or less playing the same roles, but are now referred to as "Cheech And Chong", who I'm guessing are supposed to be fictional versions of themselves. Probably what most people would expect or hope for them to be like at the time. We begin in the middle of a random day where the burnouts are in the process of stealing some gasoline so they can get Cheech to work on time. While successful in their theft, this leads to some rather explosive consequences once they attempt to light one up.

As Cheech fucks up at work, we watch Chong do jack shit with his day, which includes smoking a cock roach and terrorizing the neighborhood with his guitar-playing. Once Cheech returns home, we are treated to one hilariously random scene after the next until Cheech gets a call from his cousin, Red. Red happens to be in a bit of a pickle. From this phone call, we are given the impression that Cheech isn't overly fond of his cousin or the least bit interested in helping him with his problems. At the moment, Cheech is expecting a lady friend to drop by, so, he sends Chong out to find Red and hang out with him, and basically keep him away for as long as possible.

Chong tracks down Red at a hotel in Hollywood where he's being kept out of his room due to a failure to pay his bill. Pee Wee Herman isn't feeling especially reasonable today and isn't interested in excuses. However, Red's money is still in the room, nonetheless, so, something needs to be worked out. The "little asshole", as Chong angrily calls him, is merely trying to let enough time pass so the bill will increase. Long story short, Red and Chong break in and get Red's stuff, including a duffle bag full of pot. Pee Wee calls the cops, ultimately getting himself arrested. Listening to "dark Pee Wee" scream "YOU FUCKIN' ASSHOLE!" while being carried away by cops is every bit as funny as it sounds.

As Chong discovers Red has 20 pounds of pot in his possession, he quickly befriends Cheech's loud mouth cousin, and they go looking for some shit to get into. They end up at a massage parlor/enema clinic/whore house (?) where they run into some weirdos. Red pisses in the hottub and later walks in on some people in the middle of an unusual sex act, which he quickly gets Chong in on so they can make fun of them. Eventually, Red decides the logical next step should be to play a tape recorder of some police sirens that he just happens to have handy. This, of course, freaks out everyone and the place empties pretty quickly. Red doesn't seem to have one bit of self-control as he immediately acts on every given impulse.

The tied-up chick Chong and Red had walked in on decides to follow them where ever they go from this point forward. After causing a ruckus at some music store, they all follow some other chick home, which happens to be where that one guy who tied up the first chick lives. I assume he's the father of the second chick they just met. They are all greeted by the guy's wife, who has the thickest Minnesota accent you've ever heard. This lady isn't like other people. She seems to genuinely believe her visitors are the cowardly lion, Toto and Glenda, the good witch of the north... don't ask me! She has no idea who they are or why they are there, but for some reason, she is thrilled that they decided to drop by. After a bunch of singing, laughing and pot smoking, they all take a late-night drive and end up at a comedy show.

At the comedy show, the group runs into none other than dark Pee Wee himself, who is apparently moonlighting as a comedian. Funny, because this version of Pee Wee comes off like a miserable cunt with no sense of humor. Red being Red, he decides to heckle Pee Wee during his routine, angering him beyond words. First, Pee Wee challenges them to get on stage and see if they can do better. When that doesn't go to his liking, he tries getting them all kicked out, or in his words, "killed". As chaos ensues, Chong and Red hightail it and get separated from the others as well as their pot. Chong is not happy about this and insists they find more. What they end up finding makes me think Tommy Chong had no idea how to end this movie, because that was truly some random shit he came up with to wrap things up.

Cheech And Chong's Next Movie isn't like other movies. The story, if you can call it that, doesn't get started for a good 40 something minutes, and almost seems to abandon the familiar three act pattern most movies include. It was a bold move having Cheech and Chong separated for most of the movie, but worked since "Red" was really just Cheech in a wig with an obnoxious, Texas accent. The second half of the movie isn't completely devoid of Cheech as we go back and forth between Chong's and Red's shenanigans and Cheech waiting impatiently for his would-be fuck partner to arrive, which seems to take years. It's hard not to feel bad for him at times.

By far my favorite of the Cheech And Chong series. This movie is a perfect representation of what pot smoking can do to one's thought process and life, especially if you consider the first movie. While Up In Smoke had a more clear cut premise and characters with specific goals, this sequel has more in common with someone who's been getting stoned non-stop for a couple of years. This one is dumber, trashier, all over the place, and in no hurry whatsoever to get started. Next Movie is very much in it's own little world. Unlike the more professional production of Up In Smoke, this actually feels like it was made by someone who was stoned off their ass the entire time. Perhaps it was. 7/10



#Review