Yeah, true.

But it’s VERY pretty. Like, extraordinarily pretty. Zack Snyder pretty.

Vapid, sure. But, so nice to look at.

Sometimes, you go for eye candy.

Hiro Murai, Tom Ford, Denis Villeneuve, and Jordan Peele do smart and pretty. At least, their directors of photography support the smart with pretty.

Try out Brick (2005). Mystery and set in a high school with fun, noir-specific language. Same guy wrote and directed the Brothers Bloom (2013) and Knives Out (2019 and 2020), which is some fun mystery.

Nope (2022) and Get Out (2017), Parasite (2018), the Prestige (2004), and Primal Fear (1994) are all great thrillers.

You might also like Shane Black’s movies. Funny, some action, The Last Boyscout (1991) and the Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) are guilty pleasures he wrote. Links are fun samples.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005) and The Nice Guys (2018) are quite solid later work that he wrote and directed.

Romcom/ light sci-fi? Her (2015)

Give us a few to go on, OP.

i.e. Sci-Fi

• Arrival

• 2001

• Dune (2021)

i.e. Crime

• Heat

• Sicario

• Brick

i.e. Non-Blockbuster Comic Book

• Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

• Comic Book Villains

• Dredd (2012)

i.e. Beautiful/Painful international

• Dancer in the Dark

• Incendies

• La Vita e Bella

Good eye, thanks!

deleted by creator

The Wrestler (2008)

Requiem For a Dream (2000)

Thank you Darren Aronofsky.

The Cell (2000)

Thank you Tarsem Dhandwar Singh

This thread deserves Dancer in the Dark. Another film that I love but cannot recommend.

Set up your depression-treatment space beforehand. You’re going to be there a while. Beauty and tragedy so tightly bound that it feels monumental.

This is the thread that deserves Todd Solondz’s films.

Start with Happiness (1998).

For me BladeRunner (Final Cut) is joined with Sicario, Heat (1995), Léon (Version Intégrale), and No Country for Old Men

Indomitable people facing nightmares with guns.

All are part of my “men with guns” film festival.

This is most my contact with others who read what I read and write what I write or think about what I think about. And, I vent here. Sure. I’ll admit it.

The North American town I now live in is decidedly not like me. I work with youth. I parent young children. 21st century parents, and those who marry into my partners social orbit, need to book engagements five months to a year in advance.

So, this is just easier.

Also: Fuck Reddit. Fuck Xitter. Fuck Meta. That’s the venting. I quit, gave up, or got hacked on all of them. Admittedly, I use WhatsApp to appease my extended family, workplace, and some friends. I’d dip back to T9 SMS if I could.

And I use Bluesky to microblog — keeping a timeline of the tragicomic decline and fall of the Western empire. And books.

We teach people to do all kinds of things. We also teach people why not-to do all kinds of things. They do them anyway.

Furthermore, if all that is needed is the information in order to be able to do the thing, theres no absolute way to prevent every person from accessing that information and, thereby having the means to do what they’ve be taught not-to do. So, in your scenario, someone, sometime, will use the weapon despite know not-to.

That said, wishing a nuclear weapon into existence — the highly-enriched uranium, the implosion core, the triggering mechanism, and the delivery system needed — seems like a helluva waste when literally everything else is also within reach. I’d hope that intelligence would be needed to understand the process; and that same intelligence would be sufficient to understand the possibility of a thing is not reason to do a thing. There’s a very crude example coming up.

Personally, I think the command of matter-energy interconversion, higher-dimensions of reality, and cosmic-levels of power might inspire one to travel widely, live fearlessly, and create new possibilities. Petty grievances — those solvable with nuclear weapons — would seem like non-problems when literally everything else is not a problem either. No hunger, no cold, no lack of shelter, no distance too far, no need for authorities… just wish-fulfillment.

Summoning a nuke would be base, awkward to the point of being detrimental to all relations. It would be like a Supreme Court justice shitting in his own hands and deliberately smearing it on the faces of elders, kindergarteners, military service members, civil-rights activists, and puppies.

Like, ew. Who would do that?

That’s an old teacher trick. A better one is using a dry erase marker to remove permanent marker. Not perfect, but works in a pinch.

First and foremost, she gains cleaning. Everything except bathrooms.

Half the cooking. She has dietary restrictions, I don’t. We don’t eat outside of home often. Except phở bò.

Every form of maintenance. Cars, computers, all machines and objects with moving parts.

Weekends away with friends. I never question and I never say no.

Few hard feelings when she’s temperamental.

What do I gain?

I’ll probably live longer because she makes me go to the doctor, the dentist, physiotherapy, and reduces my cheese and bacon intake. But not salt. She loves salt.

I gain perspective. I don’t occupy i high tower where I know everything and remain academically distant and untouched by the world. I gain knowledge of all the books I don’t (and wouldn’t) read. I gain access to emotional and psychological non-fiction content.

Finally, I gain the companionship of someone who lets me do my wierd. Nothing kinky or malicious or wasteful or destructive — just unreasonably high standards and unreasonably low output. No blame for it as long as bills are paid and food is in the fridge.

She’d like to see me try to shoot the moon, and I love her for it. We’ll see. I can’t even put together a string of Lemmy posts worthy of acclaim.

Do not lick the window.

Do not hit the window.

Do not draw on the window with permanent markers.

Dry erase are fine.

Do not moon, flash, or full monty the ground crew. Baggage gets lost that way. Fueling hoses are misconnected that way.

I had intended to not.

Then, after a turn at living together with my partner in an Islamic country — where we were not allowed to officially cohabit — we realized that our rights to watch each other’s backs were made way simpler by being married.

So we got married.

Had we always lived in a country that recognized cohabitation or common-law relationships, we might have not. Had our next sojourn not been in a predominantly Catholic country, we might have not. Had we more role models who didn’t, we might have not. Had we moved home earlier, we might have not.

But we did. It was 12 years ago.

Bottom line, we don’t find it burdensome; or that we are locked in a prison together. We care for one another. We drive one another crazy. We have the same fights over and over. We support each other and keep track of each other’s families, friends, medical conditions, and car keys. It’s nice. It’s mundane. It’s comfortable. It’s practical.

Getting out would be a giant pain in the everything. And expensive.

We don’t wield our rings against one another. We don’t demand “rights” from one another because we’re married. We don’t have extraordinary unspoken expectations of one another. We accept, value, and console one another. We’re a unit in this fucked up place.

People are crazy. I’m crazy. She’s the crazy I’m used to and can interact with.

I’m too old for new crazy.

Granted, she’s certainly gaining more by being married to me than I am being married to her. But, we don’t keep score either.

TL;DR — comments in bold.

I’m still hoping he’ll reprise his role as Dredd.

In his first outing, the worldbuild was good, his portrayal was spot-on. The story, sure, had its ups and downs. But, in the end, it’s a pretty solid comic-book action flick. Better than a lot of the dreck we’ve seen.

If he’s playing Johnny Cage at 53, he could still be Dredd at 60.

Another excellent book. Much more the history of America than the offerings of high school history courses. Especially under the aegis of Project 2025.

Read Paris, 1919 by Margaret MacMillan.

Read Postwar by Tony Judt

Read the Warfare State by Fred J. Cook

And, while not strictly an historical work, The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein rounds out this series on how institutions “fuck up the endgame” — to quote from Charlie Wilson’s war.

2nded.

These two books upend a lot of “conventional” thinking; and, it’s glorious. Graeber is a notorious contrarian and sometime — but he has the receipts.

For more on debt, read Margaret Atwood’s Massey lectures, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

Looking for the alternate name for the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (the Gate of Grief), sent me looking for other strategic “choke” points.

Aljazeera came through with the first one that was descriptive and visually informative, though they skipped the Strait of Magellan, probably because it’s not a shipping lane for oil. Published this year.