Control

Everyone should go out of his or her way to see BLUE RUIN. Make sure you pay for it, too. It has a director and a lead actor who deserve more attention, and it's an incredibly tense thriller.

...and my softball team was eliminated from playoffs today. Blergh.

Americans, help a brother out: How would you pronounce the name "Berriault"? Ber-y-ult? Bear-y-ult? Bear-ult? I'm Canadian, so I'd immediately pronounce it "Berr-au."

Haven't played BIOSHOCK. The source material for SNOWPIERCER is from the 80s, but I dunno how faithful of an adaptation it is.

SNOWPIERCER was awesome. I might even like it more than GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. That axe fight! That school room scene!! Song Kang-Ho and Tilda Swinton!!! Best English-language debut from the current crop of Korean directors, by a fair sight. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who demands plausibility from their dystopic science-fiction. I mean, it's about a giant train that circles the world one a year--like PACIFIC RIM, if you don't dig the concept, you shouldn't watch the fucking thing.

Hemingway's style is very minimalist, and is largely based on journalistic writing. His work focuses on who, what, when, where, and how--though almost never "why." He's famous for his "iceberg theory" of writing: For Hemingway, I'd suggest In Our Time. It's a short story cycle, and it's one of his earliest works. Hem is a better short story writer than a novelist, to my mind, though The Sun Also Rises is quite good. Early Hem is almost always better than late Hem. Some of my favourite Hemingway stories are "Hills Like White Elephants," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and "The Capital of the World."

My softball team actually won a playoff game. We eliminated someone! We were ranked #10 of 10 teams, so this is a bit of a coup for us.

Kototenta in action.

Eh, I don't think that any of his points are wrong. I love Thanos, but I thought the character looked pretty silly in GotG, and he's certainly right that so far Thanos hasn't done anything except bring good guy teams together.

Op-ed: Marvel’s Big Bad is becoming a big problem

The advice I've received so far boils down to "turn it off and turn it back on again."

Remember that any routine that involves either giving up something you love or doing something you hate isn't going to work. That seems common sense, but I think it's a pretty common failing. Figure out what physical activity she enjoys, and try to make time to do it more often/better. Limit "guilty pleasure" foods instead of removing them from her diet.

The "classic" I can really get behind is Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. There are, as with any book that size, some tedious passages, but it's a fantastic book nonetheless.

CLAY PIGEONS, y'all.

I got an Apple TV for Christmas. I've used it for Netflix and Youtube with no problems. Last night was the first time I tried renting a movie from iTunes: SNOWPIERCER. When i confirmed that I was renting it, I got a message that it would be 10+ hours before I could watch it. This wasn't what I was expecting, but this was the first time. So basically I figured I'd leave it downloading all night and then we could watch it today. Instead, it's still telling me it needs 3 hours this morning. Then, about half an hour later, it says that it's ready to play. But that's not a good time, so I hit "menu" to save it for later, and then when I tried to watch it tonight it was only 2/3rds finished and told me that it needed another 65 minutes. That was two hours ago. It's not a connectivity issue, because I'm watching Netflix and doing other online stuff no problem. Any ideas? This is really irritating the shit out of me.

Start with the YES/NO folder.

Happy Vader is flat out weird. Lookin' good for a fat dude pushing 60. I bet you he could still flatten a bunch of jobbers.

Just best actor all around--on the show and off. Baker is probably my favourite Doctor, but I don't think he's as good of an actor as some of them. I don't know how well he'd do in other roles. I seem to recall Moffat arguing that Davison was the best of the original actors, and supported it by pointing out that he's the only one who had a robust career afterwards. Eccleston and Tennant definitely have to be considered.

Who do you think is the best actor to play the Doctor? I read a review that named Troughton for that particular honour, but I haven't seen enough of him to judge.

I submitted a complete draft of my dissertation to my thesis advisor today. It's approximately 100,000 words in length, or 310 pages, minus the works cited, which has about 400 entries. It represents, to a certain extent, the culmination of about four years of writing and research. Sadly, this doesn't mean it's "finished," since I'll inevitably have to revise it to include the concerns of my second and third readers, and I'll eventually have to defend it against a panel of scholars; however, I'm pretty fucking pleased anyway. Plus, I found $10 on the ground while walking the dog.

I left GUARDIANS off of my box office list. Pretty happy with that decision. Probably put it too low on my RT list, though.

Heg-e-mony He-gem-ony Heg-e-mony He-gem-ony FYI, it's the second one. You don't dare say "heg-e-mony" in my crowd. We'd be all like "lulz, who iz the n00b?"

I just watched the first episode of RECTIFY. Anyone watch this? This first episode has got to be one of the best series' premieres I've seen. Pretty captivating.

I'm really hoping that some clever fan takes Peter Jackson's tedious 9-hour trilogy of Hobbit films and edits it into one pretty good 2.5 hour movie. It would probably be something like: Gandalf/dwarves recruit Bilbo -> forest with the spiders -> Benedict Cumbersmaug -> whatever the best part of this last movie is, probably a severely edited battle. No fucking elves. At all.

Kinda like Lars Von Trier's NYMPHOMANIAC, Pale Fire is largely a satire about academics/critics, especially those who try to bend the original text to their own meaning, and in doing so show almost no respect for the original. Having nearly finished my English PhD, I wonder if I'd enjoy it more now than I did previously.