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Jan 26

New blog post: thoughts on Shehan Karunatilaka's Booker-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, as well as his short story collection The Birth Lottery, both of which make the argument for him as an author firmly rooted in the SFF tradition. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2023/01/recent

And honestly, it feels like a waste of the creative team to be following up Chernobyl with this. Don't get me wrong: I see the thread connecting the two stories. But Chernobyl was clearly the more complex, more interesting take on these themes, so TLOU feels like moving backwards

For all the talk about the show beating the "video game adaptation curse", the real question was whether it could find anything new to do with the zombie genre. And guess what, in 2023, with decade-old source material, five minutes after the end of The Walking Dead, it cannot.

(And yes, that includes "Long Long Time", which is very good but still wildly overpraised. The days after it aired felt like "what is grief but love surviving" week all over again around here.)

I gave it a couple of episodes to be sure, but now I'm just going to come out and say it: The Last of Us is a solid, well-made show with engaging characters, but it's nothing special, and I am baffled by all the voices insisting otherwise.

Rachel Wolf

@iamrachelwolf

Feb 4

For every Armie Hammer that Hollywood keeps wanting to "redeem" and reboot, there are 1000 unemployed actors with just as much if not more talent who would welcome the opportunity to work!

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Feb 2

On the bright side, Puss in Boots 2 is, as promised, surprisingly good (and not just for an nth Shrek sequel). My one complaint is that Puss and his story were the most boring part of the film. I would have preferred a movie about Goldie and the Bear family, or Perrito the dog.

Catching up with the best animated film Oscar nominees, and dear lord, The Sea Beast is shockingly bad. Slow, flabby script, barely-there characters, thin attempts at humor, a hopelessly muddled message, and bizarrely boring creature design. A colossal failure on every level.

i n n e s

@innesmck

streaming companies forgetting their entire existence is based on being slightly more convenient than piracy

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Feb 2

Every time twitter fucks up its service my Mastodon follows pick up, so the fact that they've been pouring in today should give you a sense of the wisdom of this new policy.

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Twitter Dev

@TwitterDev

Feb 2

Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead

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Hal Duncan @halduncan@mastodon.scot

@Hal_Duncan

Sorry, I'm now only interested in watching zombie apocalypse stories where it's about the rest of the world getting on with life after having dealt with the zombie apocalypse, shaking their heads at the US's drop-of-the-hat descent into misanthropic grimdark libertarian dystopia.

Ida Bae Wells

@nhannahjones

Those who stoked the frenzy about "wokism" are remarkably silent about actual state censorship and punishment. And this being done by the man many in media cover as a legitimate presidential candidate.

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David Beard

@dabeard

Jan 31

If Florida, teachers are advised to hide their books to avoid felony charges. At one school, “the kids began crying and writing letters to the principal, saying, ‘Please don’t take my books, please don’t do this.’” washingtonpost.com/education/2023

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Niall Harrison

@niallharrison

Five months ago it was a 60-word tweet, now it's a 6,000-word essay in

@strangehorizons

. Inflation, eh? strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/in

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Niall Harrison

@niallharrison

Aug 22, 2022

For books that have a linear past-present-future structure (so like The Bone Clocks, rather than CA), how about "overshoot novels"? Covers both narrative momentum and plot trajectory (v rare for the future to be better in such books) twitter.com/niallharrison/…

Kay Taylor Rea

@kaytaylorrea

the hilarious thing about this is nobody who's mooching will choose to pay now, but people who are using legitimate accounts will no doubt run into myriad technical difficulties that will piss them off enough to cancel their accounts, others will cancel just cause fuck netflix

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DiscussingFilm

@DiscussingFilm

Netflix’s has introduced their anti-password sharing method: Once every 31 days, your device must log in on your home Wi-Fi network or your account will be blocked. (via: thestreamable.com/news/confirmed)

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's special issue on SFF criticism is magnificent, and a worthy tribute to the dearly-missed Maureen Kincaid Speller. Kudos to editors

@danhartland

and

@ActuallyAisha

, and to all the talented contributors.

strangehorizons.com

30 January 2023

Visit the post for more.

Dan Hartland

@danhartland

Jan 30

Big issue - in every sense of the word - for

@strangehorizons

this week, and especially for

@ActuallyAisha

and me. It's our now-annual Criticism Special, but also a - we hope - suitably sprawling tribute to the mighty, much-missed

@maureenkspeller

strangehorizons.com

30 January 2023

Visit the post for more.

And the whole bit where Frank wants a community and Bill is fine with having one person... did they really stop with Joel and Tess? Just in general, these were two very different people who would never have hooked up in the old world. Might have been interesting to get into that.

Like, Frank can protest all he likes that he's not a whore, but the relationship absolutely starts out transactional. Might have been interesting to see how it grew into something more, and how difficult that might be when your life depends on being a good boyfriend.

This week's vaunted The Last of Us episode was good, but I don't know - feels like, especially in an outsized episode, there was space to go a little deeper into this relationship. Make it a bit more complex and thorny.

Every piece of information The Last of Us reveals about the outbreak makes less sense. "The fungus spread in the food." You mean the food you guys are still eating?

I'm still catching up with reading from 2022, but nevertheless here is the list of books I'm looking forward to in 2023, and might get around to reading some time in 2024. lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/01/the-bo

Happy Valley is 90% the most thoughtful, unsensational cop drama you've ever seen and then the other 10% are James Norton playing an unkillable monster who keeps showing up to torture the heroine like Jason from Halloween.

Dental hygienist: not much to clean here. You've done a good job since our last appointment. Me: this is great. I'm going to get a good grade in dental hygiene, something that is... wait, that's actually a totally reasonable attainment, and I have *done it*. WITNESS ME.

Have spent the last forty-five minutes on the phone with an elderly relative, walking her through editing a PDF on her smartphone. This is either penance for some egregious sin, or banking up mitzvot until at least the end of the year.

Bad Writing Takes

@BadWritingTakes

The Academy is now "conducting a review" of Andrea Riseborough's To Leslie nomination

There is probably no better illustration of Gender Critical "feminism" than this: "Forget about the sex trafficking rapist who tattooed his name onto the women he raped and sex trafficked, and let's focus on the real enemy - gay Labour MPs who criticise transphobic bigots."

The Observer
Forget Andrew Tate - what about the host of misogynists in Labour's ranks?
Catherine Bennett
The transgender debate seems to offer many proudly progressive men a licence to insult women who disagree with them Sat 28 Jan 2023 19.00 GMT

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Obviously, the "right" way to campaign for an Oscar nomination is to throw lavish, studio-funded parties where the star glad-hands voters and hands out suspiciously expensive gifts. A grassroots campaign by people who genuinely loved the movie is just not on.

Me: nothing could possibly epitomize the Academy's myopic narcissism better than its reaction to The Slap last year. The Academy: hold my gold-plated figurine.

avclub.com

Technically, they didn't cite Riseborough by name, but it's not hard to figure out who this is about

Excellent essay that gets at so many of my dissatisfactions with The Banshees of Inisherin. As it concludes, I think we've all made McDonagh out to be a much deeper artist than he actually is.

slate.com

The Banshees of Inisherin’s Writer-Director Has Made a Career of “Irishness.” It’s All a Load of...

Does Martin McDonagh understand Ireland at all?

Some thoughts on the best picture nominees I've seen over at

@lefarkins

. In which I rank Elvis over The Banshees of Inisherin and agonize over the choice between Tár and EEAAO. lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/01/oscars

Pedro Pascal is giving me really strong Mal Reynolds vibes in The Last of Us. Makes you wonder if that was in the mix when Joel was being created for the original game.

Some thoughts on the best picture nominees I've seen over at

@lefarkins

. In which I rank Elvis over The Banshees of Inisherin and agonize over the choice between Tár and EEAAO. lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/01/oscars

@Ben_Alpers@mastodon.online

This, basically.

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@Ben_Alpers

Replying to @NussbaumAbigail

Basically every reason you might want to nominate Avatar 2 is a better reason to nominate RRR.

Isaac Feldberg

@isaacfeldberg

Park Chan-wook's DECISION TO LEAVE getting snubbed at the Oscars across the board, and especially in Best International Feature, is really frustrating. Just a great work of art on every conceivable front.

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To be clear, I'm not saying Avatar 2 is a bad movie - it's slightly better than the first one, and anyway bad movies get nominated for best picture all the time. But it's unremarkable, except for its pedigree and box office, and neither are a good enough reason to nominate it.

Plus, Avatar was genuinely innovative on several fronts. Avatar 2 is not. Its visuals are pretty standard at this stage, and there were multiple movies in 2022 - Prey, The Woman King, RRR - that trod similar thematic ground, and usually much better. There's no added value here.

The talking point that Avatar has no cultural footprint wasn't true at the start. We spent months talking about it: the technology, the politics, the world. Avatar 2, meanwhile, opened, a lot of people saw it, and then we all just kind of... moved on. The Oscars should have too.

Genuinely baffled by the best picture nomination for Avatar 2. Feels like Hollywood penciled it in on the assumption that it would be a major cultural event, and failed to notice that all it did was make a lot of money. At this point, it's like nominating a Fast & Furious movie.

Ashley Clark

@_Ash_Clark

I'll permit myself one Oscars 🔥 take: it's a bit surreal that the most visually creative American pic of the year, made by an Oscar-winning director and featuring huge stars, was never even mentioned. But, given what it says about the industry and its history, also unsurprising!

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