I didn't get what was so great about Annie Hall. It's just another romantic comedy. I haven't seen a Polanski movie that I'm aware of.

I did like the Woody Allen movie where Gene Wilder fell in love with a sheep, but I haven't seen the whole thing.

I'm always a little relieved by the moral luck of not particularly liking some asshole's art (similarly Joss Whedon). However, I also had the moral luck of dating a guy for several years who was eventually convicted of horrible crimes, so I've been through a much more discomfiting version of AITA than debating whether to shred my old Sandman comics.

I heard Buffy was good, but I never managed to watch it.

I don't think I've read Gaiman either.

I know a bunch of people who overlapped/interacted with Palmer as undergraduates, and none of them came away liking her.

There's no point in shredding your old Sandman comics. Gaiman and his publishers already have your money and they've probably spent it. Bad people can make good art. This has always been the case. What do you want to do about it?

I keep seeing the same reaction over and over to David Lynch: His work never really resonated with me but I admire his originality.

So I'm not the only one.

I loved David Lynch so much, a truly singular artist. I've spent the day rewatching some of his films (Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive) and I had started a rewatch of Twin Peaks last week. We'll not see his like again.

I should go back and rewatch the original Twin Peaks.

It's so sad to think we will never see another new work from David Lynch. The visions that he gave to the world were truly a gift.

In college, a bunch of my friends were very excited about Eraserhead (I looked it up now and it was released in 1977 and this would have been 1982 so that is some indication of how long it used to take indie culture to get to the midwest), and I went to see it and I remember thinking this is just weird and gross and makes no sense.

The only new thing for me about the Gaiman story is that I was startled by how unambiguously awful the allegations were. I had sort of vaguely heard about it, and assumed (I'm not sure why) that the specifics were some variant of behaving badly with vulnerable people -- probably sexual assault but of a variety that would be so ambiguous that there's no way it could ever be proven. Nope. Much clearer than that (if ranking levels of sexual assault didn't seem wrong I'd say much worse).

I followed up and read his post about the situation, which was weird in that it seemed to be crafted to deny guilt in a situation with the sort of ambiguity that I had been expecting, but which really was not in rhe NY Mag article. I wonder if he was aiming it at people with a vague impression of the accusations rather than people who'd heard the whole thing.

I thought Gaiman's post read pretty much like every other such denial: Vague on the allegations; apologetic for whatever misdemeanors were real; insistence on consent.

I'm not sure how I feel about trigger warnings, but I will warn that the Vulture piece is is a rough read.

11: Same, except it was 2002 in graduate school.

But I do like Twin Peaks!

And I love that someone was doing weird, untethered stuff out there, even if it's above me.

My "logical" answer to it is, we can enjoy the art of abhorrent people when and only when it has nothing to do with why they're abhorrent. A baseball player who's betting illegally on horse races, for a relatively anodyne example? Feel free to wear his number and root for his team. But a boxer who's also a domestic abuser? If I were inclined to care about boxing, it would be harder to applaud someone for beating someone up in the ring and criticize them for doing it on their own time. This could be a work-by-work decision. Richard Wagner was personally antisemitic, so, sure, cancel his essays on German nationalism. But he died in 1883, so he's not responsible for who was a fan of his 60 years after that, and claims of antisemitism in his work are a lot murkier. I'd feel bad watching American Beauty or The Life of David Gale after the news about Kevin Spacey came out, but in Superman Returns and A Time to Kill he's not a sexual predator at all, so it seems fine.

I'm far from an expert on Wagner or most of the other people mentioned here, just basing this on wikipedia, and wouldn't blame anyone else for setting their rules about this elsewhere.

As for Neil Gaiman, unfortunately, a lot of it definitely falls on the wrong side of that rule, as the article makes clear. We have most of Sandman and some other books around the house. We haven't got rid of them yet, but don't plan to expose Atossa to them without a lot of context.

I felt bad watching American Beauty because it's crap.

14.1: That's pretty funny! Maybe University of Michigan students are always discovering Eraserhead or maybe there's a 20-year cycle.

14.2: Me, too!

The only ongoing role of Neil Gaiman in my life is his occasional appearances in lyrics from Tori Amos' Under the Pink, a work of art that meant a whole lot more to me than Gaiman's stuff ever did. Ironically, it also had a duet with Trent Reznor -- also an alleged predator although it's still just at the level of rumor -- so that's two guys sitting pretty poorly alongside "Me And A Gun" in the early 90s yucktopia.

That Gaiman article is indeed harrowing.

I did not get very far into it before I had to abort.

It took me two tries a few hours apart.

The only new thing for me about the Gaiman story is that I was startled by how unambiguously awful the allegations were.

My impression, not having followed this closely, is that the initial allegations were fairly vague and ambiguous, but that this new NYM story put a lot more horrific detail out there. I found it notable that the story itself mentions that 2 accusers had signed NDAs but their accusations are nevertheless detailed in the article.

I cannot understand why it is considered ethical for a lawyer to draw up an NDA covering potentially criminal behaviour. Trade secrets and so on I can understand, that's entirely different, but felonies?

I don't understand why they are enforceable. Maybe they aren't?

23, 24: NDAs have unenforceable stuff in them all the time in the corporate world, but the side with all the money counts in burying the other side in legal actions, or threatening to do so.

Courts are increasingly finding NDAs unenforceable for exactly that reason, which is presumably why the victims in this article were comfortable breaking theirs.

TikTok officially went dark!

Yeah I just opened the app the hang out for the last 30 minutes but it was already gone!

The fact that it went dark with a message about the benevolent U.S. Supreme Leader reversing the ban once he takes office is... not parody, apparently. (I've seen only screen shots.)

yeah, we saw that here.

I wonder if Tom Cotton will do a 180 and support the new Trump friendly Tik Tok or if he'll stay mad about it.

And T himself and his administration really got the ball rolling in 2020. But one of those "nothing matters" things, and probably appropriately so in this case. What a world.

We should all just get some of the presidential crypto and chill I guess.

I'm not asking abut whether they're enforceable, I'm asking why lawyers who draw them up are not sanctioned by their professional bodies. Why is it not malpractice for a lawyer to conspire to conceal a criminal act such as assault? ("Don't tell anyone about our trade secrets" is, as I say, different, and presumably enforceable.)

If it could be proven that a lawyer was conspiring to conceal a crime, they very well could be sanctioned by their bar. But as a wild guess, there may be lawyers in this world who would never concede that drafting a given NDA was evidence of such a conspiracy or of a crime by their client, let alone the lawyer. Just protecting their client's privacy or commercial interests, perhaps.

Hawaii just texted me that tiktok is back already.

It's still yesterday in Hawaii. Tiktok hasn't gone away yet.

Thanks Obama

The internet is too many rich people fucking with me. I'm starting to back out where I can do so without cutting myself off from something important.

I'm sure Trump will get all the credit. Democrats really shot themselves in the ass on that one.

Also its bad that the primary social media outlet for Gen Z has now been captured by the oligarchy.

As opposed to the other ones captured by the oligarchy.

I'm going to check out this new Red Note thing.

Yeah, they also got the Millenials on Twitter and the Boomers on Facebook, obviously the last stand is Gen X on Unfogged.

Yeah, the Facebook is Gen X central. It's just that no one under 30 has done the math on what generation a 60 year-old is.

Someone at the New York Times decided to spend this moment in history writing the headline Defiance is Out, Deference is In. I guess this is where I inevitably turn into a hideous Orwell-as-Joker figure.

Facebook is engagement bots, mostly.

46 sounds intriguing, but I don't want to buy new clothes.

35: even after the client gets convicted? I know, self interest beats self regulation, but still. If you wrote the NDA covering stuff for which your client later goes to prison, seems to me you shouldn't get out completely unscathed.

48: I can make it work with what I have, I'm pretty sure.

Honestly, can we throw up a "last thoughts before the inauguration" open thread? Let's do this properly.

46: I know writers do not control the headlines, but you could write a depressing cynical outline of the past decade's politics just using Peter Baker headlines:

For instance, that one and
"A Cloud Over Trump's Presidency Is Lifted" based *only* on the Bill Barr summary of Mueller's report.

Vivek Ramaswamy out at DOGE. Cue the tiny violin.

A thing I had forgotten, is that the Tim Tok was part of a "deal" that included aid for Ukraine and Taiwan.

And Israel.

But I'm not boycotting Ukraine and Taiwan.

Crazy how Trump just had Republicans block Ukraine funding for months on end and it didn't matter at all in the election.

Several of the MAGA flag types in my neighborhood were out with Ukrainian flags at the beginning of the invasion. Now if they have anything other than Trump or Blue Lives it's pro-Israel.

Since Gaiman is basically local, I've had a lot of interactions with people who've interacted with him. I'd never really heard of anything particularly awful happening, but it did give me a little pause to learn, many years ago, that a friend's sister, who, it should be said, was only 7 or 8 years younger than him, was in the habit of traveling to his place in Wisconsin with other younger women in the local SF scene for some kind of social interaction. Frankly, much of the scuttlebutt around him locally is just related to him having a very strong sense of his own popularity and power. Like you could essentially bribe him to notice you on his blog by going all out in support of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Not a terrible thing in and of itself, and even praiseworthy in some contexts, but the fact that he wouldn't even entertain other requests for support of local good works seemed to sour it a bit for me. There was an anecdote he told some years ago about how he was jetting around the world from one fete to another, and he realized at the last minute that if his assistant bent over backwards to switch a bunch of flights around, he would have time to spend an afternoon with his then-college age son on a layover. At least he thanked the assistant, but it smacked of rich people problems and solutions exclusively available to rich people.

I haven't been following closely enough to know what Democrats could have done about TikTok. But I also don't really care. What I'm more curious about is if TikTok going pro-Trump while also still being subject to an authoritarian state will end up driving people away. Maybe they really should give Musk control over the US operations in order to hasten the process.

OT: "A Real Pain" is not a good film. Strong cast, bad concept, somewhat plotless, irritating sound.

The ygolotneicS aspect of the OP link is interesting. Full on Maoist child-soldier stuff.

61: a good thing about "A Real Pain" is that it was short. Only 90 minutes.

I think I know where your pain manifested.

OK

61: Counterpoint: I thought it was a good movie. It was frustrating, because it was realistic in its portrayal of how travel changes people. I don't remember the sound being irritating, but it's been over a month since I saw it, so it's possible I've forgotten something.

Bloodline is good. Season 1 is meh and season 3 is a mess (though with some really good stuff in it), but season 2 is actually great. Kyle Chandler brings the fucking goods.

I like that cast, but you'd have to pay me actual money to watch another Holocaust movie.

Or at least, let's say, wasabi peanuts.

We've been watching Slow Horses which has been mixed--mostly saved by Gary Oldman's character--but it so spectacularly jumped the shark in the Season 3 finale that we are doing Season 4 just out of a sense of completion. Was marginally enjoying it, but the ;last 2 Season 3 episodes were so dramatically stupid that it led me to become much more critical about its flaws throughout.

We re-upped Apple after a break basically for season 2 of Severance having binged season 2 of Bad Sisters over the free weekend.

66: it's an interesting decision to give one of the two leads a big speech about how awful American visitors are for ignoring Polish people, refusing to engage with real people and real history, and using the Holocaust purely as the backdrop for their own solipsistic emotional journeys... in a film that ignores Polish people, refuses to engage with real people and real history, and uses the Holocaust purely as a backdrop for the lead characters' own solipsistic emotional journeys.

I assume 68 is in reference to "A Real Pain". But it's not a Holocaust movie, it's a Holocaust tourism movie.

A lesser included case.

71: Solipsistic Americans are real people with a real history.

Are they? Or are you just imagining them?

75: Oh, you're right! They are just images on a screen.

We re-upped Apple after a break basically for season 2 of Severance

We have just done exactly that as well. Gave "Silo" a try as well and are not convinced yet.

I'm interested that "Slow Horses" the series seems to have followed the same trajectory as the books. First couple of books were pretty good, and IIRC the third one lurched into utter implausibility and crapness.

Okay, so heebie's last comment before disappearing on Trumpmas Eve was "I'm going to check out this new RedNote thing"? What do we think she posted?

re: 77.last

I can't remember the specific book-by-book order, although I am up to date with the published books to date (including the prequel), but I do remember them swinging wildly in terms of plausibility but I did still enjoy the last couple--vague memory that I may have preferred those to some of the intermediate ones--although there's definitely that sense of an author bedding in for the long haul and getting a bit over-comfortable with the characters and plots.

We keep planning to watch the series but haven't quite got round to it, although I don't find Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb particularly true to the books, when he is clearly and explicitly inspired by Warren Clarke.

re: 79.last

In the sense that Lamb is supposed to be some kind of Falstaffian character, not a lank-haired Rigsby/Leonard Rossiter rip-off.

Falstaff is the name of a talking bear on Duolingo. But that's probably not the reference you're going for.

77: Same re: "Silo. " It engaged me (and really worked the cliffhanger thing to death), but a little of cluched sci-fi tropes and over reliance on the singular supercompetence of certain individuals. But, you know, sci-fi, TV; what do I expect.

Very compelling visuals, however.

I remain innocent if the Horses books.

||
We're doing cleaning and organizing in the dungeon/basement to distract; and boy, howdy, nearly 38 years to the day in the same place; my tools/screws/whatnots etc. combined with much of my father's same. It's a lot.
|>

Drunkness and Mexican food with friends this evening to continue the distraction.

85: isn't that called American food now?

Trump apparently didn't put his hand on the Bible when taking the oath. More support for my theory that he's Satanic.

86: "Freedom food" if not "Birthright food"

Okay, so heebie's last comment before disappearing on Trumpmas Eve was "I'm going to check out this new RedNote thing"? What do we think she posted?

ha, we got back from camping and it's Ice-mas Eve as well, so we've been unpacking and making sure pipes are nice and warm.

Honestly, can we throw up a "last thoughts before the inauguration" open thread? Let's do this properly.

Sure thing! I'm intentionally ignoring the thing, so as far as I'm concerned, we've got all week. Hang on.

Good luck with the pipes! I have no advice. I'm also ignoring the inauguration itself, although keeping an eye on the executive order updates.

84: Kid Two's things, especially including furniture, from her soon-to-be-former apartment plus all of the things from the in-laws' entire house near Cologne have now been crammed into our apartment and associated spaces. I sure hope that this is Maximum Stuff because jeez.