D-Ray Kenobi

I watched it last week, I liked it a lot.

Something about it seemed almost subdued compared to other Scorsese movies. His stuff on this same biographical or epic scale has seemed more kinetic or fast paced, it was a bit of a change up to see this purposefully take its time a lot of places. I think that slow burn worked well for the most part, but if this was something that I couldn't have split into two different nights, I think I would have gotten a little agitated by the long running time.

That's really the only knock I have against it though. The tech worked great and made those scenes in their younger days believable enough. That slow pace does work well in terms of making you kind of live with the characters and have the same thoughts in your head that they probably are, especially De Niro's character. That scene in the car where they're just awkwardly talking about a dead fish is probably the most tense scene I've ever seen with the most ridiculous dialogue.

I'm glad we live in an age where somebody with deep pocketbooks and no F's to give like Netflix can make this happen. This movie probably wouldn't have been possible even as recently as five years ago.

I'm in the boat that you should NEVER make your job your life.

Unless you're somebody like Tank that earns a room in the Mount Olympus of your career path, you should work for yourself, not your employer. I can't tell you how many projects fell out of priority at any of my jobs, but most of the time I stick with my own projects and goals until they happen one way or another.

I'm not exactly at my dream job, but I am working for my dream organization. I still honestly place a bigger priority on my travel and music festival hobbies.

I'm betting that you already know what the answer is, I'm sure nobody here minds help encouraging you with it though.

Back around 2013, I had to leave higher education. I'd worked there for about five years and I was blessed enough to get a lot done. I taught classes, managed a conference, was editor of the university homepage, all kinds of awesome stuff. But after that five years, I pretty much ran into a dead end. The President of the University left, politics got insane, and I just took the healthy option and took an online sales job in another town that allowed me to telecommute most of the time.

It didn't take long for me to realize I hated it. The people that owned the small business didn't have an ounce of ethics in them when it came to leveraging Chinese sweatshops. They also expected modern results out of a very old fashioned way of doing business, and no amount of explaining or data I gave them convinced them to change a thing about the way they did things. I hated myself for having to peddle cheap things with an insane markup that kept some kid in what boiled down to an internment camp. I was only there for around a year or so before I noped out of there.

I've had a few things since then, only one was bad since it more or less turned into the same thing, just higher quality products in a more corporate environment. I've always known what I DID like to do, but it took a few tries to find out what I DIDN'T want to do. I discovered that I loved doing the digital communications and communications strategy stuff, but for something that actually made a difference and was done ethically.

One job I loved that I probably shouldn't have left was at an embedded tech place that made the touchscreens that are used in things like airplane seats or some vehicles. It was a corporate place, but a small one that valued their employees tremendously and went a long way to make sure they knew it. It was also cool to feel like I was a part of driving technology forward. But then again, if I hadn't left it, I wouldn't have ended up doing kind of the same thing at NASA. The seven year old me dreamed of working here, so I value it tremendously and plan on making a career out of it if I can get away with it.

Anyways, TLDR: Find what you do like, and also find what you don't. Knowing both will eventually put you in the right place, even if it takes a few twists in the road to get there.

There was also a quick little moment at the funeral where he thought he recognized her.

That was kind of my guess. Being Mandalorian doesn't seem to mean there are uniform rules and traditions. It seems like each tribe, house, or whatever all have their own things unique to them.

Not showing the main character's face at all through at least half of a season is a pretty bold choice for example.

It's a testament to Pascal (and likely also a stand-in) that they can emote so much through a helmet, but that would have never been a sure thing.

I'm loving it.

If I had any complaint at all, it's that Clone Wars already did the whole Seven Samurai episode just as well. I did like that it provided some framework for Mando to let his personality out there a little more though. Gina Carano was really good in it, she had some fun stuff to do that showed she can both act and kick ass and isn't just a glorified stuntwoman. I've got no problem with it leaning hard into Kurosawa or Westerns, I'd only have a problem if it didn't do so in a way that Star Wars hasn't done already.

Also I think it's naive to expect this show to take a lot of risks and not be a crowdpleaser. This is the crown jewel for Disney + and has to sell subscriptions. It's a miracle that it's being as bold as it has been to this point.

I liked The Irishman a lot. I'd give it a B+.

I also thought the de-aging effects were awesome. There were maybe only two or three shots that I even remembered that it was a thing and didn't believe those guys weren't playing younger versions of themselves.

The **** did I just watch? I loved it. But seriously WTF.

My wife and I were traveling last week and I caught up on a ton of stuff I probably wouldn't have seen otherwise on the plane.

Godzilla: King of Monsters

C+

John Wick Part III
A-

Men in Black International
D+

Aladdin
B+

Booksmart
B+

I can understand misunderstandings in some more complex stuff in government. It's tough to keep track of all of the subcomittees and what they do for example.

But I feel like people should have a basic understanding of some of the essential frameworks written in the Constitution. I remember years ago explaining to a family member that they didn't actually vote for a President, and instead voted for an elector in the electoral college. Their expression when I showed them proof was probably the same one as if tentacles burst out of my head.

I work for the federal government these days, and it boggles my mind how out of the loop that even people here are on the process of this whole thing.

The government almost shut down last week when funding would have lapsed, but an emergency Continuing Resolution stop-gap bill funded everything for thirty more days. We had some conversations in meetings about how the impeachment hearings were probably affecting the CR.

I mentioned that even though the Senate likely wouldn't convict, I thought it was kind of inevitable that he'd be impeached in the House. Literally most of the room thought that impeachment meant immediate removal from office. Not just the start of the Senate trial.

I can't speak for everybody, but certainly can for us. Being married shouldn't make a difference. You should be able to hang out with both people, or either individually.

Being married shouldn't mean that one person or both people have to fall within someone else's definition that they didn't consent to. This isn't really in reaction to the comments here, but more so to the general vibe I get from some people in all walks of life. Other than us living together and having the same plans and goals, it doesn't mean anything else to us at all really. I feel like people assuming that we do or don't do stuff just because we've been married a long time has been a big barrier for us.

We do like that one drink on our couch with a movie over barhopping all night. But we also do other stuff that would surprise a lot of people, you certainly wouldn't know about it if you just assumed us to be a boring old married couple.

It sucks, but I think it just takes compromise and sacrifice.

There's a weekly meetup in my town of a lot of entrepreneurial types. I know if I committed and stuck around, I would probably find some cool people that I'd want to hang with regularly. The cost though, is breaking through a lot of schmoozing and convincing people to let their guard down and drop the facade they put on when they're in networking mode.

So here's a problem that my wife and I have run into as we're starting to get on up there, it's just insanely hard to make and keep friends.

Both of us decided years ago that we weren't going to have kids. We have an awesome niece that fills that whole thing in our lives, we keep her a lot so she's practically a part-time kid that's more than enough for us. But being kid-free has kind of ostracized us from a lot of our old high school and college friends that now have one, two or three in tow. Obviously, their priorities have understandably changed and it became nearly impossible to get our schedules to sync to ever hang out. Tons of others have kind of come and gone too. People got married, moved away for other jobs, got into other things that weren't really for us, all sorts of stuff.

We do have a handful of really tight friends, but they're a little younger than us and sometimes that makes for some awkwardness or whatever. You know there's a big difference in your outlooks when you'd rather just have one drink and watch a movie on your own couch than go barhopping downtown until 3AM.

At this age where we live, making new friends is like looking for a trendy Armani coat at the thrift store. It's possible, but it takes a lot of time and work, multiple tries, and it probably won't even be the right fit anyways.

Aside from the Rian trilogy, there's just the Kevin Feige thing that he's working on. Other than that, it's all shows.

I think Disney took the wrong lessons from Solo, I still think there's room for actual films. As hectic as the production of Rouge One was, it was still a solid movie that both forged new territory and kept the ethos of the OT.

Thoughts on Episode 2:

• American Hero Story basically being this show's version of Black Freighter is awesome. The over the top way it did the viewer discretion warning and the way it almost parodied the Snyder version was so cool. I'd love it if each episode we got a quick sequence of one of the original Minutemen or Watchmen doing their thing.
  
• Regina King is so ridiculously good and I'm so glad she's the lead of this. This episode had a ton of motivations pulling her apart and she played it so well. Tim Blake Nelson is awesome too, him being the subdued and deadpan guy that's secretly amused by everything happening around him was such a good choice for that character.
  
• I was really frustrated with how much exposition was needed this time around. A big problem for me was the scene inside the museum when the Treasury Secretary went through a longwinded explanation of what we already knew for the most part. I don't know why we needed so many explanations of Doctor Manhattan either, it just seemed like way too much. The first episode did such a good job of showing and not telling, so that was super annoying.
  
• The whole Ozymandias thing is walking such a tightrope. It's doing an awesome job of building a mystery box with its short scenes and allusions elsewhere, but I'm really concerned that it's going to be another Lindelof example of mystery for the sake of mystery without really going anywhere.

I've got some minor gripes this week, but I'm still so on board for this.

I loved it.

These are exactly how I wish more adaptations would go. Just take the ethos and world of the source material and go in a totally new direction that dovetails with what already exists. This and the upcoming Amazon Middle Earth series are the only ones I can come up with off of the top of my head, I hope this is a success and more writers and producers run with the idea.

It's way too soon to say at this point, but my only concern is that the mix of Moore and Lindelof sensibility could make for some frustrating storytelling ambiguity. I can see how things like Doctor Manhattan's Martian replica of Ozymandias' mansion or the baby squid rains are never explained. I hope it doesn't put themes and ideas so far ahead of storytelling that it never bothers to give cohesive answers to the questions it proposes.

What it is doing so far is great though. It totally gets the kind of grey area and social commentary that made the comic so great and flew over Snyder's head. The cool thing to me is that it's completely ripping apart what the idea of a superhero is. They probably haven't existed since the squid attack in the 80's, but now the police state has adopted the specific elements of it that suits them. I can't wait to see where else this heads.

I've thought that this is only a comic book movie because that's how movies get made now. It feels like it's more of a reflection on the state of movies in general rather than this movie specifically.

If this was just a Taxi Driver homage with some random guy, it barely would have gotten attention and probably would have been straight to Netflix.

That was kind of my view as well. This was a different kind of Joker in both portrayal and thesis.

He isn't necessarily the kind of criminal mastermind that you'd think of like from Nicholson, Hamill, or even Ledger. The only personal gain he's interested in is attention, which might be the most dangerous asset of all for someone like this.

For what it's worth, I was ready to hate this movie. I feel like media representation really gamed the conversation against this, it was not at all what I expected. It was dark and hard to watch but damned if I can't stop thinking about it.

I saw it last night, I thought it was extremely well done.

There are going to be some very fair critiques that it borrows way too much from Scorsese, but recontextualizing it in the way that it does more than helped me push that aside.

I won't go into spoilers, but there was one scene in particular that really put it over the top for me and put everything after it into perspective. It made me realize that this movie was never about a villain origin or the supposed incel themes that memes have suggested, it's instead a really harsh look at the realities of mental illness and care for people with it. It really disappoints me that the conversation around this movie has been about anything but that.

...but one gripe I have is even by the end of the film, you NEVER get the sense that THIS version of the Joker will become the Joker we know as a super villain capable of taking on and matching wits with Batman.

Going to disagree with this one, there was one scene in particular where I totally saw what he would become.

This morning I'm scrolling through feeds and seeing edgy friends joke around about how there's talk of a Civil War. I should have considered that Tweeto Cheeto would have actually invoked language like that.

What is he even implying? He's the Commander in Chief, but the Joint Chiefs and various Secretaries are never going to just sign on to what essentially would be a partial coup d'état. Is he instead saying that his "Second Amendment People" take matters into their own hands on his behalf?

This is going to start slipping away into real dark territory real quick.

The quick summary is that there will be one more MCU film in his own trilogy, one more appearance in a non-Spidey MCU film (kind of clear it's either Fantastic 4 or the next Avengers), and Holland's Spidey will appear in at least one of Sony's Venom-verse films.

Also apparently this is a bridge solution for the next few years. I think Sony sees the writing on the wall that Fiege is going to take over for Kennedy at Lucasfilm and want to wait to see how that shakes out before they go for a longer deal.

 

So, I turned 35 a few weeks ago.

 

Back throughout the past year, I'd been on the verge of depression because I couldn't really handle it very well in my head. Things like obviously not being as good looking as I once was, feeling left out when younger people were doing things without me, stuff like that.

 

Lately though, I don't even care. I'm still in my early 20's in my head, and my office in my house still looks like it could belong to a teenager. I'll keep doing my thing.

This is an attitude that I don’t understand at all. I enjoy growing old, not having to do what young people do, and don’t want anything about me to potentially be confused with a teenager.

 

My brother in law, who is 5 years older than me, has a similar mindset about wanting to be young, despite being in his mid-forties. I’m also pretty sure I haven’t peaked, though. I get better with age.

 

Whenever I look at old pictures or things I'd wrote, I certainly see an idiot who hasn't learned a lot yet or hasn't gotten a healthy sense of jadedness.

I think I'm able to apply the things I've learned since that point and enjoy a ton of the same things, just with more means and understanding.

So, I turned 35 a few weeks ago.

Back throughout the past year, I'd been on the verge of depression because I couldn't really handle it very well in my head. Things like obviously not being as good looking as I once was, feeling left out when younger people were doing things without me, stuff like that.

Lately though, I don't even care. I'm still in my early 20's in my head, and my office in my house still looks like it could belong to a teenager. I'll keep doing my thing.