“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” - Kurt Vonnegut
There was a period in the 90s where if you knew how to use a search engine well you were treated like a wizard. It's going to be like that with people who are good at AI prompts for a short while and then I think it'll become a skill most people in certain jobs have.
Nothing in human history has ever sounded better than this Slowdive song that WMBR is playing right now.
Really excited to share my new podcast episode (we're back for a new season!) - I interviewed Hudson Leick, who is perhaps most famous for playing Callisto on "Xena: Warrior Princess" about all the stuff she's currently up to. Yoga, Astrology Readings, Dance, More. A lil Xena, too. Shit gets real.
"He's just another another member of the Kitty Pryde Low Self-Esteem Mistake Parade" is the greatest line of dialogue @brianmbendis.bsky.social ever wrote.
I don't want to be the manager who makes Simpsons references to my Gen Z team that they don't understand but I literally told a video editor on my team "you need to get to the fireworks factory sooner with this" yesterday and she looked at me like I had four heads.
I have never, before or since, seen the experience of having a record change your life portrayed more accurately on screen than this: youtu.be/fRHZr3VlpgE?...
I want to dislike the Grateful Dead on aesthetic grounds but that song is undeniable.
Link here. Episode should be out by mid next week. Hudson was an absolute delight, I was surprised by how deep it got: shows.acast.com/the-best-stu...
Hudson Leick as Callisto
Just recorded a really cool podcast interview with the great Hudson Leick, who played Callisto on Xena: Warrior Princess. We honestly didn't talk about Xena that much, it wound up being a kind of deep, intense discussion about spirituality, aging, empathy, creativity and more. Out soon!
The FDA should really affix a warning label to that Cat Stevens song for how fucking hard it hits after your Dad dies.
I miss when you could post Brave Norman Rockwell Townsperson and the caption could be, like, “R.E.M was wrong to leave ‘Fretless’ off of Out of Time” instead of “The secret police should stop murdering people.”
Got my plane ticket for Dragon Con today so things are starting to come together for that. See you Labor Day weekend, Atlanta!
No one has showed up to the Boskone dance party so I’m playing “Dancing with Myself” because it’s catchy AND conceptual!
The science fiction convention I’m DJing at tonight has a little display of vintage fanzines. Fanzines got their start in sci-fi fandom but all right-thinking people know the fanzine was perfected by the punk rock scene. Still, nice to see the history. @boskone.bsky.social
Friends and I were having weekly "Buffy watch parties" during season four and invited someone who had never seen the show to watch it with us. It was the week of "Beer Bad", so he never came back to Buffy night.
It made ZERO story sense for Spike to be part of the Scooby Gang, and never stopped feeling shoehorned in because Marsters was popular with fans. Oz leaving runs counter to everything we had been shown about that character up til then.
The biggest shift for me was Whedon really started leaning into "my episodes are SPECIAL because I'm a SPECIAL BOY" which makes the whole show seem lopsided. It really hurt the consistency. Maybe worth it for "Hush" and "Restless"? Marc Blucas seems like a nice guy but Riley didn't work.
There's too many fucking people in the Epstein files. Need Yakko Warner to sing a song about it to help me get caught up
You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test
Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs)
Good tech.
Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales)
Bad tech.
O’Hara gives one of her best performances in this movie - an outright gem only marred by the tonally weird trans joke at the very end, which didn’t even land for me in initial release. Best in Show edges it out slightly as an overall film but O’Hara & Levy are hilarious and poignant in Mighty Wind.
With the passing of the great Catherine O’Hara we fired up Best in Show tonight and holy fuck is that movie still funny as hell. O’Hara is brilliant, of course, but everyone else is also in top form. The way Fred Willard bursts in halfway through and kicks the movie into a whole other gear amazes.
I have an 11 year old voracious reader and she and her friends vaguely know about it but don’t really care about Harry Potter. I’ve never pushed (I also don’t care about it and don’t want to support JKR) so maybe HP’ll be confined to millennials
I was mostly fine (as was everyone else involved) but got a bloody nose. We were close so I walked to the interview (I'm nothing if not determined) and interviewed Ryan Seacrest - who was very nice, but clearly super busy - with blood all over my face. Seacrest did tell me I should get check out.
My strangest celebrity encounters part four:
I had been sent to the Super Bowl by the local tv station I worked for "to write blogs" (this was 2008) and in the week leading up I had to go interview Ryan Seacrest. On the way there my driver got into a car accident.
Linda Gray then proceeded to yell, "Oh come on. It was GREAT!" I had never been berated by a television star for being insufficiently enthusiastic about a mediocre movie.
(this was a joke, the bride - who was part of the conversation - would not have been caught dead at a Star Trek convention.)
Anyway, Linda Gray asks me if I had seen the new Star Trek movie (this was 2009, the first JJ Abrams one with Chris Pine had just come out.) I said I thought it was fun.
My strangest celebrity encounters part three:
I was at a wedding of a friend and one of the guests was "Dallas" star Linda Gray. She asked how I knew the bride and I said we met at a Star Trek convention.
I said, "I think Yoda is circumsized but Baby Yoda isn't" and Charlize Theron replied with "I like your thinking." Our team won the game show because I had the dumbest tattoo of anyone playing.
