Laura

I think every single day about “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”

lucas completely exonerated in his critique of power, however the dialogue in the prequels is still shit from a butt bad

There is no answer to the Trolley Problem, morally correct or otherwise. It's a thought experiment to frame a discussion about culpability.

BUT ALSO it's broken containment from philosophy seminars in a way that's unhelpful and foolish

clearly we didn’t see much of each other while I was watching The Expanse (I was in the US for most of it tbf) because I mentioned it A LOT omg. she’s so much woman

Happy women's day if you're a woman

if you're not there's always next year

This repeats yet another pattern from the Iraq War. When the Iraqis did not behave as the Americans wanted — without the deference and gratitude that a foreign military occupier felt it was due — they became targets.

It was going on one, two in the morning, and we were shooting what I felt was an important scene for me, when he makes an attempt to be quote-unquote straight, in a suit, and at the end of it he gets emotional and locks himself in the other room. And I felt like, I’m not getting what I want—I’m not happy with it. Mike was happy with it. He called me the next day and said, “I know you weren’t happy with the scene last night. Believe me, we wouldn’t have gone home if I had felt we weren’t getting it.” And then he sort of became my psychiatrist and said, “You find it difficult to be happy, don’t you? You find it difficult to enjoy things.” And I said, “Well, sometimes. Last night was about feeling too tired and not feeling I was reaching what I needed to reach for the scene.” He talked to me then about when he was making, I don’t know whether it was Virginia Woolf or The Graduate. He said, “I didn’t enjoy it for a second. I was worried about so many things.” And then he said, “You know, this is never going to happen again quite this way. You should try to allow yourself to enjoy this more. Take a minute a day, and then add a minute the next day, and another minute. Pretty soon, you’ll have hours of happiness.”

The Birdcage opened thirty years ago today, so in its honor, I want to share one of my favorite stories about Mike Nichols that didn't make it into my biography. This is from an interview I did with Nathan Lane.

IYKYK

The pull out quote for me is "There’s more profit in noticing the ways in which we’re different than there is in noticing the ways in which we’re similar."

I wouldn’t say it on a site where I can’t turn off replies by strangers if people start being obnoxious; I’m brave, not a masochist. (But also I went back and found this for u)

Oh also, I love Rogue One a lot but would definitely not say it’s better than the OT, but Andor *is* better than Rogue One. On which note if I’m expanding into tv, The Clone Wars made me revise both my opinions that the prequels era was unsalvagable and that midquels were stupid cash grabs.

not counting looser franchises with even more instalments like Star Trek, DC, Marvel, Bond films etc. also not ranking LotR or Benoit Blanc films bc I genuinely think they’re all great in diff ways.

need to think about books but mid-period Discworld and Vorkosigan are pretty reliably the strongest.

three categories for me

Conventional wisdom: The Empire Strikes Back, plus In The Mood for Love if we’re counting informal/thematic trilogies.

Uncontroversial: Addams Family Values, X2, Mad Max: Fury Road, Aliens

Controversial but correct: The Last Jedi, at least as a sequel to TFA.

Have said this before in other forms, but will reiterate it here: if you're doing long-form writing of any sort, reading the words aloud into a microphone is a completely unparalleled cheat code. It's free, easy, and so effective it feels like it shouldn't be allowed. I do it in a few stages...

My brother, we had to explain a 1/3 pound burger was bigger than a quarter pound burger and still failed

Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung looking impossibly beautiful in In the Mood for Love

Finally watched In the Mood for Love after meaning to for decades. Holy shit it’s utterly gorgeous. Every frame is stunning. Her dresses! Her eyeliner! Oh my god everything is so beautiful.

one of the best to ever do it

1967 - Dystopian Sci-fi novel, Don’t Create The Torment Nexus published

1974 - Cult classic BBC mini series

1997 - BBC remake

2002 - Hollywood movie, upbeat ending added

2019 - Nexcon - A Torment Company IPO’s, $324 Billion market cap

2026 - Polymarket bets on who will be tormented next

and afaik people working in mental health and crisis services are still advised to use very factual, unambiguous language when talking about suicide to avoid miscommunication and encourage openness - we certainly were when I was a student peer support volunteer though that was >15 years ago (eek)

even if that’s sometimes a rationale it’s ineffective and potentially even counterproductive for that purpose, though. Most people with suicide triggers(incl me!) are not triggered by the *word* suicide, and using cutesy euphemistic language just serves to stigmatise suicide further; it feels worse.

I am once again begging people who want to talk about the country to learn the difference between Iran and Saudi Arabia

Letting Kristi Noem give a press conference before she realizes she’s fired is a pretty hardcore start to white history month

honestly I ignore everything that comes after because I don't actually think you're the brave truth teller you think you are if you're scared to say words because of a rumour that the app will limit your views

Photo of me (white femme, short brown hair) smiling widely in the sunshine in woodland, wearing dangly earrings with multicoloured letters vertically arranged so one ear says ‘read’ and the other says ‘books’. also a tshirt semi-visible under my dress which has a vintage book cover for Octavia Butler’s Mind Of My Mind

update: much like a panicked parent, the prospect of coming up with everyday cosplay caused me to forget every book character I’ve ever liked, but I did manage to bring out a literary tshirt *and* earrings for WBD

yeah fair, it does cover a lot of stuff I (voluntarily) read. I’ve still only read a few chapters each of Other Minds (P. Godfrey-Smith) and Entangled Life (M. Sheldrake) but just flicked back through copies & they seem to be the ‘good textbook’ end? I also loved The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Appreciate the sciency ones there are more the technical end of STEM than nature/ecology but if of interest. Also Mary Roach’s books have v high information content despite being full of jokes, but the tone might be a bit marmite in that respect. Ditto A City On Mars by K&Z Weinersmith, lot of fun.

Others I liked last yr:The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian, Mapmatics by Paulina Rowińska, We Were There by Lanre Bakare, Superior by Angela Saini, Marcus du Sautoy’s maths books usually fun.Tho I have more interest in memoiry books so possibly higher tolerance for any personal content in above

If you like AG’s medical books I don’t know if Siddhartha Mukherjee’s would also fit the bill? I’ve still only read Emperor of All Maladies & it did have stories from his practice interspersed, but it’s less personal narrative and more that patient experiences are fundamental to a book about cancer.

And where in the present, proponents will be dismissing those deaths as “well, they died by suicide or bomb strike, not BECAUSE of AI” in the same way that people died of mesothelioma and cancer, not BECAUSE of asbestos

This is a good analogy. Very useful in carefully controlled settings for specific usages, but unfortunately being widely inserted into everything and used without training or PPE and poisoning a lot of things and people and we’re going to pay a tonne of money to remove it safely in the future