http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/new-show-makes-romantic-comedy-funny

Fingers crossed that the show gets a second season, because there’s wisdom submerged in its odd premise: as admirable as it might be to date a good person, there’s a case to be made for the lover who sees and accepts your darkest side, the one person for whom you never have to fake it.

OdinsThirdRavenPhil Bhar48069 • 2 years ago Well, of course. You don't just throw something like that away. You don't sell it, either. You stick it in your underwear drawer and (kind of) forget about it. Then a few months later, this woman, who may just be your one and only legitimate salvation from abject solitude finds it by mistake, leaps to the wrong conclusion and bails on you in a moment of existential panic, leaving you so bereft and disoriented you can't even articulate your emotions to yourself, never mind anyone else.

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/youre-worst-constant-horror-and-bone-deep-dissatis-209157#comment-1589099024

Adulthood doesn’t have a timeline. No one suddenly becomes an adult at 18 or 21 or 25 or whatever age society deems appropriate. No one wakes up one morning and realizes that they’ve grown up. No one can will themselves into adulthood just by waking up earlier or drinking only on the weekends or even getting married. Maturation is a slow process and it happens by unconsciously floundering in adolescence until you slowly but surely stop fucking around and realize what you want and why you want it. Even then, you’ll still make mistakes and change your mind and maybe even ruin some relationships you hold dear, but the difference is that you’ll hold yourself accountable for your actions. You start taking responsibility for yourself as a living, breathing human being on a planet where your actions matter, even if it’s just to your small circle of friends.

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/youre-worst-fists-and-feet-and-stuff-209408

But the second moment is the return of the split-screen motif with Jimmy and Gretchen nervously staring off into space as they contemplate the choices they’ve made. I know that I name-checked the ending to The Graduate a few weeks prior, but I definitely spoke too soon, because this is the real homage, intended or otherwise. Leaps of faith can be cathartic and beautiful, and most filmed entertainment, romantic comedies or otherwise, end on that moment of catharsis because it’s happy. But if The Graduate ended on Ben and Elaine running out of the chapel, I don’t think it would be considered such a classic. It’s that penultimate 40-second static shot of the both of them nervously staring forward into an uncertain future as their smiles slowly fade. They’ve taken the leap, but what’s next? Maybe despair. Maybe regret. Maybe failure. “There is horrible sadness and pain coming, and we’re inviting it,” Gretchen remarks when she and Jimmy reconcile, but that doesn’t really hit until they’re actually moving boxes into Jimmy’s house. They’re closer together, but as the split-screen suggests, they’re also facing their own inner fear. It’s possible the whole thing will blow up in their face, but at least they’re trying. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes that’s all that counts.

thealiasman • 2 years ago Wall of text ahead on what was a really terrific finale, and season:

God forbid this be the only season, but were it to go out on this episode, You're the Worst would still make for one of the great series on facing adulthood. It's got a romantic punk rock attitude about it; rebellious, yet ultimately optimistic. The inciting incident for the series is a union between the show's most "mature" characters, and while the finale does a great job of illustrating how Becca and Vernon are just as awful as anyone else, Jimmy and Gretchen taking a leap together is a lovely demonstration of You're the Worst embracing the thing it started out so afraid of. Each of the four main characters is defined by a different aspect of conscious youth that age is meant to take away (and I think in season 2, the show will discover this in Becca and Vernon too, who have potential to grow). Jimmy's a cynical narcissist who thinks he's figured the world out, Gretchen is a mess (though you wouldn't believe it looking at Aya Cash), Lindsay is restless and horny, and Edgar desperately seeks guidance and stability. To go a little deeper: Lindsay jokes about not knowing what feminism is, but that's because the responsibility she rejects includes thinking about her actions as they reflect her identity as a woman, a wife, and potentially a mom. Taking some responsibility in her life would mean giving up the ability to follow her id, consequence free, and tonight saw her face real consequences. Edgar's military history acknowledges the real and scary world you have to expose yourself to when you become socially conscious. Everyone else is in an advanced state of arrested development, so they joke about Edgar's PTSD to distance themselves from it, and ignore what it is Edgar's been through. Edgar's seen what being part of the adult world can do to a person, and it's understandably scared him. Gretchen and Jimmy's own adolescent mindset bears out for them as individuals as well, but together, they face the show's defining fear, that of going out into the world as a somewhat fully-formed person, and trying to share that person with someone else. Most sitcoms depend on will-they-wont theys because all you need is sexual chemistry, not characters. Once they do get together, the relationship always takes place between breaths in the premise-of-the-week (as an example from a show I like, but struggled with this: New Girl). Actual interaction of personalities is limited to little tastes each week, like the serialization on a USA show. You're the Worst, like my favorite TV romantic comedy, Party Down, doesn't use relationship ennui like shared space and tangled social lives to beat around the bush; it's about two people figuring out how honest they can be with one another when they don't like who it is they themselves are. That's what makes the whole finale, and especially a moment like Gretchen slumping her head on Jimmy's shoulder -not passionately kissing or hugging him to celebrate their reunion- so wonderfully romantic. No matter how scary it might seem, there's still the chance of finding that one good thing adulthood was also supposed to have promised: lasting companionship. Finding a person who sees, and understands you completely, your fellow pitbull, so to speak. You're the Worst is funny and relatable because the characters express our own childishness with an adult's vocabulary and preoccupations, but in the end, it's a show that's wrestling with growing up by hoping it might not be so bad. God, I hope this isn't the last we've seen of it.

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/youre-worst-fists-and-feet-and-stuff-209408#comment-1595781945

But that still doesn't take away from the biggest emotional moment of the episode which was Jimmy asking Gretchen to move in and Gretchen saying no - and him being okay with the rejection and her being okay with the offer. If the fire hadn't happened, they still would have remained a couple. And that's a big deal.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/09/19/youre-the-worst-fists-and-feet-and-stuff-review https://vimeo.com/89679572 http://www.vox.com/2014/9/18/6357147/youre-the-worst-fx-stephen-falk#interview http://screencrush.com/monday-morning-critic-youre-the-worst/ http://www.avclub.com/article/youre-worst-creator-stephen-falk-sideways-approach-209377

http://ask.metafilter.com/297537/Why-is-abuse-so-formulaic

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/06/sara-watkins-the-challenges-of-change.html

“Scary isn’t the word I would use,” she replies when asked if the circumstances were unsettling. “It was something I was going through that gave me a certain urgency. I was worried that I was going to get too comfortable with the way I played, or how I lived, or how I think. I was a little concerned that I would fall into a rut eventually and unintentionally, and then I’d look back in 10 years and realize that I hadn’t evolved at all. It was out of that concern that made me realize I don’t want to stay the same. I want to keep evolving. That isn’t comfortable, but it is necessary and it feels right to me.”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/19/simone-weil-attention-gravity-and-grace/

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/215965604/old-nokia-case-iphone-6s-case-iphone-6?ref=shop_home_active_69 https://www.etsy.com/listing/226328519/pretty-cabbage-case-iphone-5s-case?ref=shop_home_active_11 https://www.etsy.com/listing/215500851/fox-forest-cute-woodland-animal?ref=shop_home_active_54 https://www.etsy.com/listing/294007029/iphone-se-case-wood-wooden-phone-6-case?ref=shop_home_active_39 https://www.etsy.com/listing/270363339/marble-iphone-6s-case-granite-design?ref=shop_home_active_79 https://www.etsy.com/listing/279551816/iphone-case-wood-phone-iphone-6-case-6s?ref=shop_home_active_49 https://www.etsy.com/listing/290780825/flamingo-phone-case-iphone-6-case?ref=shop_home_active_69

“This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”

Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.

By offering me this quiet companionship for a couple of months, day in and day out, Bill helped save my life. Unafraid to accompany me in my suffering, he made me less afraid of myself. He was present — simply and fully present — in the same way one needs to be at the bedside of a dying person.

I leave you with two pieces of advice — a flagrant self-contradiction for which my only defense is Emerson’s dictum that “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” (1) Don’t give advice, unless someone insists. Instead, be fully present, listen deeply, and ask the kind of questions that give the other a chance to express more of his or her own truth, whatever it may be. (2) If you find yourself receiving unwanted advice from someone close to you, smile and ask politely if you can pay a little less this month.

http://www.onbeing.org/blog/parker-palmer-the-gift-of-presence-the-perils-of-advice/8628

I said earlier that pain is this isolating thing, something that feels like it separates you. But it’s also one of the things that you share with every other human on earth. It can be an opening for intimacy, and for connecting with the shared humanity of the people around you. The trick I learned from my mom about empathizing with challenging people, years before I worked at the hotline, was really simple: look for their pain.

https://medium.com/@lil_mermaid/steering-into-it-8a8c2713b564#.3cvzkctwr

http://flavorwire.com/524452/amazons-stunningly-progressive-childrens-shows-are-the-streaming-sites-hidden-gems

http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2016/06/an-ai-wrote-this-movie-and-its-strangely-moving/

all of this

http://revengeofthemaskedscheduler.blogspot.com/2016/05/setting-schedule-pilot-testing.html

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/05/ask-polly-am-i-too-selfish.html

Here’s the thing: Never ask a mob to hold court on your value. That’s what we do, people like you and me. We put ourselves in that position over and over again. We ask strangers to hold court, to judge us. We ask friends to tell us the truth about what’s wrong with us. “Am I bad? Did I fuck up?” We put the question to the universe, because the people we really want to answer our question always have the same answer — YES, THIS MEANS YOU ARE BAD! — and that answer feels wrong to us, no matter how many times we hear it. You’re not a bad person. You’re a kind, ethical person who is confused and upset and tired of being chained and drowned in a shark tank. You need help to get out of this trap. You need a great therapist and good friends who want to talk things out. You probably don’t have any really good friends yet, because you’ve always been afraid to tell people what you need, because you were told that your needs are unacceptable from your first day on earth. You probably don’t know much about being in love, either, because you don’t know how to show your feelings without feeling ashamed and embarrassed by them, because you were told from day one that feelings are shameful and you have no right to feelings anyway. You have been fighting so hard for your right to have feelings, for so many years! I’ll bet you’re exhausted. Listen to me: You don’t have to fight anymore. It’s time to lay your weapons on the ground. You can surrender. You can lie down and say “I am weak. I need love. I need understanding.” The crazy fucking thing is that when you surrender, when you lie down on the ground and refuse to fight, love appears. You can’t half-surrender, though. You can’t say, through gritted teeth, “I need love, Goddamn it!” You have to let go completely. The bravest thing that any human has ever said is this: “I am fragile. I am afraid. I feel sad. I feel broken. I feel ashamed of how broken I am.” Strangely enough, this is how you grow into a towering, formidable force in the world. This is where you begin. You are not bad, and you are not a pushover. You will learn to treat yourself with the care that someone as precious and gentle and good-hearted and sensitive as you deserves. You will learn to protect yourself by faking it with the people who can never tolerate how formidable you are. You will learn to be vulnerable and authentic with the people who know how incredibly courageous that is. You are impossibly strong and impossibly broken. Show up and bite your tongue, or show up and sing, loud and strong and clear. You are powerful, and you get to choose. You don’t have to talk when you don’t feel like explaining yourself. You don’t have to ask permission. You don’t have to debate with anyone. You can simply make the call all by yourself, by trusting your heart. Never apologize for how you feel again. You own those feelings. They are precious. You have waited so patiently and fought so hard for those feelings to finally belong to you. Never let anyone tell you how to feel again.

http://transcripts.foreverdreaming.org/viewtopic.php?f=364&t=19835

female president: Rick, forgive me for doing this in notes. I'm not strong enough to do this in persons. Delivery guy: I realize now that I'm attracted to you for the same reason I can't be with you. You can't change. Beggar: And I have no problem with that, but it clearly means I have a problem with myself. Newspaper vendor: I'm sure there's no perfect version of me. I'm sure I'll just unify species after species and never really be complete. Female president: But I know how it goes with us. I lose who I am and become part of you. Because in a strange way, you're better at what I do without even trying. Yours, and nobody else's, Unity.

happy atlas 1 year

https://foodsaketokyo.com/

http://www.avclub.com/review/finding-dory-loses-some-magic-leaving-big-blue-sea-238176#comment-2730833688

s it about my cube Otakunomike • 7 days ago Yeah, Brave is like a cassette of good music that suddenly fucks up and spits out the tape in a mess. There's a lot of good, but it's messy and you can't really put it back together. igotlickfootagain Grampton St. Rumpterfrabble • 7 days ago 'Brave' does rather have the quality of a video game you're watching someone else play. Archery Level: complete! Now switch characters and play in Bear Mode! http://www.avclub.com/review/finding-dory-loses-some-magic-leaving-big-blue-sea-238176#comment-2731264992 Qualifiersrep Grampton St. Rumpterfrabble • 7 days ago The Good Dinosaur is definitely a flawed movie, but I haven't seen another animated movie able to so accurately depict the feeling of being in nature. It sticks you inside the huge, scary, beautiful diversity of the wilderness, animals just doing whatever they're doing because...they're animals. It's one of the few animated movies which has made me feel like the characters are in actual danger – and also that fighting for one's life is a normal, expected activity in the world of the movie. It's not edgy or dark, it just is. Like nature just is. Not sure if I'm making sense, but the movie struck a chord with me. http://www.avclub.com/review/finding-dory-loses-some-magic-leaving-big-blue-sea-238176#comment-2731509546

http://www.extracrispy.com/culture/226/10-breakfasts-with-men-ive-known

I wonder how dependent falling in love is on witnessing how a new person experiences everyday things and being roused to affection by it. I wonder how dependent staying in love is on witnessing how a familiar person experiences new things and having affection renewed by it.

There is much to say about the man I am in love with and about sharing morning meals with him. But love in the present is something already too big to behold in one heart. I am superstitious about speaking too much or too soon about it, that it might shrivel under the inadequacy of whatever anecdote I use to illustrate it. So I will speak not of a meal but of a culinary demonstration he gave me. Upon learning that I did not know how to fry an egg, he walked me through the process, devoting time to even the most seemingly inconsequential steps. It was precisely these steps that I’ve missed for years in my failed attempts. He asks if I am following along, and I am. We look at each other instead of straight ahead. He still fries the eggs when we’re together but now I can make them on my own when he isn’t around. But I hope that he always is.

first time at vista first time at groundlings first day of summer

http://www.vulture.com/2016/06/constance-wu-c-v-r.html

That's when my work improved because it wasn't results-oriented. It wasn't like, I heard that this director likes crazy characters, so I’m going to try to make it crazy. I was like, What do you, Constance Wu, envision for the character? What is the special thing you can bring even if it keeps you from getting the part? This is your chance to do it. Let's do it. That way when you don't get the part, they have taken nothing away from you because you got to do what you wanted to do. Even if I did play that crazy person, I might still not have gotten the part because I was too short or whatever, and then I’d feel doubly bad because (a) I didn't get the part, and (b) I did something I didn't want to do in the room in order to get the part, trying to appeal to their vanities instead of appealing to my artistic spirit. That's when I started booking work. The catch-22 is you get employment by focusing on the work, not the employment. That's generating meaning: doing what you want to do so they can't take anything away from you.

"The world is changed by examples, not by opinions." -Paulo Coehlo

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley

Sometimes, transposing a real event into fiction is all that’s necessary to convert a news headline to an effective joke. It can also happen the other way around: the writers of “Silicon Valley,” like all the best satirists, occasionally try to stretch the truth and end up anticipating it instead. In the pilot, a sexist programmer invents an app called NipAlert, directing users to the nearest “woman with erect nipples.” “When I read that, I thought, Does that seem real or is it just a silly joke?” Berg said. Between when the pilot was filmed and when it aired, two actual entrepreneurs released Titstare, “an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits.” In a recent episode, Gavin Belson asks his lawyers to invent novel legal strategies that can silence a blogger who has treated him roughly. Again, given the timing, this couldn’t have been a response to the legal actions that the provocative venture capitalist Peter Thiel has taken against Gawker, but it certainly felt like one. In the first season, in the show’s most direct portrayal of a real person, Thiel was lightly fictionalized as Peter Gregory, a smart but socially graceless V.C. “I’m sure he was offended by it, because he’s offended by everything,” Swisher told me. “It’s amazing how thin-skinned some of these people are.” However, Thiel later invited some of the show’s creators to a party he was hosting in L.A., and he treated them politely. “He said he liked the show, which we were surprised to hear,” one of the producers told me. “He was not nearly as awkward in person as we’d been led to believe.” Maybe Thiel actually likes the show. Maybe he wants to prove that he can take a joke, even if he can’t. Maybe, calculating that it would be difficult to sue HBO out of existence, he prefers to hold his enemy close. Or maybe it’s like any other relationship in Silicon Valley: part personal, part business; part genuine, part transactional; part carrot, part stick.

http://explore.org/live-cams/player/walrus-cam-round-island https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/381kp6/why_did_the_writers_just_obliterate_all_the_good/ "rick and morty ticket" http://freaoscanlin.tumblr.com/tagged/fanfiction

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/06/ask-polly-im-having-a-midlife-crisis.html

I am demanding your indulgence this week, talking about myself too much. It’s my birthday, bitches, and you will indulge me. I am showing you how to indulge, Polluted Waters, because this is what you need to relearn at such a bone-deep level that you never lose it again. You don’t have to be the good one, the capable one in the background, or risk being too big, too vain, too spoiled and flighty and wild and petulant. Your kid is old enough now to need a role model in wild petulance. He’s had his generous, solid role model, and now he needs his Mother of Dragons. He needs to see you emerge from this burning building with a calm smile on your face and announce to the world, “The next time you raise a hand to me will be the last time you have hands.” But you also need someone to remind you of how far you’ve come, the way Jorah does for the Mother of Dragons, the way Ilana does for Abbi on Broad City, the way my husband does for me. It’s absolutely true that single mothers do twice the work, but that’s not what would break me about being a single mother. What would break me is not having another voice there to remind me that everything is going to be okay when it feels like the wheels are coming off. So you have to enlist a few trusted friends and feed them their lines when they can’t remember them. You have to be explicit. They have to look you in the eyes and say, “I see how hard you work. I know how much you’ve accomplished so far, just living here, just doing what you do, just raising your boy in this wild place, so far away from home.” Ask them to say it with feeling, while you sit there feeling it. And you will practice looking them right in the eyes as they say it. You will practice saying “Thank you” and feeling that gratitude in your heart. You also have to say it to yourself. You will wake up in the morning and you will say in the mirror, “I see how hard you work. I know how far you’ve come. You can feel proud of yourself, and enjoy this day, because you are strong and brave and generous.” I know that saying these things out loud will feel a little dorky. Dorkiness is emancipation. You can have your flowing white hair and your dragons and you can be imperfect, too. That’s what no one tells you. We’re all supposed to be shiny and perfect on the inside and out. Fuck no, my friends! Be soft and sloppy on the inside. Be sloppy on the outside, too, if you want to, or do what I’m doing lately and shellac the mother-fucking shit out of yourself, because it’s fun and you’re hot and Goddamn it, how many more years are you going to walk around making yourself smaller and smaller and smaller, all for the sake of the threatened, wobbly egos around you? You have made yourself smaller and smaller because secretly, you know how big you are. You hide from everyone because you know that if you actually dared to get on top of that fucking dragon, you might just scare an enormous, unwieldy tribe of Dothraki enough that they’ll bow down in the dirt, on their knees, or shake their fists at the sky to praise you. But don’t ride that dragon just because you want to see your enemies on their knees. Maybe that’ll be a tiny, you know, pleasant side effect of the whole thing. But don’t make that your motivation. Do it because IT JUST FEELS RIGHT. You were born to ride dragons, that’s all. You were born to be wild and fierce and haughty. You can be fragile and be haughty, too. You can be humble and be arrogant. You can grow potatoes and raise your son and also sip a pricey wine with your new bossy, high-maintenance friend. You can live in your mud hut and fly your dragon into the sun. And while you love and take care of and provide for your son, who will love you and take care of you and give you everything you need? You will. You are not becoming one with the sewage. You are not swimming upstream. You are living your fucking life with courage and dignity, you are following your dreams, and now you’re going to really feel that for the first time.

http://brightwalldarkroom.com/issue-36/2016/6/9/the-lonely-city-on-the-empathy-and-isolation-of-cc-baxter-in-the-apartment

Watching The Apartment, I’m reminded of something Sylvia Plath once wrote in her journals: “God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of ‘parties’ with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”

un-f today

http://freaoscanlin.tumblr.com/tagged/fanfiction

http://www.avclub.com/review/charlie-kaufman-works-his-heady-magic-time-puppets-229905#comment-2445208657

Mr. Random • 5 months ago What I kinda liked, and thought was pretty sad, is the ending scene with Lisa. We only see it for a second, but as she finishes her letter, her friend turns to her and smiles. And if you notice, it's not the same face as everyone else's. It's different. What Michael is experiencing is solely of himself. Solely his own experiences and prejudices. It's telling I guess then the final parts of the film are with how he is controlling Lisa so he can hear her voice, and yet his final lament is that he has no one to talk to. He can't talk to anyone because he controls the conversation. He can't look at everyone as individuals because he thinks of everyone as bland and boring and the same. Lisa's voice starts changing when he's reminded of his cab driver. Once he's reminded that Lisa's human.... He starts to view her as just another... Human. Unique and utterly dismissable. Lisa doesn't seem to suffer that. While, self conscious, weak willed, and shy, she seems to be happy. She seems to want to look for the happiness in the MESSED UP situation Michael places her in. She looks for the happiness. She wants to make sure Michael's family is okay. That they feel okay, even if she never saw them. She seems to fully embody all the things that Michael preaches, to look for the individual in the unique mass of humanity. Michael can't. He won't. I think the message isn't that we're all alone. I think it's that if we ever want to be alone. We can be. But if we want to be with people, to truly be a part of the community and see others. We have to want to know others. Not just want to not be alone, but want to know who they are.

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2015/12/anomalisa_review_a_cartoon_for_adults_only.html

Charlie Kaufman tells the newest, oldest stories. New because they begin at the oddest points. Like a secret passage into John Malkovich's brain. Or a memory-erasing machine that can leave you with a spotless mind. Old because in the end, their story is almost always the same story. I met someone once who I knew I could never live without. And then, one day, I found out I'd have to.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/movies/review-anomalisa-pairs-charlie-kaufman-and-lonely-puppets.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

Lisa turns out to be the exception to this manufactured nightmare (she’s the anomaly of the title), and Michael falls hard. “Your voice!” he cries out in wonder, a moment of lyricism that the filmmakers tuck in between unbuttoned clothes and an admirably uncomfortable, honest sex scene. Lisa may seem like a mess — she voluntarily enumerates her supposed failings, like someone who’s memorized other people’s criticisms of her — yet she’s glorious. And Ms. Leigh, who brings Lisa to trembling life with soft mewls of feeling, perfectly timed pauses and a poignant a cappella rendition of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” makes you see how much is at stake both for her and Michael. Whether he can hear her is one heartskippingly moving question; whether he deserves to is another.

http://time.com/4157259/anomalisa-movie-review/

How many love, or nonlove, stories have begun this way? Kaufman (making his first film since his 2008 directorial debut, Synecdoche, NY) and Johnson (whose credits include Adult Swim’s Moral Orel) work hard to make us feel something for this man who’s capable of feeling so little for others, and the idea of using puppets to tell a story about intensely human experiences is inspired, to a point. But then we have to actually look at them: Their skin has a powdery, latexy, semi-translucent glow—they’re more like embryos than actual grown-ups, which is perhaps part of the point. Michael is a shell of a person, struggling to be a person. But he’s also a megalomaniac, a reality the film doesn’t quite cop to: He doesn’t recognize that every other human being is alone in his or her skin too. And once you start reckoning with Anomalisa’s obsession with self-absorption, the novelty of this one-man pity party begins to wear off. A little puppet pain goes a long way.

http://www.laweekly.com/film/charlie-kaufman-has-directed-his-second-masterpiece-6045163

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schwartz palicki wechsler

http://aaww.org/blank-spaces-esme-weijun-wang/

You framed David and Daisy’s relationship, too, with this undercurrent of the body. There are the various spoken languages you use, and there’s also this language of the body. There are scenes where they’re next to each other, and they’re not talking, and that’s something that they understand. I find it really interesting to think about how much of a relationship—any relationship, interracial or not—is dependent on wordlessness. Things that can be conveyed without speaking. This language that we tend to fall back on, talking all the time, wanting to discuss things, process things.

firewatch oddworld heroes of might and magic

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/hillary-clinton-candidacy.html

She is warm, present, engaged, but not sappy. For Clinton, the highest act of emotional respect is perhaps to find something to do, not just something to say. “I’m going to do everything I can,” she tells Wheeler. “Everything I can.”

She had good reason to be scared. By 1999, even without having pursued her own political path, Clinton had learned what it might entail to be a woman who competed: She had taken her husband’s last name after his 1980 reelection defeat in Arkansas had been blamed on her independence; she’d done cookie-bake-off penance for her remarks about prioritizing career over domesticity; everything from her friend Vince Foster’s death to the wandering attentions of her husband had been tied to her purported ruthlessness. When I asked her why she thinks women’s ambition is regarded as dangerous, she posited that it was about “a fear that ambition will crowd out everything else — relationships, marriage, children, family, homemaking, all the other parts [of life] that are important to me and important to most women I know.” She also mentioned the unappealing stereotyping: “We’re so accustomed to think of women’s ambition being made manifest in ways that we don’t approve of, or that we find off-putting.” She also edged toward something uglier, harder to talk about. “I think it’s the competition,” she said. “Like, if you do this, there won’t be room for some of us, and that’s not fair.” I pushed her: Did she mean men’s fears that ambitious women would take up space that used to belong exclusively to them? “One hundred percent,” she said, nodding forcefully. She told a story about the time she and a friend from Wellesley sat for the LSAT at Harvard. “We were in this huge, cavernous room,” she said. “And hundreds of people were taking this test, and there weren’t many women there. This friend and I were waiting for the test to begin, and the young men around us were like, ‘What do you think [you’re] doing? How dare you take a spot from one of us?’ It was just a relentless harangue.” Clinton and her friend were stunned. They’d spent four safe years at a women’s college, where these kinds of gender dynamics didn’t apply. “I remember one young man said, ‘If you get into law school and I don’t, and I have to go to Vietnam and get killed, it’s your fault.’ ” “So yeah,” Clinton continued. “That level of visceral … fear, anxiety, insecurity plays a role” in how America regards ambitious women. The sexism is less virulent now than it was in 2008, she said, but still she encounters people on rope lines who tell her, “ ‘I really admire you, I really like you, I just don’t know if I can vote for a woman to be president.’ I mean, they come to my events and then they say that to me.” But, she maintains, “Unpacking this, understanding it, is for writers like you. I’m just trying to cope with it. Deal with it. Live through it.” Here, Clinton laughed, as if living through it were a hilarious punch line.

Clinton self-identifies as a worker more than as a speechmaker. When I told her during one of our conversations that the comedian Samantha Bee had described her to me as “a working dog; you’ve got to give Hillary a job,” her eyes lit up. “When I got to the Senate, I said I was not a show horse!” she reminded me. It seems the thing Clinton is proudest of in the world.
Years ago, her former speechwriter Lissa Muscatine told me of an argument they often had back when Clinton was First Lady: “I used to tell her, ‘You’re not using the symbolic power of your position,’ ” to which Clinton would reply, “That’s not going to effect systemic change or make a lasting impact.” Muscatine’s counterargument was that “sometimes you effect the change through the symbolic act.”

So you can see why she would be anxious to get out of the primary morass and do direct battle with Trump. “When you get to a two-person race, it’s not you against the almighty and perfection that is hoped for,” says Clinton. “It’s you against somebody else.”

Whether she chooses Warren or not, this is an election that may require Clinton to take some uncharacteristic risks. What the nomination of Trump, the enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, and the nomination of Clinton — who is very clearly running as a successor to Barack Obama — tell us is that this election is a kind of civil war. It’s a referendum on the country’s feelings about inclusion, about women, people of color, and their increasing influence, and how it edges out the white men who have long had an exclusive grip on power.

Ironically, this could give Clinton the thing she has had such a hard time mustering on her own: righteous symbolism. She doesn’t have to talk about herself, she just needs to be herself, in order to make the point that she represents inclusion, equality, progress. In Trump, she finds her foil: America’s repressive past.

On the night of the West Virginia primary, which her campaign knew she would lose to Sanders, Clinton arrived at Louisville Slugger Field in advance of a rally that was scheduled there. It’s rare for Clinton to arrive early anywhere, and she was enjoying a moment to herself in one of the stadium’s luxury boxes, looking out over the beautiful, empty minor-league baseball field, smiling. “I really love baseball,” she said, seemingly to herself.

Watching her, I wondered if it’s possible, after all these years, once she has slipped the bonds of constrained primary combat, that she could emerge as a better and freer performer. In some ways, it seems necessary — not just to win but to govern. After all, the presidency is a public, performative job. She can’t just suffer through the indignity of campaigning and then hole up with her policy papers. It’s not enough to have a plan; you have to sell it to the country, over and over again. Obama proved to be particularly adept at using the media to disseminate his administration’s messages to the audiences it was trying to reach, but he is a masterful orator. Bill Clinton, too. Even George W. Bush was charismatic in his way.

But if, as in this election, a man who spews hate and vulgarity, with no comprehension of how government works, can become presidentially plausible because he is magnetic while a capable, workaholic woman who knows policy inside and out struggles because she is not magnetic, perhaps we should reevaluate magnetism’s importance. It’s worth asking to what degree charisma, as we have defined it, is a masculine trait. Can a woman appeal to the country in the same way we are used to men doing it? Though those on both the right and the left moan about “woman cards,” it would be impossible, and dishonest, to not recognize gender as a central, defining, complicated, and often invisible force in this election. It is one of the factors that shaped Hillary Clinton, and it is one of the factors that shapes how we respond to her. Whatever your feelings about Clinton herself, this election raises important questions about how we define leadership in this country, how we feel about women who try to claim it, flawed though they may be. Can we broaden our idea of presidential charisma beyond great men giving great speeches? Ed Rendell, former governor of Pennsylvania, made the case to me that Clinton should try to design the job — as much as she can, anyway — around her.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-this-week-lesley-nneka-arimah-2015-10-26 https://catapult.co/stories/five-questions-for-lesley-nneka-arimah

lost me at snowden, but...

https://theringer.com/joe-buck-nfl-mlb-troy-aikman-announcer-f9657c5674f9

What’s left is a guy who knows he’ll never please everybody, but whose internal network censor is nonetheless turned up to 11, scouring even basic social interactions for possible offense. When Buck listens to Beisner and his daughters talk, the censor often switches on and says, I know what you meant by saying that, but that person you’re talking to right now doesn’t know what you really meant by that. “I get real judgey that way,” Buck said. The women mostly laugh it off.

http://www.kongregate.com/

http://www.vulture.com/2016/04/jane-the-virgin-kill-michael.html

Tonight I realized it’s simple: With you, you make me feel safe in the best way. My mom kept telling me to lose control, but I couldn’t until you got here. Because I know you’re watching over me. Instead of me always having to watch over everyone else. So tonight is not my last night of freedom. It’s my first night of freedom.

http://www.wired.com/2016/05/justin-lin-star-trek-beyond

In preproduction, Lin was constructing sets—and worlds—where something would happen, while Pegg and another writer, Doug Jung, were simultaneously working on the script. For his part, Lin says he’s learned to tune in to all that buzzer-beating pressure, so that stressful urgency bleeds into the film itself. “I always end up in these volatile situations,” he says quietly. “It’s funny. They say people with lower heart rates tend to be criminals—that’s how they get that jolt of adrenaline. The joke is that my heart rate is really low, and this”—he gestures at the frenzy of the office—“is how I stay alive.”