FtttG
User ID: 1175
I went for a run on Sunday to break in my new runners. I was hoping to do 5k, but I'd barely made it 400 metres when I tripped coming off the footpath and fell over. In the past whenever I've tripped while on a run, I've just gotten back up and kept going, but this time felt different. After getting to my feet and hobbling across the road, for a moment I actually thought I was going to burst into tears from the pain.
I managed to limp home and laid down on the couch for a bit. By the evening my foot and ankle had swelled up like a balloon and I was limping heavily. I tried to keep it elevated when I went to bed, and didn't get much sleep. On Monday morning I was genuinely considered going to the hospital, as I wasn't sure if it was a sprain or a fracture. Fortunately I had a compression sleeve to put on it, and by Monday afternoon the pain had mostly subsided and I could put weight on it. Three days later the swelling is starting to go down, it barely hurts at all and I'm walking normally - but large parts of my foot are covered in dark purple bruises. It's sort of fascinating to look at, actually. I had no idea a sprain could look so dramatic.
FtttG
2d ago
The other scandal.
FtttG
3d ago
I'm now coining FtttG's Law: the longer an online organisation goes on, the probability of it becoming embroiled in a child grooming scandal approaches 1.
FtttG
3d ago
If a Scotsman finds out you knowingly transmitted human immuno-deficiency virus to them, they're sure to SHIV you.
On Friday I printed the second draft of my NaNoWriMo project for the missus to read. She's about halfway through it, and so far the feedback has been guardedly positive. She's consistently said that it is neither boring nor cringe (my primary and secondary worries about it, respectively) and that the prose is, for the most part, very readable.
Spiked has a lengthy write-up about the Zizians, whose intended readership is normies who've never heard of rationalism, Eliezer and so on. I'm glad that people are still talking about this story, I think it deserved to be a bigger deal than it largely was.
You're dead right. In Ireland and the UK, there's something of a tradition of watching Love, Actually every Christmas, a movie I loathe. My girlfriend was curious so we went to see it in the cinema. On Christmas Day we ended up watching Bridget Jones's Diary (written by Richard Curtis, who wrote and directed Love, Actually), and even though I'm not a romcom dude, it was head and shoulders above Love, Actually. It's legitimately funny, and there's actual chemistry between the three leads.
FtttG
7d ago
You ever tried to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time?
I'm doing it right now, and I am killing it. Skill issue. /s
FtttG
7d ago
Yes, that's why the OP was right to say that it's grammatically (or syntactically, or whatever) incorrect.
FtttG
7d ago
This sounds perfectly natural to me.
"Xing his Y, he Zed" is meant to describe two concurrent actions. "Tossing her hair over her shoulder, she pressed send on the email."
FtttG
7d ago
Awhile back I asked for some kind of gaming platform aggregator: a program that pulls all the games you own on Steam, GOG, Epic etc. in one place, so that you don't e.g accidentally buy a game on Steam that you forgot you already bought on GOG.
Playnite was exactly what I was looking for, it's easy to use, does exacty what it says on the tin, and it's free.
That's not all that big of a gap.
No, it isn't. If he hadn't bothered to get any Botox or cosmetic surgery, I think he would have been entirely believable as a 37-year-old: even if he looked a little older, it might have made sense given that his character works unsociable hours, shares a crummy apartment with two of his mates and has a bad diet. But Evans is obviously sufficiently vain and/or concerned about his career prospects that he felt medical interventions were necessary, so we're stuck with this flat, impassive uncanny valley appearance.
I wonder how much control a director (vs the studio) has over this kind of thing (that is, the casting of the main actors).
I would be surprised if any of the three leads were Song's first choices for their respective roles.
On Wednesday evening I went to see Celine Song's new film Materialists, her follow-up to 2023's critically acclaimed and Best Picture-nominated Past Lives, which I adored. The film concerns Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson), a successful New York-based matchmaker who mostly caters to clients in their thirties and forties. While attending one of her client's weddings, she gets to talking to Harry (played by the omnipresent Pedro Pascal; seriously, he starred in like 1/3 of the movies being screened in that cinema that day), the wealthy brother of the groom whom she attempts to recruit as a client (but he has other ideas). She also runs into John (Chris Evans), an ex-boyfriend and aspiring actor she dumped years prior, and yet who visibly still holds a candle for her.
Right off the bat, let's manage expectations: it's not much like Past Lives, and it's nowhere near as good, but it's still worth a watch.
Past Lives was an intimate, semi-autobiographical character drama about romantic love and Song's own experiences as a Korean immigrant to the West. Here, Song attempts (not entirely successfully) to wed two wholly unlike genres. On the one hand, it's a cold, glassy-eyed and cynical dissection of the economics of modern dating and marriage, in which women marry purely to spite their younger sisters; in which successful career women in their thirties are passed over by their male peers in favour of gorgeous dullards fifteen or twenty years their junior (about whom they have the audacity to complain that they're "immature"); in which Lucy's prospective clients present her with laundry lists of traits their partner must have (no men under 5'11", no women with BMIs over 20). On the other hand, it's a conventional romantic fantasy, in which the female lead has to choose between a wealthy finance bro who's safe but makes her feel nothing, and a starving artist who sends her heart all a-flutter. (No prizes for guessing how she picks.) At times, the dialogue is just as intimate and piercing as anything in Past Lives; at other times, you feel like the characters are reading out choice quotes from /r/femaledatingstrategy. If you've spent enough time in redpill and PUA circles, some of the talking points are sure to inspire a shock of recognition: it's practically a femcel manifesto in cinematic form.
Sadly, Johnson and Evans have very little chemistry with one another. Part of this might just be because of the usual reasons actors don't have chemistry with one another, but I suspect a major contributing factor might be Evans himself. At the time of filming he was a 43-year-old playing a 37-year-old character: looking at his face, I got the distinct impression that he's undergone a lot of Botox and/or cosmetic surgery to maintain a youthful appearance. (No need to do this in his most famous role, for which he mostly wore a mask.) He hasn't gone full Bogdanoff by any means, but whatever procedures he has undergone make it very difficult for him to emote: his skin is simply stretched too tautly across his skull. It was hard for me to believe his character is going through the emotional torpor the screenplay wants me to believe he is when nothing below his cheekbones is conveying this. The fact that men undergoing painful and expensive cosmetic procedures to improve their status in the dating and jobs market is actually a plot point in the film makes me wonder if Evans's casting was intended as some kind of meta-joke.* Johnson's character admits to having had work done on her nose and breasts: I'm dying to know if this is also true of Johnson herself. Nose, perhaps; breasts, probably not.
Johnson and Pascal do have some chemistry with one another, but as my girlfriend pointed out, it's the chemistry you expect between a girl and her gay best friend, or perhaps a girl and her cool uncle. It was hard for me to believe they were romantically interested in one another, even if it's implied that Pascal's character is significantly older than Johnson's (although probably not quite as much as their IRL age gap of ~15 years).
A little funnier than Past Lives, but ultimately it didn't move me nearly as much, even though it was obviously meant to. While watching Past Lives I felt like I was watching real people going about their lives and having genuine conversations, a feeling I never got from Materialists, and I don't think that's just because of the increased star power Song has to work with: a lot of the aforementioned femcel dialogue felt extremely artificial and essayistic. Perhaps the most affecting part of the whole movie is when one of Lucy's clients has been sexually assaulted by a man Lucy set her up on a date with: she angrily throws Lucy's words in her face and tearily insists that she is deserving of love, no matter how much Lucy might urge her to keep her goals realistic. It was a heart-rending scene that has me tearing up a little just thinking about it now. Shame the romantic A-story couldn't inspire anything resembling that kind of raw emotion.
Another data point added to the viewing public's efforts to psychoanalyse Song and her presumably peculiar relationship with her husband, Justin Kuritzkes. Given that both Song's first movie and Kuritzkes's first screenplay (Challengers, directed by Luca Guadagnino) concerned love triangles between a woman and two men, these jokes have been ongoing for some time. Personally, I interpreted Materialists's romantic plot as a spirited defense of Song's decision to marry a sensitive, artsy boy, rather than a wealthy finance bro as her mother presumably wanted her to. At least she had the forethought to marry a successful artsy boy, instead of a loser like John.
*At one point, Lucy and Harry attend a play in which John is starring. A poster for said play mentions that it was written by Celine Song.
FtttG
9d ago
Considering it's Ellis, I wasn't sure if that mattered.
On reflection, probably not.
I cannot recommend The Secret History highly enough, incidentally.
Coming close to a completed second draft of my NaNoWriMo project, which now sits just over 111k words (17% shorter than the first draft, which was 133k). I'm planning to print a hard copy on Friday for the missus to read.
FtttG
10d ago
Yes, but in this particular gay bar the condoms and lube are given away for free in common areas, as opposed to being available for sale in the toilets.
FtttG
10d ago
It's true. Most straight men's fantasies reside only in their heads, and there they shall remain.
FtttG
10d ago
Wow, so "gooning" is like synonymous with "edging"? In that case I'm not sure if I've ever "gooned".
FtttG
11d ago
In irl seggs is good and all but with the latest gooning technology I would argue that hardcore gooning actually gives more seggsual stimulation than the real thing.
Hard disagree. Sex has to be really bad before I would prefer to just crank my hog.
Also, why are you using algospeak? We're all friends here.
The power to find Indian women attractive?
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