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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   589 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 15, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I saw Jurassic World Rebirth in theaters a few weeks back, but didn't get around to writing a review, and honestly, don't think it deserves an exhaustive analysis. But it was okay! There were dinosaurs, in a dinosaur movie, and that is intrinsically appealing. It also raises pointed questions about how Dominion was so bad that I left it in a DNF state.

In favor:

  • The movie is an intentional throwback to the first trilogy, in terms of setting, pacing and cinematography. It's more more restrained, the pacing more deliberate. There is a tangible sense of place, a welcome departure from the green-screen-heavy aesthetic of the World trilogy, which only reminds me (negatively) of Marvel slop.

  • The characters, sometimes, act self-aware.

  • There are dinosaurs. Most of them act like wild carnivores as opposed to horror movie villains.

Against:

  • The characters just as often turn off their brain when convenient for the plot.

  • The onus for being there, namely to create a super anti-clotting drug and the precise means of doing so, are not very plausible. They need three samples from 3 different types of large dinosaur to "cure heart disease", and there is literally a wild Apatosaur in the first scene of the movie, in New Fucking York, why didn't they just sample that??

  • Do not look too hard for plot holes, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. To pick on them makes me feel bad, like challenging a child with Downs syndrome to a debate.

  • In continued Hollywood tradition, the trailer spoils about 90% of the tense scenes in the movie.

  • Children = invincible.

??

  • They soft retconned the entire point of the last two movies. Dinosaurs got loose and spread throughout terrestrial ecosystems, being somewhere between invasive and endemic. Photos of Triceratops herds migrating through Wyoming, Pteranodons nesting on skyscrapers, the works. And then they just... died off. No, seriously, dinosaurs - which colonized everything from the Arctic to the Antarctic - just couldn't handle conditions outside the modern equator. Thanks, global warming?

??? What. It would have been better to just reframe this as an alternate universe take or properly retcon things.

Overall, a 7/10. A good way to please the child in you that still fondly remembers making their plastic Rex fight and win against Army men. The British are an enlightened people, so I enjoyed it with multiple beers in the movie hall, and didn't miss anything of note during the necessary piss breaks.

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.

A few things which irritate me about the LitRPG genre and web fiction in general. You may picture me as comic book guy for purposes of this rant.

  1. Switching tense within sentences. This is rampant and incredibly-obnoxious once one notices. "Hefting his mace, he swung at her as hard as he could." I don't know how this got to be such an entrenched institution but to me it occurs as about on par with having "Like" at the start of every sentence. Is the book still readable? Yes. Does my eye twitch a little every single time? Also yes.
  2. "Whelp I don't immediately understand what's going on so let's just not talk about it at all; let's not even try to figure it out until later in the plot." No use thinking about it now!
  3. Reflexive denigration of 'religion' even in contexts where this is obviously and absurdly inappropriate. "Oh are there literal gods walking the world, enacting their wills and communicating with humans? Well I want nothing to do with that because religion is dumb and stupid and icky and only for low-status people."
  4. "No don't bow to me or call me 'sir'; I don't go in for things like that." This one is everywhere and I find it especially puerile. Hierarchy is crucial in human organizations and we developed the systems we did for a reason. Particularly outside the modern context, public displays of respect and deference are both necessary and for the good of all. People need structure and boundaries to function. Refusing to take on the mantle and respect of authority, if that is your calling, does not serve anyone. It just confuses and scares them.
  5. Related to the above, modern progressive attitudes everywhere. Of course men and women are exactly the same. Of course everyone is having casual, consequence-free sex. Of course anyone who finds meaning in faith is secretly cynically corrupt or else a psycho child molester.

I could go on but I feel better getting at least this much off my chest.

"No don't bow to me or call me 'sir'; I don't go in for things like that." This one is everywhere and I find it especially puerile.

Well, to contrast #3 with #4, you and I both believe in a religion in which the creator of the universe called humanity his bretheren and his friends, and humiliated himself because he loved them.

It's true that hierarchy is functional, and serves an important purpose in human social organization, but even in a traditional mindset there have long been strong disputes over the relative importance of hierarchy and egalitarianism. We both live in the societies that we do because our ancestors rebelled against strict hierarchicalism. "We developed the systems we did for a reason" is very true, and a huge part of the system we've developed includes the egalitarian handshake instead of the deferring bow.

I presume the point of the "don't bow to me or call me sir" elements you're quoting is that the character is some kind of a prince, or aristocrat -- someone who inherited noble dignity, instead of attaining practical power as a result of earned leadership. The "don't bow to me or call me sir" is an easy statement of opposition to that kind of hierarchy, which makes the authors of such texts completely in tune with the views of average Americans (who are likely a majority of LitRPG authors), and was very nearly added to the American constitution in an amendment I would support passing even today.

I happen to think one of the strengths that drove the West to the levels of power and wealth that it has attained simply is that it adopted values, including the Christian religion, that militated against the worst excesses of hierarchical thinking. A common feature of airplane crashes that involve non-Western pilots is that a captain will make a critical error, the first officer will mentally understand that something has gone wrong, but strict norms of hierarchy will make him nervous to challenge the captain in command, and then hundreds of people die.

Additionally, setting aside the need to be referred to in formulaic ways of deference is actually a status signal: "My status is so firm that I do not need you to make displays of public worship."

On mobile so I can't pull up a long list of recommendations. But the politics issue doesn't happen in all parts of the genre. Or at least not all web fiction.

My biggest personal grip with litrpg is when the story reads like a D&D campaign converted into a novel. The fights feel like a string of meaningless encounters. The MC bumbles their way into saving the world. The setting is nothing but a contrived excuse to bully the MC when he is young.

My biggest personal grip with litrpg is when the story reads like a D&D campaign converted into a novel. The fights feel like a string of meaningless encounters.

This was the big problem with Worth the Candle for me. It felt like the author had a list of a hundred 'super cool D&D adventures' that he wanted to fit in, and just slotted them one after another, with only the barest excuse for why they were happening. I grant that this is somewhat justified by the setting, but it doesn't make it good writing.

See I found that good. Actually I'm not sure why it would be upsetting to you. Oh no! Too many cool ideas!

I see plenty of merit in points 2 through 5, but as has already been noted I think you at least chose a weak example on point 1.

Yeah I'm open to that and also didn't expend any real effort here. You know what I mean. The point is made. Yes I could be happier with it. It's difficult for me to be ugly, even on purpose. Take no joy in the awful stuff and would sooner screen it out than collect and revel in it. Else I'd be on /r/drama.

How about first-person present tense books?

While there's often an unfortunate association there, I don't think that the problem is so much inherent to the grammatical qualities of the perspective as it is the thoughtlessness the author employs in selecting any perspective at all. This is closely related to the oft-commented-upon "books as wannabe movies" problem.

Regarding 3/4/5, there has to be a name for this trope. No matter how alien or unusual the scifi or fantasy setting, somehow the main character is a Perfectly Modern Progressive with all the Correct Opinions on race/sex/religion/whatever, all the good guys share those opinions, and all the bad guys oppose them. It's not quite A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court but along those lines.

Present-mindedness. It’s annoying. It’s like we cannot wrap our heads around the idea that people exist or even could exist that think in ways that we disagree with. I like the Mist Crown series by Sarah Maas, but its so annoying to read a medieval peasant acting like a modern, feminist, atheistic modern American as though the author literally couldn’t conceive of a premodern woman in a premodern world.

I like the Mist Crown series by Sarah Maas, but its so annoying to read a medieval peasant acting like a modern, feminist, atheistic modern American as though the author literally couldn’t conceive of a premodern woman in a premodern world.

She can't!

It’s like we cannot wrap our heads around the idea that people exist or even could exist that think in ways that we disagree with.

Values are fundamental. To a first approximation, no one actually wants values diversity, whether in their fiction or anywhere else. Good things are good, bad things are bad, more bad things are not good.

People like reading about things far away in time or distance because they crave novelty, but they want some recognizable values-coherence to bridge the gap because novelty is not terminal, but values are. Victorians write poems about Brave Horatius at the gate and I enjoy the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Pentateuch for the same reason: because all these deliver a perception of values-consonance across vast gulfs of time and space; we have our cake and eat it too.

The elements you highlight are there because the people generating them consider them terminal, and so their fiction cannot do without them.

To a first approximation, no one actually wants values diversity, whether in their fiction or anywhere else.

Challenge accepted. ("No one could ever want X". Well then, it is the philosopher's duty to want X. No generalization can be allowed to stand without an exception.)

I agree that value diversity within a given concrete mode of life is hard to consciously wish for in a direct sense (unless you're a certain unique type of individual at any rate). But certainly if we zoom out and consider a patchwork of distinct modes of life, there is no issue. I don't agree with how Islamic societies treat their women, but in an abstract sense, I'm happy that Muslims are able to continue on with their cherished values all the same. (Selfishly, it provides a further object of contemplation for me.) And fiction is an ideal medium for exploring such alternative modes of life.

I don’t value that personally because it’s not authentic to the period or setting. It’s like having a character in 1500s France Google something. To me it’s jarring because people living in premodern times absolutely do not see the world like modern Californians.

Most of these don't seem specific to LitRPGs?

1 is just a low verbal IQ thing, which you see all the time in web fiction because it is not filtered and edited the way commercial fiction is; you are reading straight from the slush pile.

2 is something you regularly see in all fiction, including mainstream blockbusters and prime time dramas; if you want something that depicts intelligent and competent characters instead of taking cheap writing shortcuts, you need to specifically filter for rational fiction or similar (e.g. hard science fiction).

3 is a blue tribe shibboleth, which you also see all the time in commercial fiction. If anything, web fiction is more likely to depict genuine respect for religion, because it is less gatekept.

4 and 5 is just projecting modern values into past settings, which, again, happens all the fucking time in commercial fiction. As Eliezer Yudkowsky put it:

Movies that were made in say the 40s or 50s, seem much more alien—to me—than modern movies allegedly set hundreds of years in the future, or in different universes. Watch a movie from 1950 and you may see a man slapping a woman. Doesn’t happen a lot in Lord of the Rings, does it?

Refusing to take on the mantle and respect of authority, if that is your calling, does not serve anyone. It just confuses and scares them.

This reminds me of a plot point in the Wheel of Time series. At one point Perrin is back at his hometown which is being attacked by monsters, and people there look to him for leadership (which he consistently refuses, because he doesn't feel like he has the right to command them). It is only when one of the other characters gives him a speech to the effect of what you said, that he realizes he needs to step up and be a leader to those people in a trying time.

LitRPG is the literary equivalent to a three-day-old, half-eaten Arby's sandwich.

And yet.
(in this metaphor, what's Xianxai? Gas station sushi?)

"Hefting his mace, he swung at her as hard as he could."

This sounds perfectly natural to me.

Agreed on all the political points though.

It's an appositive a participial phrase and isn't wrong in any way. I suspect OP could have chosen a better example.

Edit: The issue is with the hefting I suppose. Probably wielding would be better.

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."

But hefting a weapon and swinging the same weapon are consecutive, not concurrent—in GURPS terms, a Ready action and then an Attack action.

Yes, that's why the OP was right to say that it's grammatically (or syntactically, or whatever) incorrect.

Semantically incorrect; as in your example, the grammar (including syntax) are fine.

But I'd say that it's semantically fine too so long as the swinging motion is also a hefting motion. Uppercut? The sentence is correct. Horizontal? Defensible, since the attacker was exerting vertical force to keep the mace moving horizontally, but the intended implication should be "wow this mace was heavy" or at least "the attacker had to transition from raising the mace to attacking with it in a single motion" rather than "the mace had to be lifted before the swing began". Overhead bash? Incorrect, since the lifting motion for that ends before the aimed ("at her") part of the swing begins.

But regardless, if this is the worst prose that @TitaniumButterfly sees in his web fiction, I want to know what he's reading! I've enjoyed several web serials, but it's usually been much clearer that any editorial feedback did not come from professionals with English degrees, and you either make peace with that or you don't.

But who even tosses their hair over their shoulder and hits Send at the exact same time? Most people don't have the coordination for that. You ever tried to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time? It's that sort of thing.

She's obviously going to toss her hair first, and then hit Send a moment later.

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

This sounds perfectly natural to me.

I think the complaint is that he actually hefted his mace before swinging (not while swinging, which is impossible), so it should be "He hefted his mace and swung at her".

"He hefted his mace and swung at her"

Yeah but that just sounds worse to me. No accounting for taste I suppose.

I would say that the heft is part of the swing. You lift and make a motion towards your target, but I would not say that the swing starts only once the weapon is at the correct height.

I'm curious how easy this riddle I recently found myself spending days to solve would be for professional software developers.

A fictionalized description of the situation: I'm in charge of a cadre of robots, whose working shift is from 6 am to 5.50 am next day. Every time they assemble a batch of Dyson swarm units, a database entry with the size of the newly born batch is created, amounting to hundreds of rows per robot per shift. To report on the process, by midday I need to submit a table on the previous shift numbers, but unfortunately my interface only supports exporting data from 00:00 to 23:59 of a given day. Nobody pays much attention to the shift tail end's results, because even robots slack after midnight, but the results for the previous day, which actually matter, are seriously truncated after downloading, let's say 20% of the expected amount of data. After random messing with filters in the interface, turning something off, maybe turning it on again, I am able to download something looking like the full data set.

I reverse engineer the REST API of the web interface, and try to replicate that random tinkering in a script. For example, exclude those robots assigned to assemble catgirl bots instead of Dyson bots, or do two downloads, of the robots painted red seperately of the robots painted blue, or some other even more convoluted approaches. Each approach works exactly once, as if there is somebody on the other side of the API, blocking every approach he encounters.

What was (apparently) happening and how did I (hopefully) prevail?

Those idiots cache the result of any particular query, even if the day for which the query was made was not finished yet. And because I applied each countermeasure both to the important data of the previous day, and to the rump of the shift that falls on the current day, the next day all those "countermeasured" queries were already cached too. I had to resort to ludicrous random.shuffle() in the function which assembles a query.

GPT-5 Thinking one shot this. The free Claude Sonnet didn't.

https://chatgpt.com/share/689f7c89-c6c0-800b-89c5-ba2988419f6c

Two hard problems in computer science...

So they never invalidate their cache? Gross.

I was passed by a Sherwin-Williams truck earlier today and noted something unusual that had escaped my notice surely dozens of times before.

Their slogan is “Cover the Earth” and it is accompanied by a graphic depicting paint pouring out of a bucket over a globe.

Is there any other company anyone is aware of that is quite so up front about their corporate commitment to instantiating apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenarios? I’m choosing to call the Sherwin-Williams situation an ecru-goo doomsday.

BP "beyond petroleum" Their logo of a sun exploding or expanding, which would be the end of the earth, and also the end of petroleum extraction on the planet.

Luckily it didn't escape everyone's notice: https://theonion.com/sherwin-williams-triumphantly-reports-nearly-half-the-p-1819566493/

I stood @ToaKraka up the other week on Victoria 3 mods.

While I don't have as many as him, this is what I've been playing with:

  1. Regional HQs are a shitty game mechanic. They absolutely hijack your investment pool, and they're a pain in the ass to remove (made better in 1.9.8) and impossible to remove from Vassals or if they have investments in a third party country. They're also poor game design as they are a "click this button every time if it's available" option, which isn't good game design (good game design is all about making interesting choices).

Thus, I changed AI weights so they never pick them, and I never pick them.

  1. late game performance is awful, because of pop fragmentation. I increased the defines for both assimilation and pop consolidation by a factor of 10x. I think a lot of the background stuff is hard-coded because it really didn't seem to do much. I have a late game save right now that's basically unplayable now (I also fucked up and conquered too much of the world, so multithread performance dropped), so I'm going to try 1000x and see if that helps, I don't think it will.

I did notice that my assimilation did increase dramatically for a while when I had a +25% assimilation buff, so I will test that out eventually (more on this later).

  1. infamy calculation is fucking stupid as it's based off population and not GDP (african states are so expensive it's so stupid). It also scales incredibly poorly in late game. My attempts to rebalance thus far have gone poorly, I can get it to a good place in early game or a good place in late game, but there isn't a good unified set of defines for both I've found yet. I think I could probably add more infamy reduction to later game tech, but my willingness to spend my free time balancing a paradox game for free was low.

  2. clicking "build power plant" a million times makes me want to kill myself. I modded power plants to have 4x output and 4x input. This makes them somewhat overpowered, I don't care, I now click 4x less.

  3. I increased the amount devastation recovers per state. The war goal system is AWFUL which causes AIs to get locked into wars no one can end for a while, which means if one is occupied that whole time it gets inadvertently genocided (population loss has 0 effect on war exhaustion, lmao, and it wouldn't matter if it did, LMAO). Making devastation recover faster mildly helps with this. I think they just fixed this somewhat in 1.9.8, but frankly the AI needs all the buffs it can get in this game.

  4. I changed the law enactment time from 180 days to 50 days. I think this may make the game easier? Although now movements/revolutions are still mad after the law they hate is passed, so I think it's okay. The law passing mechanism is fucking atrocious, and could easily waste YEARS of times bouncing around with "+10%"..."-10%"... etc. This makes it snappy. The challenge of passing a law is maneuvering your political structure into place so it's passable at all. Once you can pass it, it's just a matter of how many de-buffs you take along the way. I'd prefer to pay the cost and move on, not watch a random number generator slowly tick.

Side note, but the paradox communities' acceptance of "save scumming" as an acceptable part of the game, but console commands as "cheating" absolutely sends me. It's literally the same thing, except one is a horrible use of your time. I once (only once) spent 30-45 minutes micro-ing and reloading to pass a very low % law. It was probably the worst use of 30-45 minutes of my free time. I don't understand why people do this in a single player game.

Something I would like to do, is get better at event modding. I want to set up some AI only global events that would trigger in ~early mid game to kick the AI all off traditionalism/serfdom as those laws are crippling and AI sucks at government management.

I also am considering setting up a global event for like +50% assimilation as that seemed to be much more effective than my define tweaks.

I also would like to make a mod that gives the AI +10 goods production of every good in their capital. I think it'll help them bootstrap supply/demand cycles for new goods. I'm not sure how they're doing at electricity production, etc

Finally, I don't know if I can, but I really want to 1) make the AI better at upgrading units as it current SUCKS at doing this and 2) make the AI stop making 30 individual armies, as that provides 0 tactical benefits to the AI, and makes the game noticeably laggier.

EDIT: ONE MORE

migration in this game is in an AWFUL state right now. If you get a Chinese or Indian country in your market, they flood your country at absurd rates (although I do plan to do an India run where I take Canada/Australia and fill em up, for historical accuracy purposes lol).

And mass migrations are basically "human only" because you GDP/capita and SoL maxxxxx and then absorb like 80% of the mass migrations regardless of you're Brazil or Vietnam, which is so fucking stupid.

I need to figure out how to give the new world a massive buff to mass migration attraction.

Side note, but the paradox communities' acceptance of "save scumming" as an acceptable part of the game, but console commands as "cheating" absolutely sends me.

Depths of stupidity on brand for Paradox paypigs. Console permits you to tailor the experience to your liking, resolve balance issues, and save AI from itself mechanically, tactically and strategically. Imagine not using it.

Also, for anyone considering Vic 3

The game has improved significantly with 1.9, but still has some glaring issues. I think by 1.11 it'll be an un-ironically good game.

I recommend buying vanilla on sale, as access to Steam workshop is MANDATORY (seriously, mods make this game so much better). It's incredibly easy to CreamAPI the DLC for free once you own the base game.

You can also make do with manual mod management on non-steam game installation, just need that workshop/forums access. Good enough if it's just one or two big mods you want to run, a bit of a pain otherwise, of course.

But looking into it now, apparently CreamAPI account risk is negligible. Huh.

I have like 40 steam mods (happy to share list if anyone cares) so vic3 was an easy $50. I've also never paid for a Paradox game and put an ungodly amount of hours into Eu4/Vic2/Stellaris (less for this one) so it felt fair lol. Still never paying for DLC tho.

CreamAPI account risk is negligible. Huh.

I do worry about this, it seems like it would be easy for Steam to book and aligned with their incentives to do it (they profit from DLC being sold) but they don't seem to care and I love farming free DLC so it's a risk I'll take.

Plus my stream library is pretty small, I'd have made a burner if I paid for more games.

Legit, you see people on the forums suffering through issues that they could solve in 10 seconds with a debug_mode mod and "~"

Victoria 3 might actually be the worst for this too. I find myself constantly needing to tag over to other countries to fix whatever insane and dumb shit they (since 1.9, 90% of the time its France) get themselves into.

Also the WORST border gore, oh god the border gore.

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.

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).

It's been a while since I saw it but that one I thought was deliberate.

The revelation about his character casts their entire relationship in a different light.

Pascal's character didn't approach her because of chemistry, but for validation.

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.

... That's not all that big of a gap. The average person would probably have difficult reliably telling those ages apart, and especially so when looking at Hollywood actors who presumably take good care of themselves. A 43yo playing a 27yo, or 53yo playing 40yo, would start to be more obvious.

Also, I had to look up who he is, because apparently Chris Evans, Chris Pine, and Chris Hemsworth are all different people but my brain had combined them.

Sadly, Johnson and Evans have very little chemistry with one another.

I wonder how much control a director (vs the studio) has over this kind of thing (that is, the casting of the main actors). A movie about romantic love with two leads with no chemistry is quite the miss.

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.

I wonder how much of the lack of chemistry is driven by the simple fact that Johnson and Evans are not good actors. Perhaps Song thought she could get something interesting out of them once they were taken away from comicbook crap?

I don't know if Chris Evans is a bad actor so much as out of practice. His post MCU run isn't exactly a Pattinson/Radcliffe-style rush to stretch himself.

This is the first real movie I've seen him in since like Knives Out (which he was fine in). The rest has been streaming slop like Ghosted and Gray Man that might as well be AI generated and he could probably do in his sleep.

Series of court opinions:

  • A wife gives birth to a child. However, around the time of the child's conception, the wife was intimate not only with her husband but also with a paramour, so the child's paternity is uncertain. When informed of the pregnancy, the paramour at first disclaims interest in it, but a week later changes his mind. Shortly after the child is born, the paramour files a lawsuit to compel genetic testing and establish paternity. The husband testifies that, regardless of any DNA test's result, he will continue to love and care for the child.

  • The trial judge rejects the paramour's request. (1) State caselaw incorporates an irrebuttable presumption of legitimacy: If paternity is uncertain, but around the time of conception the mother was in an intact marriage with a husband who was not absent, impotent, or sterile, then the husband is automatically considered the father, and this determination cannot be changed even with a DNA test. (2) State caselaw incorporates paternity by estoppel: After the paramour disclaimed interest in the child, the child and the husband were entitled to rely on that declaration, and the paramour was not permitted to change his mind and "pull the carpet out from under" the developing relationship between the child and the husband. The appeals panel affirms, solely on the first basis since it is dispositive.

  • The state supreme court vacates and remands. The irrebuttability of the presumption of legitimacy is an outdated relic of the days before in vitro fertilization, minimally-invasive (cheek-swab rather than blood-vial) DNA testing, and nondiscrimination against illegitimate children. The presumption of legitimacy now can be rebutted with a DNA test if (1) there is a reasonable possibility that DNA testing will reveal the paramour to be the father and (2) DNA testing serves the best interest of the child. (The doctrine of paternity by estoppel is left unchanged. On remand, it may serve as an alternative basis to affirm the trial judge's ruling.)

  • Two of the state supreme court's seven justices dissent in part. They think that the presumption of legitimacy already has been eliminated by the legislature, and therefore courts should be empowered to order DNA testing without a pointless multifactor test. One of the dissenters would go even further:

    I cannot cling to the notion that it is the public policy of this Commonwealth that children’s interests are necessarily served by "the stability of an intact family unit" led by married parents. I would emphasize that families regularly flourish under non-traditional configurations and that families regularly falter under traditional ones. Nowhere is it assured that a stable family unit, defined as one involving a married couple, will remain as such for any prescribed period of time let alone the entirety of a childhood. Ultimately, it is the legislative prerogative to identify and implement the Commonwealth’s policy preference, especially in an arena as sensitive as marriage and child-rearing. The Legislature provided for no fault divorce, making severance of marriages relatively easy; it endorsed scientific testing to determine paternity allowing for the potential involvement of a third party in a married couple’s family unit. As to the preferred structure of the family unit, the clearest statement of the Legislature is that in all cases, the best interests of the child must prevail in custody matters. Given the co-existence of the statutes that recognize expedient termination of marriages, the recognition of a third party’s genetic paternity to a child born to a married couple and the dominance of the child’s best interests in custody matters, I am hard pressed to find a legislative declaration that it is the clear public policy of the Commonwealth that marriages involving children must be preserved.
    (The other dissenter refrains from joining this footnote.)

  • On remand, the appeals panel reverses the trial judge. Regarding the presumption of legitimacy: DNA testing serves the interest of the child in knowing its biological father. Regarding paternity by estoppel: In past cases, the doctrine has been applied when a paramour filed his paternity lawsuit multiple years after the child's birth. However, in this case the paramour filed his paternity lawsuit just eight days after the child's birth, so there was hardly any "developing relationship between the child and the husband" to be torn asunder. (Of course, after all this lawyering the child is two years old.)

One problem with family law cases is that the guiding standard is often "the best interests of the child." It's about as vague as one can get, and unless a state legislature has clearly laid out what counts as best interests and how to weigh factors against each other, it leads to judges speculating and pontificating on what those best interests are. Knowing the biological father, not knowing the biological father when knowing would upset the stable conditions of a lifelong relationship, avoiding the appearance of illegitimacy, taking the kid away from this dysfunctional trio and giving him to a high-income, photogenic couple who has already successfully fostered 3 kids, and a dozen other things could all be in the best interests of the child, but somehow judges are supposed to sensibly pick among them.

Interesting, as usual. I almost think we should have a dedicated Saturday Series of Court Opinions: brought to you by ToaKraka™.

I wonder if the dissent with respect to "marriage and child-rearing" is some positioning in case the US Supremes ever revisits Obergefell Re. Roberts dissent:

It (marriage) arose in the nature of things to meet a vital need: ensuring that children are conceived by a mother and father committed to raising them in the stable conditions of a lifelong relationship.

I would love to read a regular "weird court cases" topic.

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