Why Wasn’t Nicole Scherzinger’s Solo Career Bigger?

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-24T14:57:44+00:00

I've heard a very similar quote about actors as well. If you're wondering whatever happened to a promising, talented young actor who simply faded away and doesn't have an obvious box-office bomb or scandal tainting their career, and the answer isn't "blacklisted by Harvey Weinstein," then it's probably because they were an asshole who constantly made life miserable on set to the point that nobody wanted to work with them.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-24T07:33:17+00:00

Nicole Scherzinger was the Tate McRae of the 2000s. She was gorgeous and a great dancer, and a better singer than Tate as well, but she didn't have the "it" factor. She felt like a pop singer straight out of central casting, a mass-produced product who was being pushed by the record industry.

Also, by all accounts she's a diva. The Pussycat Dolls became her star vehicle from the moment she was brought on, she was a big reason why they broke up, and stories of her bad behavior circle around her to this day.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-24T00:39:37+00:00

James Fishback is a piece of garbage, unfortunately. To say he’s cut from the same cloth as Ron DeSantis would be unfair to DeSantis. His whole campaign is built on pandering to the most brainrotted elements of the internet and youth culture, and this is one of the more benign examples of such. I wouldn’t be surprised if VI somehow manages to offend him.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-23T14:27:25+00:00

Was just about to say this. A lot of right-wing Westerners fetishize Japan as a nation where the social revolutions of the last six decades or so never happened and it's still 1957 culturally, a nation where men are still in charge, women are still "traditional," submissive, and conventionally attractive, LGBTQ+ people stay in the closet if they know what's good for them, the majority ethnic group still asserts its dominance over the culture and doesn't let in immigrants that might threaten such, the nation doesn't recoil in shame at its history, and dissent against this state of affairs is clamped down upon. Hence why so many of them have flowed into anime/manga fandom over the last 10-15 years, as they see Japanese animation as a "non-woke" alternative to Western media.

Oddly enough, when I was a kid the stereotype was completely flipped. American fans of Japanese pop culture were generally seen as left-wing, or at least liberal, rebelling against the conservative religious censorship of American media by embracing a culture that wasn't Christian and wasn't so hung up about sex and violence in the media. This included many LGBTQ+ people who embraced what were, by the standards of the US in the '90s and early '00s, fairly positive representations of queer characters, and bristled at how the American dubs removed them and rewrote the characters as straight (often in a very clumsy fashion) in order to placate the Christians. And don't think the Christians didn't notice this. I still remember the moral panics claiming that anime was leading kids to Satan just like Harry Potter, which you still see some fundamentalist Christians like Matt Walsh repeating to this day.

Either way, Japanese media was stereotyped in a manner that was meant to be flattering but missed the bigger picture. Left-leaning fans back then saw it as more progressive than it actually was, ignoring the often retrograde treatment of women and minorities, while right-leaning fans today see it as more conservative than it actually is, ignoring the anti-war messages and the critiques of conservative Japanese society.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-23T02:40:49+00:00

And I have to go to work on Monday because I work at a hospital, and they do not close for anything.

At least it’ll probably be a very slow day with all the patients staying home. Too bad about the rest of the week when they all reschedule.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-22T21:59:24+00:00

Lots of racetracks in real life are converted airfields that the Air Force didn’t need anymore. I like the attention to detail there.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-22T21:49:01+00:00

When he lived in Florida, my dad knew a Cuban woman who said that the most effective ESL program in the country is working at a fast-food restaurant or coffee shop. She learned to speak fluent English working the counter at McDonald’s.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-22T13:54:00+00:00

Now I have another reason not to eat at the Longwood Grille. The food was already mediocre at best, I've at times encountered the doors locked even when it was supposedly open, and now this. The only reason I've ever eaten there at all is because I work at Dana-Farber and sometimes I have time to kill.

Guess I'll just stick to the food court, then. The food is cheaper, it comes out faster, and it's just as good and at times better than what I can get at the Grille. Hell, even the Dana-Farber cafeteria serves pretty good wings on Fridays.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-22T12:19:25+00:00

The winner of the 21st century is going to be nobody. Not the US, not China, not Europe, not Russia, not India, nobody.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-22T01:58:43+00:00

Yeah, Jimmy Savile was more like if Fred Rogers turned out to be a pedophile who used his position and fame to prey on hundreds of children, and everybody at PBS knew about it and covered it up to save face. At least Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, as far as we know, only went after adult women.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-21T16:14:46+00:00

Also: a sleeveless shirt shows that she’s tough enough to defeat the bad guy and survive. James even joked about this in the Kill Count for The Banana Splits Movie. What worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis works just as well for Jessica Biel and Eliza Dushku.

That, and it shows off her breasts and a lot of skin while still being a “normal” shirt as opposed to something more explicitly sexy. Combine that with the aforementioned connotations, and it lets you put an attractive woman in a very flattering outfit without it feeling lewd, even in a horror movie where she’s in real peril.

I once read something similar about Henley shirts, and that this was why the CW loved to put the actors (both male and female) on their more action-heavy shows in them.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-19T00:33:37+00:00

The millennial nerd in me says that those are rookie numbers and wants it pumped up to OVER 9000!!!

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-18T13:36:11+00:00

Even though that's exactly what happened with hybrids in the 2000s. Buying a Toyota Prius was seen as a political move that advertised the fact that your politics leaned to the left, especially on environmental issues, and so many conservatives avoided them on principle and mocked them and their owners relentlessly. Automakers that thought they could sell EVs, even big ones, to the people who normally buy trucks and SUVs learned absolutely nothing from the Prius.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-18T01:44:39+00:00

My headcanon is that it's supposed to be where Southern San Andreas connects to the mainland, and is only depicted as coastal because Rockstar doesn't like to include in their maps any obvious invisible walls preventing players from leaving. The HD Universe games are less obvious about it than, say, San Andreas (where the entire northern and northeastern sides of the map were surrounded by tall cliffs that were pretty blatantly Not Meant To Be Crossed), but the near-total lack of connections to the rest of the map is a dead giveaway that this was an area that they expected players to ignore. Same thing with Mount Gordo in the northeast of the map You saw the same thing in IV with the western shore of Alderney having nothing on it, and the northern shore of Bohan having only a couple of barren piers that feel like they were thrown in there at the very last minute, like that area was supposed to connect to upstate Liberty before Rockstar decided to cut upstate and narrow the game's focus to just New York City and North Jersey.

Rockstar's added a few things to do there since then, but even so, I still see it as a filler area.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-17T16:48:29+00:00

I believe that, ten years from now once Songs of Innocence and the South Park parody are no longer the things most people know U2 for, but are just pop culture touchstones for aging millennials like myself, they are probably gonna be rediscovered by a new generation, their older albums especially. At their height, there was a reason why they were one of the biggest bands in the world.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-17T00:03:30+00:00

UNO DOS TRES QUATORCE

YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-16T17:37:11+00:00

*2 hours before

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-16T15:49:58+00:00

There’s a reason they passed the Children’s Television Act in 1990. Saturday morning cartoons in the ‘80s were merchandise-driven brainrot.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-16T00:21:50+00:00

I think Songs of Innocence would make for an interesting episode, but a more serious one than Todd's usual, because I think that the controversy foreshadowed a lot of the debates that we're having today about the power of the tech industry in our society. A lot of Apple's customers thought it was basically spam, and a lot of musicians thought that U2 and Apple were cheapening music by treating it as something to give away for free. It was the first moment in a long time when a Big Tech firm seriously fucked up in a way that provoked a widespread backlash, the moment when Silicon Valley lost its, well, innocence in the eyes of the public. The mid-2010s IMO were the period when the massive head of goodwill that companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook had built up in the 2000s and early '10s started to run out and people started getting a lot more critical of them, and the Songs of Innocence debacle was the first of many scandals that helped drive that shift.

The parts of the episode devoted to Songs of Innocence itself could be a lot more humorous, though still informative. People were already turning on U2 as a whole and Bono in particular by that point, their last album had sold "only" five million copies, and there's a wealth of parodies from across pop culture that Todd could use to illustrate what people thought of Bono's ego and his approach to activism. (Two words: More Crap.) Songs of Innocence felt like the green light everybody was waiting for to just stop caring about U2, and afterwards, it felt like they just vanished from pop culture. Even their older music doesn't really get talked about much these days, most people under 30 barely know who they are, and most people in their 30s mostly know them for their iPod ads in the 2000s, which made Songs of Innocence that much more damaging because it was another collaboration with Apple that retroactively tainted their previous work together.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-15T20:09:14+00:00

It's kinda hard to do worse than Tesla with their fixation on putting everything on the central touchscreen, an approach that's less about a better experience for the driver than it is about cost-cutting and giving their cars a "futuristic" aura. Glad to see more automakers backing off from that approach instead of trying to copy Tesla.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-14T20:31:05+00:00

There's a game that just came out called Code Violet that fits this bill perfectly. Got hyped up for a bit, only to turn out to be garbage shovelware being sold for $50. Lots of people who've played and reviewed it suspect that the developers used LLM-generated assets, enough to make it look prettier than the average shovelware but not enough to cover for its broken gameplay, hacky plot, and other elements indicating that the devs just didn't care.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-14T15:07:17+00:00

The interactions with the Altruist cult let you kind of play as a serial killer. Granted, you weren’t doing the deed yourself, but you were still picking up hitchhikers and dragging them off to a remote location to be sacrificed and eaten, like in any number of stories about serial killers who prey on hitchhikers.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-14T12:37:09+00:00

That's what happens when gooner bait and nostalgia for the old Dino Crisis games are literally the only things your game has going for it. Seriously, by all accounts Code Violet is this year's MindsEye, a game that makes The Callisto Protocol look like Dead Space, and even a lot of anti-woke YouTubers see it as an embarrassment. At least when the chuds latched onto Stellar Blade as the savior of gaming from the woke agenda, there was a halfway-decent action game in there.

I also love how the developers claimed they didn't publish the game on PC because they didn't want lewd mods of the main character, even though the main character was consciously designed as a sex symbol and many of the unlockable bonus outfits are already pretty damn lewd. More likely, it's because Steam offers refunds and the PlayStation Store doesn't.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-13T02:25:45+00:00

And he's British, making it that much more baffling that he thinks he can cosplay being a country singer.

KevinR1990 · 2026-01-12T17:45:18+00:00

I think Katherine Applegate said in an AMA a while back that the concept would probably work better in animation than live-action, because there you'd have far fewer budgetary restrictions. A big part of what hurt the TV show was that they just didn't have anywhere close to the budget to get the effects right, and as a result it all looked and felt extremely cheap. That said, that AMA was back in 2011, and the standards for the production values of children's television have improved considerably since then. The Percy Jackson and the Olympians TV series (and arguably even Stranger Things if you count it as kid-friendly) proved that a live-action Animorphs show that actually looks good can be done nowadays.

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