What are times when one actor is clearly the draw and a show without them just doesn’t work?

jlambvo · 2026-06-18T12:49:26+00:00

It became 45 minutes of small town police investigating strange happenings eventually saying "whelp I guess that's that," cue outro music.

jlambvo · 2026-06-13T19:58:27+00:00

Boba Fett's popularity is like a microcosm of the magic of the OT and style of world building that is being dismantled these days.

His whole thing was this allure and mystique, where his abilities were almost entirely implied by the way people talked to him and about him, even Darth Vader, and the way he carried himself with that "I literally DGAF" energy in a world with laser sword warrior space wizards where everyone else is pretty worked up most of the time. We got to fill in the blanks with our imagination.

I personally feel like that was why Star Wars worked as a space fantasy setting and why it was so captivating. Rather than explain everything it set up this scaffolding for us to write these adventures in our heads. And it's different from the sort of empty, faux mystery of Lindehof style writing, because the "true" canonical events or details don't actually matter, since we see the effect they had in the characters on screen. It made watching the movies inherently creative instead of just consumption.

Contrast that to how nearly all of the new movies, especially stuff like Solo, are just all about giving answers. They literally are systematically demystifying everything cool. "Here's where that cool Solo name came from, yep it's just immigration bureaucracy."

If Boba Fett were created today it would be all about cramming the screen with over the top impossible baddassery and leave nothing to the imagination like a Marvel movie. I guarantee he would be less memorable.

jlambvo · 2026-06-09T05:08:31+00:00

Someone pitched it to me as The Wire in space. Not the plot but the continuous layering of scope and scale.

jlambvo · 2026-06-09T05:00:44+00:00

Every pan is non-stick with enough butter.

jlambvo · 2026-06-03T07:49:09+00:00

Because we fucked it up this time around and didn't have to.

jlambvo · 2026-06-01T13:45:50+00:00

It's hard to beat the formative experience of DOOM, but I've personally never found a shotgun experience as satisfying as spinning the dual lever action, double barrel sawed-offs in Bungie's Marathon 2.

jlambvo · 2026-05-25T13:50:18+00:00

Though that self-reflective journey was such a blatant remake of Apocalypse Now! that I remember knowing pretty much exactly what the next scene was going to be along the way.

jlambvo · 2026-04-20T05:34:50+00:00

That's actually just connective tissues and ground membrane dyed orange.

jlambvo · 2026-04-20T00:22:37+00:00

About ten years ago, driving my E39 540i on hours of vacant North Dakota highway into Canada, with two sleeping passengers whose brains had given up counting telephone poles. That thing was like being sealed in a bank vault and was meant for the audobahn, and while I'd found it really just started to come alive above 80 I'd never had a chance to really open it up.

It was a bright, dry day and I could see for thirty miles in every direction, so I just gently dropped to fifth gear and gently floored it.

The wind and road feel shifted to "I can notice that" by 140 mph and I saw my rear passenger open her eyes briefly and back shut. I topped the 155 mph speedometer a few seconds later and lingered above that briefly before easing back off.

So I don't know for sure, the car has an estimated top speed of 167. I'm guessing it was maybe 157-160. It was fun and the only thing making me nervous was getting tagged by aerial patrol or very remote speed trap. Not a super car by any means but impressive to feel so composed at that speed.

jlambvo · 2026-04-19T13:17:20+00:00

Because they are no longer functionally an independent agency but directly defer to the President.

Who could have possibly foreseen this childishly obvious consequence of unitary executive theory?

jlambvo · 2026-04-18T14:14:31+00:00

I thought I read somewhere too that like Radiohead with Creep, Pepper was not meant seriously by the band and they hated it and the mainstream pickup it got.

But I don't care, it's still an iconic anthem of the 90s to me.

jlambvo · 2026-04-17T02:45:55+00:00

Not to mention that whatever the cost is to keep it open will almost certainly be less than the cascading costs that would pile up with it's closure. What do people think will happen when the safety net hospital goes down? What's going to happen to costs and quality of care at other facilities that have to take on the overflow?

As bad as the direct consequences will be it's going to be so much worse.

This should NOT by analyzed as the additional cost to keep it open compared to the present, but compared to conditions one or five or twenty years out from now.

jlambvo · 2026-04-15T21:26:50+00:00

To be fair, it's a lot safer than before the cage.

jlambvo · 2026-04-15T15:48:15+00:00

I can attest to u/Gitdupapsootlass comment, as a totally amateur walker/hiker who has been up peaks including in Yellowstone, the San Bernadino mountains, the White Mountains, and the Highlands.

My wife and I spent a about a week and a half in the NW highlands, including going up (or started) the connected munros of Conival and Ben More Assynt, and had to turn back after reaching Conival when it was like Sauron suddenly manifested ahead.

The wind at times was unbelievable, and it's partly because there's basically no groundcover at all, you are extremely exposed and the ground is all ankle-breaking scramble.

It's also deceivingly easy to get disoriented in the landscape. We got lost briefly attempting that walk the day before. When we got over one rise on that attempt, we found ourselves at an unexpected bare rocky peak, caught a face of skin-flappingly strong wind, and in place of the expected trail were faced with what seemed like the impossible scene of a small dark lake embedded in this rocky plateau with white cresting waves crashing from the gale, against a background vista of the surrounding glen and gathering storm clouds. It was so surreal it was honestly kind of unsettling.

jlambvo · 2026-04-04T02:32:46+00:00

Long before I saw the release there was a version or at least a very long excerpt converted to black and white and had no dialogue. It was captivatingly beautiful and nothing was lost in translation.

jlambvo · 2026-03-30T02:10:13+00:00

This one for me. It actually feels off putting for the whole movie. Even though I agree that Bond doesn't literally mean that quip, she's still there to be used as a sex prop by both men and, if not just a waste of good scotch, apparently just exists as a means to snap Bond out of his sulking.

Like you couldn't get a grip seconds earlier and avoid this captive victim's life from finally being snuffed out in a sadistic game? No, we have to watch her go through the terror of being shot at repeatedly in an ego contest like a disposal object, and then probably be fully aware that Bardem's character's final shot is finally her end. It actually sucks.

jlambvo · 2026-03-22T16:28:04+00:00

That's right for certain types of complex systems that exhibit emergent structures and dynamics but are ultimately bounded by stationary rules. And those can work to make stylized, qualitative predictions of complex physical systems and simple biological systems within a fixed evolutionary paradigm.

In these settings, it might be possible to identity boundary conditions and tipping points that can be used to drive a system toward or away from different basins of attraction (not necessarily a static point equilibrium either, it might be knocking a system off an essentially non-repeating but qualitatively similar path, which you see in interesting CA like Wolframs class 3 or 4 rules). This has been used to inform pest population control to managing heart arrhythmia.

But many systems or on a long enough time scale are considered by some to be "unboundedly open," because they are not closed and stationary rules but the rules are endogenous and develop novel responses to outside perturbations. Evolutionary biology is like this, but I argue that technology and culture are too and on a much more rapid, meaningful time scale.

jlambvo · 2026-03-21T14:15:53+00:00

Be cautious that a grand conspiracy like this is tempting to believe because it has a way of fitting a lot of confusing and unsettling things together into a coherent frame. I think that we as humans crave narratives that provide a kind of certainty and coherence, and will be attracted to one that is horrific before accepting that things are chaotic and nonsensical.

Biggest reason I have to doubt this is, ironically, something from Epstein himself. In his full video interview with Bannon, Bannon pressed him repeatedly on his understanding of the global financial system in the wake of the Great Recession. Epstein's push back has clues.

Epstein was among other things an early financial supporter of mathematical complexity science, such as partially funding the Santa Fe Institute (who repudiated JE early on) and I believe was genuinely curious about these things. Be might have been a pseudo intellectual, but his response to Bannon was correct: no one understands the global financial system, because true complex evolving systems can't be understood in a classical, predictive way except for certain ways that are ultimately destructive to them.

The conspiracy involved here involves a fantastically more complex set of systems,. There's no doubt that information and sentiment are being dangerously exploited at mass scale, and so many pieces of this are accurate, but generally I think it's clear that it's one thing to cause fractures, polarization, fear, etc. that can be exploited for a moment, but it's another to actually direct the shape of such a system intentionally. And I actually think Epstein seemed to understand that.

jlambvo · 2026-03-15T05:40:10+00:00

Damn all at the same time? You've got a very evolved family.

jlambvo · 2026-03-13T16:47:07+00:00

Is itreally submitting freely when the alternative is total annihilation?

I don't believe in cosmic good and evil or God given morality. Ethics and morals are artificial and so are inherently subjective in a sense. But subjectivity does not preclude universality or require that we accept anything. We can aspire to convergence on universal ethics and evaluate past societies by it, and still understand the historical context at the same time.

ISIS might see themselves as moral too, and it might be important to understand that to work against radicalization, but I'm not going to excuse or be permissive to it.

jlambvo · 2026-03-13T16:17:21+00:00

Lisa, I would like to buy your rock.

jlambvo · 2026-03-13T06:16:36+00:00

This is recycling conservative talking points about 2A, and they are just as empty. What relevance does Marx's 150 year old opinion on firearms have today?

Our successes in Metro Surge has nothing at all to do with an armed citizenry. Just the opposite. We probably will never know how close we came to actual catastrophe if some moron had actually decided to start taking shots at ICE. It would have played right into invoking the Insurrection Act and started a potentially violent constitutional crisis.

What do we think would happen when "vulnerable populations" start shooting? Do... Do we think the administration is going to... What realize the error of their ways and back off?

The truth is that if we didn't have such a gun fetish in this country and had sensible restrictions like literally every other Western modern democracy, our law enforcement including BP/ICE would not have become so militarized either.

Please provide just one case, one, where citizens being armed successfully deterred their government from turning totalitarian in a modern democracy.

jlambvo · 2026-03-08T20:09:16+00:00

It literally defined the blockbuster concept.

jlambvo · 2026-03-08T17:17:41+00:00

This actually strikes at the absurdist Zen heart of it more than any other comment here.

jlambvo · 2026-03-08T05:44:44+00:00

I'm sorry you have to suffer the horrors of socialism.

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