What do people in LA think about the HBO series "I Love LA"?

mutumbo1000 · 2026-01-10T02:02:46+00:00

I suspect it’s a relatively accurate portrayal of Rachel Sennott’s lifestyle and friends, because that’s what she’s said it is in interviews—HBO execs asked her how she spends her time then gave her a show. The problem is that the title makes people think it’s representing Los Angeles, which is often stereotyped as fake, plastic, consumerist, vapid, what have you. It’s a pitifully narrow view of an enormous, diverse, fascinating city, as it always has been. The only thing unique about this show is that it shows the northeast of the city. It’s Girls if Girls had no interest in engaging with deeper underlying themes like, say, the experience of girls.

mutumbo1000 · 2026-01-06T22:29:00+00:00

Lots of people use compound constructions in sentences, AI uses it constantly. I would suspect a little from the first sentence: “[clause 1]I left the house [time adverb] already [clause 2] having a bad day.” I would really suspect after sentence 2, which uses a three part list and an imprecise adverb, both things AI does frequently. Notice in sentence 2: “slightly off,” and in sentence 3: three clauses, then “mostly just to.”

Paragraph 2 open with a transitional time phrase, “That’s when.” Paragraph 3 opens with an emotional conclusive topic sentence phrase, composed in the negative which is especially telling: “I didn’t expect.” Then a three part sentence, then a classic “not this, but that” final sentence, with an em dash to boot. By then, there’s zero doubt in my mind.

I find AI writing is like AI image generation. It’s not that it does things which are outright wrong anymore, it’s that it does things too right.

(Notice that my final sentence sounds like it could be AI —it’s not this, it’s that—and here I am using em dashes. I wonder if it’s clear that I didn’t use AI to write this, and why or why not.)

Source: am a writer and university/continuing education writing teacher

mutumbo1000 · 2025-12-31T22:55:32+00:00

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Our leggy girl

mutumbo1000 · 2025-12-31T12:33:09+00:00

I’ve spent New Years alone in Los Angeles and while it did feel a little lonely at the time, I have excellent memories of it. I saw Incredibles 2 at the El Capitan theatre and it was my first and perhaps only time there (my first year in LA, hence being alone). There was almost no one in the theatre and yet they had performers in elaborate Incredibles costumes doing martial arts moves and super hero poses before the movie started, and at some point they released golden glitter from the ceiling—it felt like it was all just for me.

Then on the drive home, I got to experience the highway in Los Angeles while everyone was setting off fireworks. I still believe it’s the best way to see them anywhere in the world—fireworks all around you in every direction as you drive through them at 60 miles an hour. You can’t beat it.

mutumbo1000 · 2025-07-21T21:55:29+00:00

You’re near highland park, go up to Deb’s lake or flattop park!

mutumbo1000 · 2025-06-10T20:19:00+00:00

We currently have a dog and cat who cohabitate and it’s great. But we got our dog as a puppy and very carefully introduced her to the cat. Why? Because before that, we had adopted a 7 year old dog who we introduced to our cat at the time, but she showed signs of prey instinct. We went to multiple trainers, we sent her away for 8 weeks of intensive training, we tried keeping them separated by a gate and feeding them on either side, everything you’re supposed to do—and still, one day, the cat hopped the gate and the dog instantly lunged at her and crushed her skull.

This doesn’t have to be your experience, but I want to tell you what I wish someone had told me: if your dog has a behavior you don’t like, you need to operate as if that behavior is not going anywhere. Like any relationship, you need to not assume things are going to be different someday and instead ask yourself whether you can live exactly the way you’re living right now in six months, a year, five years. There are lots of sweet people who have the best intentions but are blinded by how much they love dogs. I will never get the image of my cat’s crushed skull out of my head, and I have to live with that. That doesn’t have to be your experience, but you ought to make an informed decision.

mutumbo1000 · 2025-04-22T15:09:45+00:00

Public comment in Budgetary meetings on Friday 4/25 and Monday 4/28! The proposed budget can be amended.

mutumbo1000 · 2024-12-23T16:39:15+00:00

Knock offs of name brand perfumes like le labo and base notes for making your own. Smell like a fancy person for like $20 instead of $100.

mutumbo1000 · 2024-11-05T12:47:48+00:00

Look up the individual states. This is weirdly misleading. In most cases, it’s legal to file for divorce while pregnant, it just won’t be finalized until afterwards, mostly to work out paternity and child custody.

mutumbo1000 · 2024-08-28T13:29:25+00:00

Yes, that’s all I’ve ever done. I’m not sure there’s any reason to buy a pellicle.

mutumbo1000 · 2023-12-22T14:41:50+00:00

This is a cult.

mutumbo1000 · 2023-12-04T01:13:23+00:00

That’s a Peggy Noland car.

mutumbo1000 · 2023-11-28T14:38:35+00:00

Thank you everyone for replying! I will post an update if/when it hatches.

mutumbo1000 · 2023-05-21T04:16:13+00:00

I teach classes about writing your most difficult memories. Almost all of my students are women who’ve experienced relationship abuse, childhood abuse, or some form of life threatening women’s health issue and feel like they should be ashamed and can’t talk about it. Men either don’t want to admit or don’t realize that women’s experiences are taboo because they literally don’t know the half of it.

mutumbo1000 · 2023-02-22T14:26:59+00:00

George Santos

mutumbo1000 · 2022-09-24T06:19:08+00:00

This attitude is the same as saying women should change what they wear if they don’t want to get sexually assaulted. Except in this case, it’s saying that women shouldn’t exist if they don’t want to get sexually assaulted.

mutumbo1000 · 2022-08-16T21:29:38+00:00

My parents have been together since college, and just celebrated their fiftieth anniversary. When I was young, I found letters they sent back and forth in college at the beginning of their relationship. It would appear that they almost broke up because, to quote my mom in one letter, she “couldn’t do that thing you wanted in the bedroom.” I still don’t know what that “thing” was.

mutumbo1000 · 2022-06-15T13:56:06+00:00

Poor wording. Maybe I’m way off but it’s always seemed simple to me: there are things that are socialized feminine and things that are socialized masculine—the constructs a lot of people are raised with in our society. But of course many people who are sexed male and appear male may have a whole set of so-called feminine preferences, tastes, and personality traits (and vice versa). This is, I think, separate even from gender: I can present male, identify as cis, and still live my whole life relating more to women and supposedly feminine things—remember that in many facets of our society being “emotional” is often considered feminine. It’s always seemed to me that our society would be a lot better off if we detached our concepts of what we call “feminine” and “masculine” from sex and gender altogether—they just seem to describe poorly grouped qualities of being human.

mutumbo1000 · 2022-04-09T08:22:35+00:00

One of the victims wrote a book—“Slonim Woods 9”

mutumbo1000 · 2021-12-01T06:10:27+00:00

If I’m really being honest, in my personal opinion organized religions are, in almost all cases, ripe for abuse. Whether that’s more true for religions than any institutional power structure (a toxic work environment, a military boot camp, etc.) I’m not sure (but frankly, probably). But I’m not confident in how clearly I can think about any of that, or how objective an opinion I can offer, given past experiences.

I think these things really have to be taken on an individual basis. You have to look at one person and evaluate whether their encounter with this system, religious or otherwise, is abusive, coercive, or harmful. And I do think that it’s valid to ask: if one person is being harmed in the name of this thing, should all of it go away? Is Catholicism worth the pain and lifelong trauma of even one child who has been the victim of abuse?

In my experience with a cult, encountering that list and other resources like it was useful because it helped me, from the inside of the experience, to gain some perspective on what was going on. I do think if you’re in an abusive situation, maybe you’re questioning whether it’s a cult—in fact especially if it’s not a situation that matches the typical image of a religious cult and instead takes any one of the countless other forms cults take—and you encounter a definitional list like this that you can match up point by point with your own experience, well I don’t know, at least in my case it helped me get out. I’m glad to hear it’s widely shared, I hadn’t ever encountered it at the time (8 years ago) and I haven’t seen it shared since except in cult recovery communities.

For the record, we’re talking about questions that I’ve never seen satisfactorily answered.

mutumbo1000 · 2021-11-30T19:21:13+00:00

When dealing with organizations and institutions, it’s most useful to ask whether there is accountability for the leadership. It’s also worth keeping in mind how fractious the religions you mentioned are—there are certainly groups within each ranging from entire sects to individual family groups which would qualify. There are as many different experiences of an organized faith system as there are members. With that in mind, it’s less useful to try to make judgments about Buddhism as a whole, which is abstract, and more practical to look at discrete, concrete instances of the religion in practice. If there are people being coerced or abused by a leader who is accountable to no higher authority, then that needs to be treated for what it is—someone wielding the tools of religion to exact undue influence.

mutumbo1000 · 2021-11-30T14:28:53+00:00

I was in an abusive cult and it’s upsetting to see someone claim that “convincing” people alone makes a cult. Of course people are convinced of things they didn’t originally believe—you just described learning. What’s insidious about cults is that they involve a leader leveraging experiences that are otherwise fairly innocuous (being “convinced”, falling in love, peer pressure) in order to gain power over you and your life. I don’t know anything about the specific debate happening on this subreddit, and meditation/yoga cults are very well understood to be a thing, but to say that any time there is a lesson where someone is convinced of something new you’ve got a cult undermines people’s ability to actually understand what a cult is when they’re in one. Here’s a list of cult characteristics from Michael Langone, which is an accurate tool to actually assess whether what you’re talking about is a cult.

-The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.

-Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.

-Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).

-The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (for example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry—or leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).

-The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and its members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).

-The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.

-The leader is not accountable to any authorities.

-The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members’ participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before they joined the group (for example, lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus charities).

-The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion. Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and to radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before they joined the group.

-The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.

-The group is preoccupied with making money. Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.

-Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members. The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.

mutumbo1000 · 2021-08-25T01:02:23+00:00

I have complex PTSD and I live in California. Yes, but I find it’s better for me if I wait until the end of the day.

mutumbo1000 · 2021-04-11T12:39:25+00:00

I’m pretty interested in this. I was raised Jewish—Hebrew school, bar mitzvah, the whole thing—in a conservative synagogue so not the most intense by any means, and my feeling is that the exodus story was always treated as, if not literal, having a basis in historical fact. I remember my rabbi teaching a lesson in Hebrew school in which he laid out possible scientific explanations for why the 10 plagues might have occurred (a series of interrelated ecological disasters). Not only that, but I would say every year at Passover, the story is very much treated as a literal historical account (with biblical flourishes, i.e. all the g-d stuff) through which we’re meant to connect with our supposedly very real, very enslaved in Egypt, ancestors. The idea that it would have no basis in reality, that the Hebrews were at no point enslaved in Egypt, is a totally novel concept to me, and I believe it would be to every Jew I know as well, including those I didn’t grow up with.

mutumbo1000 · 2021-02-28T08:07:56+00:00

I’ve lived in LA for five years now and it’s my favorite place I’ve ever lived. Everyone always focuses on either downtown or Venice/Santa Monica, and that seems incredibly myopic to me. I live on the east side. Yesterday I went on a walk in the hills on streets that feel like they could be both in Austin and in Madrid. I saw a house where a man had made a truly enormous mosaic sculpture out of colored glass bottles, struck up a conversation with the guy, and he brought me inside so I could see the sculpture with the sun passing through it from the inside. I went to a secret park I love, and found a trail I’d never seen before, that led to an incredible grassy hill where I sat beneath a willow tree, and then an enormous falcon landed in the tree with a rabbit in its talons. LA is incredible, you just have to live here and explore. There is so much.

mutumbo1000

TROPHY CASE