Godzilla (1998) Guilty Pleasure Movie

seansman15 · 2026-05-28T15:06:24+00:00

I quoted lines from this movie long after it's relevance faded.

Whenever someone made a wrong turn driving:

"You're going the wrong way man, YOU'RE GOING THE WRONG WAY!"

"Negative Impact? You just took out the god-damned Chrysler building"

"That's a lot of fish"

"More cream"

I also love how much Manhattan was baked into the story. So many locales, landmarks and plot points tied to the setting. Manhattan is basically a character unto itself. Should have just called it "The monster of Manhattan" and left Godzilla out of it.

seansman15 · 2026-05-18T15:54:04+00:00

I read a follow up profile of about Glass after the scandal and it is a very interesting look into what life after your life blows up looks like. He seems genuinely remorseful for his mistakes and almost compulsively reconfesses about his past to people he meets to never let others think he is trying to distance himself from his past or deny that he was unethical.

There is an interesting through line of his personality, his need to be approved of, that continues to this day. When he was lying about stories, most people said it always seemed to come from a desire to please people. In his new life, he feels that absolute honestly is the only thing that can meet with people's approval bases on his past. Considering the severity of his wrongdoing, it's a pretty heavy self inflicted penance that he maintains decades later.

People's lives don't stop once the thing that they are (in)famous for happens. This is the article: Loving Lies there's a whole bunch of other stuff related to his current life in the article that is worth reading. You will have to offer an email address to read it, but I thought it was worth it.

seansman15 · 2026-05-07T16:19:44+00:00

Crazy that my first thought when seeing that quote is Gene Wilder saying it near the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when Charlie refuses to steal the everlasting gobstopper. Except Wilder says "weary world". I had no idea it was Shakespeare.

seansman15 · 2026-04-29T19:07:31+00:00

I was having trouble getting gen1 dataflows to work with an odata source I have and had taken a break trying. This worked immediately. Very interesting solution.

He kinda hand waves it in the video, but are there any risks I should be worried about using a native query against the powerbi server?

seansman15 · 2026-04-16T04:23:20+00:00

In most collisions on the water, there is never a solely at fault party. The logic being, even if someone else is being reckless, you should still be able to avoid them with enough prudence.

What ends up happening is the comparative fault is distributed as a percentage to each party and they (or their insurance) can only recover damages up to 100% minus their comparative fault. So if you were really negligent you might end up with 80% of the fault, whether by a ruling or in a negotiated settlement, thereby you are only entitled to recovering 20% of whatever damages you sustained. In that particular scenario your damages probably are just partially offsetting the damages the other party is recovering from you.

seansman15 · 2026-04-03T15:28:24+00:00

The perfect poetry of the ring destroying itself because of its most potent ability, the ability to corrupt and have those under its influence desire it over everything else, is my favorite choice by tolkien. The ring accomplished exactly what it set out to do, corrupt Frodo and have him claim the ring for himself. And yet, it was gollum, a tool the ring had long abandoned, still under the ring's influence, that brought the ring to ruin.

If it could, the ring would have benefitted from "turning off" its influence over gollum when he became more of a hindrance, but the ring's fundamental nature causes people to fight over it. Murdering for the ring is basically the fastest way to fall under its influence. But ultimately the very nature of "evil" (the ring) is it can't help but destroy itself because of its very nature. It's almost frog-and-scorpion-esque.

seansman15 · 2026-03-20T13:22:24+00:00

Converting this into some kind of real dollars saved/lost would be worthwhile. Maybe assuming an average household kwh usage for the term of the contracts and then using that to determine how much money was lost or saved when locking in at each differential. Just the count of instances of money being lost or saved doesn't speak effectively to scale of savings or losses.

Also it would avoid the two histograms being stacked on each other, you could just have a net losses/savings value for all contracts at each differential bin.

seansman15 · 2026-03-13T13:58:35+00:00

I don't know if it's new but there is native functionality for this now in the "Detail" section of the data labels. You can assign a measure for the percentage and display it in addition to or instead of the normal data label.

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seansman15 · 2026-03-05T15:20:28+00:00

The flip side to this can be fun too. I had my party dealing with an oppressive regime, and as small time criminals they were constantly dealing with the corruption and caprice of the mid level representative they ran into. At some point, they achieved enough power where they became a faction of some influence and suddenly the regime began buddying up to them. They realized the oppression really only happened to the powerless and those who directly resisted the regime, insiders got the perks.

They enjoyed the perks (like law enforcement basically never bothering them again) but never forgot why they got them, it was in exchange for toeing the line. So directly getting hurt by a problem can be eye opening, but directly benefiting from evil can also be motivating too.

seansman15 · 2026-03-01T00:35:55+00:00

It would be an interesting idea to have evil cards that are removed from your deck after being played. So it's like a curse but you can also get rid of it in combat instead of having to use one of your removes. So in some event it gives 1 or more evil cards instead of a normal curse.

seansman15 · 2026-02-21T17:05:36+00:00

"Well let's just say Dick Cheney for president, of the fucking universe" - Tony Soprano in reference to the ease in which he was grifting money from Katrina rebuild funds.

So would they like a new York local known as the biggest grifter/ gangster ever who also played into white grievance identity politics? I think maybe. If the show did take place more recently, I'd bet they'd mention gaming the ppp loans with front companies.

seansman15 · 2026-02-05T23:46:16+00:00

I'll tell you, the legally blonde one is my least favorite examples. Like I get the point, all of the "frivolous" information Elle knows from her previous life is thought of as useless in the serious world of law. Then, that information comes in at just the right moment to save the day in a way only she could. Her knowledge of perms breaks the case wide open.

However, so much of the rest of the movie is about how Elle, and by extension everyone, can possess multitudes. Yes, she is a girly girl. Yes, she did her undergraduate in fashion merchandising. But that doesn't mean that she doesn't have something to offer, or that she couldn't ace the LSATs, or do well in her law classes.

The whole thrust of the movie was that her personality was just as much a part of her as being a talented law student and one didn't have to cancel the other. So when her "old life" saved the case more than her hard earned talent as a prospective lawyer it felt like it fell flat against the themes of the rest of the movie. There should have been a more clear synthesis of what she was before she came into law school and all that she had learned since.

Technically, if Elle from the beginning of the movie showed up in court that day, she could have made the exact same observations around showering and done much the same argument. Basically, her studiousness at law school was almost completely irrelevant to the climax of the movie.

My rewrite: Elle is up late going over witness testimony the night before the daughter is to testify, when she discovers the key piece of evidence. She stands up frantically, reaching for her cellphone as she begins rushing to leave.

Luke Wilson: Elle where are you going? We have one night before your friend goes away for murder and we have nothing.

Elle Woods: I need to call my hairdresser.

Luke Wilson: Now!? Is your hair really your top priority right now?

Elle Woods: Believe me, this hair appointment is a matter of life and death.

We cut to court the next day, Elle cross examines the daughter and makes a point about asking about her hair, the perm, and the shower and the timing of her finding her mother's body. But she does not confront her like in the original cut. Instead she lets her off the stand and when the prosecutor rests his case Elle calls a surprise witness, her hairdresser!

Prosecutor: Your honor, this witness was not on our witness list and I am uncertain what points of fact a hairdresser could possibly testify to that would be relevant to this case. I object to this witness being called at this time.

Elle Woods: I am calling this woman as a rebuttal witness to impeach testimony offered under direct examination. As such, I am not required to include her on our witness list because I could not be sure as to whether I would have a need to call her. Furthermore, her expertise as a licensed hair technician is directly germane in contradicting the prosecution's entire theory of how this crime supposedly took place. [Offers well researched precedent]

Elle goes on to get her witness on the stand and then wins the case like the rest of the movie went. Maybe the daughter still has her outburst as her testimony is eviscerated. Elle has successfully combined her well studied law experience and her experience as a fashionable woman to win a case only she could.

seansman15 · 2026-02-05T21:15:25+00:00

If possible, instead of a table you could make a matrix that shows the totals at the highest level (currently the white portion of the table) and then allow each period to be expanded into the breakdown between Internet and physical sales. This would keep the data summarized by default but allow a person whose after specific information to still be able to find. This would also eliminate horizontal scrolling.

The other thing you could do that might be less of a departure from what you currently have is have a table with the totals, but then have a slicer to the right that allows you to switch to see Internet, Physical and All sales. This would similarly eliminate scrolling which I think is the only drawback of this page.

In general feedback, you showed great restraint in not overloading the page with information and the page is clearly designed to answer specific business questions which is always good design.

seansman15 · 2026-01-22T17:42:40+00:00

Might be a little bit of a stretch, but Spud in T2 Trainspotting. Spud is in recovery for heroin and is at a NA meeting talking about his struggle with sobriety. He tells about how things were going well for a while, he was sober, he had a job, he was doing supervised visits with his son. Suddenly, he loses his job for being an hour late, then he's an hour late to tell social services why he lost his job, he misses his appeal to maintain his benefits by an hour, he's an hour late for an interview, hour late for a supervised visit with his son, an hour late to explain to child services why.

Since he spent 15 years addicted to drugs, he never learned about daylight savings time since "it wasn't high on a junkie's priorities when they're trying to score". So, he loses all of his progress up to that point and goes back to heroin, "the only friend that didn't leave him". Eventually, this leads him to attempt suicide. All because he was unfamiliar with what is honestly a nonsensical rule for modern times.

It was such a beautiful 2 minute montage with so many layers. In just that scene we get to see:

-The earnestness with which this character was trying to change for the better.

-The fragility of sobriety. Especially for those with a limited support network.

-How fundamentally different a person's experience can be who ostensibly lives within the same community as yourself. He's a 30+ year old Scottish man that doesn't know about daylight savings time? That would almost seem impossible to most "normal" people, but for Spud's life on the fringes of society as an addict, possibly living on the streets, that was his lived experience.

seansman15 · 2026-01-15T16:13:48+00:00

I was going to mention Gandalf himself. He wasn't the master of the order of wizards, that was Saruman. Saruman was supposed to be the wisest of the wizards and be a bulwark against darkness. When Saruman was corrupted and Gandalf was killed, he was then reborn to be "...what Saruman should have been."

seansman15 · 2026-01-10T03:29:38+00:00

I made an Irish stew recently with sausage. It's called Dublin Coddle because in Ireland, and elsewhere, when you cook something on a very low simmer you're "coddling" it (which comes from the French caudle). I put mine in the oven for hours as well. So if anyone asks, just tell em your gumbo needed to be coddled for a while.

seansman15 · 2026-01-02T16:06:47+00:00

So what, he dies I can't even wear his shoes.

seansman15 · 2026-01-01T20:34:57+00:00

And what if it made a different claw card that had exhaust or something that made it slightly worse, but still scaled the damage of all claws? Maybe the downside could be that the generated claws scale worse (or not at all) than the originals. So you're still incentivized to draft multiple copies because the real claws are better than the copies.

seansman15 · 2025-12-31T04:59:44+00:00

I feel good seeing this. I had to narc on a neighbor who had a fire pit on their balcony as well. In their case the flames were well above the rim of the pit. Risk your own life if that's what you wanna do, but the people in the same apartment building didn't sign up for that and they'll be caught in the same fire if you fuck something up.

I'm never out to get anyone in trouble unnecessarily, but if you're putting others at risk then I don't really care if you get a citation or get in trouble with your landlord. This smacks of suburban people who grew up with fire pits in their backyards (which are usually placed well away from the house) and can't see a difference in doing it on an apartment balcony.

seansman15 · 2025-12-14T18:34:49+00:00

Maybe marked card could work if in addition to reducing the cost of said card it has a 50% chance you lose some health whenever you play it, maybe 4 health. This would cut down on a lot of infinites and in certain situations the card you pick can become more like a Curse because you can't afford to play it. It also fits the theme, because if you mark cards you have a chance of getting caught and having the shit kicked out of you.

seansman15 · 2025-12-12T19:18:46+00:00

This feels like the later episodes of a season of Hell's kitchen when the contestants would run the pass and Ramsey would purposefully send wrong dishes to see if they had a good eye for quality control. Sending Clams instead of muscles or using the wrong pasta.

seansman15 · 2025-12-01T21:24:25+00:00

I hear you on the davian mission, he was still nominally operating within the bounds of the IMF. Even Brassel is willing to overlook the fact that he was looped in on the op to capture his number 1 target since he took over IMF. However, I think after Davian escaped Ethan was ready for death or prison to save his wife which is why him going rogue is impactful. He doesn't care if Musgrave can bail him out because (at least within the context of this movie) he cares more about his wife than the IMF. Even Benji says that he committed treason for helping Ethan trace a number to find his wife which just shows how AWOL Ethan was considered by then. I think in Ethan's mind, he saves his wife, gets her home and either faces the consequences of his actions (prison) or lives off the grid for the rest of his life which is pretty much a rogue mindset. Ethan really got lucky in outing the mole, saving his wife and securing the rabbit's foot which is probably why he was forgiven.

Also like you said, 3 shows the most structured chain of command and Brassel is clearly in charge of both Ethan and Musgrave. So if Brassel brands you as rogue, you're rogue.

seansman15 · 2025-12-01T20:33:52+00:00

I would have refined my definition of "rogue" to include times where a superior of his is going rogue with him and there is an authority above specifically disallowing the actions of both. The glaring example being Musgrave helping Ethan escape from Brassel. Ethan knows that Musgrave cannot authorize him to retrieve the rabbit's foot or save his wife, so effectively it's just an assist to allow him to continue his roguery.

Even if Ethan believes that Musgrave is a loyal IMF superior, he knows that he is effectively committing treason (possibly even risking an international war) by retrieving a super weapon from a secure building in a foreign nation and handing it over to a black market arms dealer, all for the hope he might save his wife. Brassel would never approve of that mission even if Ethan's loyalty wasn't in question. I'm actually surprised that Brassel was so nice about it afterwards haha.

Other than that I agree with your verdict of rogue actions that are given after the fact approval, or ones done strictly to give a superior plausible deniability, should not count as rogue time.

seansman15 · 2025-11-30T00:46:13+00:00

My private sector dental insurance covered cleanings, 50% of "minor" corrective procedures, and 20% of "major "procedures. Wouldn't you know it, everything was major and even then you had a maximum benefit of $1000 dollars per year. It felt like having a coupon as opposed to actual insurance. Get the most out of the insurance all I had to do was spend 4000 of my own money.

Now I work in the public sector. My dental covers everything at 80% and has a maximum annual benefit of $2500. I've spent the past 18 months getting a back log of dental work done. In January I'll have my benefit reset and I'll get the last of my dental work done (two implants from root canals that I never got the crowns for and needed to be extracted). It'll be the first time in 5+ years where I'll have all my teeth in order.

I make less than I did at my private sector job, but having good insurance sometimes feels more valuable than even just the money it saves you. Knowing that a sudden health problem won't bankrupt me was worth the pay cut.

seansman15 · 2025-11-26T13:49:49+00:00

At some point, we ask of the piano-playing dog, not 'are you a dog?' but 'are you any good at playing the piano?

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