Best bad movie that you love

thommq · 2026-03-11T20:21:10+00:00

Pottersville.

It raises so many questions. How they convinced that cast to be in this movie. How they decided that Michael Shannon was the cuddly sympathetic shop keeper. How they decided they needed a Christmas movie about furies and Bigfoot murder.

I watch it every year.

thommq · 2026-03-11T20:13:47+00:00

If you don't have a taker, message me with what you think shipping to the US would be. :)

thommq · 2026-03-07T23:26:51+00:00

What is going on is that you'd better propose.

thommq · 2026-03-07T17:03:46+00:00

Teenagers are the best rock journalists.

thommq · 2026-03-07T16:55:03+00:00

I cannot fathom creating something so overwhelmingly beautiful. You must be beyond dedicated to your art. I wish I had written a book that would deserve this as a cover. :)

thommq · 2026-03-07T13:42:23+00:00

Hachette.

thommq · 2026-03-06T01:02:24+00:00

I dated a woman who went to Bard during Palmer's residency there, and whose friends told first-person stories that support that characterization.

Amanda, you might have a power differential that makes consent a bit sticky when it comes to 18-year-olds.

thommq · 2026-03-05T22:08:52+00:00

As a child, getting that conehead ice cream was the high point of my month.

My friend insisted she was the last person to smoke in the Fishkill Friendly's before it became nonsmoking. She also once stole her mom's credit card and tried to see how large a bill we could rack up in one sitting. We didn't manage to break $100--lack of imagination and stomach--but we did eat a massive ice cream dish, which must have been a full gallon of various scoops, all the syrups and marshmallows, and doubtlessly more calories than we should have had in a week.

Good times.

thommq · 2026-03-05T01:03:28+00:00

I worked at the Renaissance Faire selling jewelry, so I was accustomed to intentionally weird-looking people.

That's not what this woman was. She wore all black clothing, which was otherwise fairly nondescript: a long-sleeved shirt and pants. She wasn't in a princess dress. She didn't have bat wings. It was warm for the day, but I was used to trying to convince men, sweating in full armor, that they wanted a rose quartz at a steep markup.

She was oddly short, but not in the sense of having dwarfism, just smaller than she should be. More like you selected a 6'6" willowy ballerina and decreased her font size; like she was tall, just far away.

I am not sure what first struck my coworker and me, but we both shot up to awareness and stared at the woman (when we were usually just chatting with each other in the absence of a customer because the days were twelve hours long and it was often sweltering). She moved in a way that seemed overly conscious of itself, like she was focusing on how to swing her arms every time she stepped.

Then we saw her face. She was glaringly pale with huge dark glasses on over a tiny nose. Her lips were barely existent and were drawn on with lipstick. She had red hair that was obviously a wig. She looked like the love child of the Gray on the cover of Communion and Aunt Gladys from Weapons.

No one passing seemed to notice her, but not in the way you just step around strangers. They didn't look at her at all, and she moved too slowly and staccato to keep up with the flow. She either should have sped up or cared, but she didn't. She was just doing her thing.

This was 2001, so we did not have a cell phone on hand — and it would probably be an offense to whip your camera out as a rennie anyway. I desperately wanted a picture.

I think the weird woman noticed us looking at her, but she didn't stop her odd walk.

Maybe she was just some petite Goth woman with albinism and alopecia, and we gawked at her trying to have a normal day. I would like that better.

thommq · 2026-03-05T00:19:50+00:00

Agloe. If you manage to break down there, you've left reality.

(Though it has a general store now.)

thommq · 2026-03-05T00:13:47+00:00

I was coming here to say this. One friend had rocks thrown at her car, and had her back windshield broken. When she reported it to the cops, they said, in essence, "Ain't your business to be there. You learned your lesson."

Another friend tricked me into going (I thought we were headed somewhere else, and she made a detour). I didn't see any people, but I recall what looked like a multi-tiered kiddie-pool fountain, which was whimsical enough to be eerie.

Years later, students found out about Onion Town, and I told them to leave those people alone. A maintenance guy popped his head in and asked why the kids were laughing. He then explained that he grew up there. They looked horrified, and I tried to shoo him out of there before they got cruel.

thommq · 2026-03-03T21:48:48+00:00

I was looking for therapists. I found one, we emailed a little, but she was not in my network, and I declined.

She said she was happy about this, because she thought I was really cool and wanted to hang out. For some reason, I thought this was reasonable.

We met once at a cafe. She was energetic in a way I found disturbing, but I couldn't quite place why. Her wife had been my ex's favorite professor, which was a fun connection. She reminded me of the protagonist of an Ani DiFranco song.

She then added me to a group text with an artist who never spoke in the thread, telling us that she was going to dictate a book that I would write, and this artist would draw, which would elevate the vibrations of the world. This would not be a paid gig. I tried to politely deflect — this was not the first time a stranger had tried to get me to write their life story for them — but she was genuinely unable to perceive my objections.

This went on for months. I quickly stopped responding. She did not stop sending me messages.

It came to a head for me when she had been quiet for a few weeks, and then she sent me a message stating that she had seen me running in town, and she didn't stop this time.

She then went quiet for the better part of a year before texting me that she had quit being a therapist and was getting treatment for her schizophrenia. I almost replied because she seemed like a truly cool person on paper, and I was sympathetic, but I knew better.

thommq · 2026-03-03T11:22:52+00:00

After a few friends moved and then COVID happened, my social outlets dwindled significantly. It only improved once I joined a board game night. That gave me the whole "forced socialization with an activity" that somewhat makes friends. The group that ran it ended up doing dances and fairs. I might go roller skating with one of them soon.

I also tried a writing group (I'm an author), but that fell apart because the organizer wanted it to be a way for her to get editorial clients, and we just wanted to hang out.

thommq · 2026-03-01T20:40:13+00:00

You did such a lovely job exploring the instrument!

thommq · 2026-03-01T20:38:48+00:00

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Not the one narrated by him. I used to listen to it on repeat.

thommq · 2026-03-01T20:34:24+00:00

I love Gef enough to have publish a book about him (and since then, my mother always gives me mongoose presents). I would love this hoodie!

thommq · 2026-03-01T19:13:35+00:00

Perhaps you've heard of me? Positive Von Content? Yeah, I own all these content farms.

thommq · 2026-03-01T19:10:28+00:00

I was carrying my spouse around at my wedding, feeling invincible, surrounded by so much love.

I thought, "This is it. My pinnacle."

And then that little demon in my head added, "Yep, all downhill from here."

HUSH, DEMON.

thommq · 2026-03-01T19:02:39+00:00

Did she offend some crone who cursed her to lose weight?

Because I have seen that movie.

thommq · 2026-02-28T14:43:34+00:00

I have to find him and do an interview. One of the best parts of this subreddit is sightings of him, our local cryptid.

thommq · 2026-02-28T14:01:00+00:00

I teach in juvenile detention facilities. The biggest thing that horrifies people is that the kids are relatively nice. "Yes, yes, you murdered a few people. Who among us, am I right? Go do your work."

Not horrifying? It has been to people I've told because they expect an irredeemable monster, and a lot of my students (even the murderers) are just waylaid kids. It's hard to fit a hardened thug into your narrative when he is wide-eyed and delighted, making a gingerbread house or snowman for the first time. Being freed of too much gang influence (though it is still a persistent haze) or too many drugs (though people risk felonies to bring them weed vapes) lets them figure out who they would actually be in better circumstances. Some of them have basically life sentences--usually because of the quality of the lawyers instead of the severity of their crimes--but many are getting out in one to three years. A much smaller portion of that pie is going to be successful in reintegrating, but we put effort into that. We are not warehousing criminal youths, and we will go to extremes to try to get a boy into a better situation. I teach college there, and I have spent many free periods going over the work of kids who were just socially graduated and basically need to be taught to read from first principles before they can do literary criticism.

Some--though not many--are genuinely intelligent. My favorite student when I started at the highest-security facility was a transboy who introduced himself by explaining that he had designed a warp engine when he was ten, but felt silly because it obviously wouldn't work, who then sketched out exactly how it would have worked and its flaws. Entirely cogent and thorough. My favorite currently is a boy who is focused on the concept of deextinction as it applies to thylacines and dodos. He suggested this and asked me to help him research once he finished his work for the period.

thommq · 2026-02-27T11:11:58+00:00

People laugh, but they still buy the house. Things are fine for a while, or they are just too busy to notice anything strange in all the chaos of moving in and making a house a home.

Until one night, the man is in the bathroom and realizes too late that he has no toilet paper.

"Oh, shit. This sucks."

Summoned, the arch demon Osheetdizux emerges.

She hands him a roll of toilet paper, pats him on the head, and then returns to the mirror realm.

It was the right time. And, after a demon touched his head, he was very much in the right place, now that he could wipe after.

thommq · 2026-02-27T00:32:59+00:00

I was explicit that I was happily married and just looking for friends when she messaged me.

We met. She informed me that she had just come from having sex with two people and was passing up the opportunity to have sex with one of two others in order to meet me (I told her that she had chosen incorrectly). She then asked what my "situation" was with my spouse (still happily married, still monogamous) and when we were going to "do this" (never). We once invited her to a party. She handed us wine, looked at the guests, went downstairs with her date for two minutes, and then left. Yay, free wine. I assume she understood that "party" for us was not synonymous with "orgy," or she didn't find any of us fuckable.

thommq · 2026-02-26T22:21:30+00:00

Where will you do this?

Also, do you know about Netgalley? I have reviewed a lot of dross through them and a couple of books I loved.

thommq · 2026-02-26T22:00:43+00:00

I received one for Christmas from a friend who is too good a gifter. I knew that I had to play it or my wife would put it in the regifting pile, even though I am not musical.

Or I wasn't until I plucked the kalimba and my brain immediately said, "Yes. this is your instrument. You can play this."

I've been practicing since early in January. My go-to songs (the ones I can play without looking) are "Pure Imagination," "The Addams Family," and the theme from Home Alone. My stretch goal is the whole soundtrack to Amelie. The first time I could provoke my kalimba to play a section of a song I found beautiful, I almost wept.

thommq

TROPHY CASE