+1 for the Dark Tower books.

But I’d note, there’s a dramatic tonal shift between the first half and the last half.

After book 4, you lose the flashbacks to Roland’s youth and it’s a straight through narrative for books 5, 6 and 7.

I think the accident that almost killed him put the fear of god in him.

Hey, I’ve been doing this 30 years and just learned it today, you have NOTHING to feel bad about. :)

Or cheese.

We made treatment voluntary, addicts aren’t choosing it.

Too busy protesting pipelines that have nothing to do with Oregon is my guess…

Portland in general is a problem because people will protest anything and everything. They have no real value here.

Is it wrong that my first reaction is “Sigh, when does the protest start?”

I could see vegan activists protesting the meat and cheese and homeless activists protesting the $35 entry fee and food waste in general.

The thing is, it’s not one off shoplifters. It’s organized gangs of shoplifters.

Police will run enforcement actions from time to time, but it needs to be continual.

March: https://youtu.be/pKx-ZW1Juyo
April: https://youtu.be/__rktMVPMN4
August: https://youtu.be/kwOmqJDZeBA

Security is told explicitly not to engage because Target is afraid of lawsuits.

2 people + snacks, I’m lucky if it’s ONLY $50.

You better have your operations in order!

Now, when it comes to “Marvel regurgitation”, yeah, they could, and should, be doing better. They essentially re-use the same basic plot over and over again and will keep doing it until they hit one that doesn’t make a billion dollars.

I’m a lifelong comic book fan and I love that nerd culture is finally taking over, but I swear to god, I don’t need another superhero movie where the hero and villain have a joined origin story and the villain is just a bigger, badder version of the hero.

Seriously.

Iron Man - Iron Monger
Incredible Hulk - Abomination
Iron Man 2 - Whiplash
Thor - Loki (both sons of Odin)
Captain America - Red Skull
Avengers - Loki + Alien Invasion

Iron Man 3 - Extremis
Thor: Dark World - Dark Elf invasion
Captain America: Winter Soldier - Bucky
Guardians of the Galaxy - Ronan - First one to break formula.
Avengers: Age of Ultron - Ultron joined origin with Vision.
Ant-Man - Yellow Jacket

Captain America: Civil War - Avengers vs. Avengers
Doctor Strange - Kaecilius
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 - Pete’s Dad
Spider-Man: Homecoming - Vulture, Pete’s girlfriend’s dad.
Thor: Ragnarok - Hela, evil firstborn sister.
Black Panther - Killmonger
Avengers: Infinity War - Tying it all together.
Ant-Man and the Wasp - Ghost, a victim of Pym tech.
Captain Marvel - Yon-Rogg
Avengers: Endgame - Tying it all together.
Spider-Man: Far From Home - Mysterio (Stark Tech villain vs. Stark Tech hero)

I recognize that Christie isn’t exactly Shakespeare, but why adapt a book and change literally everything about it?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallowe’en_Party

It’s not in Venice, the house is not haunted, there’s no seance… I guess some of the names are the same?

He’s forgetting movie history…

Back when television got big, cinema had to evolve to survive. The aspect ratio went wide.

This Is Cinerama was more of a tech demo than anything else in 1952, but it was followed by widescreen movie, movies in 1953 with “The Robe” being shot and shown in Cinemascope.

Technicolor too gave a more vibrant color scheme even than previous color film processing that actually came a generation prior, in 1932.

But the widescreen/Technicolor combination provided a must see experience that were the event films of the era and they couldn’t be duplicated at home.

Roll forward 50 years… home theater technology has evolved to a point where theater has to compete with 65" 4K television displays and 7.1 Dolby Atmos surround sound. People need a reason to leave their homes and deal with noisy, disease infected, crowds, high concession prices, expensive tickets, and annoyances like having to pre-pick your own seats instead of just walking in and sitting down.

Streaming is keeping people at home, being able to binge long form content, pausing when necessary. Cinema can’t provide that experirnce.

So it’s going the other way, the “theme park ride experience”. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the first Pirates of the Carribean movie hit in 2003, pre-dating the wave of comic book movies by, what? 5 or 6 years? 50 years after the first Cinerama movies?

But even that has roots going back to Jurassic Park (1993), Star Wars (1977), and Jaws (1975).

Now, don’t get me wrong, I dearly love “small” films like Scorsese’s After Hours, or even modern stuff like Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, but there is ZERO compelling reason to see them in a theater. I can get the same experience viewing them on my home theater setup without, you know, blowing $50 to sit in a noisy, uncomfortable theater.

To do THAT, I NEED a spectacle. I need to see something that demands I see it right away, in a theatrical environment. It needs to be a theme park ride.

If your end goal is to make a tight knit drama full of people in rooms talking to each other, well, Downton Abbey and Bridgerton are over there ->

Calm Rick sounds spot on, angry Rick not so much.

Morty sounds pretty good generally but there was one line that sounded off…

Still, given the circumstances, I don’t know what else they were supposed to do…

“Hey, it’s us, Rick and Morty! From a dimension where our voice actor wasn’t caught grooming children!”

I would love to teach again, but aside from the fact that, physically, standing and talking for 8 hours a day is outside my reach now, I would also take probably a 66% to 75% paycut to do it. :(

And he’ll probably be out in 18 months or less.

We’re getting our first “atmospheric river” tomorrow and I could not be more excited.

How To Beat The High Cost of Living:
https://youtu.be/9-77VpXSygs

Text encoding is SUPER basic and anyone looking to get involved in Linux or scripting absolutely should know that stuff FIRST.

Source: I was teaching Linux 23 years ago before it was cool.

Here’s a good primer:

ASCII:
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/ASCII-American-Standard-Code-for-Information-Interchange

URL encoding:
https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.ASP

Entity encoding:
https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_entities.asp

Really, ALL of the W3Schools stuff is just fantastic. Anyone remotely interested in this stuff should start at the beginning there and work up.