Number Go Up

I’m only halfway through this book, and the author has already gone from innumerable parties of insufferable “crypto bro’s” and NFT suckers in the US  and Carribean (the funny parts), to the edge of Cambodian forced-labor complexes where victims of human trafficking are forced to lure marks into sending them bitcoin—so far the only successful real-world application for cryptocurrency (the unfunny parts)— to El Salvador, where almost no one will accept Bitcoin, despite the president’s naming it an official currency.  I got the Kindle edition after watching this interview.  The book is just as entertaining, if not more.  Highly recommended.

Black Books

We’ve been re-watching this series from around twenty years ago.  Just as hilarious second time around. Very bastardly.  More highlights here.

Throw Money At It

I’ll be watching Glass Onion, on account of I liked the first one in the series. Netflix blew $450 million on two installments of the Knives Out franchise, presumably because the initial film cost $40 million to make, and did over $300 million box office.

Good luck recouping your investment!

Netflix also shelled out $1 billion with a “B” for The Rings of Power, which is Tolkien content from his sparse writing about the Second Age. I can’t imagine how much The Silmarillion would set them back.

Anyway, as a true Tolkien nerd I’ll say it’s comically off. Not just “hey we’ll edit George RR Martin a bit and Game of Thrones will really zip!” but “we’ll compress centuries of characters into shit that never happened or makes sense and people that never interacted and throw Weta Digital and 20 VFX houses at it.”

Supposedly the Tolkien estate signed off on it but it’s hard to believe. Maybe as a non-Tolkien story it’s fine for some people, but I wouldn’t know as I already know who the major characters are and bring all that baggage to it.
[n.b. I realize you all hate Tolkien, but I love his prose and his attention to detail, layers, and backstory. The Elven languages were created because he felt that gave a “whole cloth” feeling to the stories. For me, it works. I appreciated LOTR more after reading The Silmarillion.]

Pitch Meeting, as always, succinctly captures whatever the hell is supposed to be happening.

With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?

June 10th! According to Louder Than War

When we lost one of the UK’s most remarkable singer/songwriters Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks in 2018, we also lost the chance to hear him tell the stories behind some of the songs we love so well, or so it appeared.

However, in 2020, recordings surfaced of a series of long, personal and in-depth interviews between Pete and close friend Louie Shelley. The two had spent hours discussing details of Pete’s life, moving song-by-song through Buzzcocks’ output to reveal his memories of the punk explosion and how he came to write songs such as ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)’ and ‘What Do I Get?’.

Now, to be published in print for the first time and with the blessing of Pete’s estate, these conversations offer us the chance to hear one of the finest songwriters of a generation in his own words at last.

FUN FACT: That cover is based on the 45’s cover art, which is based on Duchamp’s Fluttering Hearts, as described over the phone to the art director!

It’s A Team Effort

Just started reading No Country for Old Men last night, and somehow stumbled onto this video while eating breakfast. It’s a script-to-screen comparison of THAT scene. Brilliantly written, adapted, directed, acted, costumed, lit, shot, edited. It all has to be there for it to work this effectively.

Best YouTube comment regarding Chigurh’s motivation for the coin toss …

I think he would be fine with it either way. The way he sees it, it’s just. The coin makes the decision not him. If the coin says heads then he should be pitied, a worthless peasant able to finish out his life. If its tails, he should be despised for his weakness, a waste, and removed from the earth. Chigurh understands this, that he is both, and the coin simply dictates the action to be taken. So it doesn’t matter either way. There’s always a reason to kill him and there’s always a reason to spare him. So the coin will sort it out.