Well that was a spectacular read in your link, keep calling attention to it, 'cause it’s gonna be a constant drip-drip-drip of people finding out. I didn’t know, but starting today, I’m gonna experiment with SearXNG as my primary search engine, see how that goes!

I’d be on a Toast, eating Boat… or wait… is that the other way around?

Toat Boast.

There, now that’s better.

Marketing can be such an immoral, insidious process.
And it takes thousands of people pushing this shit mindlessly, because hey… “It’s just a job, right? Nine to five”.

Physics/nuclear literacy in the general public around the world is lower than bad, even many scientists from other fields seem to be genuinely uninformed or misinformed, then posting wrong and often alarming interpretations in social media, which laymen give weight to because “it’s coming from a scientist”, never mind that their expertise may be in areas of biology or astronomy, nothing to do with the subject they are posting about. And they themselves might have gotten their bad info/interpretation from other figures in academia.

The philosopher of choice for mediocre self-entitled pricks with delusions of grandeur everywhere.

Ooh… capsaicin-powered hot take!

Back when Australia was still remote and exotic, before Crocodile Dundee even, a lot of people back in the day thought he sang:
“He just smiled and gave me a bit of my sandwich”,
which would have also made for a fantastic lyric in a very silly way.

My recommendations to you are as follows:

My favorite Altman film overall probably might have to be The Long Goodbye. Check out how the camera is always moving, if even slightly; there are no static shots. Midway through the movie, the great Sterling Hayden steals the show. And keep an eye out for a very, very young Ahnold Schwarzenegger in a bit role as literal and figurative muscle for the batshit insane bad guy.

Brewster McCloud is a bonkers twisted fantasy that caught me by surprise by how much I enjoyed it, it’s about a kid who:

1. Lives in the Astrodome in secret, in a forgotten construction nook, a big one, between walls and floors.
2. Wants to be able to fly.
3. Is being encouraged by an older woman, who might actually already know how to fly.

Also, there are people being killed all over town, and it might have something to do with all this.

Altman came in throwing punches with the noisy background and chaotic dialogue wafting every which way, right from the outset, on MASH and McCabe & Mrs Miller, which is why it’s a good idea to watch his films with English subtitles turned on.

I don’t remember the cacophony being as intense in some of his other early works, like Brewster McCloud, California Split and The Long Goodbye.
But in Nashville, it’s most certainly there, front and center and in your face.

a multi-character parallel storytelling style that is only ever celebrated amongst industry snobs

I’m going to agree with caveats here, because some directors who are actual artists do it for the sake of the film and the challenge of it, as opposed to what I’ll refer to as “industry types”, who do it for the prizes. And some crazy bastards manage to pull it off. Three names come to mind - Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Soderbergh.

I’ve never seen “Crash” and never wanted to, from what I’ve read, the bland yet heavy-handed results onscreen, plus the lazy reflexive accolades, made me view the whole thing with a cynical eye, like you.

In fact, Robert Altman had a thing or two to say about those “industry types”, in his triumphant early-90s comeback film “The Player”.
Also, do yourself a favor and watch Altman’s “Short Cuts”, to see parallel storytelling at its’ best.

I’ve seen Shadows, Faces and The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie.
The man nearly single-handedly invented independent highbrow cinema in the United States, a gritty and bare urban realism that is as artistically important as the French Nouvelle Vague.

To put it in an oversimplified way, without Cassavettes there is no Scorsese as we know him.

Does this sound like the prototypical clickbait headline title, or what do you say?

Remember when the web didn’t suck?

No, I don’t. Not since 2000, when I logged on from home for the first time. The majority of it has always sucked. Then the web can suddenly do new things… and finds new ways to suck.
It has, however, always had excellent little areas and corners.

I’m gonna go off the beaten path a little here and go with Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild”, chances are the guests haven’t seen it and that film is one helluva ride, it’s got a little bit of something for everyone - comedy, romance, thriller, you name it.

I read the original Foundation trilogy, then all the ones in the Robot, Empire and Foundation series in order of publication, followed by the Benford/Bryn/Bear trilogy.
Then I went back and re-read the original Foundation trilogy, and it still stands out as my favorite thing Asimov ever did.

I gotcha, I was just thinking how Patreon has been vital for nurturing a vast digital ecosystem of content creators who are in it as a labor of love.

EDIT: typo

The same goes for a lot of YouTube channels.
In fact, I opened a Patreon account just to show a little monthly support for an excellent, criminally underrated creator of videos on astronomy and its’ history, ParallaxNick.

Among other topics, the guy recently finished a four-part series on Galileo, a two-parter on Kepler before that, a single on Copernicus before that. By my calculations, I’m guessing a six-part masterpiece on Newton is right around the corner.

The point is to give someone vulnerable a full life, with safety and warmth.
From your perspective, time went by too fast; from their perspective, it was a long and peaceful lifetime, they were incredibly fortunate to have someone like you.

Also, there is an implicit assumption we carry around that to be immortal is some sort of blessing or state to aspire to, while it may very well be that being mortal is itself the blessing.

In my opinion, the highest tribute one can pay to a departed friend and companion is to again open one’s home to another vulnerable creature and make him/her family.

Do it in your departed friend’s memory and honor. If you could communicate again with them, you would let them know this is part of their proud and gentle legacy, to reduce suffering on the world - “Look what you did, by being who and what you were for me in life, you opened the door for someone else when their turn came.”

This is what I have done, and do not regret a minute of it.

Have you ever been to an oil and air filter warehouse?
Some are more common than others, but there are hundreds of different types, and some of them vary by a millimeter in diameter from the more common ones.

They couldn’t design the inlet to fit a pre-existing filter already in circulation, no sir, instead of any sort of compatibility they felt compelled to make up their own fucking specification and parameters that varied by a tenth of a percentage point.

That can only be the work of engineers, and from the looks of that oil filter warehouse, or from the different types of electrical sockets, the contrary bastards are everywhere, they REFUSE to meaningfully communicate with each other, and will NOT listen to reason.

More recently, look at crypto. For every well-meaning and thoughtful endeavor like Bitcoin or Ethereum, there are ten thousand shitcoins. Many are just greedy con jobs, but many are also due to stubborn and petty, noisy squabbles over minutiae. Suddenly the whole damn space was a hive of useless noise and confusion.

Yet one more item in an endless exhibit of how mankind is unable to standardize anything at all. Get TWO engineers together to agree on ONE standard plug and the assholes will come out with THREE separate plugs, completely non-compatible with each other, of course.

It’s almost like a miracle that we got the world to agree on certain things like time and timezones, a system of coordinates, the metric system.
All of them received initial pushback, and some to this day. Noisy, noisy fucking humans.

Did you know that for a few decades, every town in the UK kept two different times on adjacent clocks? Back when their railway grid was expanding everywhere. Local time and London time.