Rhonda Shear on USA UP All Night

Ohhhhhhhhh, Rhonda. What a woman. Here's 40 minutes of her being herself.

The Leftovers (2014-2017)

Update: Completed the show. My advice? Don't waste your time.

Season 1: 6-7/10
Season 2: 4/10
Season 3: 2/10

Hey cuntses. I've been watching this for the rather lovely TV challenge. It's one of those shows that's not massively well-known or revered, but has a handful of devotees who consider it the greatest thing since sliced things. Figured I'd share some thoughts...

The premise is that 2% of the world's population inexplicably disappears in an instant. Nobody knows how or why. And the show cleverly doesn't explore or care how or why it happened. It's purely about the fucked-up, destroyed people who are left behind.

Ultimately what we've got is a meditation on grief. Not just sadness or depression, but pure fucking soul-ripped-to-shreds grief. When people are grieving in our world, everyone rallies around them, to drag them back to some semblance of normalcy. Here, there is no normalcy, because everyone is grieving. There's no one left emotionally capable of bringing others back from the edge of the abyss. There's no one left who knows what normal even fucking is. Bizarre, irrational, unexplainable behaviour is the new norm. Weirdness here is not for the sake of weirdness, but because that's the only thing that makes sense in the overall context.

The conventional religions no longer hold any comfort, so people splinter off into weird cults. One involves a messianic charlatan who takes away pain, whilst covertly impregnating hot Asian bitches. Another cult takes a vow of silence and chain-smokes their days away, believing that a forsaken race can no longer place value on trivialities like breath. There's some genuinely profound stuff here, about the desperation for meaning where there is none, particularly poignant given that, at some point, we'll all no longer exist, with no hint available for why we're even fucking here to begin with and no clue what happens after we're gone.

It's all heavy going and exhausting, in a good way. BUT, and there is a big but... the showrunner is Damon Lindelof, the dude who made Lost and the moderately cool sequel to Watchmen. In true Lindelof style, there's threads of faux-depth running through the series. A single issue of National Geographic pops up here and there. Some viewers went to the trouble of tracking down that issue and it contains a bunch of unimportant easter eggs for the show. Like, the main article in that issue is about Cairo, Egypt. One of the episodes takes place in Cairo, New York. OMG YOU GUYS, ISN'T THAT CLEVER??? There's also a random reoccurance of people watching the shitty '80s sitcom Perfect Strangers; a thread that means nothing and goes nowhere.

I've watched the first season, 10 episodes worth, and I'm still not sure if I even especially like it. But I do know that I'm hooked and intrigued to see where it goes. There's a rare combo of weird surrealism and big, earth-shaking emotions at work here - broadly similar to say Twin Peaks or Dark or Six Feet Under. Worth checking out out if you dug any of them. It's strange and human and unique and unpredictable. Oh yeah, and there's also some good tits, a young Margaret Qualley in her undies, and one of the most genuinely brutal kills I've seen in quite a while.

I'll keep y'all posted on how I go in the next 2 seasons, if anyone cares. All I know is, I'm gonna be annoyed as fuck if the whole thing ends up being some lame alien abduction shit.

I can't stand Facebook lately

I know, you'll say, "then get the fuck off of it!" but work gets really boring when I'm on break.

Basically, every other post is Democrat horse shit. I've been blocking them all, but it's endless! So many dumb ignorant cunts out there getting angry at any and everything Trump says or does. Dude hasn't even been in there a month! You can't blame him for inflation. And if I block one, the stupid algorithm assumes I'll want to see more.

Also, every post about superman is bashing Gunn and the actor. Cavill was cool and all, but move the fuck on!

I also block every post I see with AI images of fake movie posters/ trailers. Except the ones making fun of Steven Seagal for being a fat arrogant dickhead. Those are funny.

Zuckerberg is a piece of shit.

Dexter: Original Sin

The prequel series premiered on Friday the 13th with a single episode and will go on for a total of 10 episodes. This was announced alongside the news of a sequel series to Dexter: New Blood with Michael C. Hall returning. Obviously, he has fun playing the part, and he definitely owns it, so why give that up? I'm all for more, and this prequel includes him as a narrator. So far, we're looking good.


This story begins in Miami, 1991. That's 15 years before the original season 1 is set. The casting is phenomenal here. Christian Slater doesn't look like James Remar, but he's welcome anyway. It's easy to move past that, because these characters already feel completely authentic. Foul-mouthed Deb, chuckling Masuka, serious Batista... No sign of Doakes yet, so they must be saving him for later. We may learn the reason as to why Doakes never trusted Dexter.

This pilot episode expands on a subplot from a season 1 episode featuring Denise Crosby. Fleshed it out a bit more.

I wasn't satisfied with the New Blood finale, so I'm glad this series had its fingers crossed and is undoing it. And you know what? It was a very good episode. I forgot that Dexter used to be a great show.

Fun Fact: The pilot was directed by Michael Lehmann, who directed Christian Slater in Heathers.

TV Show Challenge 2025

I'm veering away from the runtime method this time. Hopefully this will be easier to tally.

From February 1st to 28th
Watch as many TV episodes as you can

Score points by episodes watched:

• Less than 30 minutes = 1 pt (2 if FTV)
• Greater than 30 minutes = 2 pts (4 if FTV)

• Full season watched = +0.5 pt per episode
• Full series watched = +10

Mark your SPOT.

Anti-Turkey Challenge 2025 - RESULTS

Despite a slow start, congrats to Ballz for running away with the first Anti-Turkey challenge. Also, fair play to Troma for coming second by watching a bunch of movies he would never otherwise have watched - The Dark Knight? Deadpool?!. Zed probably got more points than me because I am sure he hasn't included any FTVs in his total but hey, I did keep reminding him... Hope you all (well most of you) enjoyed participating - Any favourite FTVs or a particular movie you enjoyed rewatching? Any movies you watched that you considered to be overrated? (STFU zed about Tokyo Story!).

Here are the final scores:

Ballz - 186
Troma - 153
Markus - 130
zed - 123
Ninja - 91
Box - 77
Nicko - 48
Zombie - 9

Anti-Turkey Challenge 2025

So a brand new challenge and a slight revision of the rules. Using IMDb, the idea is is to watch as many movies as you can rated 7.0+. Well, ideally 8.0+ but see below as to how I will try to encourage this...

1. Scoring:
8.9+ = 6 points
8.6-8.8 = 5 points
8.3-8.5 = 4 points
8.0-8.2 = 3 points
7.5-7.9 = 2 points
7.0-7.4 = 1 point

2. FTV = 1 point

3. Can be any genre.

4. Trifectas: franchises and directors only however they only apply to movies rated 7.5+
A movie can only count towards one trifecta. For example, the "Dark Knight" trilogy can be either director or franchise but not both. If you decide to count "Dark Knight" as a franchise trifecta and then watch another Nolan movie like Inception, you will need to watch another two of his movies 8.0+ to count as a director trifecta.
Trilogies such as The Godfather can be counted in the "franchise" rule but not something like Leone's "Dollars" trilogy because they are too loosely connected.

Single trifecta: 5 points
Double trifecta: +7 points
Triple trifecta: +9 points
Etc.

5. Movies with a rating of 6.9 or under do not count.

6. Running time must be at least 60 minutes.

7. Starts 00:00 1st January and ends 23:59 31st January in your respective time zones

So come on people, grab a spot and get watching some of those classics or to some, overrated movies!

Also, please use the discussion thread or the shoutbox for questions.

Eruption (book) by Michael Crichton and James Patterson

You guys, I am about a third of the way through this book right now. I'm mentioning it here because I am wondering if it might have been partly inspired by Return of the Living Dead.

I won't wreck it, but one of the things going on in the book involves old, semi-forgotten canisters of dangerous chemicals, which were caught up in a complicated bureaucratic screw-up by the army over a period of many years. The canisters ended up being stored in a dangerous location, overseen by people who at first only have a hazy idea of what the canisters hold, or how they (the canisters) got there.

Also, the chemical is called Agent Black, but they specifically say that it came out of the same research that created dioxin, and also they call... not the chemical itself, but a molecule that it can create as it is broken down in certain contexts, 2,4-D. All of this makes me think of 2-4-5 Trioxin, from RotLD. Maybe 2,4-whatever or 2-4-whatever are extremely common starting elements in the names of chemicals. I have no idea. But, I can't help but think of RotLD, given the various parallels.

If the canisters leak, things in the book will get pretty apocalyptic. I don't think that will happen, as far as I can tell from my sense of what is going on in the story. But it certainly could happen. We shall see. The apocalypse that would happen if the canisters broke would have nothing to do with zombies, brains, or paramedics, but it would be pretty damned bad.

Anyway. Yah. Had to share. I'm about a third of the way through the book, and so far I would recommend reading it! I think it will stay interesting and suspenseful. The authors, of course, know/knew what they are/were doing.

Tokyo Story : The greatest film ever made

ranked #1 on Metacritic's Filtered "Best Movies of All Time"
Tokyo Story at the top of his published list of the best 1000 films ever made
#1 2012 Sight & Sound Directors' Top Ten Best Films Ever
#215 on IMDB top 250



With stats like this, Surely worth a watch
You're in luck its on youtube

A fucking brutal nightmare

No, that's not the name of a movie I saw, I just had a really brutal nightmare.

My nightmare was set in my apartment, in my bathroom, until right at the end.

Basically, I was in the shower, shampooing, and suddenly I just knew (like you just KNOW things in dreams) that an ex-girlfriend had just let herself in. That wouldn't have been so bad, but in my dream this ex-girlfriend had become a vampire. She could get into my apartment because I had invited her in lots of times.

Soooo this presented problems for me.

Suddenly, very suddenly, she stared pounding on my flimsy bathroom door, and then started stabbing a hole through it with some kind of heavy duty huge btcher knife or machete.

I stumbled out of the shower as fast as I could, naked, of course, with tons of shampoo foam from my hair getting in my eyes and all over the tile floor, together with lots of water from the shower, which was still running full blast. I did not have my glasses on, of course. So, not only was I basically blind from not having my glasses on, but I could barely open my eyes anyway because the shampoo foam kept getting in my eyes, and it REALLY stung. Also, the tile floor was basically a completely frictionless surface, because there was like half an inch of hot shower water on it, which was full of very sudsy slippery foam from the shampoo.

In the real world, if vampires really existed, she would have got me. I wouldn't have had a prayer.

But in the dream, somehow I slipped and slid toward the door, got my back up against the front of my toilet, and pressed my feet against the bottom of the door to keep it shut. My vampire ex-girlfriend was still stabbing a hole in the middle of the door, but she couldn't get it open.

I started trying to talk her out of killing me, or turning me into a vampire, but she didn't want to hear it. She just kept stabbing through the door. I kept trying, but it wasn't working.

My back was killing me, because I had it pressed really hard against the front of the toilet. But, all I could do was press it against the toilet even harder, so my feet could keep as much pressure as possible against the door.

This mostly happened in the space of just three of four seconds, with the problem of being on a wet, frictionless surface with no weapons while totally naked was a massive part of the ordeal. I guess it took a little longer than that when I was trying to talk her out of killing or envampening me, but everything else happened very quickly.

Then I saw that she had made the hole in the door large enough to look through. She did that, she looked through it, and she had spooky light vampire eyes like in lots of movies.

Then she stepped aside and let some other girl look through the hole in the door, and it was some totally new girl that I didn't even know was with her.

That was the last straw. I knew I didn't have a prayer, and that I would probably be either dead or vamped out in the next few seconds.

Time for drastic measures.

So I jumped to my feet, pushed off against the wall, and skedaddled across the floor back into the shower. I pounded on the wall on the far side of the shower as hard as I possibly could, and managed not only to pound a hole through the wall, but to avoid any electrical wires that may have been in there. I clambered through the hole out into the public hallway on the other side, that all the apartments on my floor share.

Luckily, in my dream there was a window at the end of the hallway, and it was pouring (poring??) sunlight into the hallway. Soooo...

I was safe.

In real life of course, I never could have pounded a hole through the wall. Maybe when I was 18 or 19, I guess. There was a year or two around that age when I was trying to be like Herschel Walker, and I did so many push-ups over a period of many months that I became capable of walking all the way around our house on my hands. That included going uphill!!!! Try doing that sometime, it was really hard. Anyway, at that time in my life maybe I could have just beaten my way through a wall, but not anymore. Except in dreams, apparently.

Anyway. Yah. Had to share. Somehow, I bet that was inspired by The Substance, just because it was in a bathroom, and being naked on the floor was a big part of it.

That could actually make a decent scene in a horror movie I imagine.

OK! Had to share. I now return you to your regular lives. Kirk out.