PicoBlog

Trigger warning: I will be talking a movie plot that contains murder and suicide. Just for your own reference in case you need it, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Line at 800-273-8255 or text TALK to 741741. Love you. <3 A look back on films, both theatrical and made-for-TV, that have slipped from the pop cultural collective consciousness over the last thirty or so years. Most of these will be from the late 70s through the 90s, though not exclusively.

Hello there! Here we are again. For anyone who needs a refresher, every other week is Forget About It Friday, and here’s the deal: A look back on films, both theatrical and made-for-TV, that have slipped from the pop cultural collective consciousness over the last thirty or so years. Most of these will be from the late 70s through the 90s, though not exclusively. Do these movies hold up? Have we forgotten them for good reason?

Turns out I’m in the minority for last week’s fun tradeoff - 72% of you said you would choose the beach over going to the lake. This week’s question is, would you order pancakes or waffles? Loading... This week, I’m joined by two fabulous guests - Josh Lawson and Yoel Roth. Josh was a colleague of mine at Facebook and is now doing work with the Aspen Institute on AI, elections, and trust.

Happy Friday, Friends. I am still catching up from my time at home during my dad’s illness and passing (and probably will be for a long time), but I am going to resume the weekly Q&A’s, starting today. What I am not going to resume just now, however, is my study on Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclicals. I promise we will eventually get to the last encyclical, Caritas in Vertitate (“Charity in Truth”), but as I announced on Instagram, between my dad’s death, being behind on everything in life, and a significant change in my babysitting help (I’m only going to have four hours, instead of twelve hours, of help a week for the next month), I need to let something temporarily go for the sake of my sanity.

Singing played a constant role in the lives Columbus, Ohio natives Nannie “Penny” Sharpe and her brothers Donald, John, and William “Preston” Coulter. Now known to the world as Penny & The Quarters, the four siblings always found a way to make music together, no matter what the occasion. “We’d sing all the time, in church, in the house,” Sharpe told Sean Michaels in a 2011 Guardian interview. “We’d stand around, helping whoever’s turn it was to wash dishes that week, singing together.

It is a staple song of childhood across generations, a mixture of music and lyrics that are simple, uplifting, and enduring. “You Are My Sunshine” has brought countless reasons to smile.  Undoubtedly, many of you can sing the chorus from memory: You are my sunshine, my only sunshine You make me happy when skies are gray You’ll never know dear, how much I love you Please don’t take my sunshine away

I’ve been thinking about Mads Mikkelsen almost daily since February 5th, 2021, when I stumbled out of a press screening of Another Round in a giddy daze. I was reminded of how powerful an actor he is, how strange, how funny, how unique. I recently published an essay on Rough Cut about how intoxicating Another Round is. The exhilaration I left that screening with was incredible, but also felt vaguely dangerous — after two years of sobriety, the final scene of Another Round made me consider drinking again.

As I get older, explicitly political questions interest me less and less, and I’m motivated more and more to write about human conditions that are, in a sense, pre-political. I feel that intensely when it comes to the various conversations that we’re having about the role of digital technology in our lives. Here’s a piece about how you don’t need to have actual human conversations, anymore - you can just let ChatGPT talk for you, farming out the most basic and essential of human endeavors to a batch of code that has no consciousness, morals, or accountability.

This was basically the second most popular/most read article I ever wrote for The Witches’ Voice, back in 1997. Surpassed only by “You Call it Easter, We Call It Ostara” (but I think that was because people liked to argue with my theory about balancing an egg upright at the moment of the Equinox). In many ways, not much has changed for modern witchcraft culture at Hallowe’en. This is still the time of year when everyone wants to focus on scary movies, visit Salem, and interview a witch for an article (or, these days, a podcast).