2 min read

Wolmania - Friday, August 13, 2021

I watched The Suicide Squad last week. It's not great cinema or even particularly good, but it's probably the best version of what it is that it could be - meaning it's very gruesome, very irreverent, and more or less pointless. In my view, that's 100% fine. Comic books don't have to be meaningful or artful (although they can be!), and comic book movies don't either. Sometimes you just want a fun diversion that you never have to think about again, unless someone decides to write about it in the newsletter you haven't gotten around to unsubscribing from yet. "Empty calories" get a bad rap.

The above does, I admit, seem to contradict my opinion that it can be really fun to take frivolous pop culture seriously and dive deep into all its nooks and crannies. But I'm just saying, if think calling a film a "popcorn movie" condemns it, you're woefully incorrect.

The new Mortal Kombat was terrible, though.

Goblincore: the fashion trend that embraces ‘chaos, dirt and mud’

Goblincore: the fashion trend that embraces ‘chaos, dirt and mud’

Sales of clothes and accessories featuring mushrooms, snails, frogs and worms are booming, but why now?

Item 2: a list

The five senses, ranked

  1. Sight
  2. Taste
  3. Hearing
  4. Touch
  5. Smell

Item 3: a media recommendation

'White Lotus' HBO: Inside its $9,000/night 'hotel from hell'

'White Lotus' HBO: Inside its $9,000/night 'hotel from hell'

I've been really enjoying The White Lotus (currently unspooling weekly on HBO), which is a deeply uncomfortable semi-comedy about terrible rich white people irritating each other, exasperating the locals, and overall just doing everything they can do ruin a beautiful place. (Probably not a metaphor that can be extended at all.) Also, the soundtrack is great.

Anyway, if you haven't watched the show yet I would recommend that you do so before reading this article, but it did amuse me that the Four Seasons didn't necessarily think this one through:

“They were happy for the business,” White said of the Four Seasons. “But the fact that this is now the visual for the hotel from hell probably escaped them to some degree.”

Item 4: a photograph

“An aurora is seen streaming above the Earth from a window aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience on April 19, 2021. The ISS was orbiting 271 miles above the Indian Ocean between Australia and Antarctica.” - via NASA (apologies for linking to El*n M*sk content - click through for numerous other great SPACE PIX that Grimes had nothing to do with)

Thank you for reading. Hope to see you, but not smell you, soon.