Max @max@smeap.com

Velveeta is vegan right? There’s no way dairy products stay that shelf stable for that long. I’ll admit I’ve been cheating by adding extra Parmeesian cheese on top of the Velveeta Shells & Cheese, but I’m still not convinced the Velveeta itself is dairy. Weird kinda gross, but super convenient, American industrial by product, sure. But dairy, how exactly?

It’s a Saturday. It’s almost sunny (mostly not), and somewhat warm (not really), and so large mobs are out roaming my neighborhood it seems.

Heard one group excited to be “up from Jasper” (TN? MS?) and another comparing how early it was still “back home” in what sounded like MST.

Good for local businesses, I guess. Not great for my anxiety, sure.

So the “twist” from the other movies (and book) mentioned was making it far more explicitly about drug use, which hugely weakened its stakes, most of its attempts at believability (it broke my suspension of disbelief in critical ways), and greatly watered down the emotions of the ending, in my opinion. Overall, not a great movie. Watch the others, I guess.

So everything about this film seems a retelling/clone of Simulacron-3/Welt am Draht (World on a Wire)/Thirteenth Floor including some shared imagery (the way pools are shot), with a couple subtle bits of ExistenZ body horror thrown in. Yet there is no “Based on” or “Inspired By” credits. I’m not sure if writer/director Cahill thinks we are fools or doesn’t want to point people to the better versions that were cribbed from?

Cracking up at discussions of Indiana as a place no one would want to go to or live in unless forced to by a secretive war time government project. 🤣

So around this time last year I was still eating out every meal. People were worried about some sort of Chinese virus or something, so I was particularly eating at favorite Chinese restaurants like twice/thrice a week. They were mostly empty and felt like family. In a couple weeks everything went weird, of course.

This week I made a simple stir fry with store bought Hunan sauce. It’s not the same. It reminds me how much stuff changed. I’m eating alone at home. I miss restaurants.

So in the middle of some sort of zombie/monster apocalypse thing a pair of protags get assigned a bunch of fetch quests by some scientists group culminating in the formation of a “yellow sauce” for telekinesis.

Advice: Maybe don’t drink the yellow sauce no matter how many super powers it is supposed to grant you.

Protag partner on the final yellowing ingredient after gagging: “What? They said I had to quickly up the water content and I didn’t have a lot of other options.”

This show is super cute. I love that a show set about Central Park is a weird Broadway Musical in sitcom form with a fourth wall breaking busker as a narrator. It’s so smart, it’s dumb. Dumb fun.

Given the names butternut squash and watermelon exist in the English language, why don’t we call cucumbers “watersquash” for consistency?

Freaky was fun.

Started LDR: EoT. Forgot it starts with Cruise as a sleazeball PR Major, hah. Also, recognize Berlanti-verse/Doom Patrol Cyborg in J Squad, hah.

I didn’t see a deal on a copy of Edge of Tomorrow aka Live. Die. Repeat. but maybe after Freaky I’ll check the price on it, as that was the only obvious one remaining on today’s initial suggestion list

Decided to help me get through the work day today by watching Groundhog Day and as many time loop (Groundhog Day-likes) movies as I felt like. Vudu had deals on Groundhog Day and the two Happy Death Day movies (in a bundle with Freaky, which I’m curious about) anticipating this plan, presumably.

I watched all three of those and Palm Springs again (on Hulu) in between.

Probably mix it up and watch Freaky next.

Anyway, at some point I remember taking some of the better parts of SHOW.BAT, excising some of the “extension points” that made it a menu launcher, and a lot of the kitchen sink that SHOW.BAT was into a smaller, lighter SHOW2.BAT. I seem to remember it kept that uncreative name even after I think I lost the original SHOW.BAT in a system migration.

Don’t know what prompted the memory and I know those files are gone and useless today. Funny story now

Falling asleep I half remembered I used to have this folder cobbled together over a couple years called SHOW2.BAT

IIRC, the original SHOW.BAT was a sprawling mess I made of a menu system that was sometimes a launcher and sometimes like a partial implementation of what Unix less does, but by a tween me who has only used DOS and was duct taping together EDIT.COM, MORE.EXE, and a few other things in a warbling mess of a BAT file (and maybe QBASIC).

Stonks

If first aid is so good, why not second aid?

This week's gender, the last currently in the fridge, is a "lowfat" (oops) watermelon sherbet (dairy based, so especially whoops on the "lowfat", I expected a sorbet, I guess, now I know better what the difference is) with chocolate chips.

It's a delightfully cute, fluffy "baby" pink, with dark chunks, and not quite as tasty as it looks.

Is this a metaphor? I have no idea

I don’t know what I was expecting in a party to save Danny the Street, but I certainly wasn’t expecting the Sex Ghostbusters to show up 👻

Had a crazy anthology of dreams about the Jurassic Park scientists have been keeping themselves busy with during the pandemic

I found the first two episodes hilarious.

At least one friend was annoyed by “bad sitcom episode” and yeah, seems hard to be a good satire of bad sitcom episodes and not be a bad sitcom episode. Definitely understood why they bounced.

Also had fun shouting every time a SWORD logo showed. SWORD!