Posts made by GreenFlashlight

@alamias Sorry. I'll shut up.

@ganymede said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

We are introduced to Peter as he uses his advanced degree to flirt with hot college girls; Ray is the busy-body spouting off his theories; and Egon eccentrically gathers the evidence and builds the machinery.

They're also, like, objectively bad at what they do. Peter's flirtations only work on children half his age; as soon as he tries that shit on an adult, she shuts him right down. Ray's theories are so useless that he has no idea how to apply them to the ghosts he interacts with. Egon's inventions are a threat to his own life and limb, either about to drill a hole through his head until someone with sense stops him or causing him to back fearfully away from the radiation his own weapon emits. As paranormal investigators and eliminators go, they're just one step above Abbott and Costello.

The only reasons they can achieve success are because the technology is so simple only a colossal asshole like Walter Peck can screw it up, and because the big bad is an utter doofus. That all probably sounds like criticisms, but it's a comedy and that's the whole joke! The punchline is basically, "Lookit these horny idjits! What a parade of nonsense!"

My introduction to Ghostbusters was actually the cartoon. I first got into it because I realized Venkman was being voiced by the guy who voiced Garfield* but I stayed because I was terrified of the dark as a kid and I loved the idea that human science had advanced us to the point that we didn't have to be afraid of the dark any more, because we could just call an exterminator to come deal with the pests. Afterlife feels more like a sequel to the cartoon series than the movie, which I guess is fine, but to me it feels about as wrong-headed and try-hard as a reboot of He-Man that tries to present this guy as a serious villain, and who'd do that?

Pictured above: existential threat to all creation.

*Holy shit, I just put it together. Is THAT why they got Bill Murray to voice the CGI Garfield movies? It was a Lorenzo Music joke?

@ganymede Okay. May I ask what you see it as?

@ganymede I agree Paul Rudd elevates the movie every time he's in it. I'm sure the Baskin Robbins thing is a coincidence, but I still find it very funny to think about. But as for what I mean... okay, spoilers.

***semi-detailed discussion of plot points of Ghostbusters: Afterlife***

I don't think I'm being reflexively negative here. I don't go to movies looking for a bad time. I'm a big fan of the attitude that it's more fun to like movies than to dislike them. I really do think that if this hadn't been a Ghostbusters sequel, if it had been Stranger Things vs. Cthulhu or something, then I'd have been all about it. I just can't get my head around putting that story in this franchise.

@ganymede I have a soft spot for the franchise too, and that's kind of why I feel so negatively about this movie. I'm trying to be vague here to avoid spoilers, but, like, if they announced a Seinfeld reunion show that turned out to be a slasher horror with all the characters twenty years later now trapped in a murderhouse with Newman as a serial killer, that would be roughly the same feeling I get from Afterlife.

And I like Phoebe, I truly do, but I was grinding my teeth in the theater from the effort it took not to shout at the writers, "You cowards, just say the word ***minor spoiler for coded character trait I honestly could be inferring too much from but I'm pretty sure***

So uh, I kinda hate the new Ghostbusters movie? And I feel like the only thing that they would have had to change for me to like would be to not make it a Ghostbusters movie, just make it a Cthulhu movie with a cheeky wink-wink Ghostbusters reference here and there.

You ever buy all the stuff to make jambalaya, go to the fridge to pull it all out, discover the thought of cooking is too exhausting to deal with, so you just start eating the sausage cold straight from the package while wondering if this is a sign you might be getting depressed?

A year or two ago, I complained about how hard it was for me to play Starfire on a comics game because most of the other players, most especially her teammates on the Teen Titans, refused to play with me under the assumption that because they didn't know me, I was going to play her like a character in a bad porno. That was a bummer, but at the same time it felt like their refusal to play with me was doing me a favor. It wasn't because they were jerks or elitists or bad people or whatever, but because playing with then would have been a bad time for me and for them because of their attitude.

If the other Teen Titans don't want to play with me because I'm not part of their clique, then good! I'm glad they helped me to dodge that bullet instead of letting me stand in front of it.

If the other Teen Titans don't want to play with me because they have no spoons, then also good! Sucks for me, but it would suck worse to be a silverware thief.

All this talk about how relationships with other hobbyists should be transactional feels really weird to me.

@macha said in Dead Celebrities 2021 Edition:

You know how when you're forced to listen to things again and again.. you resent it? Yeah.

The Beatles.

@roz said in Dead Celebrities 2021 Edition:

...sorry i wrote a lot.

Shush with your apologies. I specifically asked.

I see why the article you linked says he had very few peers.

@roz Would you like to talk about his contributions to someone who doesn't know theater, so would be duly impressed by all of it?

A bad lip reading of Dune 2021.

@macha said in The Work Thread:

And they want me to deduct the bits and pieces of time today I had to take to deal with sugar crashes, as leave without pay, even though they expected me to be at my computer every second.

The words "fuck off" do not adequately convey how much your bosses need to fuck off.

Finding the needle I dropped last week. Shit.

@arkandel Thank you for being there for your baby. His life was better because of you.

@wizz I haven't watched the show, but here is a fairly concise, informal discussion between two professional reviewers, one of whom is well-versed in the source material and one of whom is not. Their consensus seems to be it's a mixed bag but better than not.

@testament I have something very similar. Chafing my arm with my other hand helps quite a bit, if you think it will work for you.

@tnp I could buy it being for gay boys more easily than for straight girls, but some of them say in the title of the reaction that they're for straight people.

On the other hand, Sappho and her friends.

This isn't really a peeve. I just can't think of a better place to put it.

Watching compilations of reactions to WLW TikTok thirst traps has led YouTube to believe I want to watch compilations of all orientations of TikTok thirst traps. I don't like to shoot something down before I tried it, so I tried it, and what I most feel at this moment isn't distaste or confusion but a sense of being outside; alien; alone.

It's not that the material there isn't sexy to me. I never expected it to be. It's that it's so unsexy to me I sincerely can't tell whom it's meant to be sexy for. Do straight women really like videos of shirtless men flexing their abs while pretending to receive a beejer, or is this what straight men think straight women find sexy? I didn't think I was so far removed from straight people I can't even tell who is the intended audience for their attempts to flirt with one another.