April 2026

In its founders’ own words, XOXO was “an experimental festival celebrating independent artists and creators working on the internet,” and its final edition, which included Cabel Sasser’s charming tale of going all the way down the rabbit hole of a painting that caught his attention in a McDonald’s in Washington, took place in 2024. I attended XOXO in 2014 and 2018 and was impressed on both occasions with the extraordinary care that went into the… See more →

Whatever the Exorcist II apologists may tell you, its legendarily scatterbrained attempt to rationalize the irrational is not something to aspire to, even more so if you’re unwilling to match its level of sheer lunacy. Supernatural mythology, especially in Eastern traditions, is a lizard-brain beast with little use for reason, but like that ill-advised Exorcist sequel, Ringu 2 attaches electrodes to its spooks, making a fairly simple story of ghostly revenge into a drawn-out thesis… See more →

In this Ringu sequel, which was released at the same time as the first film, almost every noteworthy survivor of the previous installment is killed off pretty much right away, and we soon start to learn that the series’s cursed-videotape shtick is a lot more complicated than everyone thought. The nature of that complication is revealed, as Hemingway would say, gradually, then suddenly, and I won’t spoil the cuckoo left turn it takes in the… See more →

Our protagonist finds a cursed videotape that kills the viewer a week after they watch it, so she starts using her skills as a journalist to get to the bottom of it, and then almost immediately hands the whole project over to her ex-husband so she can rest her little brain, because she is, after all, just a girl. Oh, and her ex is able to unravel the mystery in fairly short order due to… See more →

Matilda Lutz was the lead in this movie the same year she was the lead in Revenge, and I kind of wish I could do to this movie what she did to the dudes in that movie.

I was pretty unkind to The Ring when it came out in 2002, going as far as to make regrettable use of the R-word, and upon rewatching it a couple dozen years later, I was pleased to find myself both more amenable to its silly urban-legend premise and less intent on having a strong opinion about its unremarkable execution. The movie is nothing special, but it’s a perfectly inoffensive way to spend a rainy Saturday… See more →

Philly being Philly:

Within the first three weeks of the delivery robots’ arrival in Philly, videos emerged of people sitting on them, graffitiing them and eventually kicking one over.

And it’s not just Philly:

A quick web search produces a long list of examples of people being filmed or filming themselves attacking robots.

Buy why?

In Ouellette’s dissertation, “From Fiction to Friction: Abusing Autonomous Mobile Robots,” she created conditions to try and find out what motivated subjects… See more →

“I’m not mad, just bewildered,” says Kate Beckinsale about halfway through Tiptoes, a deeply weird cinematic act of little-people advocacy. You might assume she’s talking to the agent who got her the lead in this well-meaning misfire, but the line is actually directed at Matthew McConaughey, who plays her fiancée, who as it turns out is the only Matthew McConaughey-sized person in his extended family, all of whom are otherwise affected by dwarfism. This includes… See more →

Anil Dash makes the case that we’re running out of time to save the last vestiges of the open web from the big-tech robber barons’ multifaceted (but mostly AI-shaped) rampage, which probably isn’t news to anyone who actually understands what’s at stake, but his post does a good job of enumerating and describing the threats for those who don’t.

Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go… See more →