Chris Grace

For decades now I’ve thought about following soccer, but had no idea what team to root for. I thought about Tottenham for awhile because I really liked Steve Nash and he supported them. I didn’t want to choose a team that is the equivalent of the Yankees or the Lakers.

I sort of forgot about this for a while.

But today I saw this picture:

And here’s the thing, I love those colors and that windbreaker. And it’s hilarious that it says “Hollywood” on it (followed by the word “bets” but I can’t read that). So I googled who it was and it’s a team called Brentford. The warmup jackets are available for purchase (although they don’t have the Hollywood Bets sponsorship on them).

And ah, synchronicity! I’m going to be in London next week, and my hotel is only 1 mile away from the Brentford home stadium (and thus, their merch store).

This is a pretty shallow reason to root for a team, but aren’t they all, in a way? I asked ChatGPT to tell me what NBA team Brentford is most similar to and it said they are a smaller club that only recently got to the Premier League, so they are most similar to the Memphis Grizzlies and the Toronto Raptors, two teams I don’t love but I do like, and they seem like scrappy clubs to cheer on and so yeah, if I can find a nice piece of Brentford merch while I’m there, I’m going to get some.

Then all I have to do is learn the names of the players, coaches, history, lore, and develop an interest in watching soccer!

I found that very disappointing.

I really wish Molly’s face was the last thing I saw in this film.

I think there is probably a very complex proposition for the women in the real life circumstances of the film… surely they knew what was going on, but they had to survive in an environment where a lot of the perpetrators had insidious power and direct influence over the mechanisms that would have created the potential for justice.

As opposed to just gritting their teeth and suffering for three plus hours.

as pulled from the Rolling Stone Top 150 Science Fiction films:

1. Under the Skin
2. Alien
3. The Thing
4. Everything Everywhere All at Once
5. Galaxy Quest
6. Annihilation
7. Inception
8. Children of Men
9. Contact
10. Tron

With honorable mentions to

• Serenity
• The Fifth Element
• Blade Runner
• Dark City
• Sunshine
• Total Recall
• Looper
• The Fly
• La Jetée
• Stalker

This was tougher than I thought to make! Every movie in my top 10 is my favorite example of that particular kind of movie, although notably I clearly have a soft spot for sci-fi horror considering my top 3. The only exceptions to that are Contact and Tron… I’m not certain these are the best movies but they are the ones that I have and will continue to re-watch over and over for my whole life. A movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey which I recognize as an all-time great movie, conversely, isn’t one I’d necessarily consider a personal top 10 or one that I would seek out to watch these days, despite its clear greatness.

… Marlon Brando was still alive so he could accept the Best Actress Oscar for Lilly Gladstone.

… Greta Lee was nominated.

… France had submitted Anatomy of a Fall for foreign film.

… Celine Song was nominated.

… Margot Robbie was nominated.

… Greta Gurwig was nominated.

… Teo Yoo was nominated.

… More movie years were like 2023… I’ve seen 6 of Best Picture nominees so far and they’ve all been terrific.

It looks really cool, way too expensive of course.

I did think about: if you can sense that someone else is wearing one, you could present your physical body to them in a specific way. So they are seeing the real world through the passthrough vision, but then it’s supplemented by whatever virtual decisions they’ve made.

And maybe eventually it would be considered rude to look at someone’s actual physical form instead of respecting their vision of how they want to present themselves.

Our normal, regular bodies would be considered naked, even with clothes.

Of course it has to be damaging, to keep adding layers of separation between one person and the next. I read that even the millisecond-long delay of Zoom audio pinging back and forth between human beings makes the interaction that much less satisfying.

But it does look cool.

clarifying for myself why some platforms are bad.

I was looking at a video podcast that originally started being about personal finance. And I was brought to them because they had an interesting interview later on with a psychologist talking about gaming.

Then I noticed they had Matt Walsh (the awful hate-pundit, not the comedian) as a guest. And there were people in the comments saying, “I really wish this podcast would go back to what it was originally about.”

But that won’t happen, because the more this podcast brings in guests that get people riled up, the more views they have. They have no incentive to go back to what they originally focused on (personal finance) because the views won’t be there.

People just do what systems encourage them to do (for the most part). They’ll go towards having more divisive guests on because it’s “successful” in the YouTube world.

Just a long way of saying my new Blood on the Clocktower gaming streams are going to have George Santos on them from now on.

I resumed a job that had stopped because of the actors’ strike today. Very surreal to be back. But nice to see people, who uniformly asked me how my solo show had gone in the interim.

Also, I got crafty, a snack (acai bowl), a lunch, and another snack (tacos). And unlimited Coke Zeros.

It doesn’t take much for me to be happy!

I am most surprised that May/December seems to have made no impact. I was really hoping Charlie Melton would get a nomination.

Also I think it’s odd that Greta Gurwig was not nominated considering the sheer singular vision that went into Barbie.

There’s not enough accolades to go around.

(Oppenheimer will probably win everything.)

of time skips sideways

into the little crack between floorboards in the house you grew up in

where a penny got stuck

and the hole in the mortar between the bricks around the corner of that house

where you stuck the rolled-up note paper on which you had written

secrets for the future

and instead of time going step-step forward

it lurches to the side

dodging a punch from Glass Joe

whose eyes turned yellow

but you knew what was coming

you went back to find the note

but the house was gone

and so were the secrets

my name is Chris

my pronounces are he/him

i guess I got to know the people here mostly through some mutual friends

i’d like to have fun and i like to drive at night

once I was driving on a dirt road near a lake, and I looked in the darkness and saw two eyes glowing back at me

once I was driving from Texas to North Carolina and I was very sleepy and I drank a lot of caffeine and while it kept me awake it also caused me to shake and to hallucinate. I saw two telephone pools and I thought it was a giant deerstag encroaching on the highway. I panicked and pulled over

one time a man pulled a gun on me and my friends in Channelview Texas and we ran away

it’s nice to meet you all