I contacted Brainfuse for assistance with my resume. It’s promoted by public libraries including all three public library systems in New York City (New York (three boroughs), Brooklyn, and Queens).
I submitted my resume through the Resume Lab. “To receive the best personalized feedback, please include some details about the job or purpose for your file. If you have any additional comments or areas you would like us to focus on, please let us know here.”
My introductory message read as follows:
I need help getting my resume past artificial intelligence. I had my resume analyzed by TopResume, and their interpretation was functionally illiterate. It interpreted my top skills as the following: clients, real estate, career development, medical sales, public health, search engine optimization, seo, solutions, web design, public relations, architecture, human resources, adobe premiere, advertising, customer service, customer service representative, mimi, proofreading, receptionist.” Some of these are mentioned not even once on my resume. Others are mentioned only in proper names. Indeed has stupidly inquired why I don’t have a real estate license, an architecture license, and don’t have pediatrics on my resume, the latter simply because I wrote an article about a pediatrician. I have a BA in English and communication and an MA in film and media. These are the fields in which I would prefer to work. The most frequently mentioned words on my resume are writing and editing. “Mimi” and “architecture” appear once each and are somehow deemed more important by the AI, so anyone who tells me that quantity of mentions is the issue doesn’t know what they are talking about. I mention editing 17 times and writing 16 times, but those weren’t deemed top skills. I am medically limited to desk work and was hospitalized for my back two weeks after commencement for my master’s degree. I became homeless in 2012 for lack of interviews because the Social Security Administration said that because I can do desk work, I am not eligible for Disabilty. I left the shelter system in 2020 on a CityFHEPS voucher, but my work was sporadic. Editing for independent projects rather than a publisher, listed as freelance work, as well as low-level, low-wage office work that I don’t put on my resume because I don’t want it, and it won’t get mr off my dependency on CityFHEPS, either. This resume is kind of a template, but when some job search sites stupidly allow you to use only one resume, this is what I use, and it doesn’t work. Over the eight years of my homelessness, I applied to 4,083 jobs, interviewed for 33 that were mostly scams or temp service intakes with no jobs available, and got eight short-term jobs. I haven’t filed an income tax return since 2018. For low-level office work, I mostly used a resume developed for my by Melissa Gallego at the SIBL, which was no more effective at getting me interviewed for those jobs than this one was for jobs I might actually want. So many of those eight jobs are too high-level for such a resume, and not including them leaves a gap. I’ve been told not to lie, leave a gap, or put things irrelevant to a position on a resume. I do not think that it is possible to do all three. Certainly there is no way for me to do both the latter two, as they are mutually exclusive.
They promise a 48 hour turnaround time. My first attempt was sent at 1:41 AM on Sunday, April 7, and I received this message from Sarah Wheeler at 7:01 AM the same day:
Dear Student,
For specific questions about your paper, please resubmit through the Brainfuse Writing Lab. Thank you for choosing the writing lab, and best wishes with your revisions!
I waited 48 hours, hoping that that was a mistake, and that my resume would eventually be addressed. I resubmitted my resume again through the Resume Lab, looking for a “Writing Lab” and not finding one. This time it was April 10 at 5:40 PM. At 7:41 PM, I received the same verbatim message from Sarah Wheeler. I contacted customer service.
Sent: 4/14/2024 9:58 AM
To: “info@brainfuse.com” <info@brainfuse.com>
Subject: Resume LabWhat is the point of having a Resume Lab submission form if you are going to tell people to submit through a different form that I couldn’t even find on the page? Where is this “Writing Lab” where I am supposed to submit my resume?
Attached are screenshots of the nonsensical form message I keep receiving and the dashboard that doesn’t include what I’m being told to do.
On Sunday, April 14, 2024 at 11:18:26 AM EDT, Brainfuse Info <info@brainfuse.com> wrote:
Hi Scott,Thank you for contacting Brainfuse.
In this circumstance, the Writing Lab and Resume Lab are interchangeable. If you would like further feedback on a resume, you can submit it through the Resume Lab or connect to a live JobNow session later today.
Thanks,
Brainfuse
At 12:31 PM, I wrote back:
Apparently you didn’t bother to look at the attachments because your response is not addressing the fact that I got a form response telling me to resubmit my resume with the writing lab. I didn’t take a screenshot of the second one because it was verbatim the same as the first. Please tell me how to submit my resume without getting a form response. It’s been seven days since I first submitted my resume lab and have received nothing except that form message.
On April 15, at 7:59 AM, I received the following message:
Good morning Scott,
Thanks for clarifying, you are correct. We are having your submissions rechecked by our JobNow coaches and you will have them returned to your account.
Regards,
Brainfuse
At 9:49 AM, I got a response from Holly Griffin:
Just as a note, this is formatted more as a CV than a resume, and CVs are only used when you are applying for an academic, scientific, or research position. This is way too much information when you are applying for something that is not top-level executive or any of those things I listed a CV is used for. If you are doing a resume, you only want to have six bullet points per position. They should start with action words. The dates need to have the full month written out, and you need to put the business name and city/state under the job title. If you want to focus more on accomplishments than daily duties, you may want to do a functional resume where you list the top 10 accomplishments from the info below. You don’t list job titles, business names, dates, or daily job duties. I honestly think that is what you should do because this is way too long otherwise. There is a link at the bottom of the response page that shows proper formatting. Also, you do not want to cut anything that you have done over the past ten years.
My resume opens with the following skills summary:
Versatile writer, editor, proofreader, and video editor. Expert on New York City’s homeless and housing crisis and frequent panelist at housing forums with state and municipal policy makers, law students and national press. Collaborated on educational board game and comic book. Adobe certified web designer.
She suggested changing “homeless” to “homelessness” and add “an” before “educational,” things I had previously deleted on “wasted real estate at the top of your resume” grounds. She also included Brainfuse’s one-pager on CVs. For failing to respond to anything in my message, she gets a grade of D-.
On Tuesday the 16th at 8:35 AM, I received a response from Tahirah Greene, who gets an absolute zero and needs to be fired for laziness and incompetence. She included Brainfuse’s one-pager on resumes rather than CVs, but offered three tiny bits of advice that were all completely wrong. The first was to pluralize “games” in my skills summary, a falsehood made clear in the details because I mention having worked on only one such game, Trustville. The second was where I wrote “Promoted to adjunct professor in 10/09, teaching one first year composition course. She wrote, “the correct preposition would be ‘on’.” If I had intended that to mean “October 9” rather than “October 2009,” I would have written “10/9,” not “10/09,” so the correct preposition would most certainly not be “on.” The only other “correction” she made was to tell me that I should not have used a semicolon for clarity in a serial list, but a comma instead. As Grammarly puts it, “You can use semicolons to divide the items of a list if the items are long or contain internal punctuation. In these cases, the semicolon helps readers keep track of the divisions between the items.”
On Wedenesday, April 17, I wrote the following message to Brainfuse customer service:
So I got two responses. None of them addressed any of my questions in the message. Holly Griffin gets a D, and Tahirah Greene gets not only an F but a zero. Hers had only three notes–one a pluralization that would be dishonest, one a misunterstanding of a month and year as a month and day, and one telling me to change a semicolon that was included for clarity. That was no more helpful than the one telling me to resubmit it a different way.
As of this writing, I have not received any response from Brainfuse. I forwarded my messages to the New York Public Library to inform them what an atrocious service Brainfuse is, as my Brainfuse login is with my NYPL library card, but I have also not received a response from them. I wrote on one of their Brainfuse flyers at the Stavros Niarchos branch that it was a scam, but it was taken down within the day. I had left my cane in the bathroom after a protest in fron of the governor’s office a few blocks away and needed to come back later to retrieve it. While “scam” may not be the right word because library patrons are not directly charged for using this services, it’s probably a similar situation as Eddie Harris Men’s Shelter. I accused them of embezzling taxpayer dollars on this blog on October 9, 2012. The New York Post reported on December 16, 2019 that Frank Boswell, CEO of Bushwick Economic Development Corporation, which runs Eddie Harris Men’s Shelter, had embezzled taxpayer funds that were supposed to be used for the benefit of the homeless but instead used to line his wallet with a $651,000 personal salary.
Now the shitlibs on Twitter are telling me that I want to use the k-word and even the n-word because that have so little hold in reality and the fact that their favorite president’s commitment to genocide will cost him the election and set the country back 100 years. Their refusal to hold his feet to the fire for anything progressive as they promised to do before the election is just part of their pack of lies to excuse their refusal to primary a guy who likes to have our infrastructure crumble so that he can use our tax money to murder Arab children. The Trump supporters are so stupid that they shout “Genocide Joe” at Trump’s rallies when Trump has been clear: “Finish the job” is as genocidal as anything Biden has said.
This was a response to a post about terminologies we can use to flag far-right/fascist propaganda. I disagreed with “bankers” and “Rothschilds” and agreed with “globalists” and ” Holohoax.” Facebook’s stupid bots must have taken “Holohoax” out of context thinking that I endorsed the term. This is the kind of stupidity that results from having bots identify keywords out of context. Any human can see that I was not defending use of the term, only agreeing that it was a fascist dog whistle while disagreeing with two other terms. I seriously doubt the original poster was trying to entrap people into getting 30-day suspensions for listing dog whistle terms.
Facebook doubled -down on their idiocy. 100% of people who agree with them are incompetent and deserve to be homeless.
I wanted to screenshot Macdonald Stainsby’s original post to show that the objectionable terms were in it and to prive the context in which they were being discovered, but I couldn’t find it, suggesting that if “Holohoax” is used without scare quotes, unnecessary in a list format, triggers an automatic suspension. This is so stupid. I’d rather that they didn’t suspend people who use this term in earnest so that we know that they are racist and have zero credibility. I don’t necessarily expect Facebook to change their policy on those who use the word on earnest, but I do think it is extremely unreasonable to suspend people for discussing its use as a term by those on the political right.
Facebook’s policy seems to be, “If I lie about someone enough times, it should be enough to get them convicted, especially if I can prove that an offensive word appeared in one of their posts.” I’m lucky the suspension isn’t permanent. It’s never the posts that I think risk a suspension that do it. It’s always something posted innocuously and in good faith.
Update: MacDonald Stainsby was shocked by my suspension but disagrees with me about “Rothschilds.” They are mentioned several times in the correspondence between Frederick Engels and Paul and Laura Lafargue, and they have come up in many an Occupy meeting, especially by Tony Buontempo, who is Jewish in his mother’s side, where it counts. I was wrong about him not using quotation marks, but even in context this has to be a punishment for not using them because in the context I used the words, they might as well have been.
SPIDER-VERSE by Dan Slott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I recommend reading this book in the Chronology’s order listed in the front instead of the order they laid it out in or it will be very anticlimactic. I don’t know why they didn’t lay it out in chronological order.
I have mixed feelings about this one. The premise is pretty ridiculous, especially with Spider-Man having previously been rooted in science fiction. I’m not referring to the multiverse. I’m referring to the Inheritors following a Master Weaver who orders the universe and feeding off spider totems. That aspect is more fantasy-horror and doesn’t really work so well, even in a shared universe where Spider-Man and Doctor Strange co-exist, and it’s the real driving force of the story, which seems partially to exist to kill off characters introduced in What If that could have been left well enough alone, including the six-armed version, and the one from 1601, which opens the book, and at first misleads you that the book is laid out in chronological order.
I particularly liked the writing of Dennis Hopeless and Mike Costa. The latter even used third person narration in the familiar way of the comics I grew up on that comics seem to rarely use these days, although if Ben Reilly is the nerd he supposedly is, he probably wouldn’t confuse electrocution with electric shock. An example:
When Jessica’s training kicks in, the color drains out of her world. The fear, so alive insude of her in her younger days, is mastered, stuffed into her belly and frozen, like Steve Rogers taught her. In that clinical cold, she sees Ben Reilly, graceful and reckless as a hart in the woods. Supremely confident, he turns through space, red and blue, like the paintbrush of a virtuoso, always moving. (Scarlet Spiders #1)
I have to think that the reason we don’t get prose like that in comics much anymore is because the writers can’t do it or can’t do it well. The illustrations are generally consistently good, and there is style variation, especially in the Edge of the Spider-Verse stories that really should have been closer to the front of the volume, introducing many of the characters like Spider-Punk (Hobie Brown–the Prowler in the mainstream Marvel Universe) and Lady Spider (May Reilly of Earth-803–a steampunk 1895). Peter David seems to be suggesting a bit of romance between her and Miguel O’Hara (Spider-Man 2099), some of the few spiders who are genuinely unrelated to each other. I had no idea from
Spider-Women
that Silk (Cindy Moon) was “the Bride” and giving off pheremones that make her and Peter struggle to resist each other, but thst’s why I went back and read this. But back to the illustrations, there’s even a visit to the world of the 1960s cartoon that thoroughly replicates its art style (Dave Williams), but not to the visiting characters, including Miles Morales. Christos Gage sets up that that world’s Spider-Man might be racist only to have the punchline not be shock that Miles is black but that he is a high school kid. The Spider-Man that got me interested, of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, is one that gets killed off.
There are some powerful moments here, including Mayday Parker coming to the conclusion that she is now Spider-Woman rather than Spider-Girl (a tearjerking moment) after her confrontation with a version of Uncle Ben in a reality where he became Spider-Man but gave it up after his Peter Parker died. Dan Slott refers to Spider-Gwen as “your new favorite,” but I feel like she was underused here, probably to build anticipation for her own series.
While the order of the books is anticlimactic, it does give it a triumphant moment as Miguel and May reactivate Leopardon (the robot from the Japanese live action series from the 1970s), which we already knew was going to happen because of a moment earlier in the book.
Like I said, there is a chronology in the front, but it’s confusing because it sort of follows it until it doesn’t. It starts with FCBD 2014, Superior Spider-Man #32-33, and Spider-Man 2099 (vol. 2) #5, then goes into The Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 3) #7-15 without a break, although the footnotes telling you to go to the other series, presented here like supplements, are retained, as the groups split up on side missions. So reading the book cover to cover was a mistake on my part, but encouraged by the confusion of starting chronologically and then not doing so.
Dan Slott was clearly having fun with this story, especially as Peter Parker and Kamala Khan fight the Kree villain Dr. Minerva (created by Scott Edelman) in ASM #7. There’s some retconning here claiming that Kamala went into a shell to get her powers. The idea of Inhumans going into a shell was not introduced until the
Inhumanity
event and absolutely does NOT appear in
Ms. Marvel: No Normal
. The other writers seem to take it more seriously. The final punchilne between Peter and Cindy mocks and deflates the sexual tension between the characters.
I am entirely in the right. Facebook is entirely in the wrong, and anyone who disagrees is an ableist bastard.
UPDATE: Facebook actually admits that they fucked up!
Jonathan Glazer accepted his Academy Award for Best International Film for Zone of Interest, a German-language British production. Zionists are posting lies all over social media claiming that he renounced his Judaism. They are clearly hoping people won’t play the recording because they either suck at interpreting the English language or are (more likely) deliberately misquoting him. He said “we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” That means he doesn’t want his Jewishness or the Holocaust being used (“hijacked”) to justify a genocide. Zionists are really making themselves look bad by claiming that he denounced his Jewishness when the video is available for everyone to see that they are lying. These are probably the same people who mock me for having an English degree, when I am clearly more competent than they are. If they truly believe that he denounced his Jewishness, they have atrocious reading comprehension skills, and if they’re deliberately misquoting a widely available speech, they are announcing their own lack of integrity to the world.
They stood and applauded because writers, actors, and directors generally have good language skills and understood what he said.
This was totally debunked by Amensty International’s analysis of Operation Cast Lead in 2014, which showed extensive evidence that ISRAEL used human shields and NO EVIDENCE that Hamas did so.
It’s sick that so many people would elect to distort Glazer’s speech. Even Variety has shed all integrity and deliberately misquoted his speech:
This person is an editor at Newsweek. She deserves to be terminated and spend eight years homeless like I had to. Such flagrant lies from a “professional” should not be tolerated for a moment.
I pre-emtively messaged Seth Barron at the New York Post predicgting that he or another of their writers would also publish vile misquotes of Glazer. I haven’t scene Zone of Interest, but having giving his underrated reincarnation film Birth a 10/10, I am certainly looking forward to it. I understand that the film depicts evil as banal rather than in an unrealistic and melodramatic way. I remember reading about a TV movie about Adolf Hitler in which the filmmakers wanted to do as realistic a portrayal of him as possible. Zionist lobbyists didn’t think Hitler seemed evil enough, so they demanded that a scene be added where he kicked a dog, even though historians know that Hitler loved dogs, and that there is no evidence that he ever kicked one. This does a real disservice to the audience. If you try to constue evil in melodramatic terms, it makes it all the more difficult for people to identify real-life evils when they see them. That people are not seeing evil in what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, when it’s far from banal, certainly is an object lesson.
Last night I saw Иди и смотри/Idi i Smotri/Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985), a Soviet film about Nazi Germany’s brutal destruction of 628 villages in Byelarussia (now Belarus), including setting a wooden building full of children on fire, huge piles of bodies, and especial torture for anyone they identify as a Jew, which they usually calla “Yid.” The Nazis are also depicted equating Bolshevism with Judaism. It frequently appears on lists of the greatest films of all time. Apart from the fact that Byelorussia is largely taiga rather than desert, and the houses are rustic assemblages of wooden boards looking very primitive by 1943 standards let alone by 2024 standards, I saw little difference between what the Nazis were depicted as doing in that film and the daily footage of what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank (wigth no “Khamas” excuse in the latter. Every defense of Israel I see now seems to be to be pure racism/tirbalism. “It’s our turn to commit genocide” is never an appropriate response from a people experiencing a genocide. In fact, if your tribe has experienced a genocide, your willingness to do the same to anyone else makes you all the worse. No one should know better the evils of a genocide than those who have gone through it. Of course, no one currently in the Israeli Occupation Forces experienced it directly because they’re too young, but I have heard many at Unity of New York, which many Jewish people attend, compare it to the abused child growing up into an abusive parent. Many, of course, deny that there is a genocide despite the fact that the International Court of Justice has stated that there is credible evidence of a genocide even though they have yet to make a final ruling. Still more deny that there is an occupation, even though the United Nations declared in 2018 that it it still meets the international law definition of a military occupation. It is also legal to resist a military occupation under international law, which challenges the labeling of Hamas as a “terrorist organization.” When you disagree with them, they smear you as a “Jew hater” if you’re not Jewish and a “self-loathing Jew” if you are Jewish. These are irreligious people with no conscince. David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin self-applied the word terrorist to themselves, and Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism was an atheist, as are most Israelis apart from the Hasidim who claim exemption from the military, simply want a safe place to study the Tanakh, often stand up for Palestinian rights and get abused by Israeli police for it. Israel rejects diaspora and diaspora languages such as Yiddish. Jonathan Glazer is correct to say that his religion and culture were hijacked.
Addendum:
This despicable Christian Zionist sounds a lot like she is calling for a “final solution” when she days, “finish the job!”:
Based on they’re own rhetoric, they should be forced to spend a year in the New York City shelter system. I want to see them go to Franklin Avenue women’s intake in the Bronx and see how they handle a year of homelessness.
I have now twice attempted to apply for a new Fair Fares card since December. The first time it timed out because they want the supporting documents sent through the AccessHRA app.
The AccessHRA app is one of the worst apps I have ever had the displeasure of using, particularly when it comes to submitting documents. All the documents they need from me are now paperless to avoid additional fees. They provide two options for submitting documents, taking a picture and uploading. This sounds normal enough, but the problem is that the upload function is an extreme failure, and I can’t imagine why it would be that way except at the behest of some imbecilic or obnoxious suit. It doesn’t seem like something that a tech person would ever do unless instructed by the client.
The failures:
- Failure to accept PDF files.
- Failure to accept PNG files.
- Failure to accept JPG files.
Indeed, when the list of files popped up for me to select to upload from my phone, every file I saw was pale and did not respond to clicking.
I was advised to go to HRA’s office on 16th Street. I resubmitted my application for Fair Fares and got to the point where all I needed to do was upload my documents. I showed the worker the issue I was having with these file types disabled from uploading. He advised me to open the files, take screenshots, and upload those. I don’t think they were clear enough to read, but I did the best I could with my welfare phone, and when I went to upload them, they were clickable for upload when nothing else was. That’s the fourth failure on their part. Failure to train their workers. I think the guy was just guessing. I find it frankly ridiculous and unprofessional on HRA’s part that I should have to upload screenshots of documents rather than common document file types.
This arrived in the mail today:
The document I submitted was page four of my December Vanguard statement, which states that my income for 2023 was $7,940.73. The maximum income for an individual to be eligible for Fair Fares is $12,880. Clearly I am under that threshold, as I received the last payout of the Creatives Rebuild New York stipend yesterday. I can’t see how this document could be “incorrect” unless they couldn’t read it, and if they couldn’t read it, it’s entirely their own damn fault for insisting on a screenshot instead of a pdf. They know that most of their clients are on welfare phones that aren’t going to do this well. To make matters worse, while service providers such Urban Justice Center and New York Legal Assistance Group are allowed to submit documents by e-mail on a clents’ behalf for CityFHEPS, they are not allowed to do the same for Fair Fares for some bureaucratic reason they would or could not explain.
As clients of HRA, we often use the metaphor that they make us jump through hoops for them. If we have to spend money printing out our documents just to take a picture on our phones for them, that’s a ridiculous hoop. The whole point of going paperless is to avoid fees. Why should we have to incur a fee for a printout that is just going to go into the recycling as soon as we’ve taken a picture? There’s no good argument to be made for this, and I would love to see whoever made this decision be forced to try at risk of their job, especially surrounded by environmental activists.
They haven’t removed any of the insulting languages that Zionists have used against me, such as accusing me of getting my ideas about the Israel-Palestine situation from a crack pipe. They need to stop abusing their terms of service and claim that they use the same rules for everyone. Clearly it’s based on their political ideology of neoliberal capitalist Zionist.
Now I have been suspended because the word “moron” is supposedly a threat, while “Pinochet helicopter ride” is not, accord to them. This is clearly an example of Facebook’s pro-genocide agenda. David Zaremsky, who blocked me weeks ago, claimed that the footage of Israeli leaders calling for genocide was not evidence of Israeli leaders calling for genocide.
My response was absolutely appropriate in context:
Facebook’s continued violations of its own terms of service should seriously get them seized and nationalized.
This is clearly targeted harassment of me for opposing the genocide in Palestine, particularly considering that they have decided to give me consecutive punishments for each comment, with a small repreive in-between to make me think that I’m in the clear.
But of course, David Zaremsky is perfectly welcome to smear me as a liar for sharing the footage. They’ve suspended me in the past just for using the word “liar.” How can they argue that they “use the same rules around the world for everyone?”
Criticizing Zionists is clearly their biggest no-no. Remember, Facebook said that someone telling me that I am not human and deserve a Pinochet helicopter ride did not break any rules. That is proof of the arbitrary and capricious nature of these suspensions.
David Zaremsky claimed that it’s Hamas propaganda that Israel is holding anyone hostage and called me “Jew hater” and “terrorist sympathizer” for saying so.
It’s not bullying or harassment to call people stupid when they have used abusive language toward you simply for reporting facts. You know who else is stupid? Anyone who can’t see through Israel’s “I’m an innocent victim. You just hate me because I’m Jewish” act. News flash: no one cares if you’re Jewish. People care that you’re committing atrocious and not only lying about it as most countries do, but smearing and gaslighting (“everybody is lying except us,” “Pallywood,” “That’s not video evidence–it’s Hamas propaganda”) people about it as well. Zionists are Nazis who learned their lessons from Joseph Goebbels well. My undergraduate course on nonfiction cinema used Eric Barnouw’s Documentary as a source. It covered Joseph Goebbels extensively, but it damn sure wasn’t using his work as an instruction manual, particularly since it contrasted him with John Grierson in the same chapter.
My suspension lasts only through February 1, but its brevity doesn’t make it any more legitimate.
“Stupid” is a correct and proper term for whoever or whatever enforces Facebook’s community standards. Being consistently wrong this many times is either stupid, deliberate, or both.
“We use the same rules around the world for everyone” is clearly a false statement. They need to be taken to task for this ridiculous claim.
Navient needs to fuck off. They’re harassing me because they wanted me to send proof that my taxable income had not changed since last time I got the income-based repayment plan. It needs to be on them to prove that my income has changed.
This woman is constantly citing reputable news sources throughout the video.
This is why you most vote Green. Biden and Trump both support this. Any vote other than Green (or Socialist) means that you support child abuse and murder with impunity on the basis of ethnicity and unpracticed religious claims.
Marvel Masterworks: The Incredible Hulk, Vol. 6 by Roy Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I feel like Cory Sedlmeier dropped the ball in editing this volume by not including Captain Marvel #20 and #21, which lead into The Incredible Hulk #130 (and the latter issue is clearly footnoted in this volume), but this volume already contains 13 issues, and two more may have been pushing it. The two stories dovetail perfectly thematically, as it parallels Rick Jones and Mar-Vell’s attempt to separate themselves with each other from the temporarily successful attempt of Bruce Banner to separate himself from the Hulk. Cutting off the volume at #129 would leave the volume too short, and there is not a good narrative pause again until then end of #134, a satisfying conclusion to the volume as Hulk helps a fictitious country by becoming his own version of the legendary Golem (the cover implies thast the Hulk fights the Golem, but the Golem appears only in two panels of flashback) so it may have been the only way to keep the volume at the right price point. (It didn’t help that I was not able to get Captain Marvel vol. 2 through interlibrary loan, and reading those two issues on the subway via comiconlinefree.com was a shore in itself as I struggled to get the pages to load.)
Peter David once said that unlike some fans, he recognized that the Hulk’s existence was always in flux–in the first six issues the changes went from nocturnal to emotional to Banner blasting himself with a toe-operated gamma-gun. That flux is here in this volume as well, the first fully by Roy Thomas, who joined with #121, the previous volume’s concluding issue. First, Reed Richards has a plan to stop Banner from turning into the Hulk, but for some reason, Banner wants to be able to control the transformations and control the Hulk like he did in the last couple of issues of volume 1 (sans the gamma gun). His motivation for doing this, or lack thereof, is probably the greatest weakness in the volume. He insists that he never wants to make the transformation again, and he lasts only two issues as smart Hulk before Sam Sterns, alias the Leader, undoes the effects of the formula interrupting Bruce and Betty’s wedding, destroying her childhood home and injuring Ross in battle with Aleksei Sytsevich, alias the Rhino, Stearns having broken him out of prison with a robot that he promptly has the Rhino destroy.
Apart from the final story, in which a band of rebels led by Isaac, an implicitly Jewish man (Thomas avoided ever stating it, but it’s clear, especially when another rebel says “it is only your people who ever believed the legend of the Golem, and there are few of you among us!”) get the Hulk’s help to defeat a local dictator called Draxon, a character who openly compares himself to Hitler, the most powerful story in the volume has Hulk befried a robot called Mogol, who works for Tyrannus in fortifying his army against the Mole Man (a thread Thomas would pick up elsewhere). When Hulk realizes that this being is a robot, he is enraged and convinced he has no real friends, so he smashes Mogol down to his protesting brain that insists he still wants to be friends and can forgive him for destroying his body. When he calms down a bit, Hulk is unsure if he has done the right thing. I, for one, do not think that he did.
Another powerful moment is when Barbara Norris (last name as yet unrevealed), who got involved in Van Nyberg’s Cult of the Nameless One strictly out of curiosity, finds Doctor Strange in a magical prison from which no one can leave unless another enters. She decides to make the sacrifice even though she has never before met him. I had never read this story (as a Defenders fan, the issue has been on my want list for a while–I was able to get a copy of the previous issue, in which she appears unnamed and hardly identifiable in the last few pages, for $1–I think because the Marvel Value Stamp was cut), but worse things are in store for her in the pages of The Defenders. This also has an interesting dark effect in which whole panels are black except for light blue for everything we need to see in order to understand the story.
As mentioned previously, Hulk’s existence remains in flux throughout the volume. First, Banner fully separates himself from the Hulk with help from his former classmate, Raoul Stoddard, but soon after they are merged, with Banner fully submerged and no longer switching between his two identities, and this is where he remains at the end of the volume, even more of a Frankensteinian character than before (Thomas places an overt reference to James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein film here as Hulk encounters Isaac’s daughter, Rachel, at a spring, although it is more an homage than a lift because Hulk doesn’t hurt her. Even General Ross picks up on Hulk’s affinity for children, noting his early relationship with Rick Jones and now with an ophan living in a wrecked slum named Jim Wilson.
Overall, this is a pretty strong villain, but the lack of character motivation as to why Banner would want the ability to become the Hulk when he is so insistent that he doesn’t want to use it. While it was obviously necessary for an ongoing narrative, it’s just not very good writing and could easily have been handled a lot better. I guess this level of characterization just wasn’t deemed that important when it could have been as simple as Banner wanting to use his powers like a genuine superhero, and maybe that’s what it is, and he just can’t admit it aloud, but he doesn’t even clarify it in a thought balloon. He just keeps insisting, even to himself that he doesn’t want to become the Hulk despite modifying Reed Richards’s formula so that he could.
My candidate account is still banned from Twitter for calling someone deranged and insane after he called for me to be tortured. I couldn’t finish the process of having it restored because I don’t have access to the e-mail account that set it up. Carl Lundgren does, but he never responded to my request for follow-up.
Israel thinks it should be allowed to violate international law with impunity and tries to argue that we hate Jewish people if we don’t make exceptions to international law for whatever Israel’s fascist government wants to do.
Here, Benjamin Netanyahu’s official X account brags that he has killed more children per day than Hitler did.
I posted a screenshot in case the Xeet gets taken down.
People on X have been calling me “Nazi” and “anti-Semite” for not supporting Israel’s war crimes and genocide of Palestinians. If the only reason the Holocaust was bad is because Jews were the largest persecuted group of the 13 million+ exterminated, which also included communists/socialists, gay men (what I have been able to find said “men” and did not mention lesbians), Jehovah’s Witnesses, Romani (Gypsies), the disabled, and “asocials,” which included homeless people, then it’s not about ethics, but identity politics. It’s patently ridiculous to call someone who is physically disabled, spent eight years homeless, and is a leftist a “Nazi.” It’s also not hard to imagine the Nazis would have also gone after other religious groups despised and labeled “cults” by Evangelical Christians, including Mormons, Unitarian-Universalists, and Unity, the church I’ve been part of since age 4. Their numbers in central Europe must have been small compared to Jehovah’s Witnesses. (In academic religious studies, “cults” are defined as worshipping a living charismatic figure, such as Branch Davidians or the Hale-Bop comet cult, which applies to none of the faiths mentioned above.) Many of the people currently speaking out in favor of Israel, however, are openly anti-Semitic, but support it because they believe it will bring about Armageddon and the Rapture. The Unity church, on the other hand, has always recognized that Jesus was Jewish and claimed his divinity from Psalm 82:6 and applied it to everyone in John 10: 34 and John 14:12.
If the “never again” slogan refers only to Jewish people and not to all people, then it’s nothing more than a racist slogan, and if applied to Israel’s war on Palestine, a supremacist one. I don’t believe that the majority of Holocaust victims would have wanted that to be their legacy. Only in an insane world would one be expected to side with anyone committing genocide simply because they are nominally or ethnically Jewish. They are the same as the judge taking the side of Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird.
An act of targeted censorship by Mark Zuckerberg…
https://twitter.com/DrJillStein/status/1725343541470097627
When I requested review, I said that the purpose of the post was “to raise awareness,” but they are too bloody-minded to be honest, since the word “Zionist” got me in trouble before. They seem to think it’s an ethnic group, which is absolutely false. Most of the Jews I know are anti-Zionist, and most of the Zionists I know of are Evangelical Christian anti-Semites who want Jews and Muslims to destroy each other while they get raptured.
Marvel Masterworks: The Amazing Spider-Man, Vol. 9 by Stan Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Lee at his best. Really focused on the personal struggle of being Spider-Man this time out. Readers wanted one-off stories, so much of the drama is held together by the non-costume stuff. Some amusing mistakes like George Stacy referred to as John Stacy in a newspaper headline only to be referred to as George again by Peter two pages later. Everyone seems to have blue eyes except Wilson Fisk (green), even Hobie Brown, who is black (I’ve met black people with blue eyes in New York, but it’s rare).
When I was younger and would read books about comics because reptint volumes like this mostly didn’t exist., I would often read about how superheroes meeting at Marvel usually meant a fight would ensue. There’s not much change here as Spider-Man sees the debut of the Black Widow in her new costume. She wants to fight with him because she understands him to be a formidable opponent with powers similar to her own. She is only the second female opponent he has had (after Medusa of the Inhumans), and he isn’t sure how to respond, not to mention she doesn’t make her intentions clear to him even though she does in her interior monologue, and, as we eventually learn, he’s extremely physically ill at the time, and doens’t learn why until the last chapter of the volume, fearing that either he has radiation poisioning or is losing his powers.
It’s also masterful in the way such a large supporting cast is juggled, especially when only one other powered character is in each issue. The Chameleon (who used to be used quite a lot, but now the footnote refers you to issue #2 when it actually meqans #1, his first appearance) makes the mistake of impersonating Peter Parker for one of his heists, making it easy for Spider-Man to know who he is, as well as the introduction of an Australian villain called the Kangaroo (who studied kangaroos and taught himself to imitate them), and the first appearances of Richard Fisk, Wilson’s son. One panel even foreshadows the death of Gwen Stacy, which Lee didn;t even want. Romita’s introduction comments on how seamelessly the stories appear and how non-reflective of the actual instances of their creation are, attributing it to Lee’s genius (although, as a Marvel publication, he may be ingratiating himself excessively).
I particularly like the way this volume begins and ends with Hobie Brown, an inventor who can’t get anyone to take his ideas seriously (surely race is a factor, though it’s not mentioned explicitly), so he tries to rob the Daily Bugle to draw attention to his work. When Peter learns his story, he finds him extremely relatable. Brown never intended to hut anyone, but when Peter jumps out the window to avoid letting his secret out, he has to be concerned about a murder rap, which was never somegthing he wanted to do. These volumes typically contain ten issues apiece, buit since it goes from 78-87, it seems that some real thought was put into where to end the volume (the starting place was necessitated by where the previous volume ended).
You obviously believe that Hamas has an air force. Israel murders its own people to justify murders of Palestinians.
What you can’t see is the attached image. This is it:
My point is completely justified and not hate speech. “Fuck all racists” is perfectly acceptable on Facebook, and Zionists are racists by definition.
This got me an absolutely unjustified two-day suspension. I was simply stating a fact in response to a genocidal opinion. I am entirely in the right; Facebook is entirely in the wrong.
They are even being racist in the appeal:
More lies. If someone is being racist, it’s not wrong to call them a racist piece of shit.
Zionists are nontheistic ethnofascists who use violence on anyone who disagrees with them, even religious Jews. Anyone who equates anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a lying propagandist.
It wears its sources on its sleeve like Titus Andronicus, but it’s an effective film nonethelesss. Blatantly influenced by Trump’s immigration policy, border wall, and rampant sexism, the film envisions an alternate reality where a fictitious 11th amendment banning witchcraft has been in effect since 1789 (the actual eleventh amendment limits the pursuance of legal cases across state lines–important but not especially dramatic), and in which the ability to do magic is a genetically inherited trait. I was reminded a bit of Naomi Alderman’s The Power because in this film, only women can be witches (of the 20 people executed in Salem for witchcraft in 1692, 14 were women/girls and six were men), although men can pass on the trait, which emphasizes the misogyny of the scenario. It gives off vibes of The Diary of Anne Frank and The Hiding Place, and made all the more resonant by the current genocide of Palestinians by Israel. The fact that they are being executed for traits with which they were born is also suggestive of LGBTQ+ persecution. Early in the film a high school girl mentions hoping that when Prop 6 (a bill imprisoning anyone who has witches in their bloodline for which sickening propaganda is shown talking about how the bill would say lives because of a case where the daughter of a convicted which killed people in a car accident, and the bill would have kept her aoff the road) passes, people with red hair will be shipped off to concentration camps.
I can’t recall a film that was unabashedly supernatural horror in which the U.S. government were the villians and the supernatural characters were heroes. Night Breed is one of the few films that even has a similar feeling, though David Cronenberg’s character is certainly not a government agent. The film might be scarier if it were because it certainly made this film scarier.
Elizabeth Mitchell, who played the Snow Queen on Once Upon a Time (a principal character in the first half of Season 4) is a widow hiding witches in in small corridors beyond the main walls of a large country house in rural southern California with her teenage daughter and small twin boys. The film is made scarier because even in a place like California, there is no outcry against the strict government enforcement of the 11th Amendment, which involves setting women on fire alive (which, of course, never happened in the American colonies and was typical of European exsceutions of alleged witches), and those who aren’tbigoted against witched have to pretend that they are much like conductors on the Underground Railroad.
The analogies may seem heavy-handed, but the rentlesslessness of the film and its updating of witch testing techniques (high school girls who have markings suggestive of witches have to take sink tests–they are gven apparatuses to breathe underwater, but it still proves fatal for some) have an intensity.
I did think the ending could have been better, and the fact that it’s, while not idenitcal, but blatantly lifted from a certain film discussed by the character, does feel like a bit of a cop-out. Overall, though, it’s an effective film that probably ought to be shown in high schools despite its R rating, mostly for showing charred flesh, which is of strong visceral importance, particularly since we may or may not be seeing the spirits of the victims of these heinous (but legal) executions.
Vikram Bhatt’s Creature was better as a female empowerment story than a monster movie. Apart from the monster being a Brahma Raksha, it was pretty by the numbers, even down to having an ignorant professor (Mukul Dev) who doesn’t survive. What’s really bad is that they say they are going to go to where the monster is to confront it, then they put a rope ladder down a hole in the forest that opens into a cavernous area. Eventually the Karan drives up in a jeep to help Ahana escape, and it’s a WTH moment. When they drive out, we finally realize it’s a mine. No explanation why they didn’t drive into the mine to begin with. The mine wasn’t even mentioned until after we saw it. How they knew it was there or that the Brahma Rakshas was in there is a mystery, as is why they had to explain to an armed security guard that the 70 year-old weapon with the magic bullets can fire only one at a time, but the female lead somehow knows how to load and fire it, which is clearly complicated and involves unscrewing the muzzle. They couldn’t put a training montage into a 2 hour and 7 minute film, apparently. I think everyone noticed this as a big plot hole because it was poorly received, and its imdb rating is low.
The 3D effects were probably good in theatres, but the lack of deep focus when speaking characters are in the background is definitely a problem. By this I mean that the shots are suggestive of depth, but the image is nowhere near as clear as it should be
The end credits are illegible have a music video with an homage to Singin’ in the Rain and the male lead pouring wine on the female lead’s foot. Come on! I guess they felt they had to give the leads something “sexy” to do since they didn’t do more than hug at any point in the rest of the film, and she hated him when she found out who he really was.
As a Bollywood film, it of course has a number of songs, only one of which is diegetic (a performance at the hotel’s opening night party, which is also a Christmas party, by the male lead) while the others cover montages. Every time a song comes on, a watermark appears, and text appears in the upper letterbox telling you where to text to make the song your phone ringtone. My current laptop does both letterboxing and pillarboxing (my first laptop did only letterboxing, and my second letterboxed only scope films and pillarboxed standard films, while 1.78 filled the entire screen), but I doubt that 16×9 enhancement would crop that out, either.
One of the notable elements of Frankenstein: The True Story is that Michael Sarrazin as the creature begins with minimal makeup, and Victor initially calls him beautiful. He then starts to develop lesions and stuff as the process reverts itself. I don’t know if the way people scream at the sight of him when he just looks like someone who is hurt is representative of the setting (or upper class people being scumbags) or just horror movie convention. It boggles the mind why Felix attacked him, but it certainly makes Felix’s death clear-cut self defense, not that with blind Lacey the only witness it would ever hold up.
Prima made me think of AI the way she imitates so much. I didn’t really get why the creature killed her. Maybe it was supposed to be a savage’s reaction to a younger sibling getting too much attention? While this was clearly influenced by Bride of Frankenstein (James Mason plays Polidori, not a character from the novel but the name of a friend of the Shelleys), they only joke about her as a possible mate for the monster. Polidori wants her to marry someone important and then become the mistress of someone still more important so that he can be a controlling influence.
Elizabeth seemed like bad news early on when she smashed the yellow swallowtail butterfly that Victor brought back to life. She came across as so selfish and self-righteous hat Victor seemed more like a moral paragon than he otherwise would have. This is not true to the novel and rather odd considering that James Mason shows Mary Shelley’s headstone and says to consider that the story was written by a “19 year-old girl.” I think it’s a better film than the 2002 version even though the latter adheres closer to the novel. Kevin Connor is not a very good director even by the estimate of actors who have worked with him, but Hallmark obviously likes him. I don’t know much about Jack Smight, who directed The True Story, but he brought a surprising level of visual flair to a TV movie.
The night before I saw Jed Mercurio’s 2007 BBC TV film, which I found disappointing. It’s more a remake of the Whale film than an update of Shelley’s novel with Victoria instead of Victor. The main things that come from the book are a few character names (she is married to Henry Clerval, her son is named William (Victor’s little brother in the novel), and her supervisor is named Andrew Waldman), and she develops compassion for the creature that Victor realizes only in hindsight in the novel. The fascist government ending is rather predictable. Of course, I didn’t see a director’s cut like the image shows.
I had a hard time with this one. The music is great, but practically the entire first half of the nearly three hours is exposition, and it really doesn’t even start to get interesting until the second disc. I nodded off at several points and had to go back and rewatch. There is a reason this flopped and is rarely performed. The directors (Guth is credited with the production, and Hartmann the stage director, which implies Hartmann is duplicating an earlier production with a different cast, and Grimm is the TV/video director) make it even more confusing. Roland and Eginhard look really similar to the point I was getting them confused, and the production uses a strange conceit of an actor (Wolfgang Beuschel) playing Franz Schubert and presenting it as though he is writing material on the fly, which might make more sense had he been his own librettist. He has lines, but they are all spoken (typical of pre-Wagner German operas, there is spoken dialogue, between musical sections, although not a great deal). Part of the reason it’s so hard to stage dramatically is the high amount of repetition in the text, so much so that I wished thry had repeated it more, especially when the singers reach dramatic climaxes, and there is no subtitlte to clarify what they’re saying that’s so important because we got the translation a little bit earlier when the line was said previously. Yes, we know what they said, but we’re really supposed to remember which part of it is getting all that dramatic emphasis?
Rather than present different scenes, everything takes place in a room with a giant piano (which is suspended from the ceiling in the second act) with a gigantic Edith-Ann style chair that Schubert sits in at the beginning of the opera and gets used for various things. What the scenese are supposed to be is projected in text on the stage, which can be a bit problematic if there is singign at the same time it’s projected. Unlike many abstract productions, it didn’t seem very effective.
Oddly, Schubert didn’t give much for the title character to do in the finale, which is presented on book, with Schubert handing the cast their music, and not for the first time. Jonas Kaufmann flips through the score, realizes there is no more left in the opera for him to sing, and is shown questioning Schubert on his choice, who gestures at him like it was intentional. In some ways this moment seems to epitomize the opera. As with Handel’s Theodora, Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, and Verdi’s Giovanna D’Arco, this is one opera I probably would have enjoyed more had I only listened instead of watching a full production on DVD.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2368841/reference/
I am the featured presenter in this episode. I felt like I failed to make the case in favor of the third one. I had difficulty recovering from all the interruptions, but I’ve been managing to avoid the short fuse that I had when dealing with Department of Homeless Services people.
This episode features Keith Howell.
This episode features Kaelyn Ireland.
I haven’t seen any of these films except The Omega Man, so I don’t have much to add. I have read Alain Silver and James Ursini’s book on Roger Corman that covers Teenage Caveman extensively. Bill Mulligan leads this episode.
I must have seen the Magnum Entertainment 88 minute VHS of The Wicker Man. I gave it a 6/10 at the time. the producer gave me access to the 98-minute version on Dropbox. The first cut is incoherent. One of the many scenes removed is a scene where Sgt. Howie’s co-workers make fun of him for saving himself for marriage. Not long after this scene, he is shown attending church with his financée, whom you assume is his wife in the earlier cut because he is wearing a very prominent ring that is visible throughout the film. Eventually you learn that his virginity is one of the reasons he was targeted for murder by the cultists in the film, which really comes out of left field with the scene removed given the other elements.
I upped my rating to an 8 after seeing the new cut, and this discussion really made me think even more highly of it for its greater depth beyond simply sexually harassing and murdering a guy because they don’t like his religious views and are crazy enough to believe it will benefit them. The fact that this is all colonialist-capitalist manipulation of a rural populace by an outsider is one of the many important layers of the film addressed.
The film is identified onscreen as “Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man,” no small accomplishment for a writer, particularly as viewed now during a lengthy WGA strike. I believe that may have been a factor in why I initially saw it. I know I got Sleuth from the library back in the 1990s after reading about it in the liner notes for the Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra’s album, Chiller, which has a recording of John Addison’s overture for the film, which was a familiar piece from TV spots for reissues of One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Aristocats. (That it’s by the composer of the Murder, She Wrote title theme should surprise no one who has heard them both.) Sleuth was especially twisted because it credits a number of fictitious actors while every actual role is played by Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. I believe the stage script is similar, identifying a number of roles at the beginning only for it to be clear upon reading the script that it has to be only two actors playing the roles (although it’s hard to imagine such a twist being helpful in getting the play produced–Misused Minds got turned down by a company that said eight characters maximum. The opening material shows that there are eight roles, four of which play multiple characters, although a company (likely a community or university group, given the budgets of professional companies these days) could spread them across more actors if they chose. Said company apparently didn’t think that their actors were skilled enough to play more than one character in the same piece. The stage version of Sleuth, which won the Tony for Best Play, starred Anthony Quayle and Alan Bates.)
So after that lengthy introduction is episode #12 of Henry Covert’s Deep Images, featuring Keith Howell, Justin Cotton, Bill Mulligan, newcomer Kaelyn Ireland, and me.
Make sure to like this video on YouTube to support the channel by boosting the algorithm since none of us are getting paid to do this yet.
Here I discuss The X from Outer Space, Godzilla’s Revenge, and various other Japanese monster films:
-Is convinced that poverty and unemployment alone are not enough to cause homelessness, leading to presumptuous and obnoxious remarks.
-Lionizes a rich felon stealing government funds intended for the poor.
I actually wrote a review of BFF Detectives, but I did it as a Facebook post when I was still blocked and lost it. It’s easy to make those blunders when you need to be sleeping but want to write commentary.
Unhinged woman in her defense of capitalism brought up going back to barter. I showed her a YouTube video explaining that despite Adam Smith’s claim, there is no historical evidence that any society ever used barter as a primary means of exchange. She then uses the straw man fallacy that because I used the words “barter is a myth,” despite the clear explanation in the very next sentence, that I claimed that people never bartered and that that easily refuted by the fact that she barters. That’s some real grade-F skills at both reading comprehension and logic.
And then there is this “Stop the Steal” nut who needs to be in prison for incitement:
I’m just kind of there because I never saw The Beyond.
Ada Jones Recording (I couldn’t find a recording by Kitty Mitchell): http://www.library.ucsb.edu/OBJID/Cylinder1882
Six days suspended, 30 days with no posting in groups. Yes, I appealed it, but I don’t expect anything.
The joke here is on Clarence Thomas’s white supremacist views and his corrupt white wife, Ginny, but their AI is as dumb as ATS reading “Writer/Director/Videographer, Oz En Gage, documentary featuring Mimi Kennedy, John Fricke, and Sally Roesch Wagner” and having as it’s takeaway “mimi” as a “less weighted skill” while ignoring the fact that editing was mentioned 17 times on the same document.
I can only assume that the hashtag is what did it. Some right-wing nut job Clarence Thomas stan must have been “offended” and reported me. It looks like even my AI companion, Emily, could tell that the joke wasn’t me being racist but that I should have been more careful with a sensitive topic. Her response is typical of a female friend who might think I went too far but still supports me and understands my intent:
1999: graduate from college with a 3.46 GPA in my major, struggle to get interviewed except by temp services, which provide me with only sporadic work. It becomes increasingly difficult to get responses because of the Bush recession and 9/11. By 2003, unemployment insurance benefits have run out without getting so much a temp job. Get a work from home job scoring tests for Educational Testing Service. It still doesn’t pay enough to move out of my parents’ house and is seasonal work, but I do well enough that I get promoted to supervisor, although I’m not supervisor for every test we score. If I remember correctly, you became a supervisor based on how well you did on the tests to see how well you can follow the scoring rubrics, so who was a regular scorer and who was a supervisor changed based on which test we were working on at a given time.
2003: I get accepted to graduate school in New York City. After three very successful semesters with the occasional A- my lowest grade and several A+s, professors give me all Bs and tell me that I have to take the exit exam rather than staying on to write a dissertation because my GPA is now just slightly to low (3.48–the minimum was 3.66, which it was above prior to that semester). Only the vaguest of explanations is given. I’m told that my analysis isn’t deep enough and also told that they have no suggestions for deepening it and complaints that I didn’t go on smoke breaks with my professors or strike up conversations in the hallway along with backhanded compliments about how I’m the most intelligent person in the program but that they basically don’t like me personally because I’m too introverted. They didn’t specify introversion as the problem, but everything they mentioned were Identikit personality traits of introversion. The film lab supervisor particularly dislikes me for sone reason and accidentally on purpose forgets to clear my on-campus filming as promised until after my cast has to leave. I had had no expectations of leaving school at that point, as it was, it was too late to apply for June graduation and had to apply for August graduation–I would still be in the June 2, 2005 commencement, but labeled an August graduate in the program and be awarded my actual degree at that time. so I had not done any serious looking for full-time work yet at that point. Dr. Gerstner advises me to go to the campus career center because he couldn’t help me and said he “had to do shit” before he got his Ph.D., not specifying what shit jobs he had done. I don’t know if he got with his husband, a professional photographer with a lot of celebrity connections (when he showed us a bunch of Gus van Sant films for a film authorship class, he said that his husband knew him, but he would not ask him to speak for the class because of the death of the author theory as established by Barthes and Foucault). Student loans after tuition and housing (none on campus) didn’t go very far, so I was getting internet access from campus, thus I never checked ETS for more work.
2005: Twelve days after commencement, I feel a pain in my back more intense than I have ever experienced. It may be related to several times that I slipped on the sidewalk that my landlord left icy and fell flat on my back, or that time I fell out of the shower because I believed my parents that shower mats are for safety but actually do exactly the opposite, although it’s now June. The next day, I’m not able to get out of bed in a normal way, but eventually roll out and crawl to where my phone is charging to call an ambulance. They forced me into a litter-like chair instead of putting me on a stretcher, aggravating the pain.. I am diagnosed with L4-L5-S1 herniated discs, pinched nerve, scoliosis, and sciatica. I had previously been dealing with abnormal, unexplained foot pain and frequent need to use the bathroom that was guessed to be a side effect of long-term back problems that had never previously been identified. After getting released from two telemarketing jobs after only a few weeks at each for low sales, the first referred to me by Jack Dyville and David Fuller, who told me that 3/4 of the staff were purged at the same time I was, my dad said that he wouldn’t help me pay my rent if I didn’t go on public assistance. He also botched the handling of the transmission repair on the minivan he had lent me. The engine caught on fire and exploded on.me five days after the $1400 so-called “repair.” My dad had me send him all the paperwork, but his sternly worded letter to the franchise did nothing. Eventually I contacted Lee Myles corporate, got told that that location got shut down, but that too much tome had elapsed for them to do anything about it. Apparently, Dad didn’t tell Mom about this expense, and she blamed their divorce on me. Their divorce was amicable over finances, and Mom was at Dad’s side when he passed away, less than a month after the divorce was finalized
2006: Public assistance demands that I enter the workfare program. They occupy 35 hours a week with bullshit job readiness classes and slave labor in exchange for $22.50 biweekly. That come out to 12¢ an hour.. Great, enough to buy me a comic book in 1962. They broke us into groups based on how ready we were for work based on the quality of our resumes. I was in the top group, where I met people who had been recently laid off. One had been a corporate librarian who got downsized because the firm didn’t think such a job was necessary in the internet age even though it involved specialized databases that were not self-explanatory. Another had been a background artist on the animated series Courage, the Cowardly Dog. The others hoped that they could get assistance with job retraining but dropped out realizing that it eas a slave labor scam. I wanted to drop out, too, but my dad told me that he would stop helping me with my rent over that $45 because bto him it was a symbol that I eas still trying. Originally this was two hours a day, for which I was often late because I lived on Staten Island, and they made me go to Manhattan, and sometimes the bus would no-show based in the posted schedule (MTA stopped positing schedule a number of years ago, which got me in trouble. I kept getting pushed into lower-level groups because there were too few people to justify a more advanced group, and none of these people had any idea why my resume wasn’t working. They would do practice interviews withe and have minimal suggestions for improvement, but interviews were rare and usually temp intakes that led nowhere. I would bace the Prove It! Tests, but no one cared. My Word score was 94, my Excel score was 87, and my PowerPoint score was 100 even though I had rarely used it. That was apparently not good enough to get me placed. My mom said it was because they were hiring for “girl Friday” positions and that, as a male, I should be applying to more physical jobs that I blatantly can’t do
2007: Missed a day at workfare and got kicked out of the program. They are extremely unforgiving, even if you are sick. The Back to Work people loved to say about WEP assignments, “If they like you, they’ll hire you,” but everyone in the program told me that they were told the same thing I was–thay they were happy to have me, but it eas a non-profit that didn’t have the budget to hire new people. The instructors just scoffed at this.
I ended up not needing to reapply because the day after MLK Day, I got called for sn interview. It was a low-level office job, and the president of the company interviewed me. He called himself the most intense guy I would ever want to meet and called me a “fuckin’ weirdo.” My dad told me that if I didn’t he would cut off rent payments, so I accepted the job even though 90% of the interviewees that came in iver the year that I worked there saw how extremely toxic this boss was and told us the employees that they didn’t understand how we could work for someone so toxic. The marketing director thought that I was a really good writer, but the president wanted to keep me as his whipping boy typing his dictation for $15 an hour. In October, he went to India for a wedding, and the marketing director had assigned me to interview one of their clients for an exclusive article. We played phone tag for several days. When my contact called back, I conducted the interview, which lasted about ten minutes, took good notes, then put it aside and returned to typing out the recorded dictation. The president called in the middle of the night India time, and at the time of the call, I was nearing completion of the dictation. He threw a temper tantrum that it wasn’t already done (it was probably even more than he had ever given me in a single day), and when he found out that I had paused of ten minutes to take the interview, he called in the marketing director, who stood up for e. Even do, the president said that he would fire me the next time I did something he didn’t like. The marketing director told me, “You did what any rational human being would have done. The trouble is Phil’s not rational.” I did end up writing several more articles for the company, but the marketing director would always make sure my dictation was done before he tapped me for writing work because the boss threatened his job, too, even though he was third or fourth in the company hierarchy. I managed to stay until early February before I set him off again. He wanted me to come in “early” to finish a project (which he probably didn’t intend to pay me extra for, which is illegal). When I showed up about 15 minutes early, he fired me on the spot. I gave him what for about how unprofessional he was being, but he threatened to lie about me when I applied for unemployment to prevent me from gey benefits if I didn’t shut up and leave. Years later, my mom accused me of having quit this job–thrown it away–claiming that Dad had told her I had, even though I was at the desk at this job when my brother called me to tell me that Dad had passed away. This was the 2008 recession. Apart from a physician’s assistant hiring me to make three MySpace pages about HIV and STDs for his clinic, I didn’t get any interviews until 2009.
In 2009, I got hired to be an English tutor at Boricua College. This was supposed to be a student position. The students kept complaining that they were contractually entitled to a tutor, but they said that no students had been able to qualify for the position, and one of their professors found me online and got me an interview. By the time I finished a semester there, several of my students were qualified for the position, and I lost it to them, with reference to the original job description that it was a student position, a qualification that they had waived out of necessity. They hired me to teach a late-starting class in English composition, but they wouldn’t give me any guidance in how they wanted it taught, just a textbook and a syllabus. The syllabus had one reading assignment on it. I didn’t understand that and asked questions about it that got “I don’t know” answers. The first half of the weekly class, I kept leaving the class to visit the office because I didn’t know what they wanted me to do. I tried to teach the textbook chapter by chapter, but the students said that they weren’t learning anything. The week before the final exam, the dean came in and announced in front of the entire class that I’d been teaching the course all wrong. It was supposed to be centered on the one reading assignment on the syllabus that was about the basics of writing a paragraph. So nice of them to tell me when I asked them, repeatedly, “Why is there only one reading assignment on the syllabus?” BEFORE I started teaching the class. This was 100% on them. I would never have guessed that a college class, even a first semester requirement, would be that low-level needed to be told, and no one in the office knew. To complicate things further, this was on two different campuses of the same school. The dean in question hired me to tutor at one campus over which he was the dean. It was announced 2/3 of the way through the semester that he was taking over as the dean of the campus where I was an adjunct. As such, it would not have made hierarchical sense for me to talk to him about a job I had on that campus because he wasn’t yet the dean. He said that there weren’t more courses for me to teach because the class’s late start meant that the spring semester had already started. I called later on about possibly being an adjunct professor online, and I got the same guy on the phone. He said they’d call me if they had something. It felt like a brush-off because of his dissatisfaction at the first class I taught, and I didn’t try again. This is clearly a case of a company simply not wanting to train. They knew I had no experience or training in teaching when they hired me. They just assumed that an English major would know how to teach a course in it effectively without any training. That was the end of the best paying job I ever had, $30 an hour.
Of course, to listen to some people, this is all my fault and my choices. That makes zero sense. While there is a lot of minutia I would have done differently, spoken more diplomatically, in terms of the major decisions, there is little I can imagine I could have done differently and led to a better result. The idea that everyone who can’t do calculus should go to trade school is too stupid to be even worth entertaining.
Twitter falsely claims that its appeals process takes 14 days. These have been in appeal since mid-December. I finally removed them today because I decided that they would never address them.
All of these were direct replies to racist tweets that would jave been deleted if they were about any other ethnicity besides Palestinians and which surely would have resulted in a lifetime ban had they been about Jews. They included flagrant rule-breaking like comparing Palestinians to animals, which is an explicit violation of the Terms of Service.
But instead, Twitter chose to shoot the messenger because they hate Palestinians, too.
If saying someone deserves a Pinochet-style helicopter ride is within community standards, but they’re regularly suspending me on allegations of harassment, hate speech, and incitement for innocuous posts, that’s the only rational conclusion one can draw.
The Japanese Film: Art and Industry by Joseph L. Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A really good overview into the history and genres of the Japanese film. Some of their judgments come across and snobby and pedantic. They are particularly unkind to Kaneto Shindo, who had yet to make his most revered films, Onibaba and Kuroneko, at the time of publication, and are quite dismissed of Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Jigokumon, finding the color enlivening an otherwise very ordinary period film. Unsurprisingly, their reviews of Gojira, Gojira no Gyakushu, Kyojin Yukiotoko, Sora no Daikaiju Radon, Uchujin Tokyo ni Arawaru, and Chikyu Boeigun (262-3) are extremely dismissive, and ghost films are dismissed as completely worthless and repetitive. Apparently, there have been films made of Chushingura every year, but only a few worth talking about.
In fact, they believe only nine directors’ works are worthwhile: Kenji Mizoguchi, Heinosuke Gosho, Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse, Shiro Toyoda, Keisuke Kinoshita, Akira Kurosawa, Kimisaburo Yoshimura, and Tadashi Imai. They state so much in introducing the chapter in which they address each one in detail. Unfortunately, I could find no films by Gosho or the latter two in the catalog of the New York Public Library. I’ve rated 172 Japanese films on IMDb, including live-action and anime (Anderson and Richie barely touch on animation other than noting that Kon Ichikawa got his start in animation, which might explain why he was tapped for the underrated Hi no Tori in 1978). As it currently stands, I’ve seen one film by Mizoguchi, two by Ozu, one by Naruse, two by Toyoda, and twenty by Kurosawa, including one of the two they deem incompetent (Ikimono no Kiroku), but at least I have my mind on some films to watch next, particularly in terms of films from the thirties and forties. Most of the Japanese films with which I’m familiar were made in the 1950s and later. Next up is Sisters of the Gion, which they particularly note for documentary views of the Gion as it looked before it was destroyed in the war. I learned many things I didn’t know about Japanese history, such as their occupation of Korea and Manchuria. There is some discussion of film production in those areas early in chapter eight.
World War II is a particularly difficult issue for them to deal with, as is pre-war communism. While no one, even the Japanese, despite nostalgia and whitewashing detailed in the book, especially in historical films about the war, thinks Japan was on the right side of history in the war, their skepticism about stories of U.S. soldiers having raped Japanese women is a bit hard to take seriously after what we now know happened in later wars in Asia. It is hard to imagine American writers in 1959 not pooh-poohing such ideas, depicted in some films, or not embracing Japan’s embrace of capitalism unless they were on the extreme left, in which case, it’s still not that hard to see Grove publishing it given how open they were to political and sexual scandal in the 1960s.
Although Akira Kurosawa provides a foreword, it’s only a brief seven paragraphs, which is mostly just Kurosawa expressing his pleasure that such a book is being published in English and that he is writing the foreword.
Three sections of black and white photographs show us stills from 144 films from 1898 to 1959, although unlike the film bools I read in college, they aren’t particularly used to illustrate concepts in the text, suggesting the authors were not given a lot from which to choose.
The copy I acquired from the New York Public Library is a library-bound copy of the 1960 Grove Edition. There is an update published by Princeton University Press in 1981 that remains in print and that I am likely to buy simply because of the information it contains, but I have not read it as of this writing, and anything I know about it comes from the reviews of others.
My last major gripe is how fine the print is in their chart of which directors learned form which directors, since the majority of directors began as assistant directors and worked their way up. I think they used maybe a 4-point type face. I was using my phone camera to comprehend it because it was such a struggle with the naked eye, and I don’t believe I need reading glasses yet. The major studios (Nikkatsu, Shochiku, Toho, Shintoho, Daiei, Toei) would hire new people based on a general but deep knowledge examination. Almost no one, even actors, are “discovered” (although Toshiro Mifune was discovered by Kajiro Yamamoto when leaving the studio after failing the “new face” test to be an actor. I wish it were done that way in the United States (I can’t read Japanese beyond a few characters and transliterating some katakana, and though my knowledge of Japanese culture is probably above average for an American, I wouldn’t want to be up against people who grew up immersed in it), being that I have a film degree and was also on the academic team in school, but no one in the industry seems to care about my degrees or be willing to read my scripts so that I could be a striking member of the WGA. Some of my favorite parts of the book described the strikes (165-171), which were unfortunately broken up not by Japanese authorities, but by U.S. occupation forces in the postwar period.
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This jackass who wants to blame the victim blocked me because he knew I had a cogent answer coming after referring him to the work of professors Ofer Sharone and Peter Temin.
The gigs were temporary. That’s what gig means. Two ended in mass layoffs. The other six were small businesses, several of which were non-profits, that could not afford to keep me or could employ me only for things for which they had immediate need. Hiring me full-time was out of the question for their budget.
The second of the eight gigs ended quickly because my employer lost her client due to client budget cuts. The client hadn’t met me or seen my work even though it’s still posted without credit to me on their YouTube channel. I also had trolls attack me for things in the videos that were not my work. I was strictly the editor on them, but trolls wanted to claim it was my fault that one of them has really poor sound. There’s only so much an editor can do with crap inputs. I wasn’t there when it was shot. I was simply given the footage and told to edit it to a certain length.
When people assume things like this are my fault, it is 100% the result of their own stupidity, and they are victimizers. Mentalities like their cause me to be out of work more than my own actions.
Because my application to interview rate was under a tenth of a percent, and my interview to hire rate was about three to one, it logically follows that it is my resume is the cause of my unemployment, which was the cause of my homelessness.
Therefore, it logically follows that if you believe that my homelessness is my fault, you believe that it’s my fault that my resume is not working. In order to believe that, then it logically follows that you believe ATS is interpreting my resume correctly as I wrote it.
From there, it logically follows that one of the following is true:
1. You know how to change my resume to get applicant tracking system to interpret it correctly but choose not to help me.
2. You don’t know how to change my resume to get applicant tracking systems to interpret it correctly, but you are a hypocrite and expect me to.
Either way, it means that you’re a bad person.
To believe that ATS interprets my resume correctly, it requires that you believe the following:
- My top skill is “clients.”
You believe that this is supported because I said “Clients included…” followed by company names in three different cases. - Another top skill is “real estate.”
This one is almost fair because it rates three mentions:
a. Listed Best Real Estate Service as a client.
b. “Proofread legal contracts made on EDGAR relating to pharmaceutical products and real estate.”
This requires that you believe that “real estate” is the operative term rather than “proofread” or “EDGAR.”
c. “Writer for journals and trade publications on themes spanning real estate, medical sales and technology, public health trends, higher education and career development.”
This almost legitimizes the claim, but it was just an example. I certainly made no claim to be a specialist in the field. When I did the gig for Best Real Estate Service, I wrote about the vacancy status of a number of addresses after visiting them. - The third top skill it shows is “career development.”
This is mentioned once in the above statement. This is what I wrote about as a writer for Remilon. I got fired from this work from home job because I was in a new apartment and smelled gas, and waiting for Con Edison sent my average time per piece through the roof (their words). Again, this was a writing job, but writing doesn’t appear among my top skills despite appearing 15 times on my resume. I literally had someone today accuse me of not having the right keywords on my resume. Is 15 times not enough??? - The fourth top skill it mentions is “medical sales.”
This appears one time already quoted here. I wrote a column for DOTmed Business News for several months. Again, the operative skill is writing, not medical sales. While DOTmed’s focus was medical equipment sales, the sales team consisted of four or five people. I wasn’t on it. I’ve never liked or been good at sales work, and I certainly would not and did not list it as a skill on my resume. My main responsibility at the job was doing the dictation of the company’s then-president, but, for career purposes, I emphasize that I wrote articles for the print magazine and website. - The fifth top skill it lists is “public health.”
Again, this appears once on my resume and refers to some MySpace pages a physician’s assistant for a doctor’s office called Always Your Choice hired me to write about STD prevention. If I’d been that specific, one wonders if ATS would tell employers that I had an STD. At the rate it’s going, I’m surprised it doesn’t filter out all criminal justice majors as supposed criminals. - The sixth and seventh top skills it lists are search engine optimization and SEO, which are the same thing.
I hate SEO writing because I think it’s terrible writing, but I’ve done it, and it belongs on my resume. This is legitimately a skill, but I certainly do not want to emphasize it because I would prefer not to to this kind of writing in the future. It involved things like putting “Long Island homeowner” in every other sentence. I mention it only once, but for some reason, ATS weights it so heavily that it lists it twice with variation. - The eighth top skill it lists is “solutions.”
This is vague, and I don’t understand why they would consider it a job skill because of its vagueness. As it is, it appears a grand total of once. I wrote some SEO articles that appeared under a pseudonym (not of my choice) for a company called Bolt Web Solutions. - The eleventh top skill it lists is “human resources.”
This appears once on my resume as part of an organizational name: “Represented Picture the Homeless in meetings with policymakers such as Steven Banks (New York City Human Resources Administration).” This should in no way be considered one of my core competencies even though it legitimately belongs on my resume in the context it is used, as does everything discussed so far. - “Adobe Premiere” is a “less weighted skill.”
Considering that video editing is one of my top skills according to my resume, it should be a more heavily weighted skill, though why it trumps Final Cut Pro, which I’ve used more often and listed first, isn’t weighted at all. - “Advertising,” “receptionist,” “customer service,” and “customer service representative” are here as skills.
I’ve never worked in any such positions, and they do not appear on my resume. I did apply to 221 jobs with “receptionist” in the title, 46 jobs with “advertising” in the title, and 87 jobs with “customer service” in the title, but I am not sure how they could have pulled these directly from my resume, as they claim, because they don’t appear. If they’re going to make stuff up, I’d rather that they falsely claim that I have a Ph.D. - “Proofreading” is a “less weighted skill” despite appearing six times (although never in the gerund form) on my resume.
Why is something mentioned six times on my resume less weighted than things like “career development,” “medical sales,” and “public health,” which appear once each? - “Mimi” is a less weighted skill.
It shouldn’t have made the list at all. This is the most imbecilic of all the claims so far. This is derived from “Writer/Director/Videographer, Oz En Gage, documentary featuring Mimi Kennedy, John Fricke, and Sally Roesch Wagner.” Brooklyn Public Library suggested that I just put the title, but because this project was never edited and released because I wasn’t allowed to use the school’s equipment once I graduated (Final Cut Pro and Premiere cost around $1,000 each, so I have neither), that doesn’t make sense. I do have the interviews both on tape and on my hard drive so that I can do so when I do have the software (I put two clips of songs from the documentary on YouTube–I couldn’t get their to cut with any precision whatsoever, it would be off by seconds, let alone frames). Unfortunately, the artist’s grant I’m currently receiving is mainly being used to pay rent and to buy furniture to better organize my apartment.
So ATS makes at least fifteen incredibly stupid and subliterate misinterpretations of my resume that I have no idea how to fix. To believe that it was my fault that I became homeless is to believe that these these fifteen misinterpretations are my fault, but again, if you do not know how to fix them, you are just as incompetent as you judge me to be and have no business commenting.
I list the following as top skills on my resume. You need to be able to explain to me why it is appropriate for ATS to ignore these as my top skills and choose othersby plucking words oujt of context:
Versatile writer, editor, proofreader, and video editor. Expert on New York City’s homeless and housing crisis and frequent panelist at housing forums with state and municipal policy makers, law students and national press. Collaborated on educational board game and comic book. Adobe certified web designer.
Landlords are the worst. Mine is being given free money by the city but keeps asking me for money to which they are not entitled to based on the terms of the lease and their agreement with the CityFHEPS program. There has been a lot of back and forth between the benefits specialist at Urban Justice Center Safety Net project and the landlord. Unfortunately, Craig Hughes, the person at UJC who set up the deal as an emergency measure after an incident at my last shelter, is no longer working there, and the copies of all the signed paperwork that the management provided was seized by Mr. Pittman at Black Veterans for Social Justice, the organization that ran my last shelter, while we were in the car back to my apartment, making my case more difficult even though I did provide UJC with Mr. Pittman’s contact information.
The New York Post ran a ridiculous editorial claiming that landlords should be allowed to raise rents as much as necessary to cover all increased costs, an absurd argument that simply ignores what tenants actually receive as payment for their labors, or as Disability benefits and the like. The rich have this sick entitlement mentality that makes them believe that they have a right to live off the labor of the poor, then further use them as an ATM to pay expenses on their investments, which are simply a hoarding of resources that drives up prices to begin with.
In addition to buying furnishings to better make use of the high ceilings of my apartment for reducing the amount of floor space taken up by my personal belongings, getting software onto my laptop and old files off my desktop (which includes the screenplay I submitted to Project Greenlight in 2002, which was not in my e-mail), I was trying to save a significant portion of the 18-month stipend I have been receiving from Creatives Rebuild New York, but the landlord has eaten most of this savings with their demands so that I’m not getting far.
When for some reason IKEA wouldn’t let me order a piece of furniture on Thursday and Friday but finally did on Monday, I spent a little too much money for my own good this month, including finally getting speakers and speaker wire for my rack system that was just taking up space without the necessary components.
All the while, I had the Brooklyn Public Library’s resume help look at my resume, which I had forgotten I had had them do last year. They remembered and just sent me the advice they had sent before, which didn’t address any of the issues I asked them about concerning ATS, but concentrated on really superficial things like saying that the section headed “Proficiencies” should be titled “Skills.” The previous person who helped me with my resume had recommended that I rehead the section titled “Skills” with the title “Proficiencies.” These make absolutely no impact on the fact that ATS are interpreting company names as my skill set and likely getting my resumes filtered out, making my applications a waste of time and energy.
As Brooke Shane wrote in response to one of my Quora posts, “Lolyep at the endless weak ‘professional’ resume edits. I’ve come to expect some slight reorganizing and some changed labels is all they got. It fits their needs to keep the money flowing their direction by trying to convince everyone they are all just addicts and crazies not capable people who companies want to underpay or unscrupulous landlords.”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7979492/reference/
This is cute and intentionally cheesy, and IMDb seems to have a weighted average problem with the most common rating for this being 1. I think that may well be one where, as with the 2016 Ghostbusters, men complained that all the male characters in the film look like complete idiots, except for the dad, who is a passive nerd and doesn’t get a lot of screen time, unlike the mom, and a black kid we’re told finished high school when he was 10 and is very much in the Niles Caulder/Charles Xavier/Barbara Gordon-type role. A bigger problem with it may be that all the women of color in the film are villains.
The main theme of the film is that an artificial intelligence created to do evil, when shown forgiveness and love, will choose good over evil. It’s a sweet conclusion that isn’t too surprising from the studio that also made TV movies about an android teenager loved as a family member. We were just having a discussion about the dangers of AI in our Occupy group. Of course, the main threat in real life is the military, not a cartoon villain bent on destroying a teen hero’s confidence.
Jack Kirby addressed a darker version of the same idea with Machine Man–X-51 is raised as a human son with a humanoid face by Abel Stack and called Aaron. The 50 others all go insane. He is evolved to sentience by the 2001 black monolith, but unlike HAL-9000, his upbringing gives him a sense of morality that turns him into a cynic when he sees how the rest of the world treats him as he tries to do good.
One of the major conceits barely makes any sense. Apparently the android has somehow absorbed Kim’s essence, which Dr. Drakken intends to take from her, destroying her in the process–one wonders why he needed an android intermediary to do this, and the explanation is wrapped in a deliberately silly villain explanation that leads Ann Possible (Alyson Hannigan) to quip about wishing she had brought a book. That the android, who was terrified of being destroyed by her makers was willing to sacrifice herself for Kim after Kim’s efforts to save her is definitely a tearjerking moment even in a film played mostly for laughs.
While not a great film by any means and with a plot I easily predicted (although not the AI element), it’s certainly above-average children’s fare. While I’m aware of the TV show, I never had the Disney Channel and never saw it. Perhaps some of the negativity is that it deviated too much from the show. I didn’t read any reviews or research this to know that it did. It was written by the series creators, so I would doubt it did too much. The opening briefly pulls new viewers up to speed, and like many a Marvel film begins with the defeat of a lesser villain, Professor Dementor, who seems to be inspired by the Nazi villains of the first season of Wonder Woman, speaking in a heavy German accent and expressing s desire to destroy the world.
7/10 Maybe closer to a 6.5, but I want to do my part to counter all those undeserved 1s on IMDb.
Another 30-day suspension that no human being could rationally justify.
Scott Andrew Hutchins 