Blarg!

Dec. 30, 2024 - Judging Books By Their Covers

I was under the impression I had read fewer books than everyone else in 2024; turns out I actually have a read at least a dozen of them, which puts me way above most Americans. I liked them all, but none of them were anything to write home about in terms of their covers. For that, you have to look to the internet, which is full of book cover analysis at this time of year. I don't know if I'll read any of these books, but I can appreciate artistry when I see it.

There's a couple really big books this year that had nice covers - yes, clever, the "I" in the title of Rushdie's "Knife" is a stabmark, ha ha. And I love the little guy on the cover of Kaveh Akbar's "Martyr!" (even though the book itself is a book about a sad gay guy rather than a funny retelling of the Shahnameh or whatever). But the real revelation from skimming these best of lists was Meg Ripley's Necrology. What an incredible cover, one of those cool images that takes an Old Masters portrait and subverts it in some interesting way. (Think Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, in which the cool detachment of a Jacques-Louis David portrait is profaned by neon-pink sans-serif all-caps typography; or in the musical realm, the way They Might Be Giants literally deface an Ingres portrait on the cover of Nanobots. And yes, I know Ingres is more of a Middle-Aged Master rather than an Old One, to which I respond... shut up lol.) It's interesting how this cover takes so many "soft," "feminine" elements - the pink needlework most obviously, but also the character of the brushwork and the handwritten text - and mashes them together in a way that looks so violent! And it's inspiring, personally, to see mixed media pixel art on a book cover - perhaps this is a niche I could develop in 2025.

I'll also give a shout-out to two "gimmick" covers - Chris Kozlowski's "Kayfabe" with its faux toy package imagery, and the charmingly literal cover of Margaret Atwood's "Paper Boat" which encourages you to take off its cover and make a papercraft boat out of it. Adorable, the both of them.

Dec. 28, 2024 - Laying Low(e)

I had the misfortune of watching the finale of "The Floor" today. The premise of this godawful game show is very simple (simple enough to be explained in its entirety in a one minute promo) - 100 people stand on a giant 10-by-10 screen, and then they each have one-on-one matchups to see who can identify more pictures of things, with the victor stealing the loser's portion of the screen and then being given the option to duke it out with one of their neighbors. Since the $250,000 in prize money on this show is winner take all, you might suspect that the winning strategy is to instead play the game as little as possible. And you'd be right! The big winner was a special ed teacher who had played one match in the second episode and then was not heard from again until the literal final ten minutes of the 13-episode season. "The floor" certainly is an accurate title, although "the nadir" would also work. Naturally, it's already been renewed for two more seasons. Maybe America really likes to watch Rob Lowe wince?

As is typical for braindead game shows, this was adapted from a Dutch series; what I did not realize is that all of these dumb Dutch formats - Big Brother, Deal or No Deal, 1 vs 100, The Voice, even Fear Factor! - were all created by the same guy. Even more implausibly, this guy's name is John de Mol, which is hilarious because "De Mol" is seemingly Benelux's only game show export that he DIDN'T have a hand in creating. The only funnier name for a game show tycoon would be Joe Millionaire.

Dec. 26, 2024 - Guttenberg Galaxy

I saw a bunch of movies at the multiplex in the past week, all of which were competently made and not *boring* but which didn't leave much of an impression on me. One such movie was Robert Eggers' "Nosferatu" - which is actually only the third movie with that title, and which was released by Focus Features, so I can't actually cleverly call it "Nosfer-A-2-4" (or I mean, I can because technically it is Nosfera-'24, but that's not as funny) - and I spent most of the movie thinking... well, okay, I spent most of the movie wondering whether the lighting crews were still on strike. It wasn't great, is my point, but you'll see that when I write about all the movies I saw later this year (or early 2025, anyway).

Anyway, I did recognize Nicholas Hoult in this film from his role in the middling horror-comedy "Renfield," and I recognized Willem Dafoe from being Willem fuckin' Dafoe. But there was another guy in the movie, playing a character named Friedrich, and whenever he was on the screen I thought... hey, he's pretty cute. Who is this guy? I don't think I've seen him in any other movies.

Reader, his name is Aaron Taylor Johnson, and I have seen him in other movies. In fact, I have seen in other movies this very week. Because last Friday, I saw the (very bad) movie "Kraven the Hunter," in which he plays the frickin' title character, whose abs are the film's main redeeming feature! "Oh, this guy's really, really good looking," I told myself. "Have I seen him in any other films? No, I don't think so. But I definitely will remember his face next time I see it." Obviously, I did not.

A while ago, friends and I were discussing the actor Steve Guttenberg, who in the '80s became one of Hollywood's most reliable leading men despite being not particularly funny or talented or good looking or memorable or... anything, really. If anything, he's mostly interesting for being uninteresting - the affable but generic white guy that a quirkier cast could bounce off of. (No offense meant to Guttenberg, who by all accounts is actually very nice IRL.) Who plays that role in Hollywood today? Miles Teller was the first name we came up with; I think my final answer would probably be Justice Smith, whose filmography is filled with blockbusters in which he plays second fiddle to a T. Rex or a Bulbasaur or a gelatinous cube. (This is arguably even true in "I Saw the TV Glow," his only movie in 2024 that we collectively acknowledge exists, where he is memorably upstaged by the back of Fred Durst's head.) Maybe Aaron Taylor Johnson should also be on that list of not-quite-A-listers? After all, I didn't recognize him in "The Fall Guy" this year either, and there he's playing a character who might as well be named "Crom Tuise."

But maybe it would be more accurate to say that, now that Hollywood is in its IP era, and most human roles in major motion pictures are things like "best friend to a CGI hedgehog," every actor is now Steve Guttenberg. A sobering thought.

Dec. 24, 2024 - In Which I Remember Larry

Today my friend Rich posted a screenshot of the official LEGO website that I found pretty funny:

Strange, right? What exactly on the official LEGO website is so scandalous that it requires parental supervision? Plus, is "54 divided by 9" really something only adults would know? I wonder if fathers sit their kids down on the couch and say, "Son, you're at the age where it's time we had a talk... about the obelus." Maybe in the era of iPad kids this is actually a useful deterrent? Or maybe, depressingly, COVID-era schooling was so bad that the under-18 crowd can't actually do math with two-digit numbers. Hm.

A quick googling reveals that age verification on websites was definitely a thing when I started using the internet circa Y2K, although I don't remember running into any of them. Every so often someone would mention COPA, and then we would shrug and I would continue to interact with guys three times my age on TVTome. (It was a very weird time.) But this is pre-smartphones, and now the Western world has decided to really crack down on letting minors freely use the internet. Leading the charge here is, of course, Florida, whose fearless leader wants you to upload a scan of your government-issued ID if you want to browse "adult content." Pornhub is currently threatening to leave Florida altogether, which honestly surprised me - rare to see a website complain about laws that REQUIRE them to harvest users' personal information.

But surprisingly, there *is* a way to age-gate content that isn't a data security nightmare, and it comes from the world of video games. When you turn on the (in?)famous(?) adventure game Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987), the game warns you that its content isn't suitable for minors, and to figure out whether you're *really* 18 or older, it quizzes you on cultural ephemera of the '70s. The questions have aged poorly in nearly every respect you would expect a video game from 1987 where the objective is to have sex could age poorly, but a couple of these questions are interesting in other ways. For instance, consider this one:

Elizabeth Taylor is

The correct answer here is supposed to be A - but a few years after the game's release, Liz Taylor became the creator of White Diamonds, the first notable celebrity fragrance. (Perhaps she got the idea from Leisure Suit Larry? Sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but then consider that in 1991 she actually married a Larry!) Another question notes that O.J. Simpson is, quote, "no one to fool with" - prophetic!

Obvious mid-'80s insensitivity aside, I have a soft spot for Leisure Suit Larry's "age quiz." Part of it is that I am always amused when video games dip into the quizzing well, but I also enjoy the way this "challenge" evokes a very specific childhood memory: we had a "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" home game growing up, and - being a mean little snot - I would deliberately go through the question cards for each dollar amount and put the "hard" ones up front to knock out my parents. (Charles Van Doren would be proud.) During this , I noticed that a brutally difficult question had, for some reason, been printed at $100, and gleefully put it at the front of the deck. Imagine my surprise when my mother easily dispatched the obviously impossible question, "what is the surname of Sly Stallone's character in the 'Rocky' movies?"

I can't think of any other video games that have used the LSL age verification mechanic, nor any that would really need to in the era of the ESRB. But I can think of some websites who could use that tech. Perhaps Pornhub can check that its users are 18 or over with this tricky trivia question:

Ron Desantis is


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