Movies and popcorn. Pop corn at cinema. Family film night concept. Action or romantic comedy entertainment on screen. Dark theater with red seats. Salty snack in bucket or box. Spectator or critic pov
I went to see a movie on Friday night. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I can walk to Living Room Theaters from my townhouse in ten minutes, and their popcorn is fantastic. There’s nothing strange about going, except it had been months since I had been there. Now I have been twice in a week.
“A Real Pain” is a new film written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, who stars in it with Kieran Culkin. They play a pair of mismatched cousins who go on a Holocaust tour through Poland to retrace the experience of their recently deceased grandmother. They are opposites but are united by their shared loss and the enormity of the history they are experiencing.
Life goes on. That was the message I left the film with, though admittedly, I was primarily at the movie for that very reason myself. I recommend my strategy to anyone struggling with the recent election’s outcome.
On Sunday, I deactivated my Twitter/X account. No big deal, really. Except the app had become a habit and ditching it would mean a change in my daily routine. Oh no, not a change! I will admit that all of what I saw on that cesspool wasn’t terrible. But I really didn’t want to give up the Super 70’s Sports feed or Rex Chapman’s account.
I already had a good sized Threads following, but never really liked the clunky and algorithmic control of it. In the days that followed the election, I quickly became exhausted with the vibe there. Doomscrolling, or as my students refer to it, “rotting,” was absolutely that on my post-election-Threads feed. It was filled with people I agree with politically, but most of them seemed to need a fatherly kick in the ass to encourage them to return to the land of the living.
Enter Bluesky, the most downloaded app in the App Store for the last week. It is a text-based social media app that looks remarkably like Twitter. Not X, but Twitter. That shouldn’t be surprising since it was developed by Twitter under the leadership of its former CEO, Jack Dorsey.
When Elon Musk bought the platform, he severed ties with it. A reason the app was developed in the first place was to allow for users, and developers to have more control over their feeds, audiences and lists. Musk doesn’t want anything to do with that kind of “freedom” of course, so Bluesky went off on its own.
But then a funny thing happened when the two operations separated. As reported by the New York Times on Sunday, Bluesky eventually became a public benefit corporation, a type of for-profit company that aims to have a positive impact on society rather than focus on maximizing shareholder value. That structure will likely differentiate it from Musk’s X, and Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads in a meaningful way for the foreseeable future. And if that doesn’t, the B-Corp is also now being led by a woman, Jay Graber. Yes, change can sometimes be fantastic.
I’m loving Bluesky so far and am optimistic that my rotting problem will keep improving. Even Rex Chapman is active there now, and while Super 70’s has an account, it hasn’t started posting yet. Stay tuned.
I turned cable news off. All of it. I have found that through the old school evening news, and the headlines from the multiple print media subscriptions I have, I know plenty. I know enough to know that the first two weeks of Trump 2, The Sequel, is certain to be what all sequels are: worse than the first. End of story.
And finally, I finished some narrative edits to my latest novel and delivered the latest version of it to a new publisher. I knew what I wanted to do to it in vivid detail but was slow at getting it done because of all the time I was wasting. The compulsion to know every sordid detail about the political world was getting in the way of important stuff for me. Not anymore.
The weekend before last, I went to my first movie in months. “We Live in Time,” stars Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh. It’s an unusual love story told with an unusual framework, bouncing from the present to the past of the relationship so often, it has the feel of multiple seasons of a streaming series.
That storytelling style had me asking myself the question, “how did we get here?” in real life. I have theories like everyone does, but I guess what’s always been more important to me, is the question, “where are we going?”
Life goes on. I think I’ll just keep going where I was already headed.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.