Splice Today

I looked on Pirate’s Bay and The Devil Wears Prada has the highest figures I’ve ever seen. The original movie, 20 years ago. At the time of my visit, it had 2017 seeding and 2059 downloading. For comparison’s sake Ghostbusters had 152 seeding and seven (!) downloading; Goodfellas had 293 and 49. The seeding figures count as heavyweight on Pirate’s Bay, but not next to Devil Wears. To play extra fair, let’s take another male classic, this one from the same year that Devil came out. The Departed, released in 2006, scored 443 and 29. Читать дальше...

The naming of cats, as T.S. Eliot wrote in his 1939 poem (later adapted by Andrew Lloyd Weber into the musical Cats) is “a difficult matter,” consisting of three different types of names: the “familial name” the cat's family use daily, the "fancier" name derived from ancient and mythological figures, and the "ineffable" secretive name that Eliot states only "THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess."

Lord of the Flies is so frequently used as a source of inspiration that traditional adaptations of the original text can’t help but feel derivative. A significant portion of the dystopian young adult novel series of the early-21st century, such as The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner, tackled similar themes of youths corrupted by survival instincts, even if they lacked the brutal cynicism of William Golding’s thesis. Stephen King cited the impact of Lord of the Flies on stories such as It and The Mist... Читать дальше...

The Southpaw Part 1

It’s been a month of this bullshit. This throwing program fucking sucks. Long-toss is for outfielders. Throwing to my cousin Jorge, who l never should’ve let stay with me in my house. I think he pisses in my pool. Definitely never walks Zeus, my French bulldog. Can’t even make eggs. How does a kid get to be 22 and can’t make eggs? Guess my oldest brother and his wife never taught him anything. Now the kid is holed up in my guest room probably masturbating. He orders pizzas almost every night. Читать дальше...

Buffet Infinity sounds like a gimmick, and it is. But it’s executed, despite a high degree of difficulty, to near-perfection. This Canadian horror comedy, directed by Simon Glassman, assembles an entire narrative out of fake vintage, low-budget TV commercials and an occasional news clip, presented as though the viewer were flipping past them.

Marilyn Chin’s breakthrough poetry volume, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2002), is a mean-spirited diasporic bricolage. An omnivorous polyglot, Chin hoovers up influences from John Donne to blues to Li Bai and spits them out as satire, scatology, jaded sideways biography, and acerbic reflections on Chinese-American and bicultural experience. Line by line you never know where you are or who’s going to get kicked in which crotch until they start giggling and/or desecrating whatever tradition happens to be sitting around. Читать дальше...

The documentary Catching Pinecones (2026), directed by Chad Heddleston, was a pleasure to watch at the recent Fresh Coast Film Festival in Traverse City, Michigan. The film follows Jan and Herb Conn, a then-young couple in post-World War II America who decide to live their lives the way they want, and ignore what society expects of them.

Did I influence the Trump administration? In 2025, I wrote multiple articles criticizing its proposed draconian cuts to federal science budgets, such as those of NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF). I was particularly scornful of the administration’s plan to shut down one of two detectors of the NSF-funded Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), noting that this would severely limit the project’s cutting-edge science, since the detectors work in tandem; they are respectively in Washington state and Louisiana... Читать дальше...

Chris Ware: The problem is that we humans have craved these constructs and clichés, and we’re now so steeped in them that they’ve restructured our unconscious, which any writer or artist trying to deal with re-creating actual consciousness can’t ignore.