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It's freaking awesome! It reminds me a little of some of his long songs on Tempest (those weird ones about John Lennon and the Titanic), so yea, I concur it's probably from those around then when he was writing about topics like that. 5 straight albums of Sinatra covers is way too much, that's for sure haha.

I won’t lie: I like that. Fuck easily pinned-down accents!!!

Assorted musings: - The preview for this film was one of the first times i remember seeing a piece of media, and out loud, for real, saying " Oh NO...! ". I became, as the kids are saying these days, " Woke " and " Shook ". - I told my co workers about it. Then i had to show them the preview, because they thought i was kidding. They too were shook ( not all of them got woke though ). - I thought they'd be fighting dragons. Would it have been stupid? Yes. Would it have made more sense? Yes. - Whenever i see the Great Wall of China i think about the Futurama gag where they knock it down and then the Mongols invade. - When June was relating to the Taotei, she said " fightfightfight ", like on the Itchy and Scratchy Show theme song. COINCIDENCE??? Yes. - The Taotei life cycle is very insect like. Ants, wasps, bees and termites all have social hierarchies, and each has a different body type ( maybe the ones around the Queen were drones ). Cicadas have a very long larval development stage, as a reproductive strategy to minimize the number of predators that they face when they eventually emerge. The Taotei life cycle seems to be 60 years, which would definitely make it longer than the average human life expectancy in the middle ages. Unfortunately for them, humans have developed the concept of time, so they knew when they were coming. Guys, maybe the Taotei were REAL, and Matt Damon helped make them extinct. - Migrating birds have tiny metallic beads inside their heads, and that's how they know where to go, using the Earth's magnetic field. Do magnets screw them up? I don't know, try it out with your local geese. - Jason Mantzoukas seemed confounded by the idea of bipedal animals; Examples of bipedal animals include: Jason Mantzoukas. - This film wasn't as bad or cringey as it seemed at first, but the same can't be said of Matt Damon

Live from Boston, Paul, June and Jason discuss the 2016 action film The Great Wall. They talk about space dogs, Matt Damon’s accent, magnets, and much more. ... am I the only one who didn’t know this was about aliens OR Pedro Pascal? I don’t know what is going on anymore.

That's what made me think Tempest too. Long songs about real people/events and death as a pretty strong theme. But it doesn't sound anything like that album. Maybe that's why it wasn't released? Or he just left off a great song for no reason again? I kind of wish I didn't know this was old because it probably means it's not a direction he's going in. I'm just glad this takes my mind off of how disappointing the new Pearl Jam album is.

It's great. I appreciate that it's original take on JFK and turning toward music/art in uncertain times. It's also unlike anything in his career except maybe Dogs Run Free (except good). I've been wondering a lot this year what is Dylan's next move after three straight albums of standards. This definitely fits into Dylan just dropping something unexpected out of nowhere but a 17 minute single on JFK definitely wasn't a direction anyone was going to pick, right? I'm very curious when this was recorded. I'm guessing around Tempest but that's just a shot in the dark.

@grudlian. what’s your feeling regarding Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul?”

At one point in the movie, they hypothesize that the magnets deafen the tao tei, and that being unable to receive audible directions from the queen is what causes them to freeze up. However, there is absolutely no science that magnets have any affect on hearing at all. I’m not even sure how that would work. In fact, all speakers and earbuds are equipped with magnets as part of the speaker diaphragm. If the movie had posited that the tao tei communicated through some kind of magnetoreception (a sense that allows an organism to detect magnetic fields) then they might have had a compelling argument, but the movie specifically says “deafen” while showing them communicate exclusively through audible means. Furthermore, the Earth is essentially a gigantic magnet. That is how compasses work! They aren’t called the North and South Pole for nothing! It is literally magnetic polarization from the Earth’s molten magnetic core. If tao tai were that sensitive to magnetism, they would be in such a chronic state of lethargy that they would have probably starved to death within days of crash landing their jade meteorite on Earth.

At first, I wanted to call shenanigans on the hosts for suggesting that all of the characters should have been decked out in magnets to protect themselves from the tao tei as there was a line in the movie where Strategist Wang calls it a “strange stone,” implying that they were somehow unaware of the existence of magnets, or at the very least, unaware of the effect magnets might have on rabid space mutts. However, while searching for the scene to support this with a quote, I stumbled on another scene where Strategist Wang not only refers to the stone as a magnet, but that they actually have an ancient record of another instance where a magnet was present and the tao tei simply stopped attacking and allowed themselves to be slaughtered. Okay, if the presence of a magnet was that conspicuous during this weird outlier encounter that it was worth being recorded in their tao tei tome, then yeah, there is absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t have spent the subsequent six decades stockpiling magnetite. Why wouldn’t you? You’ve known it works for at least 60 years! According to Wikipedia, magnetite isn’t even all that rare, and that it is commonly found with iron ore. In other words, the same material they’re using to make their armor, weapons, comically large pruning shears, and Cirque de Soleil bungee hoops is lousy with the exact material they know for a fact will peacefully subdue their enemy. I’m sorry, but there’s just no excuse why that entire wall isn’t just overlaid in lodestone.

i haven't made a ton of playlists lately, but i used to do it all the time. maybe i'll get back to it. my only current one tho is one where i toss songs i like from 2020 on to a big list https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3AMB8x0SPcEZJiBxl8GFFx?si=FcE29E2WRg2vm-LUX_ZSLQ also have some lists on there of my favorite albums of each year, which is something i compile and share with friends every December

Nobody could seem to figure out what type of accent Matt Damon was going for in this movie. And apparently that was by design. In an interview with Yahoo, Damon discusses the character's accent, which he created with acclaimed Hollywood dialect coach Tim Monich. "The accent we made up," he says. "It had to be understandable. It couldn't be modern English. And then [Monich] made rules for it -- the way he does with any dialect we're working on -- so we kinda cobbled it together that way.” Who wants to speculate on what those rules could possibly be? I’m guessing they were based on the color of the outfit each character that Damon spoke to was wearing. If the person wore blue, Damon spoke in an Irish accent. If the character wore red, he spoke with a Texas twang. And so on.

Yes. It's not super common, but it can happen in the social insects i mentioned if the colony is under stress or if there aren't any suitable partners elsewhere, which would be the case here, as it seems that there is only one Taotei colony. Even in mammals, it happens in zoos ( not so much nowadays ), in feral cat colonies... Inbreeding is the way you got all the different dog/cat/fish/bird/cow/goat/sheep/insert-any-domesticated-or-somewhat-domesticated-animal-here breeds. And some fruit flies actually seem to favor incest, because why change a winning formula? If your children inbreed, that's your successful genes beeing spread. And then there's mites, where at least one species has the male impregnating his sisters while still inside the womb. You asked. But there are lots of different, non sexual reproduction strategies. Maybe all the Taotei we see are clones, or clonal. Aphids can have super complicated life cycles, where at one point, clone females are born already pregnant with the next generation of ( different bodied ) clone females. In the words of a famous philosopher, " Life, uh... Finds a way ".

Wouldn't it have been such an easy fix to say that Willem Dafoe's character had learned how to make black powder in the 25 years that he had been prisoner/guest there? Then they'd have a reason to escape with him since he's infinitely more valuable than a couple of saddlebags full of gunpowder. I bet the recruiting numbers for the Nameless Order are pretty great in years 1 through 40 after a Tao Tei attack. Start to dip some after that and then in year 59 there is no way those guys are hitting their quota.

Yeah, this isn't clearly intended as a fantasy like Star Wars is. There's no "a long time ago in a courtroom far far away" tagline. I think complaints about the realism are fair game (though IMO overrided by lots of other virtues).