Oof, what a week.

YouTube Obsession

I have a deep and unironic love for The Twilight series of films¹ . I will not apologize and I will not accept that people hate these movies. There is just no way you can watch these movies in 2024 and take them serious enough to hate them. They are filmed and performed with such earnestness that I cannot fault them for making masterpieces of camp.

That being said, I am a relatively recent “TwiHard”, only seeing the first movie in 2022. So in my new obsession I had to scour the internet for why? Why did people lambast these movies at the time of their releases? In my search I stumbled upon the YouTube channel Mr. Sunday Movies and their weekly show: Caravan of Garbage² .

The show is now a weekly watch for me as it is, above any kind of actual film criticism, lighthearted and funny. The hosts have evolving bits throughout the series and I could listen to them talk about potatoes. It is impeccably edited as well, so the production is a huge part of why I keep coming back.

Watching

I like the Kung Fu Panda movies. The first installment is probably one of my favorite kids movies to come out of aughts. But the series has been at the forefront of the horrible trend of casting celebrities for voice acting.

Ever since Robin Williams blew up playing the Genie in 1992’s Aladdin, animation has been going full-bore into celebrity VA. If the actor can covey a character in voice I really can’t complain, but really from the beginning it has been a practice of hit-and-miss. Let’s not forget that they casted Jonathon Taylor-Thomas and Matthew Broderick as Simba…call any Bank of America branch in America and you could talk to 3 dudes who sound like Matthew Broderick. And Jason Weaver, the actor who sang young Simba’s parts instead of JTT, could have done the entire role because all children sound the same.

The Panda series, however, takes the cake when it comes to terrible celebrity casting. Who the hell, thought Angelina Jolie could covey a unique voice? Same for Lucy Liu and Jackie Chan. Who thinks of Lucy Liu and says “I love her voice.” No one! Jackie Chan has unique voice but the character is given nothing to say or do, so why hire Jackie Chan I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. Seth Rogan has a unique voice, Jack Black brings every role energy, but David Cross is wasted here.

To close my tirade against celebrity VA, This what I had to say about Kung Fu Panda 4 on my Letterboxd:

Playing/Reading

I'm still full-in Caves of Qud.
The natural unfolding mystery world of Qud is absolutely addicting.

Shwubas Update or Shwubdate:

Listening

Some of my older readers may recall when you would receive a burnt CD or a mix tape and their would be that one song that was a mystery. Maybe you forgot about the song for a long time and because you never knew the name or the band, when you tried to find the song decades later it took days of internet sleuthing³ . This happened to me recently and I don’t know if it’s something Gen Z will ever have to worry about since song names and artists are always displayed on streaming services. And there are things like reverse-google image search and Shazam.

Anyway, back in 1999 I used to got to by my cousin and her husband’s house after school . They were maybe 10 years older than me so of course I thought they were cool as hell. And in many ways they were, they gave me a mix tape that had a ton of good music on it: Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine, Ain’t nothing but a Good Time by Poison, Yellow Leadbetter by Pearl Jam and a song that I didn’t know the name of it until 2023.

Tyler by the Toadies

You can see why it was such a hard song to find. The word “Tyler” is not mentioned in the song anywhere and the Toadies are not a band that is oft remembered with the greats of the grunge era.

I would think of the song mostly when I would hear Where is my Mind by The Pixies considering the similar (but legally distinct opening). Part of me also resigned to the fact that maybe I was just thinking of Where is my Mind. Every so often I would scour YouTube to try and find this song using the various and sparse clues I had: “Song about a killer”, “song about a stalker” “pixies-ish bands”.

Then, last year Tyler randomly popped into my discover mix on YouTube Music. I was floored, instantly taken back to doing donuts in my cousin’s ‘85 Mustang GT while drinking 40s of OE.

It’s wild how a song, I thought I would never hear again can mean so much to me now in 2023. It makes me realize that there are millions of songs I love that I will never hear.

Other Notables

** Vaping the Internet

** “Some of you may not know me,” the senator, a best-selling memoirist whose life story was turned into a Ron Howard movie, added. LOL

** No one ever talks about the Silk Road CEO to Crypto Security pipeline

1  There is definitely a full post on Twilight and why it rules in me. Someday.

2  The name of the series is misleading, they talk about good and bad movies.

3  This is further confused by LimeWire or Kazaa files being mislabeled: “Stuck In the Middle with You” By Stealers Wheel often came labeled as “Stuck_in_the_middle_BobDylan.exe”