Spotify Wrapped has proven hugely popular, and now everybody is doing it. I’m getting year-in-review notifications from many of the apps and services I use. I hope my urologist doesn’t want to get in on the action.
Mitchellaneous CLXXXIII: Six things I saw on the Internet
The only thing better than Walton Goggins is noseless Walton Goggins.
Mitchellaneous CLXXXII: Twelve things I saw on the Internet
Rob Reiner, RIP
… very few people, much less filmmakers, had the sort of career run that he had as a director between 1984 and 1992: This is Spinal Tap. The Sure Thing. Stand by Me. The Princess Bride. When Harry Met Sally. Misery. A Few Good Men.
I mean, come on. With the exception of The Sure Thing, every single one of those is a stone classic, and The Sure Thing is still pretty good! It made a star out of John Cusack! There are things we still say because Rob Reiner directed the film those words were in: “This one goes to 11.” “As you wish.” “You can’t handle the truth,” and so on. You could go a whole day talking to people by only quoting Rob Reiner films and you could absolutely get away with it.
“[Rob Reiner’s] films have a certain comedy style … a sweetness and toughness…. Stand by Me is not just about four kids coming of age before junior high school — they’re going to see a corpse. If John Hughes had made Stand by Me — and I’m not knocking Hughes — they would have been searching for a convertible.”
RIP Rob Reiner and his wife in an apparent homicide. How terrible. He was a great talent and a mensch.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out the summer before I was a senior in high school, which meant when I watched it I was very much oh, here’s a role model. Not for the skipping of school precisely; I went to a boarding school and lived in a dorm, skipping days was a rather more complicated affair than it would have been in a public school. But the anarchic style, the not taking school more seriously than it should be taken, the willingness to risk a little trouble for a little freedom — well, that appealed to me a lot.
Before you ask, no, I did not, become a True Acolyte of Ferris. I lived in the real world and wanted to get into college, and while at the time I could not personally articulate the fact that inherent in Ferris’ ability to flout the system was a frankly immense amount of privilege, I understood it well enough. Ferris gets his day off because he’s screenwriter/director John Hughes’ special boy. The rest of us don’t have that luck. Nevertheless, if one could not be Ferris all the time, would it still be wrong to have a Ferris moment or two, when the opportunity presented itself? I thought not. I had my small share of Ferris moments and didn’t regret them.
…
There has been the observation among Gen-Xers that you know you’re old when you stop identifying less with Ferris and more with Principal Rooney (this is also true when applied to the students of The Breakfast Club and Vice-Principal Vernon).
— John Scalzi, “The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twelve: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”
I liked but did not love “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I loved “The Breakfast Club,” and am a little abashed at that because I saw it when I was 25 years old — well older than the target demo. Y
es, I did come to sympathize with Principal Rooney over time; yes, he’s a loser, but he’s also a civil servant, almost certainly underpaid, trying to do his job, and undermined by a privileged teenage punk. And, as Scalzi alludes to in a comment, Jeffrey Jones, who played Principal Rooney, is a registered sex offender, which colors my view of Principal Rooney and his other roles. Notwithstanding Jones’s personal choices, he’s a talented character actor.
Principal Vernon, on the other hand, is a petty little bully. No sympathy. What kind of loser threatens a high school kid with, “You mess with the bull, you get the horns?” On the other hand, Paul Gleason, the talented character actor who played Vernon, seems to have been an all right guy, who praised his teenaged “Breakfast Club” costars.
Look, I’m not trying to say that new technologies never raise gnarly new legal questions, but what I am saying is that a lot of the time, the “new legal challenges” raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit, ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they’d lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam.
— Federal Wallet Inspectors, by Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr
John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But this misses his moment.
In the mid-1970s, Varley exploded into science fiction like a phoenix. His “Eight Worlds” stories were set in a future where hyper-powerful aliens have killed everyone on Earth as a threat to its whales and porpoises and humanity survives everywhere else in the Solar System. Despite this bleak background, the stories were bright and inventive. People change gender on a whim. Wealthy and glorious cities turn to shacks and hovels when their holographic fronts are turned off at night. People bank their memories so that, upon death, they can be restarted with new memories. He wrote so many major stories per year that, in a resurrection of an old pulp-days practice, some had to be published under a pseudonym.
We were all dazzled. His work was full of impressive new ideas. And, outside of the Eight Worlds sequence, he wrote things like “In the Hall of the Martian Kings,” which resurrected the possibility of intelligent life on Mars after the Mariner probes had apparently disproved that. Or “Air Raid,” which made air travel terrifying again.
His novel Titan looked to be the opening of a classic trilogy.
Briefly–for almost a decade–John Varley seemed to be the new Robert Heinlein.
And then, alas, he went to Hollywood.