I'm officially unemployed!! The union has been useless in this process. I get to write a "letter of reconsideration" to my supervisor's supervisor, but they've also announced it so I'm guessing I know which way that's going. So now the job search begins anew. Meeting with lawyers to see if I have options from that route. They put performance on the termination letter but my civil service file literally has nothing, and I was never given a performance eval despite my requests. Want them to change it to financial layoff which makes a lot more sense. The feds only delivered 70% of the funding they were supposed to, they are replacing me with someone a step below, and the feds want to cancel the grant outright. It makes a ton more sense, then I can easily collect unemployment, and then I don't need to deal with them anymore. Going to be interesting to see where this goes. Otherwise, just applying to jobs and getting ready to move. Made bagels yesterday that turned out wonderfully. Making more today. Poppy, plain, and zaatar. I'm excited for the zaatar with cream cheese.
fuck that with being given performance on the documentation. i hope you’re able to successfully fight that.
So much I could write about but I'm just so fucking tired and so fucking over it. - The heat pump that the local pool outfit said wouldn't work because it was undersized? And couldn't sell me because they have last year's stock that they want to offload at a 40% markup? And that they want $5000 to hook up two pipes and a 60A whip? Yeah it heats up the pool a degree PER HOUR. And it goddamn well should it's eleven fucking TONS of heat/cool capacity. That fucker on? it's like taking the cooling capacity for a strip mall, concentrating it in an area the size of a trash can lid and pointing it at the sky. You can't quite pretend to skydive over it but hot diggity damn it'll take the sweat off your brow in about three seconds. The delta between "buy it off the Internet and install it yourself" and "trust your friendly local pool and spa dealership is eight thousand dollars or 133%. - It's a fucking countertop, not the new Superman movie. No, I don't want a fucking waterfall edge and neither should you, you goddamn trend-following gloryhounds. Here's where we're at: some rich asshole put a slab of quartz on his wall, so other rich assholes put slabs of quartz on their wall, so now home depot has giant chunks of porcelain painted up to look like quartz so you can put them on your wall and pretend you're a Kardashian or some shit. just fucking stop it. - The designer, two architects, the cabinet people and half my friends mocked me eight months ago for wanting a 45" galley sink. Eight months ago? You could buy one for $11k or you could buy one for $800 and I'm the dipshit for wanting an $800 sink. Fast forward to "we're ready to order a sink" and Kohler and Krauss have one, Costco will sell you one and the #1 best-selling sink on Amazon is a fucking 45" galley sink, the best value among no less than two dozen Chinese ripoff galley sinks. But I'm the dipshit. The whole of the design industry is arrayed around the idea that you can have money or taste but not both so the tastemakers will get you to buy their shit by insulting you and making you feel like a fucking idiot. - I got a grocery list from two weeks ago that says "paper towels, juice boxes, potatoes, butter, lunchmeat, ramen noodles, watermelon, subzero, paint, light." yesterday? A fucking refrigerator that cost more than my wife's Honda sat in my driveway while some dipshit delivery guy, half an hour early, refused to talk to me or look at me while he bullied his boss into letting him leave without dropping off my fridge because he decided my ceiling was too low (it's 92"). When I told him to "get the fuck out of my house" he shouted at me, stepped up to me, and threatened me with physical violence. On camera. With audio. "last chance, get out or I call 911" finally got him to leave. You shouldn't have to deal with this fucking 'hood shit when you're buying an appliance that costs more than most people's kitchens and yet. So in canceling the shit out of that order and shopping around for other places you can find insanely expensive refrigerators, I discovered they'd given me the wrong install sheet anyway and now the cabinets need to move over two inches. Apparently It's easier to put a small-block Chevy in a VW Beetle than it is to put a refrigerator in a refrigerator hole. I've been telling people that the house is an aircraft carrier but that's not really accurate. It's more en pointe to say it's a Typhoon-class submarine: bigger than it looks, with four pressure hulls where one would do, constructed as the last gasp of ostentatious spending by a dying empire and 90% invisible because it lurks below the waterline. Either way it's fucking hard-mode home improvement and I'm fucking sick of it. ____________________________ Hey kids - you wanna see how the sausage is made? Fuckin' David Bois, the pitbull who terrorized anyone who said anything bad about Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos? Yeah he headed up a class-action provider lawsuit against Blue Cross Blue Shield with a fuckin' $3b settlement. So of course they slow-walked this to class members such that they put together a website they told nobody about, have a hotline where they tell people how to navigate the website but not how to interpret the data and oh by the way you need to get all your information in within the next three weeks surprise! They were careful to publish their webinars after they happened, of course. Know how I know about it? Because my cell was so contaminated by the PPP process that vultures far and wide now call and text me multiple times a day to go "hey we heard you need money." Three weeks ago I got a couple spams about some bogus settlement, two weeks ago i went "huh maybe I should ask our biller" and our biller went "whaaaaaa" and then this week we ran reports illustrating that under the class rules BCBS did us just this side of $3m worth of harm. Now - is that gonna be a check with some zeros or is that gonna be a Starbuck's gift card? Well see we don't know until everyone submits their poker-chip count and then they divide by the total number of poker chips submitted. So yeah. Fewer people who know about it the more money you make! Thanks, David Bois! We shat it wide anyway because Fuck BCBS. Of course, by the time we'd piloted the submission process there's five days left. Fuckin' capitalism. I had fuckin' dry heaves at Home Depot when I was about to flip the switch on that goddamn heat pump. Do you have any idea how much it sucks to have every expert tell you you're wrong for months, model your goddamn pool in SOLID WORKS and then spend $6k because you think you're right and every expert is wrong? And then you get to see who's the jackass? out of a cannon, into the sun has become my new mantra and that's probably not healthy.
It’s well known that most heat pump installations are grossly oversized and that installers have by clue how to size them. The worst part is that in the construction industry you simply can’t trust supposed professionals. Most are hacks some are artists but very few professionals that actually know their shit. There is zero risk for them to get things wrong, if they undersized there might be consequences for them if they oversized you slowly eat the costs over the next decade
finally got around to watching the deer hunter. uhmmmmmmmm it’s pretty fucking racist in it’s portrayal of the vietnamese and vietnam war on the other hand i finally watched furiosa which was awesome
fucking lol it's pushing 50 years old. Go watch Back to the Future and its portrayal of Libyans (who were the caterers wrapped in turbans and told to speak gibberish) or shit, The Interview and its portrayal of North Koreans. Hollywood is always racist towards whomever the country considers "enemies" and Deer Hunter was first written in '75 because of the Fall of Saigon. The two most interesting things about Deer Hunter are 1) it was filmed heavily in Mt. Baker National Forest - that epic waterfall scene is Nooksack Falls 2) As written, Robert DeNiro should be playing Christopher Walken and Christopher Walken should be playing Robert Deniro. They decided it would be more marketable the way it actually got released, which is probably good because three hours of Chris Walken attempting to be a good guy would have ended Cimino's career one movie earlier.
i was surprised because by it since i went in pretty much blind. think i prefer born on the Fourth of July and apocalypse now as far as vietnam era movies go. the Mount baker scenes totally took me out of it hahaha, that was very noticeable since ive like, been to those spots. pretty interesting that cimino pulled this one off since the rest of his career seems to suck hard.
I'm first going to say that I ain't here to defend Deer Hunter. I found it to be a tedious and brooding mess that could have happened in 90 minutes. Having said that, Cimino is probably the perfect counter-example to auteur theory, the pretentious film student's way of saying "nobody matters but the director." Auteur theory was at its absolute fucking worst in the '70s because of three guys: Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola. Spielberg showed he could do a tight little movie on a nothing budget (Duel) so he was given a whole lot of money and made it all back 40-fold (Jaws). Lucas did the same with American Graffiti and Star Wars. Coppola did the same with Godfather and Apocalypse Now - the important thing there was that Apocalypse Now was a train wreck that skidded off the rails and needed to be rescued but is still considered a masterpiece (and made bank). So Hollywood basically decided that the path forward was to throw money at "auteurs" because fuck, who's going to stand in the way of Spielberg. Never mind that Star Wars was heavily influenced and policed by George Lucas' first wife. Never mind that The Godfather owes more to Al Ruddy than it does Francis Coppola (there's a whole miniseries about that on Paramount Plus, it's really good). Never mind that Spielberg drifted almost immediately into producing and also directing, rather than just directing - Spielberg has made the impact he has because of who he chooses to work with and how he works with them, not by sitting in a corner and insisting that he gets his way. Enter Michael Cimino. Fundamentally, Deer Hunter is a coming-of-age story set in a steel town with side trips to an utterly fabricated Vietnam. It's Vilmos Zsigmond pointing a camera at Meryl Streep, Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken and John Cazale - it would have to be terrible to not be awesome. Deer Hunter drags on the page. Like, it's boring to f'n READ. You're fundamentally left with a process movie whereby people walk around a lot and don't talk about anything. But Meryl Streep not talking to Bob DeNiro is fucking magnetic. And so. Everyone was all in on auteur theory. Sure, five Oscars but its principle competitors were Midnight Express and Heaven Can Wait. Have you ever watched Heaven Can Wait? Would you have guessed it was nominated for nine oscars? Yeah, this is the era Arthur got a sequel. Note that Scorsese survived Auteur theory by never getting a big budget. Coppola was badly wounded by Cotton Club but that wasn't considered a bad film. Spielberg has never made a misstep and Lucas shifted to producing pretty much the minute Star Wars was in the can. But Cimino? He leaned into auteur theory. He got a big head. He turned out to be a royal pain in the ass. Did you know that Heaven's Gate was filmed almost entirely at magic hour? Yeah, fuck your ten hour shooting schedules we've got twenty minutes at dawn and twenty minutes at dusk. And the first cut was five hours long. And anybody sensible would have gone "are you out of your fucking mind" and taken the money away and thrown the project into completion but this was the era of - say it with me - Auteur theory. See, you can fuck up with a Cotton Club and know your next film will be smaller. You're easy to work with, everybody knows you, those are the breaks but you'll have to work harder for your money. But if you cost a fuck-ton and are impossible to work with? When was the last time you thought about Megan Fox? Cimino's best work is Silent Running which is a decidedly mid film. Silent Running, plus patience, plus discipline, plus affability, equals a long and steady career. Silent Running plus Deer Hunter? Yeah, lots of potential there! But there was a confluence of events that took the leash off a mediocre director and the result was expensive and terrible. Five hours of Kris Kristofferson brooding in the dawn light isn't the same as Bob DeNiro and Meryl Streep almost-but-not-quite hooking up.
you touched upon one of my other issues with the deer hunter - the pacing is a disaster. the first hour ish is incredibly slow pacing and then minus the first Russian roulette scene it’s a whirlwind of pacing until the end of the movie. really, really needed a much better editing job. cinematography? generally great. though you start to get some of that “everything dim all the time” approach during the fall of saigon sequence. the main reason i watched it is as part of an effort to watch every feature length film which john cazale has been in, which, isn’t a very long list…
Dude that movie is like swimming through molasses. Never let a cinematographer drive the bus - you'll end up with 15 second shots of a bug on a leaf.
If you could change one thing script edits or mapquest directions cinematography choices which would make the bigger difference?