Say what you will about participation awards, but at least their recipients actually participated in the activity in question. I don't know what this is.
I dunno, if I'm in my 70s making $240 a month and living in a shipping container that I don't technically own while the guy across the street's putting in skyscrapers, I might be inclined to call my situation comparatively not that great. I say that like that's not better than my current retirement plan, but that's beside the point.
I mean, this is obviously a senseless tragedy that's going to make a lot of peoples' already-bad situations even worse. Living in poverty in the middle of one of the wealthiest parts of the country is bad enough without having your entire life upended by a random disaster, especially when it was already about to be upended by a major redevelopment project.
See, that's why I'm saying it's gotta be "ChunkyGif." .cyg.
Is the C a /s/ or a /k/? Or is it /tʃ/, like in "cello," to match with "chunky?" Is the Y an /ɪ/, an /aɪ/, or an /i/? Is the G a /dʒ/ or a /ɡ/? Does the fact that it's a pun on the peanut butter brand legitimize the /dʒ/ pronunciation, or does linguistic precedent show it's obviously pronounced /sɪɡ/ like cygnus?
The C is silent, like in "indict." The Y is a schwa, like in "pyjamas." And the G is pronounced /ɣ/, like the proper Dutch pronunciation of "van Gogh." The filetype is thus pronounced, approximately, "Uchgh" - Which you may recognize better as the sound you make when you get chunky JIF peanut butter stuck in the back of your throat.
Probably not, but given the choice (term used loosely) between "ignore it at best, get rid of it at worst" and "fire the journalists and replace them with state-funded sycophants", the apathetic option suddenly seems more appealing. Obviously the preferred option is "stop letting the big companies eat all the smaller ones," but I don't see any formal crackdown on that any time soon, what with that slime mold and all.
Oh, make no mistake, it's still a bad merger. It's just that someone was going to buy Warner either way, and the main competing bid was from Paramount-Skydance with the express purpose of gutting CNN to appease the strange grayish-yellow slime mold that's been growing in the White House, because the news won't stop telling people how slimy it is. Which, of course, gives the adherents of the slime mold reason to try and turn public favor against Netflix's acquisition. Or something along those lines, I'd be lying if I said I was all the way in the loop myself. Maybe there's some other reason it's propaganda, I don't know. It does certainly seem to be echoing the same victim complex that cinemas have been playing up since COVID, but I'm not sure "theater propaganda" is really a thing.
I may be inclined to more sympathy had theaters and cable providers made any effort to stay competitive in the, what, 15 years since streaming started to take off? These guys are about to get hit by an oncoming train that they've been standing motionless in front of for a decade, have made no effort to save themselves - barring, perhaps, having Nicole Kidman politely ask the train to stop - and are now at the last possible minute begging the engineer to switch tracks, even though it would run over like a dozen other people in the process and, really, there's no guarantee the train would actually be going fast enough to hurt them beyond the word of some people that have, again, been sitting in front of an oncoming train for 15 years, one of whom is the guy in the tophat and handlebar mustache that tied all those other people to the tracks in the first place. Sorry fellas, you woulda had my condolences six years ago but now you're on your own. I'll be over here in my much cheaper boat with a five-meter-high stack of DVDs, which in this metaphor represents a five-meter-high stack of DVDs.
Also, I can't make this fit the train metaphor, hasn't Netflix been doing more theatrical runs recently anyway? Like, as recently as last week? Am I just completely misremembering that one K-Pop movie having to add screenings because too many people bought tickets, drawing a bigger audience than the competing Disney and Dreamworks movies in the process? If anything, these guys have got to be salivating at the idea of being able to charge people $19.99 for one movie plus arbitrary processing fees and 30 minutes of unskippable preroll ads.
You know what, I already did one but I'm gonna do another one: Lovecraft Country.
First episode did just about everything you'd want out of a Jim Crow-era supernatural horror road trip mystery. Felt like they really had a handle on the whole "fear of the unknown and incomprehensible" vibe that you don't see done well very often, the cast had great chemistry, and the whole theme of "the real incomprehensible eldritch abomination threatening human sanity is racism" was executed flawlessly. They walked a very fine tightrope between homage and condemnation of Lovecraft's whole... deal and nailed it in one.
And then the main mystery is resolved by the second episode and the whole thing devolves into a very uneven anthology of psychic snakes and angry ghosts and like, Nazi wizards worshipping what I think was just the regular devil and overall very known and comprehensible horrors that didn't really hold my attention for long enough to see if they even tried to tie them all together.
Man, all I wanted was a long-form cosmic horror story wrapped in a character-driven prestige TV period drama with some biting social commentary that doesn't suck. They don't make a lot of those!
Now that's a cat that really was gone.