when asked to explain the whole of Capital while standing on one foot, Marx replied "the rate of profit tends to fall. the rest is commentary; go and study"
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Welles's absolute, undeniable stage presence is on full display. He makes himself huge physically, visually, and emotionally, and then spends the entire film toppling himself, playing both roles of Jack and the giant. This is a film about a man full of bluster and bonhomie who, despite being superficially well-liked by all around him, continually pushes their tolerance to the breaking point, needling them, sapping their patience and their wallets even as he makes them laugh uproariously. Falstaff is good friends with all who meet him but never quite truly beloved by any, and when he finally acts upon presumption of that love he is utterly destroyed.
Knowing that Welles identified so personally with Falstaff, went to such great lengths to make this film happen, and even said that this role was his life's work makes its function as self-critique to the point of self-destruction all the more pointed. Fallstaff lies baldly and constantly, and we know from F for Fake that Welles saw his own role as a liar and charlatan; this film suggests that as much as those lies were an intrinsic part of himself, they were also a source of grief. Orson Welles, a man who always presented himself as larger than life, in this film where he is at his largest is also at his most exposed, raw, and vulnerable.
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I've been having migraines on and off for over a week now, which is a very upsetting change of pace from the one migraine I'd usually get every three to six months, but if there's a silver lining it's that I'm reading a lot of audiobooks while I more or less can't use my eyes
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rotating in my mind the concept of getting a womb tat that's a medical diagram of a uterus
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The MCCONAUGHAUPS
This weekend, a few friends embarked on a voyage of romance, adventure, and discovery all from the comfort of our computer rooms. We came together to achieve something that, to my knowledge[1], has never been achieved before. We experienced the MCCONAUGHAUPS: a two-day marathon of every 00s romantic comedy that starred Matthew McConaughey.
The germ of the idea formed when I read somewhere that Matthew McConaughey, today known for his dramatic roles on the big and small screen, had spent his early stardom almost exclusively in chick flicks. It was, in fact, a conscious attempt to flee this typecasting that led him to refuse further roles as romantic leads beginning around 2010 and eventually through force of will mold his career into what we know today.
Now, I have no particular affection for the man. I would say I hadn't thought about him much at all prior to this event. But I do consider myself quite a fan of the rom-com genre, and having watched only a single one starring him my curiosity was piqued. What does it look like for a man to spend a decade in a genre, and what does it take for him to swear it off completely afterwards? I had to know.
I managed to talk a few friends into joining me, and together we trekked into the unstoppable flood of affable grins and light Texan drawls that was the MCCONAUGHAUPS. And now that it has come to a close, please allow me to present you with the fruits of our excursion: a thoroughly-researched ranking of all six of Matthew McConaughey's 00s rom-com feature films.
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Tiptoes. A film whose existence is baffling, but not as baffling as the choices that went into making it. This only barely counts as a rom-com to begin with; only the first third of the film and the unwelcome sprinkling of fart jokes through the rest of it are at all comedic, and the rest is a dour drama about a man (McConaughey) who hates himself and his family. Glad I watched this with friends because it would have been unbearable alone.
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Failure to Launch. A deeply stupid film where one of the running gags is that various animals bite Tripp (McConaughey) and then visibly chuckle to themselves about it because he hasn't yet achieved inner harmony. Portrays him as a layabout loser only to reveal halfway through the film that he was engaged but his fiancée died six years ago(!) and he's been helping to raise her son(!!) ever since. Dragged into watchability by Zooey Deschanel and Kathy Bates moving mountains as secondary characters.
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Fool's Gold. Barely a rom-com, this is more of an adventure movie with light rom-com elements. Anodyne, overlong, and suffers tremendously from every black character being a rapper-slash-murderer. Other than that, though, it's decent enough.
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Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Silly, schlocky, but at the end of the day pretty fun. Connor (McConaughey) is a huge asshole in a way…
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2025 Oaties: Films
I feel a little less dire about the films of 2025 than I do about the games, but only a little. There are no films I found outright repulsive, which is a win I suppose, although I do feel like I'm still inhabiting the hater spirit in being relatively cool on films that sent people at large into raptures. Sinners was undeniably cool, but it was also unfocused, lacking in the clarity of purpose that's necessary to make a truly excellent film about supernatural horrors. One Battle After Another is principled in a shockingly impressive direction, but doesn't quite land the plane on its ambitions. Wake Up Dead Man is an excellent whodunit, but the writing and characterization around that ends up cartoonish as often as it is profound.
The other sad fact of this year is that there's no film from it that hit me hard enough that I have given it a full five stars. I do try to be conservative about giving out my highest possible rating, but despite that I've watched multiple five-star films each year all the way back through 2021. Worse still, looking back through the films that came out this year and my friends' reactions to them, I don't know if there's anything that's even plausible that I would love wholeheartedly.
This has been a grim year in a lot of ways, and an infertile media landscape is hardly the worst of it. But it's also hard to say that the two are unrelated. How can you separate the systematic evisceration of life through genocide and culture through LLMs from the faltering of art itself? I suppose, if there's a silver lining to be had, it's that this ignites in me the fire to create things of beauty myself. And I can only hope I'm not the the only one.
Film of 2025: Frankenstein
I'm not universally a fan of Guillermo del Toro's work, although I'm always a fan of the way he thinks about and articulates his relationship to art. Frankenstein, though, hit for me in a way that nothing he's made has since Pacific Rim. It thoroughly embodies his philosophies of creation, perhaps because it's about creation. I also can't deny the influence on me from the large volume of quotes and making-of shots that I saw on Tumblr—getting into the artist's head doesn't always help make the art more compelling, but in this case it worked wonders.
The other thing that boosts this to the top spot, of course, is the lack of competition. The only other film that I gave the same rating was Naked Gun, which I do heartily appreciate as a proper comedy that refuses the tyranny of the deadpan. But ultimately the craftsmanship of Frankenstein won out for me over the exuberance of Naked Gun.
It's not lost on me that these two are an adaptation and a remake, as I was bemoaning in my post on games as well. Wake…
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2025 Oaties: Games
This year, I think I'm going to split up my oaties post into two, one for games and one for films. I don't want the posts to be massive, especially since I'm going to continue the tradition I established last year of updating my all-time of-the-year lists along with choosing individual years.
I'll be honest: I'm not feeling great about the state of video games in 2025. I certainly missed some games that might change my opinion here—notable games I didn't get around to that I think I stand a shot of really loving include PEAK, Shadow Labyrinth, Of the Devil, and Kinophobia. I'll mention Despelote as well as a game I watched Eden play most of and thought very highly of. But on the whole, this year leaves a bad taste in my mouth and makes me feel like a hater.
I always try to muster precise and thoughtful critiques of games I don't like, especially when I know other people feel differently, and that often means I'm putting myself in the position of thinking as much about the games I don't like as I do about my favorites. This year, though, it felt like I was endlessly pouring out criticism with only brief intermissions for auditions.
Many people, including numerous friends of mine, loved Blue Prince, Donkey Kong Bananza, and Hades II. I found all three of these flawed in ways that were actively repugnant to my design sensibilities. That's not to say I didn't enjoy them, but the fun I had felt like digesting content, that increasingly refined slurry of choose-three mechanics and the steady drip-drip-drip of unlocks. The failures, on the other hand, were born of deep misunderstandings of the player's perspective-in-the-moment—the very experience whose careful shepherding is what I find most compelling about the very best game design.
I was looking forward to Civilization VII so eagerly I took time off work to play it with Liz. It was so disappointing we abandoned it after two days. Even games I broadly quite liked, like Q-Up and Demonschool, were marred by notable design flaws.
That's not to say there weren't games I enjoyed this year, but looking back at them I'm faced with the horrifying realization that everything I really loved this year was a sequel or a spinoff. Fish Fear Me, Monster Train 2, Elden Ring: Nightreign, Death Stranding 2, and Hollow Knight: Silksong all remix or reinvent their source material to some degree, and I think they're all excellent. But the knowledge that none of them (nor Hades II nor Civilization VII) is fully original haunts me.
Game of 2025: Hollow Knight: Silksong
This is kind of a shoo-in choice, if I'm being honest. There are only three games I gave five stars this year. Nightreign is certainly my most played of the three, and (similar to my reasoning for picking Elden Ring as my game of 2022) exploring…
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posted on anthonymoser.github.io I Am An AI Hater
And I’m glad they’re lies. Because the makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.
And to what end? In a kind of nihilistic symmetry, their dream of the perfect slave machine drains the life of those who use it as well as those who turn the gears. What is life but what we choose, who we know, what we experience? Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it. Blissful ignorance and total isolation, warm in the womb of the algorithm, nourished by hungry machines.
I'm a bit late to the party, but I was just linked Anthony Moser's poetic and impassioned evisceration of LLMs today and I think anyone who hasn't yet read it should do so. I cosign it as an articulation not just of my position on the subject, but of my emotional stance towards it as well. The techno-cultural nexus that we have recently taken to calling "artificial intelligence" is deeply corrosive, and we must not tolerate it. We must not give it air to breathe. When this all falls to an ignominious end, we must dance on its grave that it may never rise again.
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all my friends are disowning me for saying I'm "playing a walklike" every time I go outside
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the thing about Tilda Swinton's hypothetical doppelganger Swilda Tinton
is that if anyone were going to have a doppelganger with a spoonerized name it would be her. she's made multiple films about basically that. so while I'm not claiming that Swilda Tinton exists (although I'm not claiming that she doesn't) I just wanna say: it makes sense. it makes sense!
