Bryan Cebulski > Recent Status Updates

Oh no is this really just Butter again h

I was not prepared for how boring this is! Almost entirely made up of meetings about things that are going to happen maybe, with side conversations about hobbies like sports and hunting that the men this book is geared toward are into.

Gibson is such a committed boobs guy, you almost have to respect it.

Extraordinary levels of gender so far. Men in rooms talking about their families between rounds of strategy.

I mean I gotta read at least one Tom Clancy novel in my lifetime.

A character describes the opening of a movie, but doesn't give its title, and I somehow knew it was Miracle Mile even though I haven't even seen Miracle Mile. A subconscious holmesian deduction based on assuming what references William Gibson would be throwing around in the 90s. In case you were curious about the kinds of brain worms I have.

Been chipping away at this forever and I'm gonna need another break. This is actually taking me longer to read than War and Peace because so much of it is tedious legal drama.

Uhhhhh she says "Langston Hughes's play Fences" who fact checked this book!!!!

She really made a good career in theater and television off seeming to be Jewish. Valerie Harper: the original Lea Michelle.

Said she was scared when filming on location in Brazil at night due to "knife-wielding transvestite pickpockets" 🙄

Love how genuinely funny this is.

The Buckminster Fuller biography mentioned when he met Valerie Harper, this mentions when she met Fuller. Full circle!

Valerie Harper claims David Groh was written off Rhoda because Rhoda had lost her comedic edge by being married and the writers wanted to get rid of the husband, but all other accounts say Groh was written off because he wanted to star in a different show. What is the truth???

love how these books have gotten more and more "the author's thinly veiled fetish"

They just used the phrase "that queer feeling of strangeness"

At one point in this the evil guy recommends someone watch his "boxset of the complete works of Yasujiro Ozu", which doesn't and couldn't exist because so many of his movies are lost! Closest would be the criterion eclipse boxsets but even those don't cover much of his work.

Brief mention of Valerie Harper???

i am warming up to bucky's bullshit in his old age but ngl I love this bit where a critic is just like "yeah geodesic domes don't work for reasons that are really obvious to A) experienced architects and B) anyone with any common sense"

He wanted to BOMB THE AMAZON RAINFOREST to make AIRPORTS. this is not a serious person

I appreciate that Nevala-Lee is being evenhanded while deconstructing Fuller's self aggrandizing myths but this frickin dude has been getting on my nerves the whole time. "idea guy" with nothing but bad ideas. designed a car even worse than the cybertruck.

I knew nothing about Fuller going in and I already hate this guy.

"I seemed well on my way to becoming one of those lonely middle aged men who follow habits without really thinking about them." Genuinely great line. Can't stop thinking about how much that applies to Murakami himself, with the habit being "writing novels."

Three page description of eating blueberry muffins. We must stop this man.

We definitely needed Murakami's take on autism.

Ok she really won me over once it started getting into the road trip. Even though her humor still sometimes feels like if the word "adulting" wrote jokes.

Uhhhh for someone who left twitter long before the rest of us, like half of Lindy West's prose here so far is still made up of 2010s social media overexplaining-and-making-caveats-so-people-don't-get-mad-at-me.

First reference to jazz: Dave Brubeck Quartet playing at a coffee shop.

Part 2 is so much more readable than Part 1 because Murakami gets back on his bullshit (positive) instead of back on his bullshit (derogatory).

Prose here is bizarre in a bad way even for Murakami. Half a page of two characters going like "When it gets cold here, I work out of another room." "You work out of another room?" "Yes, another room. It's warmer there." "So it's warmer in the other room." "Yes, would you like me to show you the room where it's warmer?"

I love Charles L. Grant's quiet horror so much. Halfway through and scares have maxed out at an eerie and vague sense of forboding.