Tag Archives: Internet

“Bugonia”: What If Rod Serling Made a Lifetime Movie

November 12, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
In a basement, Jesse Plemons and Aiden Delbis in rumpled suits standing over a seated and angry Emma Stone, whose head is shaven.

Reservoir Dogs x V for Vendetta.

Two-Time Academy Award Winner Emma Stone has earned the clout to do only whatever she feels like after La La Land and Poor Things cemented her in the Hollywood history books, not to mention her nominations for Birdman and The Favourite. She could easily coast for the rest of her career playing unstoppable world-changing women with the best fashions, hairstyles, and male costars equal or lesser to her in power rankings. She’s more than earned the right to just sit back, relax, and coast along as the headliner in a network or streaming legal drama for the next ten years.

Instead with her latest she’s doubled down on her current outré mood. Anyone who hasn’t seen her previous black comedies she made with the idiosyncratic director Yorgos Lanthimos — not just The Favourite and Poor Things, but also Kinds of Kindness, which I have yet to endure — may be unprepared for their latest collaboration Bugonia. Technically it could be reduced to a too-basic streaming-menu logline: “Resourceful businesswoman must escape the madmen who kidnapped her.” Sounds like it could be slotted snugly in between 20-year-old basic-cable remainders and Netflix’s increasingly middlebrow offerings, right? Like a prime candidate for an inaugural Investigation Discovery TV-Movie of the Week? You could maybe even con subscribers into thinking it’s a vanguard in that burgeoning new pop culture market, “Based on a True Crime Podcast”. Eventually — and it does take a while — the viewer realizes with growing horror that it’s none of those things as Lanthimos gets down with his outlandish Lanthimosian self.

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WordPress Blogger Weeps Upon Realizing Chinese Bot Swarms Don’t Count as “Found Family”

November 9, 2025 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Kent Brockman from "The Simpson" on TV with caption in Matt Groening font, "I for one welcome our new robot overlords!" Next to him is photo of a real-life Chinese kung-fu robot. Yes, that's a thing now.

No, this entry isn’t about how Chinese scientists have made their very own versions of DC Comics’ Shaolin Robot. That part’s wild but incidental to the topic at hand.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: sometimes this site gets hits, which I chart at every year-end as self-reflection on what I’ve done over the previous twelve months — what worked, what didn’t, which entries got looked at most, which times did SEO seemingly help even though I never give it much thought, etc. By and large, as a stats junkie I get what I need from the WordPress dashboard, even though I’m confident the results are typically a more accurate measure of how many search engine crawlers acknowledge MCC’s existence, as opposed to gauging attention from real people. But same as in video games, a score is a score, and I’ll take whatever points I can get.

At least, that was my philosophy until a few days ago. Site traffic has been weirdly, consistently higher than usual ever since our Dragon Con 2025 cosplay galleries, though live human interaction remains as catatonic as ever. But a funny thing’s been happening since November 6th: that already-boosted activity inexplicably quintupled. None of those hits were referred here from social media or another site, either — they just materialized from nowhere and then disappeared into the night, like ghosts shouting “BOO!” just to amuse themselves.

I looked a little harder at the other dashboard sections that I usually take for granted and noticed a new anomaly: over 85% of my everyday traffic is suddenly, inexplicably coming from China.

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Milestones Behind and Millstones Ahead

May 21, 2023 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Me sitting at one end of a small table with two large slices of pizza on it, each on separate trays. One of them is closer to Anne the photographer.

Portrait of the author having brunch with his wife/photographer Anne at Pizza di Tito, an outtake from our Indiana Comic Con 2023 experience.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we have annual traditions ’round these parts! Two of them recently came up for renewal and passed without mention. Let’s kill two birds with one stone here, or at least whiz a pebble past their beaks just to get their attention.

I launched this tiny personal blog on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, enthusiasm for, offense at, and/or detailed nitpicking of various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollowness, geek lifestyles, food, and Deep Thoughts. MCC has also served as a digital scrapbook for our annual road trips, comic cons, birthday expeditions, and other modest travels. It’s a general repository for any other content that comes to mind and feels worth the time and effort to type up, proofread, and release unto a world-at-large that rarely visits websites anymore unless social media points them there. MCC entries are rarely shared with others in that manner; when it happens, it’s extremely noticeable in our dashboard stats and sincerely appreciated with all my heart.

Last month MCC reached its 11th birthday. As usual the WordPress software congratulated me as an auto-courtesy. Preprogrammed niceties aren’t quite the same as flesh-and-blood acknowledgment, but they help break the silence of what might otherwise have reminded me of that time Peter Brady overdosed on teenage smugness and was flabbergasted when no one attended his birthday party. I think about that episode a lot as I watch site traffic dwindle and wonder if I should bother mentioning my blog anniversaries anymore.

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Happy 10th Anniversary to a Website Worth Slightly Under $44 Billion

April 29, 2022 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Bernie Sanders jazz hands!

I kept this in my files for over a year and let it simmer to just the right level of finely aged irrelevance.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I launched this wee blog on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, enthusiasm for, offense at, and/or detailed nitpicking of various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollowness, geek lifestyles, food, and Deep Thoughts. MCC has also served as a digital scrapbook for our annual road trips, comic cons, birthday expeditions, and other modest travels. It’s a general repository for any other content that comes to mind and feels worth the time and effort to type up, proofread, and release unto a world-at-large that rarely visits websites anymore unless social media points them there.

Basically it’s me me me me me, plus special appearances and other invaluable contributions from Anne, my wife of 17 years and fan. This unpaid quasi-boutique hobby-job was built on a thin foundation with no claim to fame, virtually no preexisting fandom, no networking skills, no books to sell, no merch with my face on it to hawk, no funding from the Chubb Group, no patience for marketing (and pretty please never ever offer to provide me some for a price, because if you think I’m worth it, then by all means go share my works with your social pals for free, same as you do with anything else you genuinely like), and no educated grasp of “SEO” except to know that it rhymes with Vern Tessio, the Stand by Me kid played by Jerry O’Connell, who grew up to costar in Star Trek: Lower Decks, of which Anne and I have six episodes left to watch as of this writing, and watching those might be a more productive use of my time than registering my thoughts online for whomever to see, but it’s late and she’s asleep, which is the general household ambiance during my prime posting hours, so here I am.

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Reaching Out Through the Zoom Lens

April 28, 2020 By in Misc. Media, Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Zoom Jazz Hands!

As you’d expect, our most requested pose. Special thanks to my sister-in-law for the screen shot.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: for the duration of the interim normal, all other human bodies are to be treated as walking land mines, held at a remove, and if one approaches you, go hide and let them detonate in someone else’s face instead.

In these extreme circumstances we’ve sometimes found ourselves doing things far outside the old, complacent, pre-fatality routines. Letting our hair grow into shaggy 1970s grotesquerie. Taking early morning walks around our neighborhood. Calling elderly relatives before they call us first. Posting on Facebook.

Our latest deviation from the norm: hopping on a communication technology bandwagon.

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Twitter Minus Twitter

April 18, 2020 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
This Tweet.

What was he thinking about? I’ll never know.

Twitter isn’t for everyone, but the designers have created a number of tools that allow users to shape their experience, curate their input streams, intertwine narratives, choose overall reading tone, defend themselves against the forces of evil, hide from polite disagreements, and, in my case, remove irritants. The tools aren’t perfect, but I appreciate their usefulness when it comes to surgically removing unnecessary ugliness and repetitive stresses that damage my calm. For me, internet moderation is a form of self-care.

Sometimes the results amuse me more than I’d intended.

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Memo from the MCC Errors & Omissions Department

August 6, 2019 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments
The Shirt!

File photo of a souvenir my wife picked up from Indy PopCon 2015, where the special guests included Charles Nelson Reilly, TV’s Charo, and Joan Embry from the San Diego Zoo along with her amazing thirty to fifty feral pigs.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I wrote at length about a six-part miniseries that my wife and I watched on Crackle called The Final Tsars, in which I couldn’t be bothered to open an extra browser tab and verify the full name of the ruler at the heart of the story. The next morning, our first conversation after “Good morning” was a firm reminder that his official stage name was, in fact, “Czar Nicholas II”. MCC regrets the oversight and is sorry if any Russian historians were offended, but we don’t feel like editing the affected entry because it would undermine one of its underlying points and two of its jokes.

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Yes, There Are Scenes During AND After the “Ralph Breaks the Internet” End Credits

November 26, 2018 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Ralph Breaks the Internet!

Fun in-joke scene for the eight people over 40 who ever loved AskJeeves.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the original Wreck-It Ralph. Not only did John C. Reilly’s layered performance hit me squarely in the heart with that big act of would-be noble sacrifice in the climax, but it later inspired me to write a jokey Top Ten-style follow-up that remains one of the site’s most enduring “evergreen” entries to this day. 2012 was a fun year for me in a lot of ways, and it tickles me to remember that Ralph was no small part of that.

Alas, with great success comes the threat of sequels. Disney Animation hasn’t released a theatrical sequel since Fantasia 2000 graced IMAX screens 18 years ago. Someone up high decided it was time to break the streak with Ralph Breaks the Internet, which, to be fair, tops very nearly every direct-to-video Disney sequel ever. I would have to see Aladdin and the King of Thieves again to decide between the two. That’s faint praise, though. Even as I dwell on the phrase “direct-to-video Disney”, memories of Dan Castellaneta’s Genie, Princess Ariel’s daughter, and The Fox and the Hound 2 return and make me wince.

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My Entry in the Internet Peanut-Gallery Database

November 8, 2018 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Charles Linn page!

It’s cool to see your name in print even when you don’t understand all the words around it.

When you make a longtime hobby out of turning words and pictures into hopefully entertaining compositions, more for the sake of self-satisfaction and human interaction than for lofty aspirations to widespread fame and/or corruptive fortune, it’s always a pleasant surprise when something you did — no matter how tiny or inconsequential it seemed at the time — somehow catches the eye of just the right person and creates an unusual opportunity you’ve never had before, never saw coming, have trouble explaining to others, but draw a bit of pride from anyway.

I’ve had a few such occasions pop up in my life. Another one of those odd little things recently happened for me. I think I now have enough to assemble my own checklist. It’s not long or dignified enough to call a bibliography, but if there were an Internet Peanut Gallery Database — like IMDb, but for nobodies like me — then my IPGDb page would presently look something like this:

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Our Privacy Practices Have Changed! Please Come Back Now, Europe?

May 26, 2018 By in Meta, Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Certificate of Completion!

We did it! We did it! Now someone tell our European readers we’re safe and legal again.

Over the past few days, internet users have been flooded with notifications from various websites, apps, and mailing lists they signed up for in a previous millennium, all declaring the official implementation of new updates to their privacy practices as mandated by the General Data Protection Regulation, Europe’s latest tool in the war on online shenanigans. At the core, it’s a good thing — European residents using computing gadgets should now have more insight and control into how their personal data is collected, stored, used, abused, and repurposed into fuel for the corporate engines that rely on us to be their consumer puppets. On a certain level it feels like an annoying form of paranoia, but this is the kind of response that occurs when multi-billion-dollar companies can’t give straight, morally upright answers to basic questions about what they do with all the 1s and 0s they harvest from our keystrokes.

As is wont to happen in the wake of radical societal upheavals, Comedy Twitter has been having a field day with the wave of emails, notifications, and pop-ups they’ve been receiving from organizations and proprietors desperate to comply and eager to keep their traffic from European visitors uninterrupted. I’ve laughed at too many to relay here without diminishing the effect, but some responses have been comedy gold.

Then tonight I found out even my own site was affected. I didn’t see that coming.

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