This is JD Vance’s Villain Origin Story

Vance’s wife Usha had also volunteered during a recent “Fox & Friends” interview that her husband had a “dorky” streak — including an interest in Magic: The Gathering, the fantasy card game popularized in the 1990s. It was, Vance said when asked, a phase.

“The big problem with transitioning from being a 13-year-old who likes Magic: The Gathering to being a 15-year-old who likes Magic: The Gathering is that 15-year-old girls do not like Magic: The Gathering,” he said. “So I dropped it like a bad habit.”

That said, he did reveal his “embarrassing” favorite deck from his playing days.

“Yawgmoth’s Bargain,” he said.

– Shelby Talcott, “JD Vance talks Tim Walz, Ukraine, and Ohio State football with Semafor”

  • He says he gave up something he liked to make himself more palatable to others
  • That thing meant something to him, evidenced by the easy recall of his favorite deck years after quitting
  • He believed all girls shared a monolithic negative opinion about M:TG
  • He likely still believes this, based on the way he states his opinion from the past as a persistent fact, and not “when I was 15 I believed…”
    • So this 40-year-old man likely still believes there are no girls who like Magic: The Gathering
  • In an attempt to change the narrative from the reappraisal of his previous statements, the choice was made to talk about the rejection of his “embarrassing” and “dorky” activities
  • You can’t play M:TG alone. Were there friends he also dropped “like a bad habit” who kept playing without him?

I’m only a year older than this guy. We’ve had very different lives. But we were experiencing some of these things at the same time. I know that urge to hide the nerdiest parts of yourself. That worry that you’re too much. To wear the mask and follow the crowd and hope it works out the way you want.

I’m not trying to make this into more than it is, but something about this tugged at my brain. Because it makes me wonder if that insecure 15-year-old boy would’ve made different choices if he was told he was already enough. If he believed he was already enough.

And I wonder what he tells himself now, in his head, when he’s alone. Is he still chasing the desire to change into someone else in the hope others will like him more?

The Studio Ghibli 5K

From The Secret World of Arrietty. Tiny Arriety looks ahead with a determined face, standing in front of a patch of yellow and white flowers.

Sprout participated in the Girls on the Run program this school year, but they weren’t able to attend the 5K run at the end of the season.

I proposed that we do a 5K by ourselves, and as a reward for finishing it, treat ourselves to The Secret World of Arrietty in an actual theater (thank you Studio Ghibli Fest).

The Running Part

There was a time when Sprout would want to take a break after just starting to run. This is not that time.

We set ourselves a simple rule: Each time we pass a fire hydrant, we would switch between running or walking. Our goal was just to finish a 5K distance. The stretch goal was besting their time from the practice 5K (an hour and eight minutes).

We finished the 5K in 53 minutes. I’m proud of them. They’re proud of themself. And we both felt a big ol’ rush of endorphins for the rest of the day.

I knew something was going well with this program when they asked me one day, “Can I just go run around the block?” When they got back, they asked: “Can I do that again?”

The energy, the focus, the commitment. These are all things Sprout strengthened in the last few months.

There was another moment today that impressed me, too. Sprout tripped and took a tumble, landing on their knee and hand. It was a pretty hard (and loud) fall. But they took some time with me to assess how bad it actually was, calmed down, got back up, and said they wanted to keep going.

I didn’t need to push. They had a goal to finish this 5K and they wanted it badly enough that a fall that just weeks ago would’ve meant a piggyback ride home now was a minor obstacle.

Again, so damn proud.

The Movie Part

I knew this would be a movie Sprout would want to see. It’s their favorite Studio Ghibli movie so far. We’ve both only seen it on our TV at home.

I am a person who believes in the cinematic experience. Going into a dark room with a bunch of strangers and all staring at the same bright screen has for a long time felt holy to me. It’s a sacred space, and there are many films that are best seen in that context.

The Secret World of Arrietty is absolutely one of those films.

At one point, Sprout leaned over and mentioned how amazing the sound was, and we talked later about how it was both the quality of the sound system in the theater and the sound design of the film itself (like how the same objects would make different sounds depending on whether we were experiencing the moment in the POV of the Borrowers or the “Human Beans”).

We both knew this was a gorgeous film, but seeing it up on a giant screen really let all the details pop. You could see the care put in to every shot.

I loved being able to share this day with my kiddo.

It also makes me hopeful that the slop-fest of current AI/LLMs will pass (or at least the hype will clear away for less flashy, human-centered tools that could actually work as promised). You don’t get storytelling like this movie by plugging in some prompts to a plagiarism generator and waiting for it to render. You can’t fake this emotion.

The Secret World of Arrietty. Arrietty holds Sho's finger and cries as she tells him goodbye forever.
We saw the subtitled version in the theater, and the final lines from Sho were different than in the English dub. The English dub has this beautiful line, “Arrietty, my heart is strong now because you’re in it.” The subtitled version had a similar sentiment but lacked the poetry.

I don’t want this AI

Nobody listened to Dr. Ian Malcolm and this is where we are now.

I don’t want an AI to create uncanny valley renderings for fan casts of film remakes.

I would love an AI I can train to prune my phone’s photo library so that I can quickly find the best shots to share after a day out with my kids.

I don’t want an AI to generate SEO optimized content so I don’t have to write something.

I would love an AI that helped me sort my RSS feeds for the most important things for me to read, so I could more quickly collect ideas for response posts or newsletter links.

I don’t want a plagiarizing Ouroboros that tries to mimic human creativity, but ends up generating mediocre recycled snake shit.

I would like an AI that could analyze my ideas and show me comps, or suggest that there’s more work I need to do to craft something unique.

I do not need a flirty AI digital assistant programmed by people who continue to miss the point of the science fiction classic “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”

I would love it if the people working on applications of AI would appreciate human imagination, craft, and connections instead of thinking there’s a need for a “better” simulation of those things.

Roger Corman dies at 98

The Variety article gives a fairly good summary, but this one feels personal.

Let’s start with Targets, a film I always talk up. It’s Peter Bogdanovich’s first film that happened because Corman had some unused footage with Jack Nicholson and Boris Karloff, and Karloff still owed him a few days of shooting for a contract. Corman told Bogdanovich if he could work those two things in, he could make a picture.

There’s also the careers he helped start or rejuvenate:

After “Little Shop of Horrors” in 1960, Corman convinced Arkoff to bankroll some more ambitious projects, in particular, a series of films based on the works of one of Corman’s favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe. The horror series, which starting with “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1960, spawned eight low-budget hits including “The Tomb of Ligeia” and “The Masque of Red Death.” They revived the careers of Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre and became classics of a kind.

During the same period he was giving unknown actors like Ellen Burstyn, Nicholson and De Niro, screenwriters like Robert Towne and directors like Scorsese, Demme, Joe Dante and Peter Bogdanovich their starts.

– Variety obituary (emphasis mine)

And he produced plenty of movies I watched during my MST3K/renting horror movies with friends era. I can still quote parts of Death Race 2000.

I don’t think there’s a world where I love movies as much as I do without Roger Corman.