Drew McWeeny
LightNews LightNews
banner
drewmcweeny.com
Drew McWeeny
@drewmcweeny.com
33K followers 6.7K following 4.5K posts
Caustically optimistic. Potty mouth. FILM NERD 2.0. Netflix's VOIR. MASTERS OF HORROR. '80s ALL OVER. FEAR ITSELF. I helped break the Internet. Sorry about that. Keto for life. Visit drewmcweeny.com for all my shit.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
drewmcweeny.com
Drew McWeeny @drewmcweeny.com · Sep 20
Support human art. Support the plurality of voices. Trans rights are human rights. We are all in this together.

Resist what you know is wrong.
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
thejoelynch.bsky.social
THANK GOD it’s FRIIIIIIDAY!
A fresh ep of “A Couple Old Fashioneds” is LIVE!
This week’s theme:”Down But Not Out!”
What films were discussed?
(HINT:PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE & THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK!)
Watch on YouTube NOW to find out!!
Please LIKE and SUBSCRIBE!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S3J...
A Couple Of Old Fashioneds Episode 2.11 - PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE & THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (4K)
YouTube video by A Couple Of Old Fashioneds Podcast
www.youtube.com
December 26, 2025 at 5:25 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social
Can we fill the TL with suggestions of untapped archives/collections? That would be a lot of fun! I think there's quite a bit of material in the Gregory Bateson papers at UCSC Special Collections that has yet to be written about.
kevinmkruse.bsky.social Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 2h
In the spirit of the season, I want to offer my fellow historians and other scholars the gift of an amazing, largely untapped archive.

Ladies and gentlemen, the John Doar Papers at Princeton. 🗃️
December 26, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
kevinmkruse.bsky.social
In the spirit of the season, I want to offer my fellow historians and other scholars the gift of an amazing, largely untapped archive.

Ladies and gentlemen, the John Doar Papers at Princeton. 🗃️
December 26, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
eclectichutch.bsky.social
One of the things I was most glad to talk with Rian Johnson about was working with his cinematographer Steve Yedlin (he also shouted out his production designer Rick Heinrichs) on these remarkable sequences 📽️

Read the full @ebertvoices.bsky.social interview here: www.rogerebert.com/interviews/c...
Text from an interview with Rian Johnson about the lighting in WAKE UP DEAD MAN at RogerEbert.com that reads: Q: When you mention lighting, I want to talk about your collaboration with cinematographer Steve Yedlin. There are so many moments where characters are talking in the church or at night where it feels like we have been taken into a different world, where the visual language shifts. When you were writing did you have these moments in your mind and what were the conversations like with Steve in bringing them to life? A: It was something I absolutely started thinking about in the writing phase. It was the first conversation I had with Steve, which, first of all, was about the tonal mood of the whole movie being a little bit more gothic. This is definitely more of a lighting movie than the previous two were. Text from an interview with Rian Johnson about the lighting in WAKE UP DEAD MAN at RogerEbert.com that reads: A: The big conversation I had with Steve, I grew up as a kid in Colorado, where the clouds move very fast. It doesn’t happen so much in Southern California, maybe in Chicago it does more often, but you’ll be in a room, it’ll be bright and warm and sunlit, and then the sun will go behind a cloud and like that [snaps fingers] it’ll suddenly be dark. You can barely see each other, and it’s dim and cool. The emotional language of the room changes. It’s something that happens a lot in real life, and you don’t see it in movies very often. I wanted to get very theatrical with those light changes, particularly in the church. Text from an interview with Rian Johnson about the lighting in WAKE UP DEAD MAN at RogerEbert.com that reads: A: So Steve did a ton of work, and the church’s interior was a set built by Rick Heinrichs, our production designer. Steve prerigged it with all these lights and worked out the lighting control system where on set, just on his laptop, we could play the light changes like we were playing music. We could shape them to the scene as it was happening and repeat them take after take. My favorite thing is when I talk to a friend and they’re like ‘oh my god, that must have been magical on set when you guys got lucky and the sun just happened to have come out when he was giving that speech.’ I always say, ‘Yeah, yeah, it was really lucky.’ [Laughs] That’s absolutely how I want you to feel. That’s great. Q: Just the right place, the right time. A: Exactly. Just a lucky guy. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. (L-R) Director of Photography Steve Yedlin and Writer/Director Rian Johnson on the set of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Cr. John Wilson/Netflix © 2025
December 26, 2025 at 4:31 AM
drewmcweeny.com
December 25, 2025 at 10:50 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
josh-foreman.bsky.social
Tumblr user nocryptographer: I talked with someone who works in book publishing, and they mentioned they get a lot of AI slop these days. I asked how they know what's human-written, and they said that there's one thing that will reveal AI slop without error, and that's the author not knowing their own creation. A real author can talk about their story for hours. They love to elaborate every character, every twist, every detail. Because those existed in their head long before they ever made it to the paper. They were loved before they were written. AI slop wasn't. It was just vomited into existence. Someone who generates their story with AI will never bond with their story the way real writers do. That's why they may not know what to say when they're asked why did the character do this, or even remember the scene in the first place. It's something they read, not something they wrote. And to a writer, those are not the same. There's a unique bond between the creator and the creation. If your writing doesn't come of you, you'll always lack that. I keep hearing soon we won't be able to tell. And perhaps, in a superficial sense, that's true. But there is a difference. It's not em dashes or repeated words. It's whether the story was made by someone who loves it and cares about it. If the writer's eyes light up when asked why did the character do that? and they start their very own Ted Talk about that specific scene... then it's real.
December 3, 2025 at 5:37 AM
drewmcweeny.com
I want to watch someone run over these guys. Real slow. ICE is a cauldron of psychopaths, hopped up on white nationalism, and the entire agency has to cut off like a diseased limb. There is no reforming this shit.

Merry Christmas.
longtimehistory.bsky.social LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @longtimehistory.bsky.social · 1d
ICE detain father shopping on Christmas Eve—then steal his family's groceries.

Then 3 agents divvy up his paid for food—taking what they want for themselves.

"Can I just get the wife's number to call and let her know?" woman asks.

"No, guess he should've complied," agent says.

Yakima, Washington
December 25, 2025 at 9:53 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
noelmu.bsky.social
If you’re not an Apple Music subscriber, I think there are services that can convert Apple Music playlist links into something that works with whatever music-streamer you use. Here’s also the playlist in print, should you wish to make it yourself, manually. Enjoy!
December 25, 2025 at 9:45 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
themountaingoats.bsky.social
thinkin about stuff
the time when I was most immersed in Joni Mitchell's music (1990-1995ish) was also a time when I wasn't very in touch with a lot of pain I carried but the pain was there, looking for a place to be felt, and I'd locate that place in Joni Mitchell records, specifically Blue & Court + Spark & The Hissing of Summer Lawns, and while there's certainly plenty of hurt in those records it's still kind of funny when I'll cue up "In France They Kiss on Main Street" and a body memory of beginning to give myself permission to feel something very difficult will ripple through me, and it's in a way delicious, luxuriant; and I think one error in listening is to attribute agency to the artist when this sort of connection is formed, artists are just playing in their sandboxes, but it's also nearly impossible as a listener to not holler in gratitude from the heart of this process, seeking a person or Person to whom one might express that profound gratitude, someone to whom we can say "thank you, what would I be without this," but there are two people to thank for this and it's harder to thank them than to enter into the easy recourse of icon worship, and sources vary on whether those two people are actually just one person but one of them is God and the other one is you.
December 24, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
radosh.bsky.social
For many years at the beginning of the internet era you couldn't get through the Xmas season without getting spammed (usually stripped of attribution) this 1991 SPY Magazine investigation into the physics of Santa Claus. I haven't seen it in a while which means you've maybe never seen it at all?
Do you believe in Santa Claus? This is a complex theological question that each child must decide for him- or herself. Until now, that is. With the aid of a calculator, SPY JR. has conducted a rigorous statistical investigation into the question of Santa's existence. Be forewarned: you may not like our conclusions... We begin our investigation by assuming that Santa Claus really does exist. Now, if you've learned anything about human nature, you know that it's highly unlikely that a normal man would choose, for no particular reason, to devote his life to making toys and delivering them to boys and girls the world over. But this is an objective inquiry, and questions of motivation aren't relevant. We want only to know whether such a man could accomplish his mission. Santa's first obstacle is that no known species of reindeer can fly. However, scientists estimate that out of the earth's roughly 2 million species or living organisms, 300,000 or so have yet to be classified. So, even though most of these undiscovered species are insects and germs, we can't rule out the slight possibility that a species of flying reindeer does, in fact, exist. And that no one besides Santa has ever seen one. A bigger obstacle for Santa is that there are 2 billion children under the age of 18 in the world. The good news is that he needs to deliver presents only to the Christian children, of whom there are approximately 378 million. Let's assume that 15 percent of these Christian children have been bad and are thus -- like Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim children -- ineligible for gift getting. Still at an average rate of 3.5 children per household, Santa has a backbreaking 91.8 million homes to visit on any given Christmas Eve. Fortunately, Santa has 31 hours of Christmas Eve darkness to visit all these homes if he travels from east to west, thanks to the rotation of the earth. Unfortunately, this still works out to 822.6 visits per second. So, for each Christian household with good children, Santa has just over a thousandth of a second to land, hop out of his sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the rest of the presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left out, get back up the chimney, climb back into his sleigh, take off and fly to the next house. How fast is Santa moving? Assuming all 91.8 million stops are spread evenly over the earth's landmass, Santa must travel 0.79 miles per household -- a total trip of 72,522,000 miles. (This is a conservative estimate. It doesn't include trips across oceans, feeding stops for the reindeer, etc.) Given the 31-hour time period, Santa's sleigh must maintain an average speed of 650 miles per second, or more than 3,000 times the speed of sound. To give you an idea how fast that is, the fastest man-made vehicle ever built, the Ulysses space probe, travels at a relatively poky pace of 27.4 miles per second, and conventional, land-bound reindeer travel at a top speed of 15 miles per hour. But let's assume that Santa's flying reindeer are somehow able to reach hypersonic speeds -- thanks, say, to the magical spirit of Christmas giving. Let's take a closer look at Santa's vehicle. First of all, assuming a cheapo 2 pounds of presents per child (that's like one crummy Lego set), the sleigh must still be able to carry a load or 321,300 tons -- plus Santa, an overweight man. On land, a reindeer can't pull more that 300 pounds of freight, and even assuming that flying reindeer could pull ten times that amount, Santa's massive sleigh has to be drawn by 214,200 beasts. They increase the weight of the overall Santa payload to 353,430 tons (not including the weight of the sleigh itself). This is more than four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner. Imagine: Santa skimming over rooftops in a gargantuan hypersonic aircraft with even less maneuverability than a Big Wheel. Here's where things get fun. Three hundred fifty-three thousand tons of reindeer and presents are going to create an enormous amount of air resistance -- especially at 650 miles per second. This air resistance will heat up the reindeer in the same way that spaceships are heated up when they reenter the earth's atmosphere. According to our calculations, the lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. This means that they will burst into spectacular, multi-colored flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them. As Santa continues on his mission -- leaving deafening sonic booms in his wake -- charred reindeer will constantly be sloughed off. All 214,200 reindeer will be dead within 4.26 thousandths of a second. As for Santa, he will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa will be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,375,015 pounds of force (after we deduct his weight). This force will kill Santa instantly, crushing his bones, pulverizing his flesh, turning him into pink goo. In other words, if Santa tries to deliver presents on Christmas Eve to every qualified boy and girl on the face of the earth, he will be liquefied.
December 24, 2025 at 10:12 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
jasonkauz.bsky.social
Teenjus in Righteous Gemstones
December 24, 2025 at 10:20 PM
drewmcweeny.com
I thought PLURIBUS had as strong a first season as any show I can remember. Can't wait for more. Carol is my Grumpy Queen.
December 24, 2025 at 9:45 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
mikebsacks.bsky.social
Starting to get some blowback about this year's Christmas card design. I SWEAR to you that I only saw a man and his funny mustache. I thought it was cute and light-hearted. Sincere, sincere apologies!
December 24, 2025 at 9:30 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
tedflintkansas.bsky.social
Say it @outlawvern.bsky.social
alancerny.bsky.social Alan Cerny @alancerny.bsky.social · 1d
Tis the season.

(I pulled this out of a vending machine a few years back. I assure you it’s not AI.)
Ellis Coke bottle
December 24, 2025 at 9:26 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
rohmersimpson.bsky.social
A few words to those upgrading to 4K/UHD this year. No this isn't about turning off motion smoothing and other nonsense, I assume you're on top of that.

1) You do NOT need to upgrade all of your Blu-ray discs! Even if you splurge on a huge fuck-off display or projector, you know, a 108" screen,
December 24, 2025 at 8:41 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
slipperyjack.bsky.social
The evening off to a fine spooking with a candlelit screening of @kierlajanisse.bsky.social's wonderfully atmospheric Algernon Blackwood adaptation THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM followed by @nunkie.bsky.social's performance of M.R. James' tale of satyr shenanigans, An Episode of Cathedral History 👌...
Poster for THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM Robert Lloyd Parry performing M.R James ghost stories by candlelight
December 24, 2025 at 9:18 PM
drewmcweeny.com
I am immediately reporting this personal attack.
December 24, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
margogogot1.bsky.social
This is from a word scramble gameshow where the host of this show gave plenty of clues and the contestant still got the answer wrong.
A photo from a word scramble game show with the words reading "DRANCIS FORF COPPOLA"
December 24, 2025 at 1:17 AM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
sketchesbyboze.bsky.social
Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.
December 23, 2025 at 8:24 PM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
markharris.bsky.social
Today is the 20th anniversary of the release of Munich, the first movie my husband wrote for Steven Spielberg and a film I still can't believe got made. I am obviously biased but...just watch it. I genuinely don't think it could be done now.
December 24, 2025 at 4:50 AM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
whwoolhat.bsky.social
Years ago, I went to see IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. I'd seen the movie dozens of times, but never in the theater, so I was pretty excited. I got my popcorn and coke and found the perfect seat. The theater was empty when I arrived, but just before the movie started, a family of around 30 people came in.
December 24, 2025 at 4:50 AM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
sepinwall.bsky.social
Pluribus finale: great final line of a season, or greatest final line of a season?
December 24, 2025 at 3:43 AM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
gregpak.net
Thanks for sharing this document, @rweingarten.bsky.social.

I read it, and I believe it's inexcusably inadequate and will not prepare teachers or schools to confront the very real dangers of the "A.i." products pushed by your partners, including OpenAI.

A few thoughts for your consideration...
rweingarten.bsky.social Randi Weingarten 🖇️📚✊🇺🇸 @rweingarten.bsky.social · 2d
Read about Commonsense Guardrails for Using Advanced Technology in Schools aiinstruction.org/sites/defaul...
aiinstruction.org
December 24, 2025 at 3:43 AM
Reposted by Drew McWeeny
espiers.bsky.social
This is a model for what actual masculinity should be. Men don’t need to spend more time in caves beating their chests with other men; they need to take their daughters to a meaningful thing and talk to them about it. Relatedly I think the biggest cure for toxic masculinity is platonic women friends
paulscheer.com Paul Scheer @paulscheer.com · 2d
In 2023 I became obsessed with videos of dads in cargo shortswaiting in parking lots during Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. So when she came to town, I grabbed a camera and headed down to talk to them. I thought it'd be funny. It turned out to be something else entirely.
December 23, 2025 at 11:25 PM