I haven't been able to make myself watch that one. Going from "cartoony" animation to photorealistic loses something with animals, since they can't give them human facial expressions. The fish in The Little Mermaid were creepy.

It was two irregular visitors. One I've seen on the deck a few times but mostly see around the neighborhood. It's less skittish than most of the others. The other is a tuxedo I've seen rarely (but always tell it that it looks very dashing). I hope they didn't just move the fight elsewhere.

Did it even need to be done at all? There's maybe one shot in that whole trailer that shows any difference between the live action and the animated version. Otherwise, it's all just a slightly different kind of computer animation. What's the point of sticking live actors in it?

I keep seeing discussion of how the book didn't work, but it worked in this production. It was in an arena theater in a geodesic dome, with the square stage being a chess board, and they brought in furniture to suggest sets. No video screens. Jodi Benson (the Little Mermaid) was Florence.

Yeah, the description of the plot in the reviews made me queasy. I saw a production in 1991 that was semi-local (they brought in some Broadway types for the leads and used local pros for the chorus), and the story actually worked. I don't know if they did anything different from previous versions.

The ones I was wearing Sunday were Skechers. These are good for summer because they're cloth and breathe, but in colder weather they get a bit too breezy, and when I wear tights or socks my feet slide forward so my toes get squished.

For the next week, I'll be living off the kielbasa and kale soup I made last night and the butternut squash soup I'm making tomorrow. I won't have to cook for the rest of the week.

I've also been on a soup kick. Some of the soup can go in the freezer, if I can find room for it. I still have a butternut squash soup I need to make. The squash would last, but the shallots I bought might not, and part of the squash will go in a warm kale salad for kale that has to be used.

At the very least, it should eliminate the individual reposts of every post in a thread, rather than simply reposting the first post with a note that it's a thread.

They do have a setting to not see just reposts but to see quote reposts. I'll see how that works. Most of the interesting stuff that gets reposted is done with some kind of comment. I'm trying to cut down on social media time, and I realized how much time I spend scrolling past reposts.

I don't want to unfollow them, but I just want to see their posts, not their reposts of every post in a thread I've already seen several times. And I pick up on a lot of interesting things through judicious reposts, so I don't want to block all reposts from everyone.

I hope the fact that the movie bombed and didn't work will make them rethink the error of their ways. The personal stories have so much depth, and the specificity doesn't take away from the universal core emotions.

Apparently, they were far enough into production on this one to have a trailer when Pixar came down with their "no more intensely personal stories" dictate, so a movie that was supposed to reflect the feeling of being a lonely kid had all the emotional resonance stripped to make it more universal.

With this one, we have a kid who sees a museum exhibit on Voyager then suddenly desperately wants to be abducted by aliens, to the point he's pushing everyone away, being a brat, and skipping school to hang out in his "abduct me" sign. It's a big leap.

It was as though they decided they didn't need the prologue of Up and just started with Carl slamming the door in people's faces and then tying a bunch of balloons to his house to fly to South America. You're thinking "what a jerk" and wondering why he's doing this crazy thing.

Mostly, the main character was utterly obnoxious for reasons that weren't really explained. He had a good growth arc, but for most of the movie I was siding with the adults who "didn't understand" him and with the bullies (he actually was the one who started things with the kids who bullied him).

It was fun. There were places I drive by all the time that I haven't had a good look at until I was on foot. We walked by my old apartment building, so I got to play expert guide there on the history of the building. And I saw areas I hadn't explored yet. Plus met interesting people.

This was a department store. They didn't even have Christmas decorations up.