Apparently inspired in part by Schimberg obsessing over his cleft palate and dealing with lifelong and getting surgery, and then working with Pearson who is intensely charismatic, outgoing, and confident despite being a much more visible condition

Stan get surgery to look like Sebastian Stan and creates a new identity, but then Pearson enters his life and is super outgoing, cool, and way more beloved by everyone, which slowly drives Stan insane as he can’t match Pearson’s charisma

It’s good! It’s written/directed by Aaron Schimberg, who made Chained for Life, and who grew up with a cleft palate. Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson both play guys with, essentially, the Elephant Man condition, which Pearson, who was in Chained and Under the Skin, actually has.

This is kind of the premise of the movie A Different Man

There’s a gift links/free articles feed on bsky you can follow, although even with gift links I’m not clicking through to read an NYT opinion piece

I really liked the novel it’s (very loosely) based on, On Parole by Akira Yoshimura, which is very flat and numb in an interesting way

That was always my favorite Discworld subseries

I was going to say something about the media framing around the book, but I’m a random guy that doesn’t live in PA currently and has no influence on national discourse, so this would be a poor use of time on a Saturday for both of us. I’d prefer to drop this and wish you a good rest of your weekend

I don’t know if it’s stupid framing, who cares to go back to read Hillbilly Elegy to see if Shapiro is accurately characterizing Vance’s attitude to Appalachia, and it fits with the general characterization of Vance as a spineless shit who uses people and turns on anyone at the first opportunity.

There’s convoluted lore because they killed off Jigsaw early in the series but needed to put him in subsequent entries and he’s not magic, leading to an incredibly bizarre timeline as some sequels are part prequel and/or concurrent to another entry

Watched about 15 minutes last night after intro-ing for a film society screening. Pretty early on Landau walks into the record label and someone mentions that they still want Brice to put out his outtakes and Landau does a “yeah, right, that’ll be the day.” In other words, yep