Taylor Swift has made it known that she does not like being called “calculated”, and I get it. To refer to a woman by that word implies a certain tone that one would not give to a man, who normally would be called something like “ambitious”. It’s a shame to me that she doesn’t like this term, because I consider the word a grand compliment and I believe it applies to the pop star. As we enter the tenth month of 2025, Swift has her twelfth album, The Life Of A Showgirl, out. And there is a lot that is needed to calculate.
Every week during the NFL season, FBC co-founder Brandon Andreasen takes a look at the NFL and makes fun of a bunch of teams and players and bets to make him feel better about the fact that he roots for the Chicago Bears and is such a degenerate gambler, he is probably betting on Korean Table Tennis at this very moment.
The Pregame Show
It’s going to be a long winter for Chicago sports fans. It is completely on the Bears to put together a winning streak to give us all something to root for. The Cubs are actively sabotaging themselves on a Wile E. Coyote level. They are hitting the playoffs like a brick wall with the road painted onto it. The White Sox actually improved from historically atrocious to merely really bad. The Blackhawks had all of the free agent money in the world to spend on a couple star players. They chose to sit around, playing with themselves, like that weird kid in the back of class, instead.
If you google the words “art and tragedy”, one of the first results to pop up is a post on r/ArtistLounge that asks, “Is tragedy required for being an artist?”. Of course, you probably read that question and thought, “Absolutely not, ya weirdo.” However, depending on who you ask, that answer may vary, despite how unthinkable that notion may be to you. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard ill-fated news about the personal life of an artist I patronize, only to read a comment that crawled out of a festering pit in the dark corner of a forum that says something to the tune of:
“That means the next album is going to be amazing!”
To which I retort, “Does it? And even if it does, why are you stoked about that?”
One where the sun decided there was no point in showing itself, so the clouds were sent in to provide the grey so appropriate. With the clouds came the snow. Not a blizzard of epic proportions, just snow. Slow snow, spitting, spotty, light, inconsistent in its consistency. Cold enough the snow stuck, piled up to nothing material – 5, maybe 6 inches lying flat in the open spaces where the bare tree limbs stretched out but failed to catch the snow, so it reached the ground.
There was nothingness. Wasn’t cold enough people would look back and say what they did during the Great Freeze of January 2025; not wet nor warm enough to remark how the streets ran with sluggish snowmelt; not deep enough to talk about the battle between shovelfuls; not windy enough for any shoveled snow to angrily return to the driveway.
With raging wildfires forcing the delay of the nominations until Thursday, it’s given me time to reflect on who the nominees should be. As some of the guild precursors have resonated, my Buzz Meter from a week ago has undergone great tumult. Nickel Boys has lost a ton of steam, The Apprentice has gained some, and Sing Sing has had one of the crazier pre-Oscar runs in recent history.
But, it’s time to lock them in. My goal is always for around 75%, with anything over 80% a near guarantee to turn me into an unbearable douche. So, with those stakes on the table, let’s get predicting!!!
Nominations for Hollywood’s biggest night will be revealed this Sunday which means we need to make some predictions. And we cannot do that without seeing which films seem to be peaking at the right time. So, to do that, I made the Buzzmeter!!!
The Buzzmeter looks at which films are getting the most predictions in the major categories (Best Picture, Director, Acting and Screenwriting) and puts them into three piles: Definite locks, Lots of good buzz, and Wild Cards. I gave 5 points to every lock, three to a film with good buzz and a point to the Wild Cards. Also, if you haven’t seen the movie, I will give what I can only assume was the basic one sentence elevator pitch for the movie.
When the pandemic started in 2020, part of my escapism from the dread of the moment was going back and rewatching the entirety of the old Muppet Show. And it felt good, letting the nostalgia wash over me, but also it made me sad. As I continued watching more Muppet content, the movies, then the later TV shows, I felt like something got lost along the way, and it was the earnestness with which the Muppets and even the humans around them behaved. Even in moments of commentary or weirdo subversion, there was a genuineness that I felt fell away a bit. Recent years felt like there was more snark, more bite, more irony, even in how we as viewers engage with the Muppets. I was pleasantly surprised by the Electric Mayhem focused show with Lilly Singh and Tahj Mowry from a few years back, that felt like a love letter to music through the heartfelt lens of the Muppets. And it gave me hope that perhaps more Muppets could be coming. Then news came that a certain Warner Bros owned streaming service might be looking to off-load Sesame Street, and I didn’t just have hope, I had an idea, a movie pitch for how to reunite the Muppets and the folks of Sesame Street for the first time since the early 2000s.
I guess in order for this to happen Disney would have to buy the rights to Sesame Street to have them under the same umbrella as the Muppets. I’m not here to discuss the pros and cons of monopolistic IP hoarding and such. I’m here to talk about Muppets. So…
Well, if we can say anything about the state of music in 2024, we can certainly say that it was decidedly less horny than last year.
Look, there were definitely still some efforts to keep the mojo running in music. Sabrina Carpenter, Tinashe and Addison Rae all did their best to get us going like so many did in 2023. But there was not enough to overcome some of the bigger feelings we got this year: Rage. Contempt. Loneliness. Hopelessness.
Because of this, joyous songs (and there were a good number of them) felt like overwelcome lifeboats getting us to the next day. And even with this year’s crop of the best songs taking us to darker, more introspective places, there was still so much amazing music to share. Let’s take a look at the 50 best songs from a very good year of music.
Yes, there’s a playlist at the bottom of the article. Let’s boogie!
“Have you heard of Martini Ranch?” It’s a question that I ask of anyone who gets to know me on a long enough timeline. More often than not, I’m not even met with a faint glimmer of recognition. Which always blows my mind until I remember that I also had to be introduced to Martini Ranch long after it had ceased to exist.
I remember exactly how it happened, I was working as a truck driver in 2017, and I had a lot of time to listen to podcasts on the road. A personal favorite was the Witch Finger Horror Podcast. I’d started listening to it as a fan of the band Kittie (who still rips by the way and just dropped a phenomenal album back in June), because the vocalist Morgan Lander was one of three hosts along with Megan Rae, and Yasmina Ketita of Rue Morgue Magazine. As I was listening to episode 19, titled “Near Dark and our tribute to Bill Paxton” (he had died earlier that year) I heard the name Martini Ranch for the first time.
Zack Snyder is possibly one of the most fascinating directors in pop culture today. He’s certainly one of the most divisive, whether for the content of his films or for his… let’s say “enthusiastic” fanbase.
Cries of “Release the Snyder Cut!” still echo through the halls of twitter, usually couched next to the worst cultural and political takes one can imagine in a steadily MAGAfying online space, even while Snyder himself professes liberal politics and endorses Democratic candidates.
Is Zack Snyder a woke Chad, a MAGA chud, the coolest dude, a giant dork…?
Fancy Boys Club 