I Must Watch This Movie Forthwith

I must watch this movie forthwith

Snippets Of Rotten Tomatoes Audience Reviews For Caligula (1979)

Snippets of Rotten Tomatoes audience reviews for Caligula (1979)

The TikTok Ban: Everything We Know

Highlights

The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would require Beijing-based company ByteDance to sell TikTok or it will lose access to app stores in the United States.

The bill will now go on to the Senate.

The CEO denies its users’ data is in danger.

ByteDance will have six months to sell the app if the bill is passed.

TikTok is one of the most influential social media apps to hit the market. The app has over 100 million active users in the US, which is why a lot of Americans can’t help but feel invested in this new situation. For those of you living under a rock, the House of Representatives has just signed a bill to ban TikTok in the US. Why? Because it is owned by ByteDance, a company based in Beijing, China, which is a problem according to US officials.

The concern is that TikTok could give the data of American users to the Chinese government, or possibly influence US citizens through the algorithm. This isn’t the first time lawmakers have tried to shut down the app, which is why TikTok adopted an initiative called Project Texas in 2022, to safeguard American users' data on servers in the US. Despite this, TikTok would have to give their users’ data to the Chinese government if they so demanded.

Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal said, “The Chinese Communists are weaponizing information that they are constantly, surreptitiously collecting from 170 million Americans and potentially aiming that information, using it through algorithms at the core of American democracy.”

(Sen. Richard Blumenthal)

Many are displeased. Many TikTok users are arguing that this is a violation of the First Amendment, and since there is a lot of chatter on TikTok about the situation in Gaza, many are saying it is a way for the government to silence negative talk about Israel. This is not an unjustified concern, as Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton said that TikTok has a “clear skew in pro-Hamas propaganda on TikTok versus other social media apps.”

So, what does it mean if this bill gets passed? ByteDance will have six months to sell the app. If they do not, it will be removed from app stores in the US, and its website will become inaccessible. Now, there is no way to make the app disappear from everyone’s phones, but since the app will be removed from the app store, this means you can no longer download updates, meaning that over time the app will become glitchy and borderline unusable. You could still access the app through a VPN, though this will be illegal.

How is TikTok responding? Well, they are not taking this lying down. In the past, they have challenged similar moves in court and they've confirmed that they will challenge this one as well, and they have also confirmed that they have no plans to sell the app. Shou Zi Chew, CEO of the company, has also made several statements voicing his displeasure at the recent events and doing his best to assure Americans that their data is safe.

(TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew)

So, what happens next? The bill will be reviewed by the Senate, where it will have a long fight before it can be passed. President Biden has already confirmed he will sign the bill if it is given to him. Though many TikTokers in the US are concerned, there is still a lot that will have to happen for TikTok to be banned in the US.

Rick Stepp (calebstepp23@gmail.com)

Sources available upon request.

Onision's Book is an Abomination Against God

1/28/25

I have a burning desire to hold opinions on things that are none of my business. I also love unintentional comedy, I love stories that are so unaware of how bad they are, that they’re quite good. This blog post started as an experiment. The plan was to read the lowest-rated book in my library and then read the highest-rated book to see how they compare. The lowest-rated book in my library happens to be Stones to Abbigale by Onision, with an average of 1.87 stars on Goodreads, which is concerning. Goodreads tends to be very forgiving with reviews, if you can find anything below 3.50, you’re in for a wild ride. After reading this novel and compiling my notes, I realized that this novel is so grotesque, so insulting, that it deserves its own post entirely.

Onision is a disgraced YouTuber who has been accused of s*xual ass*ult. Among the countless videos about him on YouTube, there are plenty that discuss his lackluster books. Curiosity ebbing in my heart, I bought a used copy on eBay and waited eagerly for the novel to arrive. I was worried I’d be biased while reading the book, being aware of how other people feel about it and Onision’s past, but oh boy, I didn’t think about Onision once while reading it. The book completely immersed me. Not because it was good, but because it was so terrible I couldn’t focus on anything else.

This novel is 180 pages and normally I could knock that out in an evening, but I had to pause often to regain my composure and wait for the growing migraine to dull before diving back in. On BookTube it’s easy to find reviews of readers claiming to have found the worst book, but they’re all wrong. Stones to Abbigale is the worst novel. Ever. It contains immature, inauthentic, pretentious writing, filled to the brim with spelling errors, characters that make no sense, and senseless tragedies that are used to make the novel feel edgy and deep.

This post contains spoilers, (trust me, please don’t read this book) and trigger warnings for s*xual ass*ult, school sh*otings, m*scarriages, ab*se, self-h*rm, s*icide, and death, though I talk about none of these things in detail.

Stones to Abbigale follows James, a high school student who falls in love with his classmate, Abbi. There is no standard plot to the story; it’s less of a novel and more of a random series of events that happen to these two teens.

The other characters include Ms. Robertson, Jason, Davis, James’s Mom, Seth, and Barack Obama. There are more characters but they don’t matter.

Actually, none of the characters matter. In most novels, the author takes time for the reader to develop a connection to the characters, that way the reader will care about the story and continue to read it. In this novel, I was divorced from James and Abbi. There are scenes in this book where you should be worried about their safety and I felt nothing. There were even points where I was rooting for them to die, and these characters aren’t written to be unlikeable, they just are. Onision meant for the reader to sympathize with these characters.

We’re chronically told how smart, funny, and kind-hearted James is, but we’re never shown that. James’s inner dialogue reads like an alien’s memoir and his two personality traits are being ‘observant’ and being obsessed with Abbi. As James parades through the story, everyone is chronically kissing his ass, including the president of the United States.

Abbi doesn’t have a personality beyond having a cartoonishly tragic past and having the hots for James.

Ms. Robertson is the guidance counselor at the school and she does not behave like a human being. She’s framed as being a crazy religious Karen who has a personal beef with Abbi because Abbi was s*xually ass*ulted and when she didn’t want to keep the baby, Ms. Robertson lost her shit. Okay, that’s believable, there are tons of pro-life asshats out in the world, but Ms. Robertson loathes Abbi to the point it seems like she knows something about her that we don’t. This could've been an interesting subplot, but it was not handled well at all and came off as unbelievable. Ms. Robertson’s crimes against humanity include screaming at children in public, changing James’s class schedule so he can spend more time with Abbi, and framing innocent children for crimes they didn’t commit.

Davis is James’s ‘best friend.’ I use that term loosely because as soon as James starts dating Abbi he seemingly forgets about Davis. But Davis does not forget about him. Davis is in love with James. This is unconfirmed, but Davis goes on and on about how much he loves his buddy! Platonically, of course! At one point, Davis becomes withdrawn when James starts dating Abbi and even asks James if he ever thinks about anyone else in a romantic way. This would be an interesting subplot but it is never explored and it is never confirmed that Davis has romantic feelings for James, though it is quite obvious. Davis seems to love James a little too much… Davis’s crimes against humanity include talking like a mentally ill eight-year-old and having no interests outside of James.

James’s Mom is a cardboard cut-out who does whatever is convenient for James, which I’ll talk more about later.

Seth is Abbi’s boyfriend, who she eventually leaves to be with James. Seth is ab*sive and cartoonishly evil.

Jason switches back and forth from being a meathead bully who s*xually ass*ults classmates, to a brain-dead himbo.

Barack Obama makes a brief appearance to congratulate James on being a good person. He is never referred to as Barack Obama, just ‘the President,’ but since this book was published in 2015, this officially means that Obama made an appearance in this story. He visits James’s school shortly after a sh*oting took place there and took the individual time to speak with every class. When visiting James’s class, he knows exactly who James is, because James is the main character.

“James Patrick, the boy who nearly saved the day.” - Barack Obama

By the way, James did nothing during the sh*oting except roller skate through the school searching for Abbi. That was all he did.

The authenticity and realism of this novel were a big reason why I couldn’t empathize with these characters. This book is written how Onision believes teenagers think, but the entire novel feels unrealistic and inauthentic. Nobody talks in a normal way, nobody thinks normally. This book felt like it was written by an alien who doesn’t understand human nuances or emotions. At one point there is a school sh*oting and the only observation that James has about the incident is that his classmates are staticistly higher to experience depression or s*icide.

“[The survivors are] all now subjected to a heightened risk for depression and, statistically, even s*icide.” - James

The most egregious example of the characters behaving unrealistically is when James’s Mom invites Abbi to move in with them after her father is arrested and allows her teenage son and his girlfriend to sleep in the same bed and share the same room. Later on, James’s Mom gets remarried and moves in with her husband, leaving James and Abbi alone in the house to finish out the school year on their own with no adult supervision.

The entire novel is filled with sentences that are empty and devoid of meaning, sentences that are meant to be deep and hard-hitting. This book is like a novelization of all the r/im14andthisisdeep posts.

“Make up is just make up, skin is just skin, it is what it is.” - James

I can’t forgive this book for its sloppy, ham-fisted use of very serious issues. This book includes s*xual ass*ult, s*icide, self-h*rm, ab*se, a school sh*oting, and a m*scarriage, and absolutely none of those things added to the story. The school sh*oting is conducted by Seth shortly after Abbi breaks up with him, and it is an event that is used as a dramatic garnish right in the middle of the story and none of the main characters die or get hurt, so it doesn’t matter. The other terrible events are just a randomized list of occurrences that Abbi experienced in the past, horrible things that she often laments about so James can fix her. Words can’t describe how angry I was when it was revealed that Abbi was SA’d.

This book has nothing to say about any of these serious issues. It is ill-prepared for it, and it doesn’t even try. To lazily shoot out incidents that have nothing to do with the story so that the writer can feel deep and smart is something that I cannot take. How dare this writer use such a terrible thing as a random occurrence to make us feel bad for these unlikable childish characters. I’m not against any of these topics being written about, but when you, as a writer, introduce them into your novel, you have a responsibility to the people who suffered through these things to write about it seriously and realistically and not treat it as a joke. Onision should’ve just written “fuck SA survivors,” on his online forum and left it at that. Instead, we get this shit.

This entire novel reeks of arrogance. This novel has so many spelling errors. If I’m to believe what Amazon tells me, Onision’s partner, Kai, edited this novel, and boy, did they do a bad job. The writing style is borderline unreadable. There were so many spelling errors and the language was stilted. Just one pass through a spell check system is all it would take. Onision has fans who offered to edit it for free, and he refused. Why? Because he’s arrogant. He believes the novel doesn’t need a second or third draft, he believes it’s fine the way it is and if we can’t see that, then we just can’t appreciate true art!

James is a self-insert character for Onision. It is obvious through the way everyone treats James and his heavy plot armor, not to mention the fact that Onision’s real name is Gregory James Daniel. In the description of the book, Onision writes, “James is essentially a better version of myself. His home, his school & his life all resemble my own at his age. The people James analyzes and is surrounded by are not so unlike those I’ve known as well. I have experienced much of the loss James has however his happier moments are more often than not also mine. I want to share my story without it being purely non-fiction.”

I hope that droning, moronic sentence gives you a glimpse into what it was like to read this book. By the way, any spelling errors you see in the quotes are Onision’s and his alone.

If this is a fictionalized retelling of actual events, then what parts of this are real, then? If this novel was a way for Onision to tell his story without the confines of reality, then what percentage of this actually happened? Did Onision meet Obama? Are they still bros? Did Onision’s mother give him an apartment when he was a junior in high school? Did Onision survive a school sh*oting? From what I can find, Gregory James Daniel or James Jackson, has never survived a school sh*oting. What about this novel was real? What parts of this novel actually happened? None. None of this happened. Onision romanticized his childhood and added some random bullshit drama and violence to juice it up. The end.

On top of everything else, this book has the audacity to be pretentious. Some people can do pretention well, like Quentin Tarantino, or Christopher Nolan. Gregory James Daniel has not earned the right to be pretentious. If you’re going to be pretentious, at least give me a good story, but Onision can’t do that because he’s too arrogant to accept feedback or criticism.

The only saving grace of this story is that it can be funny sometimes. Not funny in the way it was intended, but funny nonetheless. Around 2/3 into the story, James, Abbi, and Davis are driving and witness a man jump off an overpass. Davis rushes out of the car, which is still moving, by the way, and attempts to help the man, who is clearly dead, and gets hit by a car and fucking dies. This all happens within two pages, and I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes. It was so unexpected, completely out of left field, and so fucking stupid.

So after this, we get a chapter of James blaming himself, even though he didn’t do anything, Davis’s mom praising James for being a good friend, and James pushing the pain away by smashing his girlfriend.

“[Abbi] was all I had left.” - James

Yeah, fuck your mom and your sister, I guess.

So, how does the story end? Someone blows up the school. That’s it. The school is blown up and the last line of the story is, “Well, I guess I won’t be running for [class] president.”

Whoa… what a story. I bought this book on eBay for five dollars, but if I had paid full price, it would’ve been ten. Ten dollars. That was how much I made per hour at my last job. That means that one hour of labor is equal to this torture nexus. God fucking damn it…

If you’re curious about the details of this book, watch one of the countless YouTube videos made about it instead of reading it. I recommend the one by @strange-aeons, which was how I found out about this goddamn monstrosity in the first place.

I gave this story 1 star on Goodreads and 0 stars on Storygraph because Storygraph is a superior app. When looking at other reviews on Goodreads and Storygraph, it seems all the positive reviews are either people trying to give Onision the benefit of the doubt or people who are being sarcastic.

Overall, this book is similar to The Perks of Being a Wallflower if it was co-written by a fourteen-year-old and a mentally ill incel and published on Temu.

Final grade: BAD

Rick Stepp (irresponsibleink@gmail.com)

Born Again Put a Bullet in My Childhood

Born Again Spoilers

The return of the Man Without Fear not only broke my heart, it signifies the end of my childhood. The bullet fired by Benjamin Pointdexter went straight through its victim and into the last bit of nostalgia I held for my younger years.

I was twelve years old in April of 2015. The concept of a streaming service was still new to me, and I expected the first Marvel/Netflix show to be reminiscent of a low-budget fan series. I was going through a lot at the time. My parents were getting divorced, my grandfather was sick with cancer, and my family was on the verge of being homeless. On April 10th, my father and I stayed at my grandad’s house. Grandad was at the hospital because his lung cancer had taken a turn for the worst, and I curled up on the worn couch as spring air filtered in from the open window and my Dad sat down with a grunt in the recliner. My Dad turned on the show and I was enthralled.

I had never seen a superhero show that felt so adult, so real, so slick, and complicated and heavy. I related to Matt Murdock, someone who always seemed to have some sort of obstacle ahead of him. I related to Matt’s boyhood counterpart who was concerned about his father making the rent payments on time. I related to being small, consumed with the big mysterious world that can change at any moment with various levels of stability. I liked that Matt Murdock kept going, no matter how bad things got.

Two days later, I was sitting in my bedroom late at night, watching the infamous episode “Nelson V. Murdock” on my Wii console, legs folded under me, chewing my nails as Charlie Cox and Elden Hensen cried on screen. I was still thinking about that episode the next morning as we drove to Grandad’s house. Later that day, the police called informing us that our house had been robbed. My TV and Wii console were both stolen along with all our other possessions. The drawers in my bedroom were pulled free and clothes were strewn about. Looking at my room, I felt naked. There were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle decals on my walls and I wondered if the thieves looked at them when they came into my room. I wonder if they felt bad about stealing from a child and I knew they probably didn’t. Two days after that, we were officially evicted.

In 2018, I was an angry teenager. My mother was getting remarried and I didn’t like the guy. I didn’t like that we were moving or that I wouldn’t see my friends as much anymore, even though they didn’t feel like my friends at the time. Most of them treated me like shit because we were all young and unhappy about something. I was suicidal but I didn’t fully understand what I was feeling. I pretended to be happy all the time and that made it worse. The new season of Daredevil was the only good thing I had going on in my life. I coveted the episodes, watching one every other week, taking my time. When the series was canceled I was halfway through the season. I stopped watching it and I wouldn’t finish it until 2024. I didn’t want the story to be over. I didn’t want to say goodbye to Matt, Karen, and Foggy, my only real friends.

Recently, I’ve been struggling with the concept of growing up. I’m twenty-two years old and I’m in a weird space where I’m not a kid but I also don’t feel like an adult. It feels like I stopped aging in 2020. I keep reminiscing, thinking to myself “Things used to be better,” even though I know that isn’t true. I’m in college, I’m in therapy, I’m on medication, and life is good. Yet, I can’t seem to move on from periods of my life that have passed. I find myself dreaming about my childhood home and places I lived in my teens. They’re always altered, mashed together like some fucked-up Winchester mystery house.

For years I wanted Daredevil to return. The original series was the postmark of my adolescence. Matt, Foggy, and Karen did more for me during the worst parts of my life than most of my friends have. I wanted to see them again. It was so weird when I got my wish. Tuesday night, I assembled the best bar food I could find, spicy chicken wings, fries, mozzarella sticks, a big juicy burger, and three ice-cold bottles of Coors Light. I set my favorite Daredevil comics and Funko figurines around my television set and placed my fancy chair right in front of it. Seeing Matt, Foggy, and Karen together again was like a dream or a hallucination. And none of that compared to the shock of seeing Foggy gunned down in the street. Hand covering my mouth, food getting cold next to me, and my cousin crying on speakerphone, I watched one of my best friends bleed to death on screen.

I’m a sensitive person and I tend to overthink. I like drawing connections, even if they don’t make complete sense sometimes. In the aftermath of the Born Again pilot episode, sitting on my chair and staring at the ceiling, I realized something: I can finally move on. In some odd, fucked up way, seeing my three favorite comfort characters together again, and seeing one of them die, has given me a sense of closure on my childhood. No TV show was meant to last forever. I’m glad the 2015 Daredevil series died a hero before it could become a villain, and I’m glad the new series is taking a different route. Seeing a definitive end to the original series is permission for me to let go of my unhappy adolescent years and move on. I’m grateful for that, and I know that Born Again is going to make me cry more in the future.

Tonight, I will drink to Nelson, Murdock, and Page and all they’ve done for a lonely kid.

Rick Stepp (irresponsibleink@gmail.com)