Author Archives: diestl

What a waste of an interesting premise. The original story comes from a French source, “I Am Not an Easy Man,” but this adaptation feels unfocused and uneven. It leans heavily on broad generalizations about male behavior, flipping stereotypes in a way that never really lands or makes any sense, instead trying to be provocativeContinue reading “Ladies First”

There was a time when Hollywood was seen as glamorous and mysterious. Celebrities were elevated by the media and largely protected from scrutiny. It was viewed as a playground for the elite, and people dreamed of becoming one of the Hollywood ingenues or a leading men in film and television and join in the fun.Continue reading “The collectivism of celebrity”

Back when TV was free, it was better. Sitcoms ruled network television through the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, and the world was better for it. Most sitcom actors weren’t celebrities, they were working theater actors, character actors, and unknown comedians who served the script instead of themselves. By the mid-‘80s and throughout the ‘90s, stand-upContinue reading “When less was more”

Which is better for the mind when celebrated with weed. Music or screen time. History’s timeline. Weed + friends + rock records is clearly superior. The classic era you’re remembering, weed + rock ‘n’ roll records with friends, peaked in the 1960s–1970s (hippie counterculture, vinyl listening parties, festivals) and lingered through the ‘80s and earlyContinue reading “The Circle and the Screen”

A House With Rules A nation is a house. It has walls. It has a foundation. It has rules for the people who live inside it. You don’t walk into another man’s house and start rearranging the furniture. You don’t kick holes in the walls because you prefer a different design. And you certainly don’tContinue reading “Freedom Under Threat”

There are people on social media who wake up every morning angry, searching for anything, anything at all, that can be twisted into outrage. A crumb of negativity is enough to keep the fire burning. But life is happening somewhere else. It’s in the quiet of a park bench, the rhythm of water against theContinue reading “The World Beyond the Hypnotic Screen”

When you build something incredible from nothing and it begins to make sense, that’s when they arrive. People who had nothing to do with its creation suddenly looking for leadership. Not willing to start at the bottom. Not willing to learn the small duties. Not willing to carry the weight. They want a chair nearContinue reading “Skip the Steps. Expect the Fall.”

I don’t know who’s writing the scripts for a lot of these shows on Amazon, Netflix, and the other streaming platforms. Sometimes it honestly feels like AI wrote them. The dialogue is so bad it doesn’t even sound like real people talking. It’s like they’re trying to be clever, but it never lands. The charactersContinue reading “Tampon flavored Fanta”

For centuries we’ve believed in fairytales. Storytelling through the spoken word. Stories in books. Movies pretending to be truth. News telling us what to think. Religions promising certainty. We imitate the scripts handed to us instead of becoming ourselves. Propaganda rarely feels like propaganda. c 2026 Chu The Cud All Rights Reserved