Paulo Seabra

I was watching the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie the other day. A bit late to the party to be sure, as I always am when it comes to movies, and I guess maybe I was in a certain mood or state of mind or what have you, because the animal abuse scenes in it made me think about a lot of things. And while there are quite a few of those scenes, the main one for me is, as it is also often the case when it comes to movies, a small one, it is a small detail, a specific and very singular moment. Then again it might not be as insignificant as all that, in great movies the details never are. A lot of thought and work is placed behind all things, and maybe a lot of meaning too, and so now I'm left wondering if I'm on to something or if I'm overthinking everything, or if maybe in a few words time I'll reconsider, and then rewrite, and then delete, this entire page. And the thing in question would be Rocket's very first word, a short and simple word that doesn't even ma...

I like to look into a bunch of things that are best avoided when talking to colleagues and whatnot. One of those things is abortion, which is obviously a controversial and delicate topic that everyone, and especially every HR department, would rather avoid. Another one of those things I like to look into, one that is maybe a bit more accessible but still controversial, would be veganism. For me these two things sorta coincided over time, with my thoughts about abortion forming into a pro-life position even while, or maybe especially while, I was looking into veganism, agreeing with it in some ways, disagreeing with it in other ways, and even having spats with vegans here and there... Whatever it may be, I just kept finding lots of echoes of the two ideas as listening to vegan activists in video essays or podcasts makes me very often come across thoughts that I could very easily plagiarize into a pro-life statement. In fact, a quick exchange that I once “won” against a vegan was when ...

I've written about this topic at least once before, when I was more or less at stage two of my opinion on it. The first time I was confronted by this idea, when I was more or less as a teenager going into my early twenties, I immediately leaned towards the pro-choice side. I did so due to a combination of not seeing the embryo as a morally valuable thing in and of itself, and of believing that it would be kafkaesque to force a woman to carry something in her body against her will for nine months, and to then be forced to undertake the birth itself as well as the subsequent recovery with all its potential long-lasting side effects. In many ways those instances aren't washed away clean, they still make the entire matter of abortion a delicate one. Still, I've now come to see even the pro-choice name as a euphemism, and furthermore, like all things, and especially like all things nowadays, to win or to lose a debate about this topic is often contingent on optics, it's more...

Like most people who know their stuff I too love The Wire. But like another big chunk of people who also know their stuff I love The Sopranos even more. In many ways my heart should be torn betwixt two lovers but it kinda isn't. So though I do love both shows, and though I even compare them all the time and consider them to be cousins, my heart rests firmly on the belief that The Sopranos is and always be the king of kings. There are a few reasons for that, some of which are bound to be personal and therefore subjective, but since I often come across casual debates about this topic in a variety of comment sections, I figured I'd write down something about it. For that reason, this isn't really meant as a take-down or anything of the sort, not even close. It's really more of a nitpicky thing, basically pulling apart five reasons why The Wire is just a bit lesser than the titan that is its rival HBO show. I picked five reasons because it's a round number, but eve...

I can't say I've ever been a fan of biographies, and biographies of comedians even less so. But being a huge fan of Norm Macdonald compelled me to read this one. Maybe I should have read it way before, certainly before the man died, but what's done is done, I suppose. Regardless, I knew I had to read it, and the final impulse for that was reading a random comment somewhere that consisted of a specific paragraph from the book. I say comment, but it was more of a quote, really... I'll get to that shortly, but for now, what is the book like? Well, first of all it's funny, you can't expect anything less from Norm, but it's also kinda sad, what with him channeling his inner Rodney Dangerfield and pouring on and on about all the losses in his life. Then again, you never know what's true and what ain't, because after all, Based on a True Story ends up being more like a title than a description. What you do get instead is an image, true or false, of a wande...