by Lowell Kempf

I recently finished reading Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert, one of his collections of reviews of movies he didn’t like.

I read it over the better part of a year because I would only read a review or two at a time. It was brain fog or coffee break reading, not something that I would read big chunks of at a time.

And it was entertaining and even educational but it wasn’t something I felt like writing about. Yeah, until it got me thinking about Roger Ebert in general.

I don’t think (and I’m beyond willing to be proven wrong) that someone could hold a position like Roger Ebert in today’s media. It feels like the media environment is too diffuse for one person to have such central position. (But, hey, what do I know?)

(And I also don’t think that’s a bad thing or a good thing. I think it’s just a thing.)

At the same time, I don’t think that if Roger Ebert hadn’t existed, someone else would have taken his place. I don’t think an elder statesman of movie reviewing was inevitable. I think that’s something that required a Roger Ebert.

I don’t agree with everything that Ebert has said or written. I think he was quite wrong about some things. (A strong example of that is his opinion that video games can’t be art, which he eventually relented enough to say that it was his opinion and not definitive fact)

With that said, I feel Ebert did two things that really made him worth listening to. First of all, he explained his positions. Second, he focused on not if a movie was art but if it was worth watching.

And that’s really what it comes down to. Ebert could (and did) teach college courses on movies but he didn’t treat his reviews like college courses. He focused on telling folks were any darn good.

I suspect that Ebert helped us understand movies better. He asked for movies to be good but he made good a wide open term.

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by ulithebison

My first project of 2026 will be a simulation/replay with LOGacta Chart Soccer as I mentioned in my introduction for this project.
The whole project covers the four top leagues in England in 2026: Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two. On top of that we'll be dealing with the League Cup, FA Cup, Champions League, as well as Euros and World Cup. Most of the time I'll only be talking about the Premier League and cup competitions though. If anything interesting happens in the lower leagues, I'll mention it.

[hr]The league matches through Week 4 are done. You can find the results here:
LOGacta Chart Soccer - England - Week 1-4

League Cup

Let's start with the biggest upset of the current round:

Accrington Stanley vs. Brighton 3 - 1
The randomness of the dice.
Brighton, who should have been far superior based on dice probability, actually lose 1-3 away to Accrington Stanley from the fourth division. Accrington Stanley are currently sitting in 21st place in League Two. You literally can't be much lower in our system.

Let's take a closer look at the Premier League matchups:

Burnley vs. Leeds United 0 - 2
The upset of the round. League leaders Burnley lose at home in a complete surprise 0-2 and are knocked straight out of the League Cup.

Fulham vs. Everton 0 - 1
Another away win here, with Everton edging past Fulham with a narrow 1-0 victory.

Liverpool vs. Arsenal 4 - 0
Liverpool ride their good form and win comfortably 4-0 at home against Arsenal.

Other than that, there were no further major surprises in the League Cup.

We'll see each other in the next blog post with the results from Week 5-8.

Thanks for reading,

Uli

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