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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 6h

The horror of slasher films isn't the bogeyman or the demon or the alien. It's the apathy of the suburbs. It's the idea that you could scream for help and no one would hear you, or, if they did, they wouldn't come. It's projected alienation.

Michael Myers looming from around a hedge on a sidewalk in HALLOWEEN.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 29/09/2026

Total GDP for all U.S. private industry in 2025 was $27.3 trillion, meaning enterprise AI needs 15% of *every* business—manufacturing, transportation, finance, healthcare, scientific research, entertainment, construction, education, management, forestry, journalism, fishing—to cover its costs.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 22/09/2026

You hear films described as "a 'love letter' to Hollywood" often enough that it got me wondering what "a 'ransom note' to Hollywood" would look like and then of course I remembered:

Exclusive: Fake Accounts Fueled the ‘Snyder Cut’ Online Army
A WarnerMedia report reveals that bots and other inauthentic users bolstered the fan-led campaign for director Zack Snyder’s Justice League do-over

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 20/09/2026

I don't think everyone needs to go armed, but I can't overstate the advantages of having something at waist height that you can rest your hand on. It's such a superior way of walking.

The left hand of a handsome, distinguished gentleman, resting on an umbrella handle jutting out of the hip pocket of his slacks. His hand is also holding a Polar Springs seltzer.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 20/09/2026

The rare pro-LGBTQ / anti-skateboarder triangulation.

A street level window with a variety of LGBTQ ally flags and a "No Skateboarders" flag.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 20/09/2026

Way too many unnecessary penalties turned a promising drive into a FG.

Saints 9, Ravens 17 at M&T Bank Stadium.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 20/09/2026

I love a nice, slow 80 yard drive right before the half. Eat up that clock.

The Jumbotron at M&T Bank stadium. Saints 3, Ravens 14.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 20/09/2026

Everyone forgot Derrick Henry can also *catch* the ball.

M&T Bank Jumbotron depicting Derrick Henry on the sidelines. Score is Saints 0, Ravens 7.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 20/09/2026

Then again, I'm still rocking #52 so who am I to throw stones?

A handsome man wearing a Baltimore Ravens jersey with #52 on the front. This was Hall-of-Famer Ray Lewis's number.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 19/09/2026

Getting in a screaming match with the flight attendant about whether or not Gene Wolfe's SWORD OF THE LICTOR belongs here.

A seatback pocket aboard a 737-800. The label reads "LITERATURE ONLY".

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 18/09/2026

There's a lovely speech by J.A. Preston in BODY HEAT about people looking for excuses to break the rules in an emergency. I think many people are either hoping for a crisis so that they can stop caring about petty courtesies, or believe we are already in one (true!) and have stopped caring.

Oscar: We've got more of everything bad since the wave started. It's the crisis atmosphere, you know. People dress different, feel different, sweat more, wake up cranky and they never recover. Look at Lowenstein. Everything is just a little askew. Pretty soon people think the old rules aren't in effect. They start breaking them. Figure no one'll care, cause it's emergency time. Time out.

source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082089/quotes/

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 17/09/2026

Yeah, put me up against the dude who learned krav maga from Udemy. I'm feeling good about how that one shakes out.

An Instagram ad for Udemy, featuring a number of classes such as "Learn Krav Maga", "Learn Computer Hardware", and "Learn Self-Defense".

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 17/09/2026

REACHER S4: did a good job updating the premise of GONE TOMORROW for post-2016 America. Excellent fight scenes, esp. in the finale: Reacher is in genuine peril in a way that ups the suspense. Writing's kinda stiff and it's still plenty fascist, but Reacher is very human.

Alan Ritchson, Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette, and Sydelle Noel in S4 of REACHER. Christopher is holding a cat.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 16/09/2026

What scene makes you emotional no matter how many times you see it?

Bandit grasping a big yard sign in BLUEY S3E49 "The Sign"

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 13/09/2026

It profit a franchise nothing to sell its dignity for a habitual sexual assailant ... but for Deshaun Watson?

Paul Scofeld and Leo Kern in A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 08/09/2026

ONE MISFIT WHO CAN TELEPORT: ooh, I can rob banks; I can creep on women; I can vacation anywhere I want. EVERYONE IN THE WORLD CAN TELEPORT: cyberpunk dystopia.

the Signet paperback cover for Alfred Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION, a novel which is about, among other things, a future Earth where everyone can teleport.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 08/09/2026

Counterpoint: the purpose of a system is what it does.

https://www.ft.com/content/2e97fb28-24cf-4ab0-89b1-454b4f97cdbc

The relationship between force and diplomacy has also changed. America’s tools of soft power have always been viewed as among its strongest. But the country’s investments in them have lagged. In 2001, the US spent more than 13 dollars on defence for every dollar on the state department and foreign aid. Many have since warned that America has overly militarised foreign policy. But no one fixed it, and the second Trump administration is making matters worse. Its most recent defence budget request is nearly $1.5tn, almost a 50 per cent increase from the year before. Meanwhile, it proposed cutting the state department and foreign aid budgets by more than 80 per cent, while dismantling USAID. A ratio that was 13:1 would have approached 100:1 had Congress accepted those cuts.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 06/09/2026

THE APPRENTICE wasn't perfect but it was a remarkable depiction of a boyish Donald Trump being mentored by Roy Cohn. It got buried when the entertainment industry decided Trump wasn't worth pissing off.

Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan as Roy Cohn and Donald Trump in THE APPRENTICE.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 05/09/2026

"Do you really mean 'everything'?" You heard me.

Willem Dafoe in STREETS OF FIRE, looking like a greaser vampire and holding an airhorn, framed perfectly by the arches of an elevated train.

Diane Lane in an off-the-shoulder red and black dress in STREETS OF FIRE, onstage as Ellen Aim and the Attackers.

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 03/09/2026

What do I love most about capitalism? In one word? Efficiency.

A very complex flowchart titled PHAIDON PRE-AUGUST 2013 STRUCTURE CHART, showing the multiple owners and subsidiaries of Phaedon, an art books retailer in the United Kingdom.

source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-09-03/epstein-tax-advice-payments-focus-of-apollo-s-leon-black-s-house-deposition

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 03/09/2026

Imagine a working-class striver studying office etiquette, taking classes in How To Write a Professional Email, and then stumbling across this exchange between a multi-billionaire and his pederast tax adviser.

The note was structured as an art-backed loan, using some of Black’s personal collection as collateral.

“I think we shouls use the power of substituuion and remove the stock. from the 2006 trust , form the new entity contribute the new corpus, it could be shares of an entity that had a collateral note ( collaterialize.d by both the stock and art for example. or bank note or letter of credit backed,” Epstein wrote in an April 2, 2013 email.

source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-09-03/epstein-tax-advice-payments-focus-of-apollo-s-leon-black-s-house-deposition

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 03/09/2026

"Tax advice, huh? Are you sure it wasn't for—" No, Epstein did provide him legitimate tax advice. Just not $150 million worth.

Many of the tools Epstein employed in the tax transactions cited in the Dechert report have been used by other billionaires to generate massive tax savings. Those include using grantor-retained annuity trusts, or GRATs, a specialized type of time-limited trust which can allow individuals to bypass estate taxes; leveraging the tax code to defer capital gains taxes on art deals; and splitting assets into multiple holding vehicles to enjoy discounts to their taxable values.

source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-09-03/epstein-tax-advice-payments-focus-of-apollo-s-leon-black-s-house-deposition

Indeed, numerous lawyers specializing in trusts and estates who spoke with Bloomberg disagreed with the Dechert report’s characterization of Epstein’s strategies as creative and original, saying that some of the most significant transactions actually relied on techniques that were already well-established components of the tax lawyer’s arsenal — or, in some cases, simply weren’t good advice at all.

source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-09-03/epstein-tax-advice-payments-focus-of-apollo-s-leon-black-s-house-deposition

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 03/09/2026

When I speculate on what the 2040 Adam McKay THE BIG SHORT equivalent film about the LLM bubble will focus on, I think there will be at least one bit around the word "annualized". It's so fucking ridiculous, and journalists are getting car payment salaries taking it seriously.

headline: OpenAI’s Advertising Business Hits $1 Billion Annualized Revenue Run Rate

OpenAI had projected it would generate $2.4 billion in ad revenue in 2016 and $102 billion by 2030.

OpenAI’s advertising business has reached $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate, the company said Monday, suggesting it is likely to fall well short of the $2.4 billion in ad revenue it had projected for 2026.

source: https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/openais-advertising-business-hits-1-billion-annualized-revenue-run-rate

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 01/09/2026

if I could get them to realize one revolutionary fact:

An old-timey socialist organizing poster with some bespectacled nerd in overalls explaining things to a bigger guy in overalls with a couple of beers between them.

Title: THE BOSS NEEDS YOU, YOU DON'T NEED HIM!
Subtitle: LABOR IS ENTITLED TO ALL IT CREATES

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 31/08/2026

This is not the way the pricing model needs to move in order to make LLMs pay for themselves, but it is the way the pricing model needs to move in order to get your less gullible customers onboard.

In one previously unreported example, OpenAI in recent months has started giving some major customers the option of paying only when its AI completes tasks like handling customer support interactions, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. (An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment.)

Customer management startups Sierra and Fin—which Salesforce is in the process of acquiring for $3.6 billion—similarly charge customers only when the AI completes tasks without human intervention. Coding assistant Cognition, meanwhile, is promising enterprise customers up to $10 million in credits if it fails to deliver engineering results worth at least what customers pay for it. And some older software firms, including Adobe Systems, HubSpot and Zendesk, have already moved in the direction of charging for AI only when it works.

source: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/salesforce-overhauling-way-charges-ai

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The Looks of His Face, The Maxx of His Mouth @johnperich.com · 30/08/2026

PROS: spacious, mid-century modern, excellent views, rich history CONS:

The villain spying on a house from the bushes in HIGH & LOW. The house is perfectly reflected in his sunglasses.

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