Ivan K
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ivankander.bsky.social
Ivan K
@ivankander.bsky.social
150 followers 500 following 260 posts
Repping the DMV. Bad filmmaker. Mediocre motion designer.

www.lucky9studios.com
thereisnttimeforthat.substack.com
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ivankander.bsky.social
Screenshot from my substack newsletter that reads: "Eddington is a Thanksgiving movie in that it is representative of the awkward interactions that occur at a yearly meal with family members you hardly see, ripped from our bubbles and forced into ceremonial congregation. It’s where barely-researched—but strongly held— ideals clash with one another, where Facebook posts and Twitter memes are confronted with the reality of the person spewing them. After the niceties about weather and football fade away, you begin to realize that your dear old uncle is actually kind of racist, or that perhaps you didn’t really know as much about clean energy or bitcoin as you thought you did. The irony of modern life is being inundated with information, yet, also still being woefully uninformed about most things."
November 26, 2025 at 2:24 PM
ivankander.bsky.social
Meme image of Frank Costanza from Seinfeld complaining about motion smoothing.
November 21, 2025 at 1:40 PM
ivankander.bsky.social
Well, as a father of two, I have a theory: kids don’t so much like mac and cheese as they like the blue box that comes with the powder. The homemade stuff? Fancy gruyere and shredded cheddar? They ain’t having it. As a food snob, I refuse to submit to the altar of Kraft, and so I stubbornly always make mac and cheese from scratch. My homemade variation basically amounts to buttered noodles, some milk, shredded cheese, salt, and paprika, mixed together in a single pot. My kids like this okay, but they also don’t go bananas for it like I’m always secretly hoping (to be fair, it’s always a bit bland). And, of course, I have to suffer through their eye rolls when they discover the vegetables I try to sneak in there. Dad!? Are these frozen peas?!
November 13, 2025 at 2:49 PM
ivankander.bsky.social
My hot take is just make a good movie.

People don't care about continuity and universe building nearly as much executives think they do.
November 11, 2025 at 1:34 PM
ivankander.bsky.social
After the series’s inciting incident where Ron Trusper is humiliated by a faulty chair, we watch him deal with the mundane insanity of “normal” American life. Ron just wants to talk to someone on the phone, but alas, he’s forced to navigate stock-photo filled, corporate-speak laden websites, useless and infuriating AI Chat Bots (“you’re a fucker!”), an ouroboros of phone trees and bad on-hold elevator music. Is Ron Trusper crazy? Or, are we insane for living in a society that has normalized all this? Just yesterday I tried to buy groceries at an Amazon Fresh, only to find that my “smart cart” couldn’t recognize the store QR code on my phone, and thus, didn’t keep track of my scanned items, resulting in me having to wait in line for 10 minutes so that the check out clerk could just scan my items manually—you know, like they’ve been doing for the last five decades. It’s amazing that we all haven’t snapped already. Tim Robinson is clearly fascinated by the dumb rules and mannerisms of “polite” corporate culture—how we all comply with arbitrary guidelines or default into HR speak…the way off-hand comments can become obsessions, and, ultimately, how people at their core only care about their own wants and desires (a recurring bit where the father of Trusper’s daughter’s fiancé kept bringing up how often a dead dog used to bother him had me rolling). As I often glibly joke to my wife: Everybody is nuts about something. Robinson’s oeuvre, through the characters he plays or encounters, is emblematic of that idea.
November 6, 2025 at 2:23 PM
ivankander.bsky.social
Trump is also evil, but it's all just so much dumber and louder now.
November 5, 2025 at 6:19 PM
ivankander.bsky.social
It's shocking how much of America's reform/conservative Jewish population has so easily bought into propaganda, whether it's about Mamdani or Israel/Palestine post Oct. 7th. I've really had to distance myself from certain folks in my congregation.
November 5, 2025 at 6:05 PM
ivankander.bsky.social
It's terrifying how we have essentially ignored the fact that this ghoul was responsible for the death and suffering of so many, all because his was able to exercise his evil under the banner of "civility" and "norms."
November 5, 2025 at 6:01 PM
ivankander.bsky.social
The real question mark for me is that I have no clue how OpenAI or Meta or whomever else intends to make money off this garbage. And, let’s face it, all of these tech projects, at some point, need to figure out how to make money to satiate their investors. Social media is already a tremendously difficult industry to monetize; people won’t pay to use the service, so you are reliant on advertising or other avenues for revenue. In other words, the currency is eyeballs and the content itself—created by users—is free. But, with AI slop video apps, the content is no longer freely generated…it costs money and time—compute, energy, server usage, whatever—to make these things. So, now, literally the only selling point of social media as a business—the fact that users will self-generate the stuff that people will want to click on, and thus, appeal to advertisers looking for eyeballs—is gone. Silicon Valley has managed to make an unprofitable industry, less profitable? Amazing. We thought the future was flying cars? No, it was computers burning hectares of rainforest in order to get enough compute power to generate facsimiles of existing social media videos, which are then being commented on and viewed by other computers. Gosh, our technodystopia is way more boring than I thought it would be.
October 30, 2025 at 1:14 PM
ivankander.bsky.social
Such an insanely good combination of source material and director
October 23, 2025 at 5:01 PM
ivankander.bsky.social
Maron’s departure truly is the end of an era. The podcast boom has been punctured by the enshittification that always swallows any endeavor dependent on profit and constant growth. Honestly, I’m just glad Maron is quitting on his own terms…that he got out before selling out (albeit after uttering hundreds of ad-reads for Shari’s Berries). And, really, at this point, what more could I have asked for? Maron has talked to practically everyone—from guitar players to politicians who share my last name. Dude deserves a break. Still, though, it’s hard not to get a little weepy knowing that his familiar voice just won’t be there anymore: on neighborhood runs, when I’m cooking dinner, when I can’t sleep. Marc Maron has been the soundtrack of my life for nearly 15 years. Everything ends, I realize, but that doesn’t make it any easier to say goodbye.
October 23, 2025 at 1:23 PM