Hi!

Happy 2025! Most people start off the new year with resolutions, but that’s boring. Instead, let’s play a game — one that I had a few opportunities to play with friends, family, and coworkers over the last month or so.

The rules are simple: one person explains a movie plot badly, focusing on obscure plot points or making oblique and sometimes punny references to main themes. Using that clue, everyone else has to guess the film being described. For example, if I said “A girl loses control, puts on gloves, and it helps her keep control — but when the gloves come off, she loses control again,” that would be a description of the movie “Frozen.”

Get it? It’s fun. (If you’re playing in-person, a good second rule is that if someone figures it out, they need to come up with a way to let the original person know they got it without ruining the challenge for everyone else. For example, instead of yelling out “Frozen!,” you could say “there’s a carrot.”)

Okay! Let’s play. I’ll give the clues today and I’ll follow up with the answers sometime next week.

Explain a Movie Plot Badly

Almost all of these have been used in real-life with my friends and family over the last month. Not all were solved. I did run them all through Copilot to make sure they made sense, though!

1) A girl from Africa is elected queen, breaks her crown. 

2) A recluse puts children in grave danger for philanthropic means.

3) A shattered light shatters the main character’s reality.

4) A boy goes home from the courthouse and is surprised to find a new truck in the garage.

5) A gardener goes for a long walk, barefoot.

6) A young woman is concussed and fantasizes about becoming a serial killer.

7) Drinking coffee reveals that everything is a lie.

8) An estranged daughter is knocked up by her father’s namesake.

9) A man, pretending to be a cowboy, crashes a Christmas party.

10) A man without a nose digs up a grave to fetch a stick and then goes killing people who have noses.

11) A sick child stops playing video games but still feels sick at the end of the day.

12) A cosplayer enters the main chamber of the House of Representatives, appears to die, but runs for city council instead.

13) A tax lawyer steals a nuclear weapon and attacks an art museum on New Year’s Eve.

14) A teenager gives a piano concert in NYC.

15) A misunderstanding over tuna fish leads a lawyer to commit identity fraud. 

16) A man doesn’t notice that he lost his wedding ring until he sees his wife with it, and decides to leave her.

17) An ex-Marine’s wife is murdered while he’s abroad, so he returns home, marries his former sweetheart, takes over the family business, and makes a killing.

18) A baseball fan finds the clue he was looking for in someone else’s closet.

Good luck! (And if you want more, there’s a subreddit dedicated to the game.)

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “The 7 Coolest Mathematical Discoveries of 2024” (Scientific America, 7 minutes, December 2024). It’s probably more like a 3-minute read, but you should spend at least one minute thinking about each cool discovery.

2) “Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars” (The Ringer, 22 minutes, December 2024). The subhead: “The crusade against bright headlights has picked up speed in recent years, in large part due to a couple of Reddit nerds. Could they know what’s best for the auto industry better than the auto industry itself?”

3) “Humphrey’s world: how the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain’s strangest pub chain” (The Guardian, 24 minutes, December 2024). Here’s a reddit comment that piqued my interest in the story: “This article is a deep dive into the eccentric approach to business of the owner of the Samuel Smith pub chain, Humphrey Smith. Smith insists that all of his pubs prohibit swearing and loud music, and personally enforces his rules with surprise visits to pubs. He has fired the landlords of numerous pubs he owns for supposedly failing to uphold his rules. His aim is believed to be to preserve the kind of traditional Victorian pub that George Orwell idealised in his essay ‘The Moon Under Water’. Smith has been criticised for his uncompromising approach to planning disputes, for the unfair treatment of pub landlords, and for leaving pubs empty for long periods of time for no obvious reason.”

Have a great weekend!

Dan