DTulpa
24d ago
The Pandora Radio option is there mostly for car trips with other people. I'm not really a George Michael or Prince fan and wouldn't acquire their albums. But 80s pop hits are the best pop hits, and they're definitely more palatable to others than, say, Autechre. I don't mind firing and forgetting a playlist there as long as we're having a good time.
I think what made me pull the trigger years ago on setting up my own media server and foregoing streaming was deciding one Thursday that I was going to watch David Lynch's 'The Elephant Man' that coming weekend. I saw it on Prime, noted its availability, played a little bit just to have it at the top of the queue, and made the plan. Friday night rolls around and it's gone; 'Unavailable in your region'.
15 minutes may seem like a lot to some folks these days. But that's all the time it took to download a blu-ray rip, fire it away, and put this nonsense behind me.
DTulpa
5mo ago
I remember reading that Hemsworth was tapped for a US adaptation of The Raid films. I didn't think it would work because American fight choreography wouldn't capture the appeal of silat.
Suddenly I'm watching a prison fight in Extraction 2 that feels very similar to Raid 2's. And it works! Sure, the protagonist has merc gear and guns, and it dodges direct comparisons to the Indonesian films since it's not an adaptation. But without knowing anything about Extraction's production history, it feels like vestiges of the old pitch made their way in.
DTulpa
10mo ago
I have no idea who Pence or Biden may have exposed their documents to while they were sitting in their garages. So maybe indict them any way well after the fact.
DTulpa
6mo ago
Understandable, and a fair enough play. Despite my last post, I'd probably do the same.
One does lament, though.
DTulpa
9mo ago
Yeah, this all intuitively rolled into my mind after the incident. Not shocking in any revelatory sense; more a "this how things really be" reminder/wake-up from the artificial, socialized script everybody's trained to have - particularly in a corporate environment.
If Justin is Castro's son, and he with the Canadian government vociferously deny it, then who is sewing seeds of low trust.
DTulpa
15d ago
Then I think your nose will serve you right here. I know here in TheMotte we've had people praising the writing and also those unimpressed by it, and the latter consistently brings up zaniness and the 'it's a fun romp' vibe as criticisms. And regardless of writing quality, everybody pretty much agrees this is a Larian game with a BG skin, not a proper continuation. The horniness of the companions alone makes it feel juvenile to me.
Outside of a dabble or two, I don't table-top. But my understanding is that Critical Role played a big part in reviving DnD in the age of streaming and Let's Plays. I went to a DnD birthday party years ago for a girl who had no awareness of any of the rules or anything, but wanted a game held because the show looked so fun. She was very confused when we explained to her that she had already wasted all her spells in the first combat encounter, when all she really wanted to do was girlboss a mage.
That night was fun, don't get me wrong. But I felt like I got a decent insight into the kind of person CR was appealing to: people who like the drama, the self-expression, and the costumes of table-top, but are quickly in over their heads when they have to roll for crit or w/e. So they just watch others do it.
I don't necessarily think this framing is wrong, but this certainly isn't the kind of anodyne charity deployed in the wild.
It's all well and good to say that 90s liberalism would drift into a kind of conservatism as times change. What I see is progressives habitually claiming that this new strain of 'conservatism' is actually the latest genealogical strain of fascism and white supremacy that traces its lineage to Nazism or similar. You see the difference, and so you can surely understand why that tribe may balk at this "No no, you really are technically right-wing" insistence.
I agree that some of this is 'embarrassed conservatism' being expressed by people who probably identified as good liberals up until the 2010s give or take. But some of this is because there are consequences to being frankly conservative. Few are going to honestly embrace the conservative label if that immediately and unfairly typecasts them as villains.
I'll admit to not seeing it outside the occasional clip, so maybe you'd like to put an asterisk there! But it's not my cup of tea from the outset. I liked it at the time, but I'm over Rick & Morty zaniness and yelling and have been for a while. I've also become very picky about animation in general, and the 'popular default' look of the show kills my interest.
I think there was also a cartoon/live-action crossover with SNW? Ehh... It has this obsession with winking self-reference that undercuts the whole thing for me.
I think a lot of these attempts to course-correct after DIS and PIC are just doing the obvious "make it more positive and fun!" pivot, but still not understanding that the appeal is more than that? That's all well and good, but what I miss the most is the professionalism and maturity. This is one of my favorite scenes from TNG, because I think it encapsulates the thoughtfulness and quiet dignity that Trek embodies to me when at its best. Two fully grown adults have a legitimate disagreement, they talk through it diplomatically, when it's resolved you know they're both fully back on the same team, and it's over within 3 minutes instead of dragged out for the whole episode (or a season, god forbid). I try to think how a modern writer would play this out and all the excessive drama or sentimentality they'd load it with.
I was in that trench, too. I don't share your view of that period. Plenty of Christians condemned WBC, and this was casually disregarded as inauthentic or meaningless because we perceived very little daylight between WBC's stance on homosexuality versus Christianity on the whole. "WBC is disgusting, but at least they're honest" was the kind of thing you'd read (or write yourself) in a lot of those spaces.
Worth remembering that WBC was paid attention to primarily for its protesting of soldiers' funerals - an act that I'm sure you can easily imagine pisses off people of with all sorts of different politics and faiths, including Christians who were against gay marriage! The image of some Jesus-loving Good Ol' Boy passively accepting Phelps and co picketing his dead son's funeral is a bit hard to swallow.
And since we're comparing notes on history - I don't know why anybody should go hunting for the unicorns of consensus-bucking trans spaces when a lot of us here have spent the last 10 years watching their political movement steamroll nearly every forum and platform we used to be part of, and got to see first-hand how these spaces got captured, converted, and degraded. I am not lacking examples of what I see as the default MO of trans and trans-supportive spaces. If somebody wants to show me a trans space that goes against a lot of the current progressive orthodoxies, I'll happily peek at it. But then we will be clear that the thing making their lives harder isn't right-wing bigotry, but a prog-aligned media that doesn't consider them worthy of attention. I think you have a good point that perhaps they are reluctant to criticize their messengers out of fear that it may result in wave of Red Traditionalism crashing over them after tampering with the barricades. But I think if you're already subscribing to that dynamic on anything, it's too late. You're practically a foot soldier, whether you're enthusiastic about it or not.
DTulpa
6mo ago
And most people would probably be with you in punishing J6ers if the previous consensus on violence hadn't been utterly thrashed by progressives and fellow sympathizers. So yeah, they're not judged as harshly because the standards changed. We weren't aware they had changed, but media consensus dictatated otherwise. And this is somehow incomprehensibly alien to you? Come now. That's a pose.
So you would be willing to throw the book at J6ers because you feel they objectively warranted it. Congratulations; now what? I am more interested in fair treatment than I am justice as a terminal goal, because I think that's the superior algorithm for a host of reasons. So what if I think J6 qualified as violent by some technical metrics? So does play-shoving a friend, and I'm not going to entertain anybody calling that violent just because Webster says so.
So if BLM wasn't violent, then neither was J6. As I said before, this is indeed partly cynical. But is also deadly serious. I refuse to call J6 violent because of the valence of that word, much in the same way I don't consider assimilation to be cultural erasure, that taxation is theft, or that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is ethnic cleansing, even though any of those could be considered technically true. This isnt being cryptic, or hiding behind a mask. Why do you assume this some deliberate, self-inflicted partisan error?
No impugnation intended on my end either. I don't blame any of them for ditching cubicle life, and I have moments of almost immaturely wishing I could get pregnant, if only to have a readily-accepted excuse to escape its doldrums. The women who left are displaying perfect sanity, and I don't think it reflects badly on any of their work ethics for the reason you point out.
My last paragraph was mostly included as an interesting anecdote because of how much it struck me coming from a woman's mouth. It's the kind of comment that is typically pattern matched to a certain male 'MRA' type that certainly exists online, but I've never heard uttered in the real world. I'm sure some men think it but have the sense to never vocalize it. But when I do hear something that cutting and uninhibited, it is nearly always from women directed at other women. An interesting dynamic with probably other observable parallels, but another topic.
On your 2nd point - did they really?
If the marine restraining Neely was in the wrong and jumped the gun, intervening on Neely's behalf would have made it less likely that he dies. Instead, they enabled the marine.
I'm very much on the side of the marine and the men who assisted, but you cannot so neatly excuse the 'extras' from culpability if you see Neely's death as a grave injustice. If you're going to be pissed at the marine, you should be pissed at the others.
Saying "Actually, the other two men could have potentially saved Neely's life by helping restraining him" is a disingenuous redirection from the obvious racial dynamics at play. That may have pull with you, but I'm betting most people who are even aware of the incident don't even know there were others involved.
We could investigate the reasons behind that state of affairs as well, but the answers will also lie in that general direction.
DTulpa
1yr ago
That certainly seems to be the takeaway I'm left with, given how progs have boxed in these arguments. And I don't think they appreciate how psychically destructive it is. Like everything you were taught from your childhood upbringing to adulthood was actually just total bullshit, and we all decided this last year.
This is the kind of thing that annihilates any and all integrity of your political project, AFAIC. gj
DTulpa
1yr ago
NPR told me Trump was 'groomed' by Putin. It just reveals what a bad-faith farce this debate is. NOW we need to have sensitive conversation about when it's kosher to use the word?
I saw the film probably in my late pre-teens before ever being aware of the conversation around it. It struck me immediately as parody and/or satire. The opening of the film has a grinning child soldier with that old-timey propaganda feel that even a middle schooler would detect as an intentional riff on grandpappy's jingoism. Then a minute later you're watching men scream as they're haplessly ripped apart. I even had the sense that everybody in the movie was too good looking to take seriously. And I remember feeling bad for the Brain Bug when it was getting that painful looking device shoved into it at the end, and I felt instinctually that this was intended, at least in an "oh that's awful..." morbid gag kind of way. My reception of it as satire was more visceral than intellectual.
If you're looking for something in the literal text of the script to show it's hand, I'm not sure how well that would fare. To me, there's just so much artificiality in the world and people who inhabit it that it's hard for me to see it as anything other than an extended pisstake.
So boom shoot is out, and you're ideally looking for something more current. So we'll skip the usual list of 96-08 'classics' I'm sure you're aware of to one degree or another.
Have you checked out the Metro series? I've yet to play the third entry, but I quite enjoyed my time with the Redux versions of the first two. They don't lean into the pure shooty aspect of games like Halo or Destiny quite as much, although they are still shooters first and foremost. There's a lot of quiet exploration, sneaking around, and even a few linear mini-tours through underground Moscow. I'd describe it as STALKER without the jank and sandbox elements, if you're interested in that kind of tone and atmosphere.
S'all opinions, but nearly all the new Trek stuff is awful to varying degrees. Strange New Worlds may the best of the bunch (not saying much) by virtue of not being a nihilistic, mean-spirited mess, but you get the impression the writers would rather be penning Buffy. I'm not dead set against a musical Trek episode, but when you have your Klingons mimicing KPop instead of Klingon Opera - without even the presence of Q to justify the absurdities - it's just a lollygag.
If you have any fondness for TNG, S3 of Picard is surprisingly decent, and probably the best sendoff for the cast under these current conditions. But even so, it feels more noteworthy as an impressive salvage operation given what came before. It's also bittersweet seeing the flame flickering on the candle again, knowing it's soon to be buried in turds as if to apologize for being decent for one single season.
Also, spoiler for the ending dilemma if you'd like a little thematic titillation: The youth of the Federation has been infiltrated and brainwashed by an alien enemy to destroy it from within. Space Boomers need to save the day.
Gotta say I found this pretty bold in today's age where media goes great lengths to kiss younger generations' asses, and I'm surprised I've barely even seen it discussed! There's no moment where the plucky young cadet winkingly upstages the Enterprise crew, thank fucking God.
DTulpa
6mo ago
Imp always seemed more direct with his disdain. darwin would couch his with the sort of "Have you considered" plausible deniability wrt the rules, but transparently just calling people assholes. That or just terminating a convo with evasiveness.
I think there is some value in reflecting on "Maybe you just suck?". But I don't expect many people to do it when asked, and it was noticeable that despite being a sometimes quality poster, Darwin's effort levels would evaporate by the time he was issuing those queries.
Of no particular import - I also pegged guess as a darwin alt just because the posting style seemed so familiar. Not that I have a problem with it.
DTulpa
10mo ago
My default assumption, but I can also see current-day writers avoiding it because "I feel icky just even writing the word". Part and parcel of modern writing being unble to write anything outside of its own perspective, and coming up with ridiculous (yet strangely gimped) caricatures when it attempts to.
DTulpa
10mo ago
Is Fasnacht all that spicy? Some bizarre imagery and some grotesque caricatures, but not really Love Parade circa '99 (RIP). More of a colorful brass instrument party that occasionally invites itself into your pub, killing any attempts at conversation without yelling.
DTulpa
1yr ago
You know full well I'm talking about media outlets twisting themselves in knots over how to gender a mass shooter - or in many cases trying to dodge it altogether by just not mentioning it.
You only find yourself in this bind if you've swallowed trans activists' prescriptions, but now find yourself having trouble fully digesting them.
DTulpa
1yr ago
Yeah, and to most people born after their presidencies, all that is behind the smoky curtain of history. It's the perpetual meme that all that shady stuff that happened in the past is just the messy, unglamorous history of an imperfect nation - but we certainly don't act like that any more!
And I feel extremely silly for writing that, because the naivete is blinding by now. I considered myself more cynical than most, and the degree to which people went mask-off during Trump was shocking to me. At the very least, I expected them to manage their appearance better.
Both of those bullet points are completely compatible with reducing cop presence. Or if not presence, cop interactions - to diminish the overall surface area where police and black Americans interface with each other. The second point in particular gestures towards this.
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