Folamh3
User ID: 1175
If you haven't seen Your Name, watch that first. Suzume is pretty much just Your Name but not quite as good.
I'm not much of an anime guy either, but Perfect Blue is my go-to recommendation of "anime for people who don't like anime". If you liked Black Swan with Natalie Portman you will almost certainly like Perfect Blue, as Black Swan is effectively a live-action remake/adaptation of Perfect Blue.
Everything Everywhere
Watch the first half, then stop. The second half is just the jokes from the first half beaten like a dead horse.
I enjoyed Top Gun Maverick despite never having seen the original. Suzume was decent, even if it's transparently the director trying to recapture the magic of Your Name (which also describes his previous film Weathering with You). The Black Phone was alright but forgettable, and not a patch on Sinister by the same director. I didn't like The Banshees of Inisherin at all and don't understand the hype one iota. The fact that Tár is at #85 is a travesty, easily the best film on this list and it's not even close. Decision to Leave was pretty good, not as good as Oldboy.
Folamh3
2d ago
And it would have made perfect sense, given that it's already a running joke that Homer has had dozens of jobs in the course of the series. They should have moved him to a new "permanent" job every couple of seasons.
Folamh3
2d ago
Point taken. Ad hoc epicycle: the proportion of Americans who oppose nuclear energy is directly proportional to The Simpsons's ratings, and both have declined steeply in recent decades. Per your chart, the ratio of Americans who support:oppose nuclear power has been more or less constant since about 2010, shortly after the last time The Simpsons truly defined the zeitgeist (the release of The Simpsons Movie in 2007).
I've heard an entirely sincere theory that a major underlying cause of the opposition to nuclear power in the public is that, when people think of nuclear power plants, their brain immediately goes to Homer Simpson (idiotic, careless, buffoonish, lazy and a habitual drunkard) and Charles Montgomery Burns (cost-cutting, shamelessly corrupt, bottomlessly greedy and unabashedly malevolent). Coupled with the fact that there are, to my knowledge, no well-known heroic fictional characters who work in the nuclear power industry. I honestly think it's a significant contributing factor at a minimum.
Co-creator Sam Simon has even personally apologised for how the show depicted the nuclear power industry.
Folamh3
3d ago
I’m not aware of any parents losing custody for opposing transgenderism when the child is cis.
I'm not aware of this ever actually happening, but Scotland's recent hate speech bill makes it a legal possibility for someone to be arrested for a political opinion they expressed verbally in the privacy of their own home, and "gender identity" is a protected characteristic in Scotland.
Folamh3
3d ago
Very relevant sketch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UEp3zUR9YAM?si=SRup9sUqO_0OFNUX
The classic, Augustinian example is the born again Christian who sleeps around when they are young and then finds Jesus right around the time that most people get bored of sleeping around anyway.
I immediately thought of Russell Brand, who has made a hasty conversion to Christianity just as numerous allegations of sexual misconduct were beginning to come out. Cue all the jokes about him giving up "preying" for "praying".
Folamh3
3d ago
'93 had some real cultural bangers
What are the entries highlighted in yellow?
The Fugitive holds up pretty well, and In the Line of Fire absolutely slaps. John Malkovich is fucking terrifying in it.
Folamh3
4d ago
I noted the parallels with Falling Down, a movie I disliked far more than Joker.
Folamh3
4d ago
Exactly, the standard of Hollywood slop in 2019 was so poor that a movie which would have been straight-to-DVD in 2004 makes a fortune and is praised as a masterpiece.
I still don't understand why the first one achieved the acclaim it did, although that might have been primarily the result of the expectations I had going into it than the film itself.
When I heard that it had won the Golden Lion and was being praised as this incisive portrayal of mental illness, I was anticipating a sensitive, intelligent art film. What I actually got was an overwrought early-2000s psychological thriller, which clumsily attempted to tie in Arthur Fleck's origin story with Batman's (to the detriment of both) and featured a completely superfluous pseudo-romantic subplot for no good reason. The supposedly realistic portrayal of mental illness bore about as much relationship to the genuine article as Norman Bates in Psycho.
The only really positive things I can say about it are a) Joaquin Phoenix conjured a genuinely impressive performance out of a decidedly underwritten character, the most powerful portrayal of the character since Heath Ledger's; b) the score and cinematography were decent, if unremarkable; and c) I liked that they made no attempt to sanitise the violence in the film, and instead endeavoured to milk it for all the horror it was worth. The latter choice lent the film a gritty integrity which would have been sorely lacking without.
Folamh3
4d ago
Doing research for NaNoWriMo and I have (yet another!) question for the medics among you.
How does one go about diagnosing a woman with a specific reproductive defect which prevents her from having children? MRI, CT, ultrasound, what?
Folamh3
6d ago
Oh I'd be curious to read that book. I have something of an obsession with the 2002 film of the same name starring Richard Gere. My understanding is that it has very little in common with the source material, but it's incredibly eerie and unnerving all the same.
In several of my posts over the last couple of years, I've alluded to a piece of legislation making its way through government in Ireland. The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 was an extremely sweeping and draconian piece of legislation which would make it a criminal offense to be in possession of a piece of media deemed to be offensive to a group defined by a protected characteristic, and would enable police officers to request search warrants for all of your electronic devices if they believed you were in possession of such a document. In theory, this meant that if your boomer uncle sent an edgy meme to the family group chat, everyone in the group chat could be guilty of a criminal offense, and would be forced to disclose the PINs and passwords for all of their electronic devices to the police. This bill was poised to turn Ireland into the UK, in which hundreds of people are jailed every year for sharing edgy memes or making tasteless jokes on Facebook. The bill passed in the Dáil (the lower house) in April of last year despite a mere 40% of the public being in favour and public criticism from no less than Elon Musk, but has stalled in the Seanad (upper house) since June of last year, well over a year ago.
What a delight the other day to find out that the bill has been officially shelved, although in an effort to save face our Minister of Justice promises that she'll still be pushing for hate crime legislation (so if a crime is determined to have been motivated by prejudice on the basis of protected characteristics, that will be considered an aggravating factor). I always wondered why the bill had stalled for so long in the Seanad: perhaps senators were unwilling to rubber-stamp it but also fearful of what might happen if they officially vetoed it. I suspect the recent shelving is part of the government's last-ditch effort to course-correct before the general election: after this year's earlier embarrassment of a referendum on International Women's Day which was rejected in a landslide, the Fine Gael-led government must now be acutely aware that this woke shit will not fly with the median voter (possibly not even with wealthy urban Irish voters either). Perhaps another possible sign of wokeness in retreat?
Folamh3
7d ago
I've never seen a cis man being praised in those terms for the latter two.
The word "empowering" no longer means anything, if it ever did. Women raising their children is empowering; women getting abortions is also empowering. Women posting thirst traps on social media is empowering; women posting deliberately unflattering selfies to combat "toxic social media beauty standards" is also empowering. Women putting their career ahead of other things in their life is empowering; women deliberately refusing career opportunities in order to focus on their "mental health" and practise "self-care" is also empowering.
If a woman does it, it's empowering - except (for some reason) daring to suggest that a person with a penis isn't a woman, or that Hamas squaddies raping Israeli women is bad.
Folamh3
7d ago
A consequence of this, possibly relatable to some on this board, is an aggressive hiding of ones power level within 'polite' company and a simultaneous revulsion at the baseness (as in lowness, in the originally uncouth way as opposed to chadian basedness) of DR intellectualism.
You put it into words.
I have only a passing interest in aliens/UFOs, but the one book I read on the topic really piqued my interest. It's called The Uninvited by Nick Pope, who by his own account was tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the UK Ministry of Defense, began the role as a sceptic, but came away from it convinced that there really was something going on.
Per your dichotomy, the book starts off by the Explorer end of the spectrum and becomes increasingly Esoteric as it goes along. The opening chapters describe some of the canonical alien abduction stories which are very much in the Explorer camp (a man meets a spaceman who claims to be from Venus and who explicitly urges him to promote nuclear disarmament; a couple on a long cross-country drive experience several hours of "missing time": regression hypnosis reveals that they were plucked out of their car into a spaceship and surgically experimented upon by "Grey" aliens), followed by chapters in which Pope recounts anonymised interviews he's conducted with members of the British public, whose own accounts are far more bizarre and harder to square with a simple extraterrestrial explanation. Throughout the book, Pope emphasises that accounts of interactions with non-human entities (from Biblically accurate angels to leprechauns and djinn) are as old as the human species, and gave me my first exposure to the Bayesian concept of priors shaping experience: if you wake up in the night and see a pale, short, oddly-proportioned figure at the end of your bed, you might think it's an alien, but a religious person might think it's an angel, while a believer in the afterlife might think it's a ghost.
At the end of the book, there are two chapters in which Pope offers a range of hypotheses for what's going on. The first is Explorer: assuming these experiences are the result of aliens visiting us from elsewhere in our own universe, what are their motivations? The second chapter is a collection of hypotheses which don't take aliens as their starting point, ranging from mundane (hallucinations, mass hysteria) to mundane-but-conspiratorial (government-induced mass hypnosis) to Esoteric (the "aliens" are visiting us from another dimension; the aliens are our genetic descendants visiting us from the future). It's cracking stuff.
Folamh3
7d ago
I've tried to get my head around the Repugnant Conclusion a bunch of times, but I still don't really grasp it, and definitely don't feel that I could explain to a third party what it entails, in simple language. Anyone care to do an explainer?
Folamh3
8d ago
When did headline writers start putting the adverb "quietly" in every headline?
I swear to God, I feel like I haven't seen a headline about Netflix just adding a movie to their library for months if not years. They're always doing it "quietly".
Netflix Just Quietly Added the Best Cannibal Thriller of the Decade
Netflix has just quietly added one of 2023’s very best movies
From three different sources. What on earth is this supposed to convey to the reader?
Folamh3
8d ago
Article from Foreign Policy: Israel's Seven-Front War.
If I heard "Bob was a parent but is no longer", I would take that to mean that he'd outlived his offspring.
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