FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
34m ago
English blogger arrested for "Fuck Hamas" tweet
All the more bizarre given that they were seriously considering prosecuting the hip-hop band Kneecap for yelling "Up Hamas" during one of their gigs.
I understand the logic that it's illegal to offer support to a proscribed terrorist organisation, even if I don't agree. But it's also illegal to criticise Hamas? Are you just supposed to pretend they don't exist, or something?
FtttG
3hr ago
That progressives have done away with any sort of true belief in the ideas of John Stuart Mill is a foregone conclusion at this point.
I agree with you. But I will reiterate that there is a distinction between the government throwing you in jail because of something you said, and a jury of your peers electing not to convict someone for assaulting you because of something you said.
People have this stupid idea that a 16:9 aspect ratio is "better" than a 4:3 aspect ratio, and don't like watching movies or TV shows with black bars on either side of the image.
The obvious thing to do would have been to release a HD edition of Friends, but retaining the original aspect ratio it was intended to be broadcast in when it was filmed. But it seems the market decided that because a 16:9 edition of Friends was possible, it was therefore preferable to the original 4:3 edition, even if the 16:9 edition includes loads of distracting elements that were never intended to be displayed onscreen at all.
FtttG
4hr ago
I loved The Onion's: "U.S. Children Still Traumatized One Year After Seeing Partially Exposed Breast On TV".
FtttG
4hr ago
A possible explanation that springs to mind is that while the original on-set recording may have been done in a higher resolution format, broadcast was still at 1080p and as a result the original VFX where the vomit hose technician would have been painted out were done at 1080p and the failure to re-do the paint out at a higher resolution was a product of negligence, laziness, or penny pinching on the part of the parent company.
If this is the case (and it sounds plausible), then presumably the VFX layers in which the crew are painted out are transparent 1080p video files. Sounds like it would be trivial to upscale them to 4k and drop them into the timeline on top of your upscaled 4k live-action footage.
FtttG
4hr ago
Lucy Connolly did not call for arson. She said she wouldn't care if all the hotels were set on fire. That's quite a bit different from instructing a specific person to set a hotel on fire.
FtttG
4hr ago
if someone posts "death to the Jews" or "English people should all die in a fire," do they get Big Brother knocking on their door?
You will have to clarify if the individual is a white Briton (in which case they will throw the book at him) or not.
FtttG
4hr ago
Following on from last week's discussion about the proportion of American university students claiming to be disabled in order to secure assorted "accommodations", Hanania has an article about the legislative decisions which led to this state of affairs. It's succinct and interesting, particularly in how certain of the laws carry the tacit implication that an outright majority of Americans could be considered disabled.
The reason I'm posting it in the Fun thread rather than Culture War is because of the passage below:
My favorite court decision from this era is PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin (2001), in which a golfer who had a condition making it difficult to walk between holes demanded to be able to ride around in a cart during the qualification tournament for the professional tour. The Supreme Court ruled on behalf of the plaintiff this time, holding that it would not alter the fundamentals of the game to grant his request.
[Antonin] Scalia responded with one of the best dissents in the history of the Supreme Court.
Before considering the Court’s answer to the first question, it is worth pointing out that the assumption which underlies that question is false. Nowhere is it writ that PGA TOUR golf must be classic “essential” golf. Why cannot the PGA TOUR, if it wishes, promote a new game, with distinctive rules (much as the American League promotes a game of baseball in which the pitcher’s turn at the plate can be taken by a “designated hitter”)? If members of the public do not like the new rules — if they feel that these rules do not truly test the individual’s skill at “real golf” (or the team’s skill at “real baseball”) they can withdraw their patronage. But the rules are the rules. They are (as in all games) entirely arbitrary, and there is no basis on which anyone – not even the Supreme Court of the United States — can pronounce one or another of them to be “nonessential” if the rulemaker (here the PGA TOUR) deems it to be essential.
If one assumes, however, that the PGA TOUR has some legal obligation to play classic, Platonic golf — and if one assumes the correctness of all the other wrong turns the Court has made to get to this point — then we Justices must confront what is indeed an awesome responsibility. It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States, laid upon it by Congress in pursuance of the Federal Government’s power “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States,” U.S. Const., Art. I, §8, cl. 3, to decide What Is Golf. I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer? The answer, we learn, is yes. The Court ultimately concludes, and it will henceforth be the Law of the Land, that walking is not a “fundamental” aspect of golf.
Either out of humility or out of self-respect (one or the other) the Court should decline to answer this incredibly difficult and incredibly silly question
This may be the first time I've actually laughed out loud at the contents of a legal opinion. You can practically see Scalia rolling his eyes.
FtttG
5hr ago
I hate to fall back on the "they're a private company, they can do what they want" argument, but there is an important distinction between the government arresting and prosecuting you because of something you said vs. a jury of your peers collectively deciding that something you said was so appalling that it retroactively exculpates the person who assaulted you.
The former is indicative of government overreach. The latter is indicative of ethical myopia and skewed priorities among political progressives. Both grave issues, but distinct ones. It's yet more evidence that Western progressives no longer see themselves as upholding the spirit of the First Amendment (even if they will grudgingly uphold it to the letter) — but then, we already knew that, they haven't even been pretending otherwise for a long time.
FtttG
8hr ago
Similarly, in Oragen a stabber was acquitted because the victim said a racial slur.
Obviously this is outrageous, but I do think it's important to put jury nullification and infringements on free speech in different categories. It's not like the victim himself was prosecuted for saying a racial slur.
- A man arrested for praying completely silently outside of an abortion clinic. (You can't even say he said something which offended someone else – he was praying inside his own head. Thoughtcrime in the most literal sense of the word possible.)
- A man convicted for misgendering someone (although it was overturned on appeal).
- A man convicted for training his dog to do a Nazi salute for a joke.
- A man convicted for taking a surreptitious photo of a police officer, drawing some cocks on it then posting it on Snapchat.
- A man who was convicted and fined for setting a Koran on fire, while the man who attacked him with a knife while he was doing so only received a suspended sentence (the Koran-burning man's conviction was overturned on appeal).
- A woman gets beaten up by a man in a manner severe enough to require hospitalisation. While venting about the experience to someone she considered a friend in a private text conversation, she refers to her assailant as a "faggot". She is, of course, convicted of a hate crime. Meanwhile, the man who beat her up has yet to be prosecuted.
FtttG
18hr ago
I wasn't referring to ultrasonic frequencies (I don't think anyone's arguing that humans can hear literal dog whistles), but rather to the recording sample rate.
FtttG
18hr ago
I believe you, but this is something I'd really like to verify with a double-blind. Some sound engineers claim they can tell the difference between a 192 kHz sample rate and 96 kHz, but I'm honestly sceptical.
This is a good comment, with one qualification:
While the election denial from the left has not infected the upper echelons of the dems as much as it has infected the GOP
Uhhh... Russiagate?
FtttG
18hr ago
In. There was also a papier-machê member protruding from my fly going into the pig's mouth.
FtttG
19hr ago
Funnily enough you just reminded me that I dressed up as Cameron for Halloween '15, with a papier-machê pig's head attached to my waist. Annoyingly, several people at the party I went to thought I was dressing up as "the guy from Black Mirror", which I hadn't even seen at the time.
What's "real" 4k versus not?
I think what @Rov_Scam was getting at is that, if you compare a 240p video and a 1080p video, the difference in quality will be obvious even if they're encoded in a lossy format like MP4. Whereas when comparing 1080p with 4K, the differences are so subtle that the only way you could tell them apart is if you were looking at an uncompressed video file.
The 4K videos being streamed via HBO Max are "real" 4K, in the sense that the image resolution is 3840x2160, but because of the lossy compression used to make them playable over the internet, most viewers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between that and a 1080p version of the same video file.
Are there .... more FPS out there?
Yes, Ang Lee's last two films were shot at 120 fps.
I haven't seen either, but even watching this clip from the latter (which has been downsampled from 120 to 60 fps), the effect is weird. Somebody in the comments said that in a strange way it makes the movie seem too real by making the artifice inherent to the medium too obvious for the viewer to suspend disbelief, which is kind of what I'm feeling when I watch it. For some reason the high frame rate makes it really obvious that you're looking at a soundstage, in a way that isn't obvious merely from a 4k film shot at 24 fps.
When The Hobbit came out it attracted controversy for being filmed at 48 fps which many viewers found distracting in the same way. There was a period where it looked like high frame rates might be the future of the cinema, but truthfully I can't remember any movie since Gemini Man touting them as a selling point. This article lists a handful of movies since that one which have been filmed at unusually high frame rates, invariably 48 fps: it's quite a ways from becoming industry standard. Curiously, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was filmed at 48 fps but released as 24 fps. Wonder why they even bothered.
There are multiple cases of a teacher's former career in porn coming to light and her losing her job as a consequence:
I missed this on a first pass: the link I linked to earlier did analyse this exact question and found that the average female porn star's career duration had fallen from nine years in the 1970s to three years in the early 2010s (the report was published in 2013). The analysis also found that the average woman (regardless of ethnicity) gets into porn at the age of 22.
Given my earlier point about how a woman's perceived attractiveness tends to diminish over time, we can tell a story about women getting into the industry when they're very young, making some money while they're pretty close to their prime years, then retiring when their star is starting to fade.
Well, it stands to reason that if no "average" woman would want to be friends with Bonnie Blue, her pool of potential friends is dramatically restricted. If the only women who would want to be friends with her are
- lesbians
- single women who aren't looking for a relationship with a man, or
- straight, coupled women who don't have a problem with introducing their partners to a sex worker who actively encourages married men to be unfaithful to their wives (perhaps because the women in question are polyamorous or in open relationships)
it stands to reason that her pool of potential friends is minuscule compared to the average woman's. Not to mention that, even if a woman falls into one of the above categories (even if she loudly claims to believe that sex work is real work), she might just have an instinctive disgust reaction towards associating with sex workers.
So, no, I don't know for a fact that Bonnie Blue has no friends, but given that we both accept there are a lot of women who would have perfectly understandable reasons not to want to associate with her (and given that many OnlyFans content creators report chronic feelings of loneliness), it seems reasonable to assume that she has few same-sex friends, if any. (Maybe she's a fag hag who has a group of gay men she goes to brunch with: other than other porn stars, a promiscuous gay man is probably the only kind of person who could hope to match her in body count. They could trade war stories.)
I just question the accuracy of extrapolating Bonnie Blue's career longevity from the average porn star's career longevity, given the many other ways in which she is not average.
What "many" ways are these? I accept that she's an unusually successful and famous porn star, and that you would naïvely expect a porn star who's making bank to stick around longer than one who's making peanuts (although who knows? maybe the reverse is true – you make bank at the outset and then quit while you're ahead before diminishing returns kick in. Mia Khalifa was a household name comparable to Bonnie Blue, and she was very keen to point out that her initial foray into pornography lasted less than a year). But I don't know that Blue is "not average" on many axes other than her sizeable wealth and fame.
As an aside, I really dislike this style of argumentation where I try to make a prediction based on historical data, and you point out that the person we're making predictions about isn't average, therefore historical data is completely useless for making predictions and we might as well throw darts at a wall.
Like, imagine if we were curious about how long Michael Jordan will live for (I don't know why we want to know this, just roll with it). I might look up an actuarial table for the life expectancy of a black American male born in the year whatever. But then you jump in and say "but Michael Jordan is not average on many axes! He's unusually tall and unusually rich! Therefore looking up the average life expectancy of a person born in that year is of no help to us at all!"
Averages are just that, average. They will describe an average person more accurately than they describe a non-average person, but that does not in any way imply that they don't describe a non-average person at all. At best they might describe a non-average person just as well as they do an average person (we might find that Jordan's height and net worth have no impact on his life expectancy, or one has a positive effect and the other negative, which cancel out); at worst they give us a ballpark figure, a lower or upper bound which is more relevant to the conversation than pulling numbers out of a hat. As I said, I'm open to the idea that there might be a positive correlation between a porn star's financial success/level of fame and the duration of her career (but there might not be), but citing two examples of successful porn stars with unusually long careers doesn't come close to demonstrating that. And I find it kind of rude that I'm trying to answer a question with empirical data, and you're rubbishing these efforts because "Bonnie Blue isn't average, therefore averages are completely useless in making any predictions about her future career trajectory".
FtttG
22hr ago
Per Wikipedia, over 5 million subscribers on her YouTube channel and over 1 billion views. Her Patreon says she has 177 paid subscribers which at the lowest tier works out at $3,500 a month.
Why?
Imagine you're a straight woman. You meet a woman who must be in the 100th percentile for promiscuity (at least in terms of numbers of sexual partners); who's had sex with men who were cheating on their girlfriends with her; who's explicitly encouraged married men to cheat on their wives. Maybe she'll tell you that's it's just a persona she's playing and she's nothing like that in real life (or maybe not). Either way, are you going to take the risk of introducing her to your husband or boyfriend? Maybe you'll counter that you're extremely sex-positive, without so much as a single SWERF bone in your body, and that you'd never get into a relationship with a man unless you trusted him completely – but I would hazard a guess that that does not describe the average woman. And a woman you don't trust to leave alone with your husband or boyfriend (or even your potential husband or boyfriend) is not your friend, no matter how you slice it.
Ok. But I think we have already established Bonnie Blue is hardly average. I am not sure how to compare traditional films to OnlyFans but I'm confident she has done more than the equivalent of three.
I agree that she is above average. The point I was making about the average number of films a female performer stars in before leaving the industry is that a lengthy career is not the norm. IAFD has an "active from–to" field listing a performer's period of activity: if one were to scrape this data it should be trivial to find the average duration of a female performer's career. Given what I've read about the industry and what I know about the relationship between a woman's age and her perceived attractiveness (her value on the sexual marketplace), I would be astonished if the average female performer's career lasts for ten years or more. I'll do some digging and see if I can find a definitive answer to this question.
There might even be a number of "acceptable" oopsies that leadership decided on. Because these days everyone wants widescreen, and if you instead crop stuff out, then other people are gonna conplain about what you cropped out. Better to give a bit of behind the scenes sneak peak instead.
But as I said in the OP, that can't be the cause of the error here: the original HD release of Mad Men was widescreen out of the gate. It's not 4:3 being upscaled to 16:9, it's 1080p 16:9 being upscaled to 4k 16:9.
British man visits some friends in the states, during which trip they invite him to try his hand at firing a gun. They take some photos of him holding assorted various firearms in a fashion which highlights his inexperience. When he gets home, he posts some of these photos on LinkedIn with self-deprecating captions..
Arrested.
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