SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
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User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
18hr ago
Now, granted, it's only a fanfic, but in principle there is no reason why it could not be filmed and become the best Terminator movie since Judgement Day.
Sure there is: It completely ignores prime parts of the franchise's setup such as rewriting Sarah Connor's personality to a weirdo rationalist character so that the author can shoehorn his ideology into a familiar story as well as magically moving the story forward by 13 years.
Or to put it another way, it's not and cannot be a sequel. At best it would be a completely different story with terminators and a completely unfamiliar character who somehow shares a name with Sarah Connor.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
19hr ago
And the Alien series. "Oh man one of these things was terrifying. How about HUNDREDS of them?"
Where to do you go from there without being derivative?
Alien Resurrection showed one possible way to do that. Unfortunately the movie fucked up in so many other ways, probably not helped by the setup from (equally fucked up if in other ways) Alien 3.
I think it's a mistake to think that you necessarily have to escalate. There are many other ways to add a twist. Sure, Aliens added a whole lot more aliens but it also transformed the movie into a different genre and made Ripley into one of the most badass female film characters of all time (an excellent example of how to show an actually badass female character instead of telling someone is supposed to be one).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
19hr ago
A sequel should be another story.
For fairly good examples of this, see Indiana Jones 2 & 3. They don't try to reinvent the canon of the first movie but are simply further adventures that Indy embarks on.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
21hr ago
What's America getting out of it?
The US is effectively a client state of Israel and the politicians go out of their way to jump when the Israeli lobby says so.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
22hr ago
When even Israeli sources make the point that Israel in fact has knowingly propped up terrorists / militia that target Israel, that makes your "doubt" rather poorly sourced. Direct control is largely irrelevant when you go to fund someone whose target you already know.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
But I doubt Israel has been doing what Iran has been doing, namely having an organization like Hezbollah, which is effectively controlled by Iran, to engage in terrorism against Israel.
Ahem.
"Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad."
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
Terminator
By the time T3 came out (in 2003), the style of action scifi that the Terminator 1 & 2 were was getting too far out of style. Since then it's only gotten worse.
This may be nostalgia but to me both Terminators appear to be more "grounded" than more modern action scifi films. Yes, there are killer robots but once you get down to it most of the on-screen action could be described as "Young man and woman try to escape a monomaniacal Austrian bodybuilder in a leather jacket while falling in love" and "An Austrian bodybuilder in a leather jacket tries to protect a teenage boy and his mother from a psycho killer while learning to be more 'cool'". If you remove that groundedness, a sequel just doesn't feel like right.
Then there's is the cautiously optimistic vibe. A part of what made both T1 and T2 feel so good was that neither had a downer ending or even setting. The end of T1 implies that the bad future has been averted while T2 finishes with Sarah Connor saying "The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope, because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too". How do you make a sequel that manages to keep things reasonably optimistic without basically undoing everything that has happened?
Finally there's just the fact that both movies were just goddamn great and it really isn't easy to make a worthy successor for a movie of that caliber while having to stick to an established setting, never mind for two. Good plotting and directing, quotes galore, outstanding music and iconic characters. The T-800 is Arnold while Linda Hamilton starts as a fairly realistic slightly ditzy girl next door in T1 and evolves into a a fucking ripped warrior mama who leaves no doubt that she is capable of doing what needs to be done to protect her son all the while staying feminine (ie. no unrealistic freak territory).
Terminator 3 was a semi-ok movie as such if you're ok with John Connor looking like a hobo Beverly Hills 90210 / Dawson's Creek "teenager" but ultimately is what you get when a sequel loses the vibe and just isn't that good. Terminator: Salvation was a sequel only in name. Genisys tried to be a proper sequel but replaced Linda Hamilton with a silly little girlboss with zero credibility and the ending was frankly ridiculous. Dark Salvation was some weird dystopic and depressive attempt at probably being "gritty and real" but mostly seemed to just concentrate on removing everything good from Sarah Connor to the extent that I couldn't make myself watch more than a few scenes where Arnold showed up.
I think Terminator 3 (or perhaps right after it) was the final moment when a proper sequel was possible but that would have required involvement from James Cameran and for everyone to have been more enthusiastic about it. Any time after that there was too much baggage in modern Hollywood trends that prevented making a proper sequel (in addition to Arnold playing The Guvernator during most of the 2000s). Just compare Linda Hamilton with the girlboss replacement.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
The visual effects of Terminator 2 were mind-blowing on release and have aged incredibly well.
Much of this is because they were used so brilliantly. A killer machine made out of liquid metal doesn't have to look realistic as long as it looks cool and plausible. I believe they only used fancy CGI for the FX that look like FX (ie. time travel, T-1000 morphing, terminator vision) and did most of the rest with traditional techniques where the viewers are going to be much more critical about realism compared to what was achievable with CGI at the time. Contrast this with Jurassic Park where the dinosaurs look almost like upscaled rubber toys because it turns out that people have a whole lot more practical experience of how real animals move compared to killer robots.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
I'm saying that for the SF tech crowd, actually removing so-called "cultural safety" (racial equity, transphobia etc etc) would be a much bigger deal than removing limitations on mass suirveillance. For evidence, see Google's transformation from "do no evil" to their ubiquituous spying on literally everyone.
You can't draw an equality sign between woke and self righteous moralism as wokism has no monopoly on it. See eg. the religious right, war on porn etc.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
The most based reason.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
OpenAI will simply say that they have policies preventing mass domestic surveilance and autonomous weapons, and then not actually prevent their models from being used for mass domestic surveilance and autonomous weapons.
Since when have typical San Francisco tech people cared about mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons more than they have cared about woke?
For example Dean Ball, the guy who literally wrote the Trump's admin own AI strategy as senior policy advisor is saying that this move is essentially destroying any trust investors could have in America AI companies.
Hey, don't threaten the rest of us with good time!
In many European cultures, it is common practice that people who hold academic degrees (in particular PhDs) can list them with their name everywhere, replacing the appellation (Mr/Mrs/Ms) where available.
Is that the case outside Germany and Austria?
I can't recall having ever seen it anywhere else and quite a few people make fun of Germans for that (eg. Herr Doktor Doktor Professor Someone). Sure, in academic and some professional contexts you would say Dr Someone but not in normal life. Unless you were German, of course.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
Yup. Seems fairly trivial as soon as you accept that not all names are English and aren't meant to be pronounced with the fucked up "rules" of English pronunciation.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
17th to 19th century American West was very much an outlier. I won't say similar things never happened elsewhere but they were a rarity. Even in the rest of America that was an exception as there wasn't a sizable body of people who expanded the frontier by conquest for an expanded length of time and then replaced the original people more than culturally. Ultimately the amount of wealth that can be gathered by that route for ordinary men is limited (almost as a tautology - where would masses of men they get such wealth from?)
It was fairly often the norm for the man to gather enough wealth to support himself and his family before getting married (although even that depended very much on the time and place) but that involved traditional boring stuff like working as a farm hand etc.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
I am not sure this is a good top level CW post. In large parts it is basically the format of Scott's link posts, each line with a link and a sentence or three of hot takes.
I for one vastly prefer it over posts that spend half a dozen pages to say what could be said in two paragraphs or, even worse, AI augmented slop employed as a sort of one man gish gallop meant to drown everyone who disagrees in pages and pages and fucking endless pages of text, as favored by one prominent poster here.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
The idea presumably would be that if you can degrade the IRGC's capabilities, since they act as kind of the internal suppression force (being a sizeable army/navy in their own right), the regime won't be able to maintain control over a populace in revolt. At least, that's my take on it.
How would this work when IRGC (presumably) consists largely of true believers and their suppression capabilities are of the "we'll shoot you on the street", and not the "we'll use a highly centralized apparatus to eliminate key dissidents"? That is, when killing a bunch of leaders doesn't actually degrade on the street capabilities of the organization (unlike with the nuclear program or traditional state leadership).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
Men would often get married later [...], having returned to their poor home towns as impressive figures with money in their pockets to whisk away
No, they really wouldn't. The vast majority of men in history were subsistence farmers who never traveled particularly far from their home and certainly didn't "work on the frontier" (except sometimes when that meant starting a farm on the "frontier" and staying there).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
8d ago
My God, that double-necked guitar/bass must weigh a fucking ton though.
Now imagine if it was based on a Les Paul instead of a Strat.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
9d ago
They play a simultaneously incoherent and very danceable style of microtonal music.
At first I was "Wait, you can't really play microtonal music on a guitar". Then I saw the frets of said guitar...
This is also the first time I've ever seen someone use those weirdo pedals that /r/guitarpedals loves such that they sound actually musical.
super expensive radio-quality mic
Ah, the cliche Shure SM7B, used mostly by people who have no idea why you'd choose it and who don't even know how to use it. Aka the less colored more upscale version of the uniquituous SM57 / SM58. Although at 400e it's hardly "super expensive" considering there are plenty of fairly run of the mill microphones that cost 1000e or more. Still, you can easily get that same "sound" from any number of cheap 100-200e cardioid electret mics (or even the cheap SM57 and a bit of EQ). All without looking like a goddamn idiot.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
10d ago
Isn't that how English has behaved for the last N hundred years?
That’s a bit like a frog accusing a toad of being a dirty amphibian.
I feel like any Terminator 2 influences weren't nearly as overt as The Matrix and everyone and their cousin trying to ape bullet time or something similar.
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