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Why are blockbuster movie scripts so... bad?
I've been going to the movies more in the last year than I have in the previous decade, because I have a coworker turned friend that likes to watch films in theaters and it is a cheap way to hang out with him (protip: bring your own snacks and drinks in a backpack instead of buying from the concession stand and watch the morning matinee instead of purchasing the more expensive evening tickets). And what I keep noticing is that, while they are very pretty, the writing in them is absolutely, uniformly awful.
I'm not even talking about politics here. I'm talking about how nobody in Mufasa ever stops to think about "wait a minute, how do I know that Milele even exists?!" the way a level 1 intelligent character would. I'm talking about how half the runtime of Jurassic World Rebirth is pointless action sequences that contribute nothing to the plot. I'm talking about how Brave decided to waste its amazing prologue by focusing the movie around the mom turning into a bear.
If you are already spending $200 million dollars producing a movie and a similar amount marketing it, why can't you just throw in an extra million to hire Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin (or, hell, Eliezer Yudkowsky) to write your script for you?
But... it doesn't seem to be a question of money? It is certainly possible to find much better writing in direct to video films than in theatrical films, despite their much lower budgets. Everybody agrees that the DCEU was a pile of crap, while there were have been some very solid entries in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series. I recently watched Justice League: Gods & Monsters, and I was hooked from the first scene of General Zod cucking Superman's dad to the end credits; I wasn't looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie is going to last, the way I do when watching a blockbuster.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
Ask any Chinese nationalist and you will hear all kinds of animosity towards Europe, particularly Britain and France but also the rest of the Eight-Nation Alliance. Right now it's a bit of a "for you it was the worst day of your life but for me it was Tuesday" sort of situation, but when the power balance is inverted it matters quite a bit what their feelings on the subject are.
Tiber727
4d ago
I'm less worried about TikTok as a security risk from a perspective of promoting anti-American sentiment via the algorithm, and more from a perspective of finding a Senator's daughter's account, geolocating her location and making educated guesses as to the Senator's location, contacts, etc.
Tiber727
4d ago
No it hasn't. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, probably not even you, has ever rejected it. What happened is that Democrats noticed that it's losing them the election, so they're trying to turn the volume down, but they did absolutely nothing to reject it.
On this part, the Democratic party is in a bind because it contains both centrists and progressives. Both want to push the party in one direction but the party heads can't overtly reject the other side because they need all the votes they can get. Biden in 2020 was one of the least progressive candidates and became the nominee, though admittedly it's hard to draw conclusions because he was also Vice President and the other candidates weren't all that well known. I somewhat subjectively believe progressives are a minority, but the party knows they don't have the luxury of rejecting them whether they truly want to or not.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
4d ago
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
4d ago
My bigger concern is that Affirmative action et al doesn't actually primarily help the people its meant to help.
Or rather, affirmative action helps precisely the people it's meant to help, and the[ir] claim it was meant to elevate someone else was always bullshit.
hanikrummihundursvin
4d ago
Like I said, I suspected this to be the case, just not this pronounced or shameless. The post does not even have a single reply that voices disagreement, despite being reported into the janitor queue. I think that's a tell that there is something very wrong with how certain people engage with certain topics on this forum.
Considering the post itself, whilst rather 'hot', is not overstepping what would be considered typical mainstream left discourse on the subject, I think the people who use the report button in such a way should be warned or otherwise influenced to stop their behavior.
I would find it much closer to the spirit of the forum, as I see it at least, to allow the person who worked up all that heat the chance to prove themselves by challenging and discussing their assertions, rather than straight up asking for a ban.
If you think it only happens when people are going on about Jews, you are deeply mistaken and have not been paying attention.
Though I would not think it only happens regarding any specific subject, I would not be surprised that it happens a lot on certain topics over others.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
4d ago
Stuff like this is why I roll my eyes when i see junior programmers complaining online about how thier stupid employer wont let them use the latest AI tools/models.
There are often very good reasons that they don't want you to be using those tools.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
4d ago
I see you.
SSCReader
4d ago
And if you were a black parent to a black child, how much of a cost would you say you and your people have borne only to end up (statistically) at the bottom of the ladder?
Words and laws do mean things. They mean what the people interpreting them thnk they mean, no more and no less. Just as "all men are created equal" didn't stop race based slavery because all men didn't really mean all men.
I completely agree that two wrongs do not make a right. If we could wave a magic wand and be done with race based issues, I would. But we don't live in that world. And in this world the sins of the fathers appear to be visited on the children whether we want it or not. Our options are constrained by human pyschology and the dynamics thereof.
I'm ok with headwinds for my kids, they'll be fine either way. My bigger concern is that Affirmative action et al doesn't actually primarily help the people its meant to help. I'd take a much more narrowly tailored version if I had the power.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4d ago
This story made the NYC radio news. One of the examples they have was grok responding to a post calling the girls killed in the Texas floods "Future Fascists of America" with (from memory) "Hitler would know how to handle this sort of anti-white racism". No recognition at all that the original post might have been bad.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
I saw precisely one guy link to an actual "bad" comment Darwin made, and it wasn't actually bad at all in terms of debating style.
Several people linked you to many comments, and if you don't think that comment is bad, I'm still waiting for an explanation for why the comments of other posters that you linked are bad.
gattsuru
4d ago
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Most of those people are already old.
The most plausible theory remains that the Clintons/Mossad/whoever else wanted to kill Epstein destroyed thé evidence and the FBI would be chasing shadows to roll up a blackmail network that no longer exists(so far as anyone knows, Epstein‘s MO was to lie about his girls’ ages to collect blackmail material, theres no reason to believe these people are like actual pedophiles).
I’m not doubting that if you really wanted to prosecute some people for statutory, you could- but the FBI probably thinks this is beneath launching a major investigation.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
I saw precisely one guy link to an actual "bad" comment Darwin made, and it wasn't actually bad at all in terms of debating style. The person Darwin was debating with was far worse, funnily enough.
I don't trust testimony because people just disagreed with him since he was a leftist, and then tried to work backwards to find things they claimed were "manipulative" debate tactics. If we asked a bunch of lefty /r/politics users what they thought of the average poster on this forum, and the broad consensus was "horrible", would you trust them? I wouldn't.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
4d ago
Completely unrelated to everything else, can we all just appreciate how great a name "Swasticar" is? Still gives me a smile every time I read it.
JFKay
Here N There
4d ago
There is no historical animosity toward China as Europeans historically have had limited interactions with China.
There's little animosity in Europe against China now, but this might not be reciprocal (because of extensive contact ), and the situation could change fast once China starts throwing its weight around.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Germany and Texas are very different places electricity use wise; Texas’s electricity demand peaks during peak renewable production(air conditioning is mostly when the sun is shining). Germany is the opposite.
Can you elaborate on what you think words like "read", "searches", and "know" mean in this context. Im not asking just to pedantic, how you think about this question has informs how you approach algorithmic behavior.
Edit: if that is a bit too abstract instead try explain why you believe that the algo "knows" which claims are likely spurious and then explain why you would expect that to have any influence on the algorithm's output.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Yeah a bunch of that in Annihilation Score that I noticed. It felt especially weird given the author is actually a male. Like, is he white-knighting for his political agenda, or does he try to paint Mo as a whiny Karen for some reason? That's certainly not what I'd expect from a professionally successful woman who is a highly sought after demon fighter and literally the main character, to be constantly worried about.
gattsuru
4d ago
VCL started in 1995, Furcadia in 1996, so toward the tail end of that time period there'd already started to be pretty dedicated online spaces. Early 1990s period you start looking at smaller websites like werewolfdotcom or USENET like alt.fan.furry (1990), and the line between furry and just-a-fan-of-media (or other related stuff -- a lot of modern therianthropy spread over early USENET group alt.horror.werewolves) was a lot more blurry. Some furry-specific MUCKs and MUDDs go into the early 90s, and there was supposedly a lot of early subcultures inside 'normal' MUCKs. At that point, they were pretty similar to modern-day furry communities, complete with the associated controversy. Back when google had usenet copies searchable, it was actually kinda impressive how much overlap to the modern era you could find: the zebra inflatable pool toy enthusiast has gotten into an ugly fight with the weird libertarian gundam lunatic, is it Tuesday again?
Supposedly the first physical conventions started around 1990 or 1989 with ConFurence, but a lot of early conventions had precursors as room parties or talks in more conventional scifi conventions a few years earlier. Not a lot of documentation on them, unfortunately; even historians like Fred Patten just have to kinda say they happened. Before that, you're mostly looking at fanzines, like Rowrbrazzle (1983) or Vootie (1976) (which as APAs were mostly artists or writers trading with each other), or for audience-oriented works Albedo (1983) or FurVersion (1987). Most of this was categorized as "funny animal" fandom at the time, but they still had the emphasis on 'underground' themes (not just sex; biting satire, less-cartoony violence, social themes, yada) that kinda differentiated the early fandom.
Written works existed throughout this period, and a lot of the early zines had written stories as part, but outside of dedicated publishers the line between furry and non-furry is really hard to figure out from the modern day. Alan Dean Foster's Quozl (1989) and Spellsinger (1983) were very often referenced by furries (though I can't really recommend either book), but afaict ADF himself wasn't. There may be a way to distinguish those stories (or even Cherryh's Chanur Saga 1981) from those of Bernard Doove's chakats (1996ish), but you don't really get dedicated furry publishers until nearly 2000 (with the still-extent Sofawolf).
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
4d ago
From Founding to the Civil Rights movement was what 200 years give or take?
Why measure in time, and not lives? Or GDP, as reparation advocates want, with numbers larger than the wealth of the entire world?
Would 200 years of the things you don't like now worth 200 years of what black people had to go through in their 200 years? Or is that too great a moral price to pay?
Two wrongs do not make a right, so why would four centuries of opposing wrongs make a right? The past cannot be undone. Do the principles matter, or not? If the principles matter, then they shouldn't be violated over and over, no amount of violation fixes what's wrong. We are individuals, "created equal," "endowed with unalienable rights." And saddled with blood-debts and those rights left contingent on our protected class identities.
If the principles don't matter, than such arguments are bullshit and the problem isn't that we failed to live up to them, it's that we pretended they exist at all. But now that's moving away from concerns of moral improvement and into a suggestion of moral anti-realism.
I think being a white man in the US is pretty good even with whatever headwinds being faced.
It is, it could certainly be worse, and the social psychosis is a little less fevered than it was 2016-2023. And yet! Black-letter law says discrimination isn't allowed. And yet!
How many Supreme Court cases before Harvard and UNC and Michigan give up being racist? Or the state of Minnesota, apparently. Alas, they have taken the Jacksonian stance on such things.
I like it when laws mean things. I like it when words mean things.
I'd choose to be white over than black in a heartbeat from a flourishing point of view in the US right now and I don't see that changing particularly.
If the only choice is black or white, I too would choose white, even if that means zero chance of being Idris Elba and nonzero chance of being on the meth transformation list. But why limit the choice to those options, if choice is to be imagined? Anyone would choose to be born to a rich family rather than abjectly poor, given the choice. To be born in fair weather and healthy lands than next to an EPA brown site or tornado alley. Beautiful rather than deformed, smart rather than stupid, et cetera.
The point is we don't choose. Isn't the lesson from Rawls' veil that we don't want laws where such differences matter?
Moral luck rules the day. So shall it ever be. Unless we're aiming for Harrison Bergeron communism, we can only do so much to account for moral luck, and the more we account for it the further we are from those principles that supposedly matter to have failed.
But how much of a cost (if any at all) anyone person is willing to bear for the mistakes of Americans past, is going to be invariably a very personal thing.
The cost I am willing to bear for history has gotten much, much lower since becoming a parent.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4d ago
Don't confuse what white progressives might say and what black people believe. They may be allied politically but they are very different groups.
Which does not mean that a large number of black people (or at least specifically black descendants of slaves) do not in fact still resent white people, for slavery, for Jim Crow, for various hurts both real and imagined.
If we look at Rittenhouse, of the three people who he shot, none of them were black.
The one he missed (Jump Kick Man) was black. Kenosha is about 10% black.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
4d ago
X CEO Linda Yaccarino has resigned, I doubt the timing is a coincidence.
And the correlation between genetics and IQ has? Nobody's running randomized control trails with polygenically screened embryos. We're at least as confident that SES affects intelligence as we are that any particular gene marker of intelligence does. Sure, SES effects genetics too, but it's not like causality is required to be unidirectional.
Even if these claims are true, and true because of specifically genetic factors, It's not clear to me at all that these things should result in tradeoffs. Faster maturation seems like it would select for greater learning speed; color vision for visual pattern analysis; faster running for spatial intelligence. Maybe I'm wrong-- but either way, it's an empirical question that the current data can't resolve. That's ultimately my big problem with modern race-based intelligence research: that the data is too fuzzy, and that there are too many empirical questions left unanswered. At this point I simply can't reject the null hypothesis and accept that the HBD racial intelligence rankings accurately reflect reality.
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