maegul

maegul , 4 hours ago

Yea, car congestion isn’t about industrial transport, it’s about personal transport. All of the people commuting to/from work etc in single person occupied tanks.

maegul Mod , 15 hours ago

Huh!

My impression of Godzilla x Kong, as someone who's generally enjoyed that franchise, is that it's basically reached a sort of "strangely calm and abstract animated cartoon vibe". Which I'm probably down for, but which is also probably just not as entertaining as many would expect.

maegul , 2 days ago

Fantastic framing! Not just of the internet, but the whole economic sector including big tech, various publishers, of course the ads industry and now all of the push for winning the AI platform wars.

It's a toilet economy! Fueled by the attention, tastes, inclinations and urges of people taking a shit! And now, as AI "learns" from the internet, also fed by and literally made of the writings and thoughts of people ... taking a shit.

It's also a nice litmus test for what kind of internet space somewhere online is based on where people are when they comment or post: "Is this a toilet or desk space". Depending on what you're after, you will probably want to know if you're in the right kind of place.

maegul Mod , 2 days ago

The prestige Coppola carries certainly makes reviews less reliable for this, I’d say. Industry can’t let a good marketing angle slip by.

maegul , 3 days ago

And are really eerie against the brown of the sky and water!

maegul , 3 days ago

I've found a fair amount of strong loyalty to the place from all sorts of people. I was never a twitter person, so I don't understand it, but AFAICT, all sorts of people have a real emotional bond to the place, like for them it's been their main internet experience in life or something.

maegul , 3 days ago

I hear you ... most people are still there (I've claimed in the past that it will be the MS Windows of social media, that no one really openly talks about using but is actually everywhere).

But I feel it may be useful to distinguish FOMO and social media gossip from actual useful information. I'm not saying there's nothing useful on Twitter (I don't actually know). But we're talking about microblogging and social media here.

maegul Mod , 4 days ago

Likely annoying hot take (and certainly a rant)

Being picky about bad CGI has run its course now and is likely a toxic urge in film culture ATM.

I'm a bit of a broken record on this already (see prior posts here, here and here, all driven by the "No CGI is really just invisible CGI" series on YT.

Is this actually helping us enjoy cinema or priming us to be sensitive to something that prevents us from enjoying something we easily could? All I'm going to say here is that some lessened sensitivity over the "quality" of CGI is likely warranted right now.

And I know, we all prefer good CGI over bad so why not enjoy what we enjoy.

Well because the industry is gaslighting us over how much CGI is actually everywhere and fundamental to modern cinema, likely in part because they enjoy pushing down the CGI industry, but also because they want to control what we think of as "spectacle" so that they control and retain effective marketing.

Out of that YT series, there were two really novel things for me. One, was that the studio's have always underplayed their reliance on effects and lied and not given VFX artists due credit almost since the beginning. Two, was that part of what's going on right now with CGI and the excitement over "practical effects" is that the glorious epic spectacular shots that got viewers excited in the past have lost their appeal or efficacy due to over saturation over time.

But spectacle puts people in seats and makes money. So the studios want to be able to tell us and control what is "good spectacle".

Sounds conspiracy theorist, I know. But I'm not talking about thought control here, just marketing.

Think about how much you or I actually know about VFX and CGI?

Do we really know what is "good" or "bad" CGI? Sure somethings will stand out to us as "bad", but I've seen instances now of people mistaking "practical" for "bad CGI" for the simple reason that they don't actually know what the practical thing really looks like (the Rings of Power trailer with liquid metal is I suspect a good example ... people thought it was cheap CGI, but it was apparently practical ... the point being that basically no internet nerd actually knows anything about what liquid metal looks like).

Add to this how things and tastes have shifted pretty quickly as CGI has gotten way better pretty quickly, and you get a weird scenario where viewers can want the latest/best CGI to the point of being hyper-critical of "bad" CGI that would have been well received 10-20 years ago ... while also demanding practical effects that "look real" when there's a good chance that they're either being lied to about what is real and isn't and also don't really know.

But the studios want us hyped. So they'll keep lying or trying to feed us what they think we want right now. And then viewers' tastes will be molded by this experience. We'll think we know what the latest/best CGI is and what "good and real" practical effects look like ... which will push the next stage of attempts to hype us with lies and catering to our particular and likely somewhat arbitrary needs.

It's what got us to hyper-CGI driven film making in the 00s-10s and has got us studios lying now about practical effects that actually involve a lot of CGI (Top Gun seems really egregious on this front).

And in all of this lack of transparency is a whole industry going unrecognised and being over-worked and underpaid by studios more likely to pretend they don't exist than actually pay them for the work they do.

So ... maybe try to enjoy the story, characters and the writing?

Maybe don't be so obsessive about good/bad VFX? Maybe we no longer know what we're talking about when it comes to convincing VFX, or at least spoilt to the point of being artistically meaningless in our amateur critiques?

Maybe just break the hype feedback cycle

/rant

maegul Mod , 4 days ago

Bad CGI takes my immersion away from the actors and story and breaks my ability to enjoy the not-CGI shit, so that essay you wrote is wrong.

Well my point was that perhaps your "immersion" (and others' or the current culture too) is excessively sensitive to the apparent "quality" of the CGI, not that your immersion was never affected. IMO, it's a mentality and expectations thing, not a "right/wrong" "what is objectively good cinema" thing.

maegul , 5 days ago

a mutated form of free TV.

Fantastic description!

Similarly, Casey Newton described it as "Managed decline", on which I riffed "big tech is moving on from the internet".

But yea, something relatively drastic is happening here. The big-tech end of the internet is no longer the internet we used to have. As you say: Mutated Broadcast TV.

maegul OP , 5 days ago

I think it would be nice to be able to make some posts “community members only”

This would make a good amount of sense as part of the local-only and private communities features IMO.

maegul OP , 5 days ago

Just to be clear, when I said "as part of", I was thinking of it as a suite of options centered around enabling a community to control how it engages with the external world. I wasn't suggesting that what you were talking about would pair well with being private or local-only.

maegul , 5 days ago

The pandemic is an obvious inflection point in many of these graphs.

What exactly is that mechanism or process? That rents have gone up makes sense as passing on interest rate increases. But vacancy rates going down? There aren't more people all of a sudden (it was a pandemic not a baby boom).

maegul , 5 days ago

Yea right. If people left tiny apartments, that should balance out in terms of vacancy rates though. Plus I knew of some people that really hated living alone and so presumably sought to live with someone else.

But share houses blowing up makes a lot of sense.

I wonder if there's a demographics to it as well, where millennials are now middle aged, and so either more entitled in their residential "needs" or starting families, with the pandemic suddenly accelerating that trend. But in reality, was it a very foreseeable trend?

maegul OP , 5 days ago

Absolutely.

And this is why I'm seeing Google winning this. They've got the infrastructure for both running and training their AI as well as the long standing web scraping for getting in as much data as soon as possible. But they've also got the ads business and the brand and user base. Together, they'll be the first to get AI tech to the point of being able to insert ads or other paid endorsements (however hard that is) and the first monetise that through ads and userbase size. Meanwhile Microsoft (OpenAI's backer) will probably do what MS has often done which is fail to piece together a coherent business model and squander an opportunity on failing to monetise.

maegul OP , 5 days ago

It’s interesting to think that Big Tech might just move on from the Web, leaving it to us ordinary humans to go back to the way we were doing it in Web 1.0 just with fancier tools at our disposal. I quite like the idea.

Yep. The idea has been buzzing in my head since I read Casey's post and thought about it as "Tech moving on from the web". For those of us who like it, we'll just be left to (re-)make it ourselves. It's a weird feeling for me honestly.

It's almost like the eternal September is actually ending.

maegul OP , 5 days ago

perfect!

maegul OP Mod , 5 days ago

yea there were definitely some significant positives in S1 for sure. The writing was just off though.

My biggest like from S1 turned out to be the quasi-romance they created between Galadriel and Sauron. I thought it was creative and interesting without terribly violating any lore but instead kinda adding to the lore with an interesting "maybe this actually happened" that is vague enough that even the main characters (Galadriel and Sauron) can't be sure what it was.

maegul Mod , 6 days ago

Well, we were discussing trailers that reveal to much yesterday. That’s not happening here.

Came to say the same! And yea, I haven't been following this closely or anything ... but apart from the visual style (which I'm totally down for) I really have no idea what this is ... which is awesome!

Also, perhaps as a sign of how indie this is for Coppola, he seems to have a youtube channel just for promoting this film and is posting the trailers there: https://www.youtube.com/@Francis_Ford_Coppola_

Maybe it's a fake channel, I dunno if youtube do any verification.

maegul , 6 days ago

I imagine many are common based on their geometrical shape on the number pad.

maegul , 6 days ago

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it's just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

• Money back requirements
• Clear warnings to consumers about "ownership" being temporary
• Requiring tracking statistics of how long "ownership" tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
• If there are structural issues that increase the chances of "withdrawn" ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that's the point ... to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It's not hard, it's just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

maegul , 6 days ago

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

maegul , 6 days ago

Yea, I forget where, but she's openly lamented the rise of ARM for this reason. Not because it's a small blemish on redbean and cosmopolitan libc (what redbean uses to be "universal") ... but, IIRC, x86 had gained such ubiquity that simply sticking with it for the sake of interoperability and backwards compatibility was/is probably worth it. However accurate that is, or viable in today's tech world, I certainly resonate with the sentiment. And given what her and cosmopolitan libc seem to have accomplished (I've never used these things), it certainly seems like one of nice things we could have if we just did things in a nicer way.

maegul , 5 days ago

yea, from what I've seen of her, you could say she's part of or used to be part of a sort edge-lord techno anarchism that involves a good amount of "fuck you" trolling and embrace of the chronically online/urban life style. The "fascism" part here seems to come out of nowhere. The twitter post from Justine that that whole blog post hangs off of doesn't exist anymore (and she's active on twitter). In the end though, if she's a bit nutty on how much better tech governance would be than ordinary government, I don't resent her for that. And the sorts of things she's building technologically certainly align with my interests.

What would "cosmopolitan" and "ape" be dog whistles for? Racism?

maegul , 4 days ago

Hmmm yea. Put together, cosmopolitan and “ape” do point in a single direction. I still wouldn’t be surprised if it were trolling. But yea, interesting. Being hyped on SV as a Googler in 2014 seems to me to have been a thing (you might disagree!), so so that doesn’t surprise me either.

Thanks!

maegul , 3 days ago

truth is that everything is scattered. And different alternative social media platforms or ecosystems ... fighting and competing looks a bit silly once you zoom out a little. Both fediverse and BlueSky are sitting around 1 million monthly active users ... which is nothing compared to the likes of twitter and threads and IG etc.

It would be physically impossible to say that "all of the scientists are actually on BlueSky/Mastodon". By any reasonable approximation, they're all on Twitter/Threads, with some experimenting with alternative social media. And those few are likely on both because they're still interested in getting their messages out there.

maegul Mod , 7 days ago

Came here to say the same about the Alien Trailer.

I think they both exhibit the same approach: a sequence of slightly moving images (ie very short snippets) that convey no plot (and are likely completely jumbled relative to their in-movie occurrence) ... but instead show you the vibe, look and general subject matter of the film. Essentially an appetiser that isn't the main course at all but is perfectly matched.

Except that tag line ... "In space no one can hear you scream" ... is likely unmatched.

maegul Mod , 6 days ago

Oh yea! The hype going into the sequel trilogy was very real and a lot of that was the trailer game. I remember seeing this for the first time! It alone probably carried me into about halfway through RoS!

maegul Mod , 6 days ago

Oh man, I just watched the 2.5 minute trailer ... that shit still works! Had me nearly wanting to watch the sequels trilogy again. The promise/potential of that trilogy was soooo high. I'd only made the connection now, but in hindsight there's real Game of Thrones season 8 energy around the whole thing now. Like even with the Finn jedi fake out, it would have been so much more interesting if he were also a jedi of some sort rather than just "vaguely force sensitive" or whatever.

maegul , 3 days ago

Underutilisation seems to me to be a problem common to both DIS and SNW.

maegul OP Mod , 8 days ago

Yea, it was bit more of a cluttered video than I would have liked too. Maybe copyright issues were on their mind? Still, I had no idea bout any of this. I can imagine a bigger deeper dive on the ideas though!

maegul , 8 days ago

Market segregation is worth it for them and the chips will be used in plenty of other hardware anyway, so dumping them in iPads doesn’t hurt, even if it’s mostly just marketing fit the products, nor does it necessitate a product change.

maegul , 10 days ago

Oohhh. Seeding the alternative with all the old data, if possible, could be an awesome move here!

maegul , 10 days ago

most struggle to accept minor inconveniences.

This is the really jaw dropping thing whenever I see it. I just have no idea what to say and don’t get how people don’t have an instinct for when there might be a bigger picture.

Some are really cruising through life just trying to maximise convenience and comfort.

maegul , 11 days ago

Ah right. Obvious guess I should have made.

maegul , 9 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Maybe I just don’t worry about it as many others in our nation apperently do?

Well the polls would suggest that.

it can be a little weird or unsettling sometimes

I find this striking. Some places just aren’t used to major migration events, and from this it seems to be true for Germany and even you however accepting you are. And not to be an immigration absolutist about it, but Europe might benefit from realising how common migration is elsewhere in the world.

maegul Mod , 8 days ago

All good points!

Something I'd never really picked up on or forgotten was the fading value of natural female fertility in the film. Thanks! I'll look out for that more on re-watch.

Like I said, I don't disagree.

I'll reply with is the part of my previous comment you didn't quote (and rant from there I suppose):

In the end I think two things can (edit: both) be true here. 1) the film itself isn’t misogynistic and the portrayal of women in it is part of a bigger dystopian theme, and 2) the use of female characters for that kind of story just doesn’t cut it for some/enough women anymore who, without demanding “girl boss” characters, would prefer either direct stories about female oppression or portrayals the lean into more fruitful or interesting ideas and themes.

IE, I think a woman (or anyone else sensitive to such to this issue) can see all of what you point out and fairly conclude that they don't need to like the film or feel like they're missing anything by forgetting about it. While there's dystopia all around, the focus and the depiction of the main characters is pretty gendered. I don't think you're really arguing otherwise. And I think it's fair for someone to conclude that they don't get anything out of that. That they already know all about the lack of agency of housewives or pleasure bots or the centrality of women's fertility to their social value ... because they live it, and are busy handling it IRL and this film isn't really helping anything.

I think Blade Runner 2049 is a deeply, deeply feminist film. It doesn’t shy away from depictions of female objectification/ownership/subordination/violence - they are important for telling its story and getting across its themes - but it sure as hell doesn’t endorse them either.

It may very well be. Has Villeneuve or anyone else spoken about this??

But I think it's worth asking what makes a good feminist film. Simply having the suffering of women as a gender in the film as a theme or plot point etc arguably doesn't cut it. The general angle I'm pushing here (without having really thought about this question at all) is that today there arguably needs to be something useful for feminism today in the film, and that I'm not sure it's there in BR-2049.

You point out the various female characters around K driving his story. I noticed that too, but in the end, for me (long time since I've seen it) it didn't feel like women were playing the game. It felt like Wallace was powerful, Deckard was important and K was "us", the protagonist we relate to and see the world through. The woman were either bosses, attack dogs, agency-less loving partners (Joi), prostitutes, or indelibly special creatures in need of protection (Rachael/Deckard's daughter). The freedom movement and their leader is probably a notable exception but I'm not sure it really gets much screen time.

So it's dystopian but men are still at the center and women still suffering the usual things ... for what?

To compare, I'm thinking of the Earthsea series (by Le Guin ... if you haven't read it and like fantasy at all I recommend it). Its feminism famously gets on the nose toward the end (though it ends well IMO), but the second book, Tombs of Atuan is a wonderful metaphor of womanhood told through the character of a young priestess that, IMO, does a good job at getting at how the roles people/women are forced to play traps them in labyrinths they don't or struggle to understand and that are darker than they can realise. I personally found it subtly haunting.

Also, just randomly here, Ripley in Alien & Aliens. Many would say she's an early "girl boss" character (but done right/well), but something you forget about her time in the films is how much everyone basically flatly ignores her until shit goes bad and she has to save herself (and the cat or adopted daughter). Even if you're oblivious to feminist issues, you feel and see it in those films ... a woman who knows what she's talking about being ignored by men who think they know better with horrible results.

The Shining (Kubrick), where Wendy is totally keeping that family together (notice how she's the only one every doing maintenance work) and tolerating a child beater husband (in one release there's a scene that makes it clear that Jack had previously hit the child) and his career to the point of being trapped alone in the cold wilderness with a murderous husband because that's who he's always been (what a metaphor for domestic abuse). Again we get a depiction of something real today but elevated with horror in a way that highlights not what women suffer (Wendy and Danny survive in the end) but what trap they're in and how they don't see it coming or even understand it, but, you know, really should if they want to live.

With BR-2049, I feel like it's kinda just dystopia and the whole slaughtered women, prostitutes and hot loving-AI just have to be there to fill out the world. The video about Joi linked above was definitely interesting (like I said), but I don't think it reverses anything I'm saying here ... if anything its point was that even men are now living more like housewives than they used to (at least middle-class and lower millennial men) and so nothing really fruitful about feminism right?

---

All that being said ... great post! I like the film! I'm not sure it's deeply feminist though. I think it's got feminism in there within its dystopia, but I'm not sure that's a high bar and I think it bears the mark of being done by men (who probably think they're feminist).

Is it a good feminist film for men to digest? Maybe?!

maegul Mod , 7 days ago

it is good for men to see the issue portrayed, from both sides. That’s not nothing.

Well, a counter argument would be that it’s taken a number of words for this to get pulled out in this conversation. So maybe it’s not that effective or impactful to most men?

I personally land, again, on not really worth it or at least a bit of a misfire.