Recent movies

Since there's nothing interesting happening in the news today, I might as well post some movie micro-reviews.

The Crow: Upon a recent re-watch, I have a few observations:

  1. This movie is about Ellis Act evictions. That's the entire plot.
  2. Candyman is also a movie about a Vengeful Spirit fighting Gentrification. Therefore they are set in the same universe.
  3. I always forget that Tintin is Lord Nikon. In my headcanon, following the events of Hackers, after all of his white friends went away to college, Nikon's life took an unfortunate, more explicitly criminal turn. RIP Nikon.
  4. So now Hackers and Candyman are set in the same universe.
  5. To this day, a Graeme Revell score is enough reason for me to go see a movie.
  6. I saw a very clean 35mm print on a big screen, and even so, this movie is just so, so blurry. The mastering is crap. I truly hope that they never, ever re-make this movie -- it is and should remain a monument to Brandon Lee, and remaking it would just be an insult to him -- but I wish someone would re-master it, by which I mean, digitally generate a better render of every single frame. Throw some of that Fury Road tech at it and make a watchable 4K version.
  7. A reminder about that TKK performace.

The Matrix: I re-watched all three to get in the mood for our upcoming screening of the first one on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. The first one is still a fantastic piece of filmmaking. That first scene, where we see Trinity performing the most incredible ass-kicking we've ever seen, and then she learns that Agents are inbound and she just turns tail and runs. She's afraid of someone? That's how you set the stakes. Also the dojo scene: "Do you think that's air you're breathing?"

The second two... can confirm: they are still an incoherent, babbling mess, and they make you like the first one less in retrospect. The freeway chase is pretty good. The Merovingian has a nice suit. That's about it.

And it reconfirms something I thought about Sense8: "Did they love that 'Burning Man rave in Zion' scene so much they had to expand it to 12 episodes? Yeah, I think they did."

Repo Man: I still love this movie so much. It's ridiculous. You should go watch it again.

The Magicians: I re-watched it from the beginning and it still holds up. The current season is killing it. And can I say how much I love that the Library Planets are triple mobius toruses? That makes so much sense to me in a Borgean way I can't explain. I am especially liking that the show is now totally "off book", because the show was always so much better than the books, largely by disregarding them.

The Man who Killed Hitler and Also The Bigfoot: This was great, and it was definitely not the movie I thought it would be. I mean, yes, those two things do happen, but mostly it's about how much he regrets them both, and they really make that work.

Perfect Skin: It's a "creepy stalker kidnaps and abuses a girl" movie, this time with non-consensual tattooing, so it's fair to ask "Why is this the story they chose to tell, again and again?" But the villain has this calmness to him and lack of mouth-foaming insanity that makes Stockholm Syndrome seem not-entirely out of the question. So, good acting and production. But still, "This story, again?"

Alita was pretty good. It was simple, but much punchy. It's relatively faithful to the manga, which is not necessarily great beause a lot of the manga was pretty stupid, such as her piece-of-shit boyfriend. The parts of it that were ripped off by Altered Carbon just made me angry at Altered Carbon all over again.

Vox Lux: This was really hard to watch. Good acting, but another movie about deeply unpleasant people. And it didn't really have much of an ending: I guess she just carries on being deeply unpleasant, the end?

Happy Death Day 2U: I am, as always, a sucker for Groundhog Day movies. This one is not as good as the first one, but still fun. It didn't waste a lot of time, so to speak. It adds some nice wrinkles in the cosmology, but it suffers from too much dumb slapstick. The "I am a blind French student in a beret and striped shirt" bit was stupid enough to almost overpower the whole rest of the movie. Why. Why would you do that, why. And the Dean doing his best Ed Rooney.... You are no Ed Rooney, Sir. Also, time travel fusion cores are clearly graduate level work, not undergrad, so why is that dude still living in the dorms?

Slaughterhouse Rulez: Well I should have known to veto it base solely on that "Z". Simon Pegg and some kids fight monsters, which sounds promising, but 3/4ths of it is on the theme, "English private schools are full of rich, bullying assholes", which was a daring revelation that I'm pretty sure has never before been committed to film.

Previously.

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The Trauma Floor

The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America:

Collectively, the employees described a workplace that is perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos. It is an environment where workers cope by telling dark jokes about committing suicide, then smoke weed during breaks to numb their emotions. It's a place where employees can be fired for making just a few errors a week -- and where those who remain live in fear of the former colleagues who return seeking vengeance. [...] Where people develop severe anxiety while still in training, and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave; and where the counseling that Cognizant offers them ends the moment they quit -- or are simply let go.

The moderators told me it's a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: "I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack." [...]

Here is a racist joke. Here is a man having sex with a farm animal. Here is a graphic video of murder recorded by a drug cartel. [...] When Miguel has a question, he raises his hand, and a "subject matter expert" (SME) -- a contractor expected to have more comprehensive knowledge of Facebook's policies, who makes $1 more per hour than Miguel does -- will walk over and assist him. This will cost Miguel time, though, and while he does not have a quota of posts to review, managers monitor his productivity, and ask him to explain himself when the number slips into the 200s. [...]

It entrusts essential questions of speech and safety to people who are paid as if they were handling customer service calls for Best Buy. [...]

One QA, named Randy, would sometimes return to his car at the end of a work day to find moderators waiting for him. Five or six times over the course of a year, someone would attempt to intimidate him into changing his ruling. "They would confront me in the parking lot and tell me they were going to beat the shit out of me," he says. "There wasn't even a single instance where it was respectful or nice. It was just, You audited me wrong! That was a boob! That was full areola, come on man!"

Fearing for his safety, Randy began bringing a concealed gun to work. Fired employees regularly threatened to return to work and harm their old colleagues, and Randy believed that some of them were serious. A former coworker told me she was aware that Randy brought a gun to work, and approved of it, fearing on-site security would not be sufficient in the case of an attack. [...]

When I ask about the risks of contractors developing PTSD, a counselor I'll call Logan tells me about a different psychological phenomenon: "post-traumatic growth," an effect whereby some trauma victims emerge from the experience feeling stronger than before.

I've been reading this same story since before Google bought Youtube, so 14 years now at least? Good to see that it hasn't gotten any better at all.

If you want a vision of the future, imaging a 30 second clip of a boot stamping on a human face, looping forever.

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About Face

This is a great, long comic about the semiotics of the new fascism:

About Face: Death and surrender to power in the clothing of men:

It pairs nicely with this long twitter rant about Beau Fucking Brummell.

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Fourth Seal Studios

You Nexus, Huh?


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Finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it


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FDA rebukes noted vampire Peter Thiel

Beware of Using Young People's Blood to Halt Aging:

"There is no proven clinical benefit of infusion of plasma from young donors to cure, mitigate, treat or prevent these conditions, and there are risks associated with the use of any plasma product," the FDA said in a statement from Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and Peter Marks, head of the agency's biologics center.

The idea of infusing young blood to fight aging has attracted technology entrepreneurs like billionaire Peter Thiel. [...]

"We're concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies," Gottlieb and Marks said. "Such treatments have no proven clinical benefits for the uses for which these clinics are advertising them, and are potentially harmful."

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DNA Lounge: Wherein we need a new restaurant manager. Again.

Well, our restaurant manager rage-quit again. This one only lasted two weeks. The last one lasted five!

Both of these guys had extensive experience actually running restaurants, and sounded like they knew what they were doing. And then both of them basically said: "The restaurant has this list of problems (that you explicitly told me about before you hired me). You should probably fix those, bye!"

I mean, no joke, in the interviews we would say, repeatedly, "We're not looking to hire someone who's going to say to us, 'You should have more checklists!' We're looking to hire someone who, as the manager, is going to make those checklists, and make sure they are followed." Both of them said, "Absolutely, I'm your guy!" Then a couple weeks later, "You should get some checklists, good luck with that!"

Double-you tee fuck.

This is so frustrating, because we know there are problems -- money-losing problems -- with our restaurant, and the solution to literally every one of those problems begins with, "Step 1: Hire a competent manager". Right now restaurant management is being spread between three or four people who all have other full time jobs here, jobs which are also critical.

Anyway, here's here's our Craigslist ad. Help, help.

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Today in Youtube's joke of a fair-use appeal process

Every few days, my robots generate a compilation video of DNA Lounge's upcoming shows, comprised of a ~20 second clip from a music video by each of the upcoming bands, like so. It gets uploaded to our various social media accounts.

Currently, three of the bands we have booked are apparently wholly-owned subsidiaries of multinational media conglomerates who would prefer that we not promote their live concerts.

So my morning ritual for the last couple of weeks has been to paste this into the Youtube copyright claim dispute form:

DNA Lounge is a concert venue. This video contains extremely brief clips from videos of bands who are booked to perform live at this venue in the coming weeks.

These bands are putting on live shows on our stage. We are using these videos to get people to show up and pay money to the bands who made them.

This is literally why music videos were invented.

This is the seventh time I have submitted this same dispute, with no response. Apparently your robots are going to do this every single time I post a video. That's fabulous.

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Teletype Model 33



Turn the sound on! Though I was hoping that it would overstrike so much that it cut through the paper.

Actually <STRIKE> should do that. To your screen.

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Today in Hot Superyacht Probs

The Lonely Life of a Yacht Influencer

"Nah, I'm nobody you'd know," he assured me. "I'm here to take some pictures and post some video stories of the yacht, which a brokerage group is trying to sell. The watch is a loaner from a friend. I wear it, take a picture of my wrist and tag his company on my Instagram account. It's just a small part of the hustle."

The yacht hustle, I soon learned, was the all-consuming passion of Jimenez's life. He went from a guy who took Instagram pictures, always head-on yacht shots run through one of the generic filters, to a guy that yacht brokers paid to stay on their yachts in order to mention that said yachts were docked in a port and available for sale or charter. He was helicoptered from yacht to yacht, and slept in the smallest guest cabins. [...]

For Jimenez, Instagram is essentially a money tree that must be fertilized and harvested as much as possible before its popularity wanes. As another side hustle, he "plants" subsidiary yacht accounts, accounts with soundalike names and images, and uses cross-promotion from his primary account to grow them until they're large enough to sell to yacht brokers or manufacturers. "I build them up and then sell them off, and my client gets a ready-made account that has real followers and legitimate engagement," he told me. "I started focusing on that when I realized that this wasn't just a 'life of the party' job, that pushing social media is something you do all day and all night long.

"I fire off these posts while I'm sitting around on the yacht, when things are very slow. I'm not in this for the fun of it, I'm not posting silly stuff. I basically do sponsored advertisements that follow a set format. I watch Instagram like a hawk to see if anything is hampering the growth of these other accounts, and to see if I'm continuing to get the activity I need on my primary posts."

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