Yeah, I mean there’s not a big huge punchline, but this was clearly a bit of a general send-up, and also prodding at a very specific “Tim Tebow” type of muscular Christianity.

That type of Christian man is big and strong, but also extremely manicured and soft-spoken (even while saying the usual heinous shit) and “effeminate” by certain heteronormative standards. The look and vibe lends itself to fairly easy jokes about men who are closeted or so naive they don’t realize they’re closeted, which will needle some and maybe give others food for thought. Anybody who’s spent time in the Bible Belt will have met the dude in this comic, and maybe his wife.

Absolutely. I think there will always be room for thoughtfully filmed 1.5-3 hour storytelling, but this idea that you have to go out to a communal viewing on a screen that fills your entire filed of vision feels gatekeepery and fetishistic. Just like playhouses before them, cinemas will settle into their best use cases, and sensory spectacle seems to be the one where they offer a competitive advantage. Another one is serving dedicated cinephiles, but that market is not as big as Spielberg, Scorsese, etc. want it to to be, and they sound like old men shouting at the sky when they complain.

Now that said, I think a 65"/5.1 is much closer to a movie theater than it is to a phone screen, so I personally hope we don’t get too much stuff filmed and framed for the latter, but maybe that’s just me on my path to being an old man shouting at the sky.

Very cool, but is anything as cool as that Space Wars Computer Space cabinet in the same scene?

some of them taking home north of $250,000 for office-based shiftwork

Sucking up resources and not actually shooting and teargassing innocent people? These are the least-awful people there!

1. Spoiler tags.

2. You’re not going to get anybody to agree to “Trust me bro” on keeping the 8-figure alien VFX out of the marketing. Spoiling Rocky was pretty much a pre-condition to this being done as a big project, and…

I don’t agree about the movie being better, mostly because I think getting Mark’s inner monologue made much of the humor land so much better than the vocalized stuff in the movie. And they had to handwave a bunch of the more technical sciences and engineering that I found genuinely interesting in the book. But it was very cinematic and a pretty solid adaptation.

That’s certainly fair, and probably more common among people who’ve gone into both with an open mind. There are certain things that books simply explore better than films, and the more in-depth “Swiss Family Robinson” competence-porn and meditation on isolation did work very well. Someone who wants that particular story with more depth and different pacing can always make a good argument that the book is better," but I do sometimes like to gently push back on the notion that any book is inherently better than its adaptation, not to make you a straw man or anything. :-) Also, for the record I really liked the book a lot.

I thought Damon did a very good job with converting the monologue into video messages and very much caught the spirit of the character. I honestly didn’t miss the rover ride, which dragged and made an already constrained story positively claustrophobic, though the science and geography it showed was obviously core to what Weir wanted to do. I also just had a personal bugaboo where I struggled with the fact that every book character other than Watney was drawn thinner than thin and had clunky dialogue, so I found it a chore to wade through their scenes. The script doctors and professional actors made them much more palatable in the movie.

I think first-time-novelist Andy Weir just didn’t really have more than one character in him at the time, and that character was his “juiced” author-insert. You can see him stretching his literary wings in Artemis but it falls flat in many ways, though that setting could result in a really good project of its own if they tweaked the characterizations some. PHM was nice because it kind of took a more incremental step of giving the author insert more flaws, making genuinely excellent use of his second character, and making the “plot device humans” comfortably deliver exposition and obstacles from the sidelines without being distracting.

I actually think The Martian was better as a movie. I think I’m rare in going that far, but most people seem to think it was a pretty solid adaptation. Weir has improved as a writer, and so PHM has more to work with but it’s playing with a lot of the same techniques, so I’m optimistic this movie will be decent or better.

They clearly felt like they couldn’t even market the movie without revealing one of the major spoilable plot points, and frankly I’m sympathetic, but I’m curious how they’ll handle the other.

I liked The Mandalorian, even as the seasons got weaker and it descended into a series of backdoor pilots for moving Filoni’s projects from animation into live action. However, it always felt a little small, kind of intentionally so in the first season and increasingly more like a failure of budget and vision as it went, and the panicked Season 2.5 course correction crammed into the middle of Boba Fett was bizarre.

I just don’t know if there’s a “Star War” there for a big screen big event. It won’t be hard to improve on TRoS, minimally competent plotting and scripting will do that, but that’s a low bar.

Here’s a slightly more nuanced, but still ultimately disappointed review. Sounds like this one is old-fashioned Nov-Dec overhyped Oscar-bait.

A Dog Took My Face And Gave Me A Better Face To Change The World: The Celeste Cunningham Story

Hmmm. Skyler Gisondo plays characters who seem nice, but he’s got all the charisma of a wet paper bag.

While bots seem like the obvious answer, there’s also a possibility of demographic shift over time towards a younger and more mainstream commenting/posting population. More young adults with no baggage asking for advice means cutting ties is more likely to be a novel suggestion for them and has less friction, and more young adults (and, frankly, kids) in the commenting population means less nuance, more “edge”, and generally more advocating for hot-takes that have attracted upvotes in the past.

You have to be quite the special guy to lose a knife fight and still be the one who gets fired. Of course, if you started the fight in the first place in a hazy drunken rage…

That’s his major value-add. With any luck he’ll sputter in the primary versus someone with actual charisma and decent ideas.

He believes something incredibly toxic and nuts, but I’m not sure it’s exactly that Christianity is “true,” but rather that it’s just so incredibly useful that it might as well be, and therefore it’s not hypocritical to espouse it with gusto, regardless of what you personally think about the supernatural.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/

I don’t recall the link for now, but there was a fairly long piece a couple of weeks (months?) ago that went into the Thiel religious awakening. The short version is that he doesn’t necessarily believe in Jesus so much as he believes that organized religion is so important as a binding agent in society that you’re better off pretending to believe in it, advocating for it, and imposing it by force if it seems necessary, all to satisfy the human need for mimesis, or imitative desires and behaviors.

Society’s movement away from Christianity in particular as a uniquely humane and sophisticated global-ready religion means it’s okay to fall back on older “tribal” religious patterns like assertive scapegoating to reimpose the world order. There is room for regions of the world with independent traditions to impose them as a means of having a safe and orderly society, because it allows the Christian region to interact with a relatively small number of competing ideologies, which satisfy similar psychological needs for their populations, and therefore a balance can be maintained. It’s better for the system if most people hold sincere beliefs about the supernatural aspects, but it’s not utterly critical, particularly for elites, as long as folks legitimately buy into the societal repercussions of failing to rely on religion for social control. It’s like Pascal’s wager on meth, which is appropriate because a lot of it dates back to a German guy who was a Nazi apologist through most of the thirties until being discarded by them right before WW2. Some of this is strictly IIRC, so be on notice, LOL.

Conveniently, all this allows the Christianized advocates for this worldview to declare any systemic threat to the triumph of their vision for world peace to be accurately-enough referred to as the Antichrist, and the things you’re allowed to do to oppose the Antichrist are quite broad.

JD Vance is thought to be well-ensconced in the ideology.

EDIT: Found it, plus a couple of others that discuss the same thing. Thiel is absolutely nuts, but not quite the way he’s sometimes portrayed.

• https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/
• https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/desconstructing_thiel/
• https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/1176-from-philosophy-to-power

Okay, I’m willing to accept that we generally shouldn’t decide that our personal lines in the sand can serve as meaningful differentiators between art and not-art. By the same token, don’t expect me to be particularly impressed by a (mostly) photorealistic composition just because you spent 30 minutes fine-tuning your prompt. If I’m not appreciating your skill and the time you committed to your vision, the bar for the impact you need to make is that much higher. For me, most AI art falls flat on that front as well.

Maybe someone will be the breakthrough artist that shows the rest of us luddites what a genuinely beautiful interplay between drafting a prompt and massaging an engine will look like, but (1) even that person is something other than a painter or a photographer, and (2) I don’t think we’re there yet and may never be.

I like that, though I might consider that rhyme, alliteration, and especially repetition also aid retention by requiring less data to be committed to memory as-is. References to other works are also very much a shorthand for cramming pre-existing memes (in the Dawkins sense) into less “word-doing.”

I dunno. The whole thing breaks down pretty quickly, as most analogies between mental and computational process do, but it’s fun to think about.

Adults also make a face with how much it’s a copy of Frozen’s premise.

Definitely very similar, but it’s different enough, I’d say. It sort of makes explicit that there are cultural repercussions to imposing Elsa’s burden on everyone, that embracing individuality can ironically create a stronger sense of community, and then, in splitting Elsa into Rumi and Jinu, it allows for parallel redemptive tracks, one who never had a “Let it Go” first act moment at all and suffered because of it, and one who really thoroughly bought into the anti-social aspects of it but is then gaslit into thinking they can never be anything better.

If we can do the Hero’s Journey a thousand times, we can do Elsa’s every few years, especially when the rest of it is changed up and fun. I do think there’s a world where K-Pop Demon Hunters comes and goes without making any waves, but the songs are all earworms and it hit at just the right moment, apparently.

It’s still out there. For one that’s specifically what you describe try Keep the Wolves at Bay by Uncle Lucius.