I use lib-redirect for everything if I really need to get to a reddit link. It’s rare, but there are certain types of communities where I’d like to get a “average laymans” perspective and unfortunately just due to the size here on the fediverse there is rarely wide-spread availability. As you mentioned, specific games. Lots of hobbies. Even the opportunity for consumer tech talk, if I’m interested in replacing something that’s 8+ years old there’s just not a lot of existing content to search through here and that leaves blog posts and… Reddit.

I’ve had plenty of time recognizing what astroturfing looks like, so I rarely feel like I’m left out of options to search. All that said, I’ve been doing this a lot less since the whole shift happened. Maybe an endeavor every few months, rather than few days/weeks.

My friend pointed this out for the recent live action Avatar show. Their clothes were pretty much immaculate the entire time

I’ve been having issue with it the last couple days, but I also tend to just have issue with it overall lol

Search the credits on linkedin and the like, I’m sure you’d be able to find some

I think there’s a wide spread. I’d say that there’s westerns like Brokeback Mountain and Dances With Wolves, where the suspense is more from the dire circumstances and grit that they have to work through in order to survive – few times are their lives gravely endangered. Similarly, there’s the Clint Eastwood westerns where you don’t really expect anything to be happening to that main character, yet they’re still well received. The “True Grit” style Western – someone to protect while you rough it through the hard life.

And then there’s the westerns you’re talking about, The Good The Bad and The Ugly, nearly Magnificent Seven style western where the characters present an archetype and have a fatal flaw that leads to their downfall.

The Mandalorian is more like a Western of the Week TV show where you have the drama of the grit, an undercurrent of hope that’s played off the main characters hardships.

Idk. Din being invincible in the show is seemingly irrelevant to me, and not even supported in the content of the show. The first two seasons definitely have space Western episodes though, even if they might not be the more typical main character on the verge of death style ones.

Eh. I think characters dying as the only stakes is weak writing anyway. If I were using that as a judgement, all of Star Wars is terrible, especially the Clone Wars. Obviously, that’s not the case. Besides, clearly the armor rating is meaningless given the events of the S2 finale – clearly the armor isn’t protecting him from impacts what with his head injury.

We if look to Ming Na Wen’s character I’d even argue that being hit by blasters in New Star Wars is just an opportunity to visit the medic anyway, so Din wearing beskar doesn’t really remove any of the suspense for me.

Maybe he was worried that Luke would go down the same path his father would, so he kept things vague. That was always my take on Old Ben – he wasn’t really guiding Luke to do anything, it was the Force. “Luke, your father was actually a dangerous madman who slew younglings. In fact, is the right hand man, that academy you were joining? It’s Space Fascism, so definitely don’t go and join it to be with your father.” lol

On the topic of the other two – Personally, I liked Kenobi. It has some sillier bits, but nothing IMO that isn’t easily explained (as an example, there’s a scene where young Leia is chased by mercenaries and she kinda dunks on them. People hate it. I think it was a clear example of her Force Sensitivity, so I don’t mind it at all.) Its main shortcoming for me was the villains could have been better and Reva was a bit predictable. I didn’t think she was as bad as the Internet did.

Ahsoka… I wanted to like. It had a lot of potential, most of my issues were that it seemed like they were filming a video game, but since we’re not playing Ahsoka we end up just watching her interact with things we have no meaning for. Other than that, it was decent save for what they did to Sabine, which was just a disgrace to her character. Sabine was disappointing, over and over again. Overall, I think it has been my least favorite of the Star Wars shows as it has had the most visible quirks and awkward shots.

As a continuation of that story it’s pretty decent and I’m excited for S2. But as a continuation of that story, the characters were not as strong as I felt they could have been. Time passed and people change, that’s fine. This wasn’t quite that though.

The mystery is part of the character. He also gets plenty of plot, it’s just not shoved in our faces from the get go. The Mandalorian is one of the best space westerns we’ve gotten in a long time.

Season 3 made season 4 harder to watch. Season 4 was better than 3 but it also felt kind of… I’m not quite sure the right word. Diluted? Or maybe the other direction as a Flanderization?

Most of my issues were the pacing and the attempt at making the show feel heavy, but it ended up not quite hitting the marks for me.

I wonder if there is a meaningful difference between your example, and the technology with which the JWST uses to view light in the past. Rather, if the later is something we can use for time travel ;)

Sorry

How do we know how much energy time travel would take?

Man, this is gut wrenching :(

At this point digitally downloading things needs to just stop being called piracy and start being called digital archival. WiFi went down, luckily I have my digital archive.

All the people who made the content already got paid for their hours in large media. If you’re pirating from a studio that is 1 to 10 people you probably know that and probably know it’s lame. The money we’re paying to view/listen is literally just the corporation trying to “make money back”, even though the CEO and execs are probably a few tonnes richer than the rest of us, and the regular working class is getting paid hourly.

We’ve really got to be moving away from restricting knowledge, honestly even the idea of a $/hr type thing. Imaging being charged 15c every time you heard 40 seconds of a song or TV show. I like the idea of artists being paid royalties but our current system is such a scam with us, the core creator, getting hardly anything after the corporations get their cut. FFS, audiobook producers get more share of royalties than musicians do (most audiobooks are ~40% royalty share and musicians are lucky to get 25%.

It’s hard as an artist. I want to be able to make money off my music, and be able to live from just that. The very real reality is that piracy (digital archival) would have almost ZERO affect on me due to the scale of it. People would be more likely to hear about me through its word of mouth than they are currently trying to buy my music with my advertising (none). I’m also not making music for money, but so that it can be listened to. Making money from it is more of a benefit than the goal, despite how nice it would be to do nothing but make music.

So, really, if I am hardly affected by people archiving my work, why in the fuck would HBO be? And if it were true, why would they remove hundreds of movies and shows from their service, lost forever. How are the royalties from those being lost when I archive it?

No, there is none.

There is only one reason to not digitally archive something. One alone.

Metrics.

If you like something and you want it to survive, fucking pay to watch it. I love It’s Always Sunny. I have all of it archived, and mostly watch it there. But I will put money into Hulu once in a while just to stream Sunny, for the new season, for whatever. Because those guys have more hours of my life than any other show, and I want them to be able to continue making it, and they can only do that if FX sees that enough people watch them to justify continuing. I don’t agree with everything Hulu does, like their showing ads for networks even on the “Ad free” tier (the network contracted for it, which leads me to wonder when other networks won’t leverage for the same deal), and something else that I had on my mind but just escaped me due to the late hour. Those guys all already got paid, the crew and teams, everything is taken care of. But for another season to happen enough people have to have seen it on a platform that matters to them, so the only thing that really matters is the metrics.

Of course, if you’re HBO even that doesn’t matter and it can be all thrown out anyway… so…

to digital archival I go

I think that’s a really key point - back in the days of the PS2 to 360 era, it was all about Xx_Graphics_xX and there were so many 30fps games that dipped to 15 at times, making “30FPS” feel worse than it was.

That said, 30FPS can still be rough. IMO Dragons Dogma 2 running at 30 on the PS5 is pretty rough. Even excluding dips, but it has them. But the game Heroes Hour on the Steam Deck running at 30 is perfectly fine. Similarly, setting Red Dead 2 to get a consistent 30 is fine too.

Consistency is huge, for sure!

There’s a good theory that Beskar has some properties that draw bolts to it. Makes sense

I gave it a read and there’s some interested takes but overall disagree and I think this particular read may miss some of the best parts of what make Blade Runner work. To just respond to the surmise, since all 10 points to me are more like 7 and even those 7 kind of just come down to these 3, lol.

First and foremost, its pacing is fine. Bad pacing in a movie is far worse, like Anna, and even pacing in a good one like Dune, doesn’t mean anything necessarily - Blade Runner does a fine job if you are able to pay attention, I guess. Personally it seems a little odd to blame being molded by contemporary media to be the reason why an older film no longer holds up. Let me put it this way though - We have Drive (2011) and Baby Driver (2017). In a lot of ways, these movies are exactly the same at times being almost shot for shot early on (likely homage). But Baby Driver is an extremely fast paced movie, and Drive is an extremely slow burn. Both of these movies, like Blade Runner, do something different, so of the critiques there can be I’m not fully on board with this one, unless the argument is that old movies should be able to take any viewer out of their subjectivity mold, I can’t really agree with the takeaway from this. I had a harder time watching the new Dune than I did Blade Runner, does that make Dune’s pacing worse than Blade Runner or is Blade Runner’s pacing better than Dune? See what I mean? I might feel different had there been any examples, but it seemed that it just found a “Blade Crawler” comment and made a point about it, and now that’s bad because… movies are faster paced? Nyeh, not sold, lol.

Decker is no more than an analogue for the viewers to be in the world, he may be the protagonist but Decker, IMO, is far from the main character. I also disagree about him lacking complexity, however I would say that it is indeed because he is 100% a foil to the antagonists. Decker isn’t meant to be this incredible Blade Runner that no other can live up to - he’s good sure, he’s alive and has his faculties and limbs, but he quite literally takes the role of the futuristic Desk Jockey, he is just the pencil pusher that grinds up the replicants. More on this later.

Whenever I watch Blade Runner I’m always surprised by how it’s such a quiet film with so much exposition in just a few sentences. I don’t think anything overshadows anything else. I think there is a strong emphasis on atmosphere which helps with the world building we get from the characters and interactions. It critiques hyper-capitalism by showing a world far in the future that by all accounts is exactly the same, save a few office jobs that have evolved. The underground is still working girls and chefs and the government is still uncoordinated and corrupt. Without the focus on visuals to evoke just how different this world is supposed to be, we don’t get snapped back into mundanity when we see Decker ordering food and getting stopped by other officers. Moreover, the depth of the story comes specifically from Roy Batty, who as I mention should be viewed as the real protagonist. I think the movie itself argues this point to the bone, but everyone only ever seems to want to talk about Decker so maybe not.

I find it hard to see a lack of depth when Roy and Pris, literal cybernetic robots, are the most emotive characters in Blade Runner. The only other character we genuinely see some emotion from is the Tinkerer J.F. Sebastian, who has a love for his toys and makes friends with the replicants. They get inhumanly emotive at times, but they more than anyone we see express just how much they want to live. Roy’s entire journey is a process of becoming human, until death when he gives birth to Decker by saving him. Roy lived as a human would have. In life, Roy was enslaved, escaped, and lived on the lamb. He sought vengeance towards God (Tyrell), found love, exacts vengeance once more before, in my opinion, realizing and accepting that God was right. There is no extending life. Not his own.

As he sees Deckard about to die, with the understanding that Roy himself will soon as well, Roy saves Deckard not as an act of mercy but as a birth. To extend life. For me, the story isn’t much about Deckard. It’s about what Deckard’s piece represents for humanity. He isn’t complex, he doesn’t need to be. Not everyone is. Particularly when Deckard himself isn’t even the point that the film was trying to make, each and every quintessential moment of philosophy comes from the antagonists musings, not the protagonists inquisitions.

Your final act in death is to give life which you were no longer allowed.

That is complexity.

Jack Black rarely really plays himself in voice acted roles. He really embodies Bowser in the Mario Movie, and even Kung Fu Panda he isn’t really himself, so I’m not really worried for Claptrap.

As for the other examples, I don’t think actors have to be young or yolked to play a character. Not that I see Hart as Roland, just that I don’t think his size matters for this at all.

But yeah the movie could really go either way, there’s a lot of potential but Borderlands could very easily be a franchised series so I do wonder about the casting from a different perspective.

It reminds me of that bit from Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia where Dennis is talking about Hollywood movies.

I mean, it used to be only, like, the hard-line conservatives, like the pearl-clutching types, were the only ones that were overly vocal and extreme in their policing of sexuality. But now you got this, like, liberal wave of moral authority sweeping the nation. You know, it’s nuts. I mean, think about it. If the conservatives had always run Hollywood, movies would have sucked. You know what I mean? The art would have suffered. So I guess the question we’re asking is how will art fare under the oppressive thumb of this new liberal Hollywood moral PC elite?

It’s just so silly and yet so accurate. Whether it’s social values, politics or even just the opinion of AI and it’s capabilities vs. it’s potential vs. how people actually use it, there’s this pervading idea that restrictions en masse are a viable solution. I feel almost the opposite, like to some extent the oversaturation of it intrinsically lowers the negative reception of it. Prohibition philosophy - when it’s not allowed people will work even harder to use it in those ways, when it’s not only allowed but widely used and even encouraged, people just inherently care less over time.

We’re at a point right now where we are getting some pretty poor quality oversaturation of AI content and the tool alone is what is being blamed, to the point where copyright is being touted as this saving grace despite it consistently having been used against us smaller artists when corporate money is involved. Copyright isn’t promoting small artists, rarely has, nor is it preventing AI, but it’s somehow suddenly meant to ensure that the art you uploaded isn’t reproduced? That seems not only unlikely, but like it’s a scapegoat for a larger issue. Generative art isn’t a problem because Ms. Jane working two 40-hour jobs uses it to make art featuring existing characters. That circumstance was and never will be a problem because Jane very likely would never have the money to commission an artist in the first place. What Jane makes is 100% irrelevant, so long as she’s not claiming it as her original creation and trying to sell it - beyond that? I don’t think anyone should care or fault her, because she is doing the amount of art that her circumstances allow her.

What I absolutely agree is an issue is businesses and corporations using AI, cutting staff further overworking employees that remain. However, that Secret Invasion intro that seemed likely AI generated? I can’t in good faith try to argue “they should be tried for infringement” but I can fully support the fact that they should have hired an artist who would at least try to better use the tools at their disposal. I can simultaneously feel that the fact that Deforum may have been used is absolutely awesome, while also being annoyed and frustrated that they didn’t utilize artists who deserve it.

There is a very large difference between Ms. Jane making AI images, even movies, and any corporate product - or that AI generated rat for the science journal. For the former, it is something that IMO is fully necessary in order for Jane to be able to enjoy the experience of a creative process under the bullshit system we’ve worked out. The latter is a completely unnecessary replacement used to cut costs. And yet, for neither does the concept of infringement actually matter that much, because copyright isn’t the fundamental issue of AI, it’s just the one people are latching on to. Without realizing that the likelihood of copyright laws helping someone like us is nil. Especially since there’s probably an overlap of people who laugh at NFT’s and pirate files because bits of data aren’t a physical commodity that runs out, but a generative Imaging tool that does it is… Too far?

I think AI’s issues are separate from what I’ve mentioned here. What people blame AI for is something else entirely. AI is still just the tool that speeds up the process. We have the concept of safeguards utilized as signs, barriers, and nets, so that if someone wants to use a bridge for the wrong purpose there are some measures in place to prevent them. We don’t blame bridges for what the person is trying to do - we recognize that there is some reasonable level of safeguard and beyond that we just have to trust the person to do the right thing. And when it does show to be a pervasive issue, even still there is pretty much a bare minimum done - add another layer and a net and call it a day - instead of focusing on maybe why people in society are so inclined to jump.

The issue is always us. Yes AI makes evils job easier, like so many tools have. But trying to safeguard AI to the point of non-existence is just absurd from every angle, given that the bad stuff is likely going to happen in abundance regardless. I don’t particularly see AI as the evil so much as the humans creating the meaningless AI generated articles.

There was the 1991 Point Break with Keanu and Patric Swayze, and then there was the 2015 one with Luke Bracey and Edgar Ramirez.

1991 was a gem, 2015 felt a bit like what happened with the 2010 A-Team movie. The only thing “wrong” with it is that it exists when it never really needed to. Does that make it bad? No. Does that make it not worth watching? Also no, it’s just different.

'91 feels very much like an undercover agent, '15 very much feels like a high paced action mission impossible thriller. Again, not necessarily bad, just different.