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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I guess they’re trying to insinuate that there’s a conflict of interest because he worked for a government agency and Wikileaks leaked documents pertaining to that government agency.

    But, like… That would be like saying no judge could oversee the case of someone who attacked a courthouse because they work for the same legal system. That would be a real loophole in the law if by breaking the right ones, you just couldn’t be tried anymore.




  • I also noticed that both here on Lemmy and over on Reddit that there’s been a push of pro-Russian talking points and a huge push towards Islamaphobia for the past few days, starting just before the attacks this weekend.

    I understand there’s going to be some natural anger over the attack, but the amount of accounts I’ve seen, especially noticeable here on Lemmy because we just don’t have as many users, who are saying things like, “This is just what Muslims are like,” and, “Western countries accept these kinds of people, so expect them to do the same there,” and other racist bullshit talking points. They’ve also been painting the ongoing conflict as unquestionably one-sided in Israel’s favor.

    It’s depressing but kind of to be expected that there’s a psyops campaign going on trying to get people outraged at not just Hamas, not just Palestine, but all of Islam right now while simultaneously trying to paint Ukrainian surrender and pro-Russian propaganda. This horrible act of terror was either in part planned by Russia or at the very least is seen as an easy opportunity to try and weaken Western support of repelling their invasion of Ukraine. Just spending a little time in the wrong circles on social media should make that obvious.




  • It’s weird to me that he’s lumping all comic book movies together and acting like they’re the problem. We keep having trash movies churned out by studios because they make money. That’s been true since at least the nineteen-forties if not earlier. Hell, I’m really just talking about the ones where enough of them still survive that you can go find them. Earlier, in the silent era, yeah, you had trash get made quickly and churned out so that people would pay a dime to watch it. I don’t get how a single genre is supposed to be the culmination that’s ruining cinema.

    But, here’s the thing. Have movies changed over the years? Absolutely. Scorcesie’s movies have changed over the years! His style has changed, his vision has changed. What sells tickets has changed. How studios are producing films based on what they think will make them money has changed. It’s been discussed before that the fall of video rentals and the rise of streaming has changed what kinds of movies studios are willing to put their money behind and how they’re less likely to take a risk on something than they used to be. That’s a problem. That’s a big problem because it’s reduced the number of small-budget and medium-budget studio films. None of that can be blamed on comic book adaptations.

    And there’s nothing inherently wrong with a comic book adaptation. Marvel movies are overly formulaic and especially since Disney bought them overly safe. Even in the ones I like, I can just feel that Disney touch that makes me go, “Ew,” sometimes. DC’s movies have been mismanaged with an unfit vision helming its original run from the start. So the big series, yes, I’ll admit, they’re kind of shit cinema. I still enjoy some of them, but they’re kind of shit cinema. There are plenty of shit crime movies and thrillers and other things like that, but I’m not going to start yelling about how they’re killing cinema and we have to fight against them. Why do comic book adaptations get singled out as artless trash when there’s a constant stream of hollow feel-good romance films that get churned out every year? Do those formulaic vacuous sap-fests (some of which I love and will watch whenever I need a good cry, I’m really not knocking them) really merit a pass yet for some reason comic books require this war be waged by filmmakers against them? I really don’t see how they’re the problem.

    And you can come in and say things like, “He’s just stirring the pot to promote his film,” but I don’t think so. Scorsese has had a lot to say about modern filmmaking even when he doesn’t have a project on the table. He’s talked about his feelings on modern film culture, comic book adaptations, using the word content to describe any form of media, and more. I really don’t think he’s doing it to bring attention to any project so much as he just really feels very strongly that movies have changed and change is bad? Is that really what it is? Because some of the stuff he sees as a problem, yeah, I agree, it’s an issue. But other stuff like this, even if there is a problem, your aim at what the problem really is is just completely off.



  • You joke, but I’ve seen those kinds of arguments, especially online.

    Some time back, someone argued that global warming was a self-solving problem because the oceans reflect light and heat energy back out into space, so as the earth warms and the oceans rise, the ability to reflect that heat will increase and we could even go back into an ice age because of it.

    That is, of course, not really how it’s going to go. Massive ecological collapse and possible human extinction would occur due to the initial warming, first off, even before you get to the arguments about… Everything else at the crux of that.

    For a long time, one of the talking points of climate change denial wasn’t that it wasn’t happening but that it was normal for us to go through heating and cooling cycles, so just deal with it and wait it out, we survived the last ice age so we can survive this heat wave, right? But again, that’s mostly bullshit.





  • Federal appeals are more difficult and more rare. The state charges he’ll have an easier time appealing against, though. Lots of questions still up in the air about how all that will go, though. Unless he’s barred from office, there’s a chance he does become president again, which would make things incredibly complicated. There’s also the question of him appealing to the Supreme Court and them simply overturning anything they can that’s been brought against him. I find these unlikely, but they’re possible. For the USA, this is the first time someone in that high of an office has gone to trial like this, and we’re going to be having to make some answers on the spot.







  • I don’t fetishize them and I don’t have animosity against people who use CGI responsibly.

    My problems come with a sacrifice of art and a sacrifice of the workers.

    Let’s start with the workers. Technical jobs in filmmaking have always been kind of shitty, working long hours and usually not getting a whole lot of credit with very little job security. And you don’t have to go back that far to see a lot of techs getting themselves hurt because there weren’t as good of safety standards for them. So it’s not like it’s a new thing. But a lot of studios have been treating CG as a miracle cure ever since it was first used, and it’s created a real problem for the people actually making these movies. A lot of the CG is rushed and its creators underpaid for the work being asked of them. And this leads into the point about art because while CG can look great or it can look shit, when you rush it, the chances of it looking terrible are far greater. That’s true for practical effects as well, yes, but people seem to accept that practical effects will take time while they’re pushing CG studios to produce faster and faster with ever-worsening results.

    But then let’s really talk about the art of it. There’s a lot of art that going into CG, and I think that’s wonderful. There are things it can do that almost nothing else can. It has been used to great effect for decades now! CG isn’t an inherently bad thing. But there are also things it doesn’t do as well. And one of the problems I have with CG-heavy films isn’t really that they use CG but that they use it when it isn’t the best tool for the job. Or they rush it or cheap out on it as talked about in the previous paragraph. There are different types of directors and some prefer tightly controlled sets while others let things come up naturally and then find ways to incorporate that. Practical effects, they’re never fully controllable. They’re not made in a sterile environment. They create a little unpredictability. They make a little chaos. And that chaos can bring a lot of personality to things. It’s usually really small, but it’s there. The best CG also has personality, sure, and I’m not certain how to describe it, but it’s different. Because in CG, every frame is hand-crafted like you’re doing animation. And I love animation, but if you’re doing something in live action anyway, I feel you should lean in to your medium and use its strengths. And one of the strengths of live-action is that there are things, physical things, and if you take all that away, I mean, come on. My feeling on a lot of the films that are basically done entirely on digital sets and almost entirely CG except for maybe an actor’s face here and there, and sometimes not even then, it’s, why not just stop living the lie and make it fully animated?

    So, yeah, summary, for me, I don’t like the culture around CG at the moment which has become notoriously harsh, and I miss the personality that practical effects bring to some things as well as disliking the feeling of hegemony in a lot of films when it comes to their effects. It’s not an inherent dislike of CG, it’s disliking how it’s being misused.