On a personal note, I regret missing the first night, which had several greats, starting with The Battle of Algiers, which moved me. I would have liked to hear the guest discussion on it.
At just over 1/2 hour, Night and Fog is a must-watch (but also triggering).
Of the other upcoming movies I’ve happened to see in the past, I highly recommend: The Fog of War, The Tin Drum, The Murder of Fred Hampton, and if you don’t mind subtitles, High and Low, and The Passion of Joan of Arc.
That’s it. Audubon sucks. I was immediately reminded of a recent Vox story on How the most powerful environmental groups help greenwash Big Meat’s climate impact
The National Audubon Society, the beloved bird conservancy organization, rewards regenerative ranchers with its seal of approval in the form of a label that reads “Grazed on bird friendly land” and “Audubon certified.” Such beef can be purchased at about 250 retail and online stores.
Then there’s how Massachusetts Audubon pretended it was going to chop down its trees so it could continue NOT cutting them to get paid to preserve them for carbon-offsets. Propublica:
However improbable the idea might be of a conservation group actually permitting the removal of so much timber, Mass Audubon officials said they had simply followed the state’s rules in claiming that the society could heavily log its forest.
Then there’s E & E News (politico) discussion of Audubon’s internals:
The organization’s former president and CEO, David Yarnold, resigned under pressure in 2021, following POLITICO’s reports of widespread staff dissatisfaction at Audubon, especially among workers of color and the LGBTQ community (Greenwire, April 21, 2021).
An external audit later substantiated some of those claims, and pointed to widespread cultural problems. “Nearly all of the women we interviewed and many of the men commented that implicit bias toward women and people of color is prevalent at Audubon,” the audit found (Greenwire, May 6, 2021).
Refugio Mariscal, a former geographic information systems analyst in Audubon’s Great Lakes regional office, said that management at the national level had “almost gotten worse since Yarnold left.”
“I would say as a person of color, there’s still a lot of issues that Audubon needs to deal with,” he said.
Mariscal left Audubon in January for a job at another environmental nonprofit. He said workplace issues at Audubon, plus better pay at the new job, factored into his decision.
“The general culture within Audubon is not very welcoming to staff,” he said in January. “They seem to have a tough time letting go of their old ways of doing things.”
making bean burgers
Oh no! Just buy them! My better half is vegetarian, which means I started mostly cook meat-free because it is easier than making two meals, but now I’m just in the habit of not eating much meat. Our bean-burger experiments were never worth effort. We use fake-beef veggie crumbles for casserole-type recipes and big frozen packs of Beyond Burgers (Impossible is also good) if we want an actual burger. For chicken, we’ll buy some unbreaded seitan/TVP substitutes, like these examples.
I have the same problem with egg substitutes, so we’re still eating eggs – but from happy-seeming chickens we can visit. The hard part for me is cheese. I’m waiting for lab-grown cheese, but for now I can’t match the flavors of actual cheese.
Reminds me of the incident in February where a waymo tried to get through a bunch of street revelers, and their response was to set it on fire. From the old pcmag story :
San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson noted that it had tallied 55 incidents where self-driving vehicles had interfered with rescue operations in the city.
Edit: unrelated to above quote, pc mag also says:
In some cases, residents have put orange cones on the hoods of cars, which makes them temporarily immobile.
(see also the autopian story it references)
Reminder that Palantir is the same company whose bosses are deep in bed with AmericaPAC – which got big write-ups (link is to one comment, but you can read more there and lots of places) because Elon Musk is gathering voter data seemingly for that PAC to target swing state voters with canvassing efforts.
That’s my fault. I didn’t even notice I typed Munich instead of Berlin. I was reading about lots of Olympics and just messed it up. The source was the Wikipedia article and there you can clearly see it says Berlin. I’ll edit it.
@[email protected] nailed it in the crosspost, saying:
“Why didn’t they have the white guy there?” “Because he wants you to stand in his place”
Well he liked Blade, so I’m guessing his issue isn’t with comics in general.
Do you spend those 2 hours watching something with more ‘substance’ or do you do something else entirely – like play with your kids or read up on investment trends? For the time you do choose to use for passively consuming entertainment, is it in the medium of: books, tv, podcasts, music streams, or what? Regardless of medium, what sort of content is it (documentary, romance, action, op/ed, true crime, sci/fi, real-tech, instructional)?
studios being run by business vultures wanting short term massive returns only, even if it means no longer making anything else but trend chasing mega films
Two things on that:
I’m not sure we ever lost that variety, but no longer have the constraint of theater-only viewing that gets people to all see the same set of movies at the same time such that ‘different’ movies (like One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest or Star Wars as well as Smokey and the Bandit) were all getting attention and conversation at the same time.
Now we have streaming from services and we can wait to watch movies until they become available online, so many films miss the box-office and never get the hype they deserve because only the biggest have publicity junkets promoting them online and on chat-TV. So maybe the critic’s actual issue is that – as a paid critic – he’s forced to watch the publicized flicks designed not-to-offend and doesn’t have the time to find all the other movies going under the radar.
Nah, he’s read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and/or subscribes to Suber’s ideas in The Power of Film and is doing a mental checklist of what Marvel lacks.
Marvel hits the main points of a Hero story most of the time – where we have a Hero who comes from one place, goes ‘adventuring’ elsewhere and ends up doing a ‘thing’ that benefits the ordinary folks – but the frequency of needing a HERO over and over, and the escalation of what’s at stake (the whole world, the galaxy, universe, multi-verse, existence itself) means that after you’ve seen a few Marvel movies, the characters aren’t doing things that are new or different from what they did in other movies. Saving ‘normies’ is their day-job. Yeah, the path is different each time, but we keep seeing the same Heroes and most of them aren’t getting transformed by the journey and there are too many cases where the ‘sacrifice’ they make doesn’t have any real choice involved (if you can opt walk away from the drama then staying or doing ‘X’ is a sacrifice, but it’s no sacrifice if leaving means you die anyway).
Suber suggests that a hero often has to GO AWAY at the end of the story. The normies are happy for help, but then they want to get back to raising their kids and the Hero is not good for that. I like that idea. More than that, I think that is the critic’s actual complaint. He sees this as another story in the same universe (multiverse) with the same characters and he wants something new rather than something comfortably familiar – and that’s HIS problem because lots of us would like more stories about the Heroes we’ve come to know and love.
If it matters, my favorite Marvel story is the Loki TV series. It hits many of the expected markers and both the lead-up to- and the actual-ending both really resonated for me.
What really struck me was that he compared Deadpool & Wolverine to Blade?! So… Blade is the movie with “discernable purpose” and/or “artistic ambitions”? I mean, I liked Blade, but if the complaint is that Marvel movies aren’t Citizen Kane, then Blade seems a weak comparison. So where does he draw the line?
I knew about the police getting access, but I missed that home insurance companies were checking properties with drones. I guess I don’t mind them spending their own money to send their own drones to verify properties they insure, but I agree that using MY camera that I bought to get info or sell MY data is at least unethical and ought to be illegal. It should be required that they get my explicit consent to that sort of thing for each instance of data collection or sale.
Who? The Senators? I think they’re genuinely interested in stopping the practice (obviously it also gets them good press, possibly even votes, but they coulda probably got cash if they did nothing).
I think the car companies are just trying to make money anywhere they can.
Doubtful since NAT is a service with multiple RFCs defining various methodologies for mapping. That is: software expects NATing. Software expects IPs, ports, etc. to get redirected. I guess if you wrote your own NAT service that did not conform to RFC standards, it might be considered a modification of the original intent, but I suspect the issue would have to be with changes to packet data rarther than the header… now try explaining that to a copyright judge – because I bet some will choose to not understand.
So in the 2002 suit against bnetd, “Blizzard sued them for analyzing software they’d paid for, while it was running on their own computers.” …
because IP law is (correctly) understood as “the law that lets a company tell you how you can use your own real, physical property.” Hard cases make bad law, hard IP cases make batshit law.
Now:
Sony argues that the Datel device – which rewrites the contents of a player’s device’s RAM, at the direction of that player – infringes copyright. Sony claims that the values that its programs write to your device’s RAM chips are copyrighted works that it has created, and that altering that copyrighted work makes an unauthorized derivative work, which infringes its copyright.
and:
How bad can it be? Well, get this: the German publishing giant Axel Springer (owned by a monomaniacal Trumpist and Israel hardliner who has ordered journalists in his US news outlets to go easy on both) is suing Eyeo, makers of Adblock Plus, on the grounds that changing HTML to block an ad creates a “derivative work” of Axel Springer’s web-pages
And Cory says all this to convince the public to reject Intellectual Property rights as a form of “rent” which he equates to dangerous feudalism.
I can’t argue him. In the cases cited in the piece, his complaints seem valid. On the other hand, I feel like there has to be a case for saying that if you, say, try to fix your iPhone yourself and botch it badly, Apple doesn’t have to honor a warranty. The tricky part is whether they would have any grounds to terminate your service or stop running some software because … oh, maybe some security feature can no longer be verified or something. The only case for that which pops to mind is if you hacked it to copy/relay the identity of other phones such that you were stealing from other people – which is already a crime, but you’d want a way to stop it immediately rather than rely on the hope someone catches the perpetrator.
IMO, all voting should be on paper so that a hand recount can be done if the machines are questioned.
Myst can be a bit esoteric, especially the older versions.
Did they rewrite it in later ports? Also curious as to where you stand on Zork.
Yes. The story here is straight from Associated Press, but I looked around and found a few more details in a Telegraph article:
Note they say MANDATORY quarantine. At the end of the article they explain that Austria’s far right party, Freedom Party, is hyper-anti-vax, expected to win upcoming elections: