And similarly, from Tool’s “Right In Two”:
Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over
pieces of the ground
Silly monkeys
Give them thumbs, they make a club
to beat their brother down
How they’ve survived so misguided is a mystery
Repugnant is a creature who would squander the ability
to lift an eye to heaven, conscious of his fleeting time here
And telling all the poor people how much of a sin their envy and greed is, of course!
I don’t hate the idea of midichlorians, honestly. Or rather, I do hate them but I think that’s the point - to show that the jedi have kind of lost their way, are judging everything by “midichlorian counts” and tried to standardise and automate the process as much as possible rather than properly considering the human element and doing things on a case-by-case basis. If it’s not the point then, well… it should be.
I think there are some decent ideas in the prequel trilogy, I just think the execution was pretty bad.
Yep. LLMs are great for bouncing ideas off, and for getting “soft answers”, but no-one should ever be looking for factual answers from them.
The big difference between the two for me is how much feeling of gameplay expression there is. In Fallout, my options feel like melee, shooting enemies with shotguns, shooting enemies with automatic rifles, shooting enemies with long-range rifles, shooting enemies with lasers, shooting enemies with miniguns, and so on. And the shooting mechanics don’t feel strong enough to really differentiate those different weapons as different playstyles for the most part. If I play a game like Titanfall, Battlefield, etc, then changing weapons can feel drastically different - they handle differently, you navigate combat arenas differently, you prioritise targets differently, you use cover differently. But that doesn’t really feel like the case with Fallout for me without any of the moment-to-moment decision making that tends to allow for gameplay expression in shooters.
Whereas Skyrim feels like there are a lot more playstyles available. Destruction magic feels very different to conjuration which feels very different to illusion which feels very different to being a stealth archer which feels very different to using a dagger which feels very different to using a huge, two-handed melee weapon. They’re not just visually different; how you approach and navigate combat encounters will be significantly different depending on what kind of build you have. It just feels like there’s so much more gameplay depth.
I’ve been separating Chris Brown’s music from his personality for a long time. I hated his music long before I know how terrible his personality is.
I don’t disagree, but gaming laptops are always overpriced. You’re paying a premium for the small form factor. (And I assume they also have the much less powerful RTX 4070 Mobile, which makes the value proposition even worse for laptops.)
Let me know what you think when you’ve listened!
Their song “Shut Up And Let Me Go” was fairly successful, too, so they weren’t quite a one-hit wonder.
I actually quite enjoy their 2018 album “The Black Light”, even if it wasn’t that well received. It’s kind of a stripped back indie dance record, and it’s fine. But they did an alternate version called the “Manchester Version” that had a much more raw, indie rock sound to it that I dig. It’s no masterpiece by any means, but it’s something I’m happy to put on every now and then.
Unfortunately for her, too. She might be successful, but she seems fucking miserable all the time.
I wouldn’t recommend ChatGPT for factual information at all (at least, not without validating for yourself afterwards), but I think it’s quite good for helping you mull over or develop ideas, and for finding “soft answers” to things.
I used it recently to suggest a font to use, for instance, and found it much, much better than trying to use a search engine. My font knowledge isn’t particularly high at all - I know what serif means but that’s about it as far as technical knowledge, and I wouldn’t recognise or categorise most fonts - but I was able to describe what I wanted to ChatGPT and narrow it down:
And so on. I could be somewhat abstract with my requests and it still mostly seemed to understand what I meant. Eventually it suggested something that fit my requirements pretty well. Trying to find a similar suggestion via a search engine would have been very difficult, I think, and would basically have just relied on me stumbling on a “top 10 fonts for X” listicle that happened to cover my requirements.
ChatGPT is fantastic within its specific niche (assuming you know how to feed it prompts properly and how to interpret its outputs - it’s a tool thats usefulness very much depends on the operator) but I definitely wouldn’t want it to replace search engines.
I agree, I had the same thought. And not only is she very pretty, she’s also “believably pretty”; she doesn’t look like a movie star or an unrealistically attractive Instagram model, she looks like someone you could see walking down the street. She’d catch your eye, of course, and probably be the prettiest person you saw that day, but it’s not like some pictures/videos I’ve seen of people where I’ve thought “I’ve never seen someone look that attractive in real life” and there’s a bit of a disconnect because of it.
Using Olga’s likeness, I suspect a lot of people can be fooled into thinking she’s just a regular person who happens to be at the upper end of the attractiveness scale rather than a paid model, and I’m sure they very intentionally decided to steal her likeness for that reason.
I think @rayyy is right, unfortunately. If the West severs ties with Israel overnight (and suddenly stopping arms shipments would essentially be the same thing as severing ties), it’ll just create a power vacuum where Russia or China will cosy up to Israel instead. Israel has a lot of influence in the region - partially because it’s been propped up by US support, of course - and other countries would absolutely try to prop up Israel and capitalise on their influence in the US’ place if they had the opportunity. Which would perhaps slow down the genocide for a little while, but it would inevitably pick back up, but this time without the US/West having any influence at all.
Not to mention the fact that the US losing its influence over Israel would almost certainly destabilise the region. Iran would be emboldened, as you alluded to. Hamas would be emboldened, and while I take the side of the Palestinian people in this whole ordeal, I don’t think Hamas being emboldened would be a good idea - it would likely lead to further conflict and even worse suffering for the Palestinian people. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey would all likely try to expand their influences, too.
Biden is trying to slowly reel Israel in while still maintaining US influence there. Partially because the US just wants to keep its power, of course, but also because it’s perhaps the best way to have some control over the genocide and over the region rather than just being an observer. I don’t like all the blood on our collective hands but I think that, at this point, the genocide would continue without us.
I absolutely think the fact that Israel has been put in the position it’s in represents decades of shortsightedness and foreign policy failure, though. Israel should never have been in the position to do this.
I feel like no amount of trailers or reviews are going to give me an idea of what to expect from this film, and it feels like I’ll probably not know what I think about it until several days after the credits have rolled.
I’m not convinced it will be a good film, but it absolutely seems like a must-see for me.
Of course, take your time! I think Blade Runner 2049 is such a deep and complex film that you have to let all the ideas percolate anyway.
PS, @Blaze, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this, especially with the film being so fresh in your mind!
I think a lot of people on lemmy use lemmy/kbin/the threadiverse interchangeably. But yeah, I use kbin, too.
I definitely find myself being much, much more active on Discord since the whole reddit thing went down. It has its issues, and it’s not exactly a 1:1 substitution for thread-based forums, but I enjoy the greater sense of community that comes with Discord.
I think it’s a film where most people are being objectified and in some cases pretty senselessly murdered! Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista’s character) is senselessly murdered. Joe/K attempts to senselessly murder Deckard. Joe/K is left to die on the steps at the end of the film. Ultimately, I think it’s less about any kind of gender divide and more that almost everyone is just a victim of extreme capitalism. Everyone is dehumanised in the name of profits. Everyone is made to compete with everyone else for what scarce resources remain. And that’s especially true for the “secondary citizens” the film largely spends its time with - replicants, women, orphans, poor people. Slaves.
If patriarchy and violence against women weren’t a problem or if the film were about those issues, then all good.
I’d go so far as to say that patriarchy, violence against women and fertility are major themes of the film. With replicants existing, we see a world where women aren’t needed to create life. With overpopulation and resource scarcity, we see a world where having children is less desirable anyway. The film’s larger narrative focuses on Wallace, who is very much patriarchal himself and also representative of the patriarchal ruling class in the setting, wanting to discover how to make replicants reproduce because breeding replicants would be cheaper, quicker and easier for him than building them from scratch.
Wallace is cruel, power-hungry, sadistic, and dreams of electric wombs - of a world where women aren’t necessary (because he only sees them in terms of their “function”) and he can play god. He’s very much painted as the villain - one gory scene shows him quite literally see him cutting into where the wombs of female replicants would be because he sees their infertility as a failure and something that makes them worthless to him.
Blade Runner 2049 goes far beyond using the sad prostitute and the destitute brothel to signify dystopia; it fully integrates them into its plot and takes a deeply anti-patriarchal stance.
It feels like other options were available and, TBH, using female objectification/ownership/subordination/violence as a vehicle and marker for dystopia is perhaps lazy and trope-ish.
I don’t feel like it leans into them so much that they become tropes, personally, and I don’t think men fare much better either. But while women’s sex appeal is commodified - quite literally with pleasure models, the most clinical, corporate name possible for sex robots - we also see combat models and blade runners commodifying violence. Some of these roles are filled by humans doing what they can to survive in a capitalist system trying to crush them; others are replicants or AI literally designed and manufactured for those roles. I don’t think any of them were used as markers for a dystopia so much as being part of the fabric of the world, the story and the themes.
For me, as much as I like the film, I don’t think it’s story and point quite get to the point of making what happens to women in it feel justified in our current era.
I really don’t think what happens to men in the film is much better. The film is miserable for everyone in it - it’s an equal-opportunity dystopia. The only person not being crushed by the world and the system is Wallace, and not only is he the oppressor (so, y’know, not much sympathy there…) but he also doesn’t come across as too happy either.
Perhaps a bit more like the story of the protagonist in BR 2049 (who’s of course male).
Joe/K might be the main character of the film but he’s not special, and that’s the point. His entire character arc is that he starts off feeling like any other replicant - ie, not feeling much at all because of all the emotional suppression - before daring to hope that he might be special and becoming more and more in touch with his humanity as a result. As the story progresses, he becomes convinced that he is indeed special. And then it turns out he’s not, and he decides to give up his life to help someone - a woman - and that is when he really becomes special.
Almost everything that happens to Joe/K in the film is at the direction of women. His boss - the police chief - is a woman. The person who implanted his memories - and who is responsible for implanting all replicant memories - is a woman. The person who leads the replicant resistance is a woman. His direct antagonist in the film - Luv - is a woman. A lot of his emotional development comes from being prompted by Joi, a female AI. Almost everything that happens to Joe/K ultimately happens because of a woman, because they are the ones who are really playing the game around him.
I think Blade Runner 2049 is a deeply, deeply feminist film. It doesn’t shy away from depictions of female objectification/ownership/subordination/violence - they are important for telling its story and getting across its themes - but it sure as hell doesn’t endorse them either.
I always read it as “apocalypse proof” rather than “apocalypse-proof”. That is, it’s proof that the apocalypse has happened, rather than something that’s immune to the apocalypse.
Tom Cruise is an odd one for me. The idea I have of Tom Cruise is that he always plays the same character, is just a generic action star, etc. And then whenever I actually watch Tom Cruise in a film, I’m always really impressed by just how good an actor he is. But I still can’t shake the idea I have of Tom Cruise.
I have a similar issue with Brad Pitt, where my idea of him is that he’s just a generic leading man, despite him almost always putting in a really strong, nuanced and varied performance.