… it doesn’t actually point to specific solutions. Such can of course be inferred, but it would be nice if some candidates or such ran this ad with “And vote for me or something, I dunno, let’s try something different, anyway.” It would also be a good lead-in to The Labor Day AR-15 Sale at Big Jim’s Gun Emporium.
Well, this is weird:
Not the sort of headline you tend to expect out of Canada.
As rants go, this one is both entertaining and on the mark:
Someone jacked footage from “Metropolis” up to 4k, boosted it to 60 frames per second and colorized it. It’s incomplete and imperfect; the scenes from the utterly craptacular recently discovered archival bits were not fixed up. Doing so would be a *major* chore, but with new software and AI, it might be practical soon. Convert the whole movie to this level of quality, and it looks like I’m springing for another copy. Add an alternate soundtrack where actual dialog and sound effect are added and include a fully restored and upgraded yet still B&W version, and that’s a hundred-dollar package any day.
Same folks did the same to the 1902 “A Trip to the Moon.” The colors tend to jump around a bit.
Comedian Andrew Schulz realizes why children are being used as political mouthpieces: because you aren’t allowed to argue with them, no matter how ridiculous, wrong or downright evil their positions are.
NSFW language is deployed.
Womp womp….
The “artist” used a piece of software called “Midjourney” that used his text prompts to produce the image, which he upscaled and printed off. And then he won, and artists are cheesed off because, like the factory workers before them, they are finding that automation can do a better job than they can.
It’s definitely an interesting piece of art, and the controversy is likely to make it popular enough to make a few bucks off of.
We are rapidly approaching the day when AI *and* robotics can do anything humans can do, and do it better. This is a subject science fiction has covered over the years, and it’s something that society had damned well better figure out how to deal with before it comes along and drives *everybody* out of a job.
But for now…. *snerk.*
Lots of folks don’t like the show. They are not wrong to do so.
I’m seeing people arguing back and forth on whether or not to “hate watch” the show. Shrug. I can see both sides: give up and sigh in vague, fatigued defeatism, which is where I am with this; or rage against the dying of the light. I will never not hate on bad Star Trek; I’ve got forty years of fandom invested there. But LotR is *only* thirty or so years deep with me. And my house ain’t exactly littered with die cast and plastic toy spaceships from Middle Earth…
Anyway, this guy takes another view, and he ain’t wrong to do so:
[ stuh–kas-tik ter–uh-riz-uhm ]
Of course, this is not new. Violence has been occurring for several years, egged on by politicians and activists. Antifa and their culture-destroying depredations may not be in the news as much as they were a few years ago when they were the shock troops of the Left, but they’re still out there carrying out acts of violence upon the regular citizenry.
I watched the first two episodes of Amazon’s “The Rings Of Power.” Is it as bad as feared/expected? In a word: yup. Here’s the thing, though: it is so far from Tolkein that it can’t really even be considered a bad interpretation of Tolkein. It’s just a bad fantasy series. And there have been a lot of those.
Beyond the well publicized problems of stunt casting and weird ethnicity swaps, the thing that jumped out at me the most was just how badly interpreted the elves are. The elves of the books and reasonably so of the movies are freakin’ *unearthly.* They are shaped like humans, but they are unrealistically beautiful; the light of the moon and especially the stars seems to fall on them at all times. They are *above* mankind. They are a different order of being. But in Rings of Power? They’re just a random assortment of actors with pointy ears. Many of whom have not just short hair – rather than the long hair elves were well known for – but actual buzz cuts. They are the same height as the bog-standard humans they occasionally stand next to. They might be fantasy elves… but they’re sure as hell not Tolkein elves. Given the billion dollars Amazon spent on this, they can’t claim poverty when explaining why they skimped out on these factors, especially since they *did* go to the bother of showing a “Harfoot” (a Hobbit stand-in species that is short like Hobbits, has large Hobbit feet, but otherwise don’t seem to be very much like Hobbits, which is fine because Hobbits haven;t evolved yet by this time in Middle Earth history) next to someone who will probably turn out to be Gandalf or Saruman (though, again, the wizards are centuries away from showing up in Middle Earth).
The whole thing is a weird mix of high production values – in particular the renderings of environments such as elvish and dwarvish cities – and low-effort CW-level acting and especially writing. It is, essentially, quite forgettable in the sort of way that Star Trek Discovery is enraging. I’ll probably end up watching the other episodes at some point, but likely mostly as background noise. I won’t be hate watching the series like modern horrible Star Trek. I don’t know if it’s because RoP is so far off the mark, or if it’s because so many franchises have been so badly mauled lately that I’m just kinda burned out.
