maegul

maegul, 9 days ago

The pandemic is an obvious inflection point in many of these graphs.

What exactly is that mechanism or process? That rents have gone up makes sense as passing on interest rate increases. But vacancy rates going down? There aren’t more people all of a sudden (it was a pandemic not a baby boom).

maegul, 9 days ago

yea there were definitely some significant positives in S1 for sure. The writing was just off though.

My biggest like from S1 turned out to be the quasi-romance they created between Galadriel and Sauron. I thought it was creative and interesting without terribly violating any lore but instead kinda adding to the lore with an interesting “maybe this actually happened” that is vague enough that even the main characters (Galadriel and Sauron) can’t be sure what it was.

maegul, 10 days ago

Well, we were discussing trailers that reveal to much yesterday. That’s not happening here.

Came to say the same! And yea, I haven’t been following this closely or anything … but apart from the visual style (which I’m totally down for) I really have no idea what this is … which is awesome!

Also, perhaps as a sign of how indie this is for Coppola, he seems to have a youtube channel just for promoting this film and is posting the trailers there: www.youtube.com/

Maybe it’s a fake channel, I dunno if youtube do any verification.

maegul, 10 days ago

Although I’m sceptic of the Vision product line, I wouldn’t write it off just yet. They’ve just launched the first version and we don’t know yet how future versions will look like.

Thing is, they’re leaning hard into it, which makes sense if they’re going to make any progress in that space in part because it aligns with their strengths. But the big question is whether “spatial computing” is there yet? And that’s the elephant in the room here and where I think there was a lack of wisdom on the part of the execs. As good as Apple have made the Vision Pro, the tech just isn’t there yet as you still need a large device hanging off of your face.

Not to “if Steve Jobs were still alive” this too much … but I think of the whole stylus v fingers thing here. To blow up as a new “form factor”, it likely has to feel natural and seamless. Which means it probably has to be tantamount to wearing a pair of glasses or small goggles. If improvements of that magnitude are on the table, then yea, maybe the 3rd gen could be interesting. But if not, it’s looking to me increasingly like another Apple Newton where they just go too hard too early on something.

maegul, 9 days ago

There are successful companies that make a single product, and have been doing so for 50 years. I wish the view on companies would shift back to that being more the norm.

I’m with you there.

maegul, 9 days ago

Holy crap, who is writing all this?

LOL. No worries!

they’re enshittifying slower than everyone else - I’m waiting to see if there’s a new Apple TV release this year but my Firestick has become unusable with ads and data collection, as has my TV, and chrome stick, so my only hope is Apple TV. If I can’t get back to enjoying video with that I swear I’m done with anything tv-like

My “smart TV” is an Apple TV 3 which was released 2012 (and bought ~2015). It’s still going fine. It hasn’t had an OS update for ages. For a while, Apple streaming/tv/movies had a bug that would crash it pretty regularly. But that disappeared, meaning they probably fixed things on their backend. While a number of services have stopped supporting it (youtube and netflix, notably), streaming from a phone works perfectly well and Amazon TV still supports it (or works) indicating that there’s nothing wrong with it at all.

it’s fantastic that they’re trying to do on-device ai - they almost sold me on the iPad Pro just to better support that. I’ll probably get the Air to replace my old iPad, and grumble when it drops out of support a year earlier

I agree. I hope they persist with this.

maegul, 10 days ago

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it’s just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

• Money back requirements
• Clear warnings to consumers about “ownership” being temporary
• Requiring tracking statistics of how long “ownership” tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
• If there are structural issues that increase the chances of “withdrawn” ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that’s the point … to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It’s not hard, it’s just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

maegul, 10 days ago

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

maegul, 10 days ago

Well, with macOS there are layers to what the user can do. You can stick to apps (most), or you can open up the terminal and the console and use the machine at a significantly lower level (ie, “hacker” unix/bsd style).

I haven’t used an ipad in ages … but AFAICT It seems slightly dumb that they don’t just open up a similar possibility with the ipad for those who are happy to go there. A mode that is literally just “Laptop” mode … full macOS with mouse cursor and the full functionality. Then when you want to just browse and read etc, hit a button and you’re back to touch based iPadOS. At this point it should really just be a different UI skin.

The reality though, I think, is that it’s about market segregation (ie monopolistic money).

Apple, like Microsoft, Amazon, Google etc are all “IBM-ified”. More about squeezing their well established market positions than doing anything remotely risky or interesting. A fusion ipad/laptop is the sort of thing a younger company would have done by now (with of course microsft having tried that ages ago).

maegul, 10 days ago

Flexibility. And I wonder if remote work has altered that balance lately too. Many I suspect now have chiefly desktop computers, except they’re actually laptops plugged into screens. Because there are still some occasions in which you want to be able to take a working computer somewhere else.

But a laptop starts to look like a strangely optimised device for this. Too small to be a powerful desktop and sometimes (if you’ve gotten a beefy one) too big to be comfortably portable. However, a nice desktop machine coupled with a very portable tablet that can, in those few times its necessary, be a productive enough work machine, but also just be the nice portable media machine wherever you want, seems like an ideal pairing for many now. That the ipad absolutely cannot do some things you’d maybe, even just once a decade, need to do on the fly is a show stopper for this pairing.

And so many probably have a laptop used as a desktop most of the time and an ipad used as a kindle most of the time.

maegul, 11 days ago

Came here to say the same about the Alien Trailer.

I think they both exhibit the same approach: a sequence of slightly moving images (ie very short snippets) that convey no plot (and are likely completely jumbled relative to their in-movie occurrence) … but instead show you the vibe, look and general subject matter of the film. Essentially an appetiser that isn’t the main course at all but is perfectly matched.

Except that tag line … “In space no one can hear you scream” … is likely unmatched.

maegul, 10 days ago

Oh yea! The hype going into the sequel trilogy was very real and a lot of that was the trailer game. I remember seeing this for the first time! It alone probably carried me into about halfway through RoS!

maegul, 10 days ago

Oh man, I just watched the 2.5 minute trailer … that shit still works! Had me nearly wanting to watch the sequels trilogy again. The promise/potential of that trilogy was soooo high. I’d only made the connection now, but in hindsight there’s real Game of Thrones season 8 energy around the whole thing now. Like even with the Finn jedi fake out, it would have been so much more interesting if he were also a jedi of some sort rather than just “vaguely force sensitive” or whatever.

maegul, 11 days ago

Makes a lot of sense.

In the end, though, I feel like committing to a pandoc for fediverse platforms would be a better effort if every platform is going to have to cook up some fall back that works everywhere.

With a pandoc equivalent, you get a buffer between how a platform wants to manage its content structure and the translations that have to bridge differences between the platforms. That way a shared project should be viable where, so long as each translation is reasonable, no platform should be upset. I don’t know how easy it is to tell what platform content comes from in the protocol though.

maegul, 11 days ago

Yea, it was bit more of a cluttered video than I would have liked too. Maybe copyright issues were on their mind? Still, I had no idea bout any of this. I can imagine a bigger deeper dive on the ideas though!

maegul, 11 days ago

All good points!

Something I’d never really picked up on or forgotten was the fading value of natural female fertility in the film. Thanks! I’ll look out for that more on re-watch.

Like I said, I don’t disagree.

I’ll reply with is the part of my previous comment you didn’t quote (and rant from there I suppose):

In the end I think two things can (edit: both) be true here. 1) the film itself isn’t misogynistic and the portrayal of women in it is part of a bigger dystopian theme, and 2) the use of female characters for that kind of story just doesn’t cut it for some/enough women anymore who, without demanding “girl boss” characters, would prefer either direct stories about female oppression or portrayals the lean into more fruitful or interesting ideas and themes.

IE, I think a woman (or anyone else sensitive to such to this issue) can see all of what you point out and fairly conclude that they don’t need to like the film or feel like they’re missing anything by forgetting about it. While there’s dystopia all around, the focus and the depiction of the main characters is pretty gendered. I don’t think you’re really arguing otherwise. And I think it’s fair for someone to conclude that they don’t get anything out of that. That they already know all about the lack of agency of housewives or pleasure bots or the centrality of women’s fertility to their social value … because they live it, and are busy handling it IRL and this film isn’t really helping anything.

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.

It may very well be. Has Villeneuve or anyone else spoken about this??

But I think it’s worth asking what makes a good feminist film. Simply having the suffering of women as a gender in the film as a theme or plot point etc arguably doesn’t cut it. The general angle I’m pushing here (without having really thought about this question at all) is that today there arguably needs to be something useful for feminism today in the film, and that I’m not sure it’s there in BR-2049.

You point out the various female characters around K driving his story. I noticed that too, but in the end, for me (long time since I’ve seen it) it didn’t feel like women were playing the game. It felt like Wallace was powerful, Deckard was important and K was “us”, the protagonist we relate to and see the world through. The woman were either bosses, attack dogs, agency-less loving partners (Joi), prostitutes, or indelibly special creatures in need of protection (Rachael/Deckard’s daughter). The freedom movement and their leader is probably a notable exception but I’m not sure it really gets much screen time.

So it’s dystopian but men are still at the center and women still suffering the usual things … for what?

To compare, I’m thinking of the Earthsea series (by Le Guin … if you haven’t read it and like fantasy at all I recommend it). Its feminism famously gets on the nose toward the end (though it ends well IMO), but the second book, Tombs of Atuan is a wonderful metaphor of womanhood told through the character of a young priestess that, IMO, does a good job at getting at how the roles people/women are forced to play traps them in labyrinths they don’t or struggle to understand and that are darker than they can realise. I personally found it subtly haunting.

Also, just randomly here, Ripley in Alien & Aliens. Many would say she’s an early “girl boss” character (but done right/well), but something you forget about her time in the films is how much everyone basically flatly ignores her until shit goes bad and she has to save herself (and the cat or adopted daughter). Even if you’re oblivious to feminist issues, you feel and see it in those films … a woman who knows what she’s talking about being ignored by men who think they know better with horrible results.

The Shining (Kubrick), where Wendy is totally keeping that family together (notice how she’s the only one every doing maintenance work) and tolerating a child beater husband (in one release there’s a scene that makes it clear that Jack had previously hit the child) and his career to the point of being trapped alone in the cold wilderness with a murderous husband because that’s who he’s always been (what a metaphor for domestic abuse). Again we get a depiction of something real today but elevated with horror in a way that highlights not what women suffer (Wendy and Danny survive in the end) but what trap they’re in and how they don’t see it coming or even understand it, but, you know, really should if they want to live.

With BR-2049, I feel like it’s kinda just dystopia and the whole slaughtered women, prostitutes and hot loving-AI just have to be there to fill out the world. The video about Joi linked above was definitely interesting (like I said), but I don’t think it reverses anything I’m saying here … if anything its point was that even men are now living more like housewives than they used to (at least middle-class and lower millennial men) and so nothing really fruitful about feminism right?

---

All that being said … great post! I like the film! I’m not sure it’s deeply feminist though. I think it’s got feminism in there within its dystopia, but I’m not sure that’s a high bar and I think it bears the mark of being done by men (who probably think they’re feminist).

Is it a good feminist film for men to digest? Maybe?!

maegul, 11 days ago

it is good for men to see the issue portrayed, from both sides. That’s not nothing.

Well, a counter argument would be that it’s taken a number of words for this to get pulled out in this conversation. So maybe it’s not that effective or impactful to most men?

I personally land, again, on not really worth it or at least a bit of a misfire.