I think pretty solidly this is being driven by business and intelligence communities, our police and spy agencies have been trying to get around encryption and online anonymity for years. They desperately want to be able to tie every bit of data that moves around the internet to an individual without getting the courts involved, and bear in mind since Australia is a Five Eyes nation not all of that pressure is onshore. It is getting the limpest push back from these big tech companies though because how much more valuable is your advertising profile if they can associate it with tour government ID, or birth certificate, or confirmed validated biometric data.

I know of a Telco that had to pay to move a family to a different state after they provided their address to a man who posed a credible risk to their lives. They had to buy this family a new house, pay movers, and buy then a new car. The telco preempted the court on this so it wouldn’t become a national story in the media and they could minimise the eventual fine they faced.

That one incident 2 decades ago cost more than half a million dollars to fix, uprooted a family and caused unknown amounts of trauma. Do we seriously think Twitter will take a similar incident as seriously? Google? Facebook? But I guarantee they will slurp up every bit of data they can.

Give it a month it will be retabled.

When I called my federal representative about the laws and the miles wide holes in Australian privacy laws and more particularly who would be responsible for covering the costs associated with helping citizens recover in the cases of rampant identity theft these laws are going enable, I got assurances that the eSafety Commissioner would be able to hold large tech companies to account. I pointed out that if Meta was to suffer a breach that exposed the details of say a thousand Australians I could see them ponying up the fine, just cost of doing business, if the details of 2 million Australians got leaked then with potential fines stretching into the billions why would they even fight it, so much simpler to cut Australia off like a gangrenous limb. I was assured that the eSafety commissioner would be monitoring these large companies to ensure their data security was up to standard, I laughed. I was told that our parliament may be looking in to strengthening data protection laws and was promised an email with details about this (3 weeks ago with not even a message to say sorry for the delay). I was thoroughly disgusted, this I’ll thought out plan to scrape as much data as Australians can be tricked into handing over is going to result in massive costs to the tax payer before too long. Discord has already leaked data related to age verification and Australia hasn’t even got its law started yet.

I really think we need remove a lot of the protections from Politicians: “You want to spy on the Australian public at the behest of a shadowy cabal of Intelligence Community wonks? Ok we can do that, but you are personally liable for it when it goes wrong, you will be personally paying all the costs associated with the following scenarios we are categorically stating will occur if you proceed with this nonsense. If you do not have sufficient money to cover these costs all of your assets will be sold and you will become an indentured servant of the Australian public until your debt is cleared.”

I got an interesting response when I told the guy at the MPs office that I would shutdown or abandon any app, website or service that demanded my ID. There is no service online which is worth providing a drivers license or sufficient photos to create a reasonable reproduction of my face.

No silly you need to upload your drivers license to some shady 3rd party age verification service to protect 16 year olds from accidentally using dating sites.

They even pinky promised to not store your data in some vibe coded system that will leak it all the first time a hacker so much as scans for api end points.

Now stop asking questions and grant front camera permissions so our AI that is maybe 75% accurate cab guess your age.

I mean yeah, but the fact that serious drama in a scandi country was seen as transgressive humour in Australia, does that not prove my point.

“How dare he stand up to foreign influence based upon the majority opinion of the country he represents, what a weakling.” Said the individual who starts international conflicts whenever it looks like his own citizens are sick enough of his bullshit to get rid of him.

Yeah that movie was something. Having not read the comics first I quite enjoyed the vibe of it. I think the penis in question glowing in Watchmen made it fairly hard to disregard. I really liked the HBO series and as much as I hated it at the time I respect that they had a single season show and they just did a single season.

Yeah the puritanical thing is weird right. I took my kids to a beach here in Australia and they literally staked out a spot 5 metres from a lovely Canadian backpacker, who just so happened to be topless. We had a chat for a bit and I gave her some tips about local sightseeing as well as directions to the nearest unofficial nude beach. Both my boys (6 & 8 at the time) didn’t glance at her once, kids just aren’t super concerned about boobs in my experience. On the other hand you better believe I heard ALL about the first fight they ever saw in person.

My kids are now teenagers and have gotten a bit more concerned with their own privacy, but still don’t seem to be exhibiting any hang ups about casual or contextual nudity.

No, I’m from Australia, which I always considered to be a pretty conservative country with regards to nudity. I think we have been more inconsistent with that than the USA though.

I read my comment out to my wife after I posted it. She gave me a smirk and asked if I had any good responses yet.

As far as the TV is concerned, it has been a bit of a nuisance in terms of finding the right space for it, but it does make going back to smaller TVs super noticeable. It was actually my wife who demanded we get the 85 over the 75, pricing was good on both. Can recommend getting the best tech you can afford though, our blacks are not super uniform and that shows up quite a bit on better quality Dolby Vision content.

You know what its like, it seems big at first. I remember right after I first mounted it I wasn’t sure I would be able to take it all in. After a while though you get used to it, it doesnt seem so unmanagable. Hell I could probably handle something a bit bigger when the time comes to upgrade.

Oh yeah Eccleston knows how to play an absolute monster.

For this though:

I guess I just saw it as fairly naturalistic, the whole naked infected kinda made sense to me and after a moment or two it stopped registering with me. I guess I watched the movie on an 85 inch TV, maybe it was more evident watching it on the big screen at a cinema.

Also the series has been fairly judicious with its use of femininity throughout I think the way that the female characters were put in jeopardy in the first film made it clear that the apocalypse held additional threat and danger for the girls and women after society had collapsed. I can see how given that framework this primal embodiment of masculine power and virility might hit some people hard.

I’d be curious how it landed with Europeans as opposed to Americans/English/Australians I wonder if the more puritanical views on nudity would show differences in audience reactions.

Look I kinda agree with most of what’s said here, the tonal whiplash of the final act left me a bit lost for words. The thing I find so weird about the reviews I have read is the obsession with penises. Have these people not seen one before, is it that upsetting to them. There are also nude infected women, you can see some “zombie” titties but this seems completely unremarkable.

Am I just too old and rational to express adequate shock about seeing naked men in a group of naked people for whom nudity isn’t an absolutely unreasonable state of being?

Or was it just the size of one particular member that made the experience noteworthy for them?

Kinda telling how little regard this gets in the same week that I was scrolling through multiple repeats of stories about Ozzy Osbourne. If he had shut up and enjoyed living life on his profits from the 80s & 90s he would be held in higher regard today.

“Star Track or Space Wars… Oh no you misunderstand… The Doc won science fiction in 1954 with Lensman, it was so good that they stopped making Sci-Fi. But I’m sure your things are just fine, I guess.” Looks like you missed that opportunity, better luck next time.

And of course Donald Trump is as immovable as granite and unwaveringly loyal to his friends & allies.

There is no chance of him having a spat with the Aberdeenshire council about rubbish collection for his golf club and responding with a 50% tariff…

Or for that matter of being directed to do it by his owners with even less justification…