I looked into his worldview a bit when the San Francisco lecture happened, and it is deeply, deeply fucked up.

There is a certain allure because it’s based on a well-known philosophal thread of “mimetic theory” (filtered through a then-contemporary Nazi apologist, and Silicon Valley hubris) and for all it’s “Anti-Christ” talk, it doesn’t even 100% require a supernatural belief system, just the commitment to one as an outward-facing and socially enforceable ideology. What makes it so fucked up and dangerous is the almost Foundation-like orthopraxy that it demands.

The gist, IIRC, is that humans want and need something stable to copy from to know what they want, and that modernish (like in the last 300 years) interpretations of major religions, but particularly Christianity, have landed on a perfect balance of giving people boundaries, aspirations, and just enough freedom to keep society going. Therefore, the only way to avoid falling back onto outmoded and dangerous practices like mass scape-goating is to get huge blocks of people invested in that worldview. Ideally it would be the whole world in one ideology, but their nod to reality is to concede that three or four could survive in tension if they’re geographically insulated.

So moving onto the Antichrist, anyone or (importantly for the Thiel version specifically) anything that poses an existential threat to this orderly control of society risks chaos and a descent into destruction and with a Christian context can therefore be comfortably called the/an “Antichrist.” If Palantir watching literally everyone and everything means the enforcement of “western” values on western populations, then opposing that is dangerous to humanity and therefore a threat. Fighting that threat is a crusade, and even justifies the interim use of tactics that will ultimately be rendered moot by the imposition of a religio-philosophical order, such as mass scaepgoating and pogroms (coughjdvancecough).

Then, just as the classist cherry on top, remember that the supernatural part of this is all just to make sure that the stupids buy into the same worldview as the elites who will preserve society by controlling it and directing it towards self-sustaining power structures. So a Thiel can be gay, and a Thiel acolyte like Vance (we’ll look past Musk for now, as I think they probably view him more as a lucky and useful idiot) can marry a Hindu woman from one of the viable global powerbases (though we’re seeing cracks in that as current political realities weigh on him), and he doesn’t even really have to believe any of the specifically dominionist nonsense he preaches, as long as the MAGA rubes do. What it does give them is a handhold where they can legitimately believe that they’re doing what’s best for the world by trying to dominate it, and that is fucking terrifying.

As an aside, Thiel’s philosophical mentor would have been very nearly as horrified as most of us are by the conclusions he’s reached, and this is why you don’t let the software engineers think they’re the only ones who are smart, simply because it’s harder to do calculus than write a B+ Freshman essay. If Girard is “love each other or we all face ruin,” Thiel is “love each other, or we all face ruin, but you’re too stupid to love each other unless a brutal technostate surveillance apparatus enforces adherence to a love-based religion.”

Obviously not all of it, but I would just about bet that it’s at least 75% of this thing will be set on Earth. This is almost always a logistic/budget compromise move when a franchise is normally high-fantasy and/or space-based.

Either that, or the filmmakers don’t believe in the property, which is even worse. Despite Jo being a hack and an awful person, Harry Potter grabbed people’s imagination because it was built around being low-fantasy with Harry serving as an audience insert. The Matrix inverted the trope, but narratively it worked on the same idea. He-Man, IIRC, has some winks and nods to Earth existing, but it’s basically high-fantasy, where Eternia and its galaxy are the universe. OG Star Wars, among others, is the model for how you structure something similarly without bailing on your high-fantasy setting. You need you naive hero to refuse the guide’s call to action until they have been taught lessons about the broader world, possibly by flambeing their aunt and uncle, but you can do it by starting in a corner of the setting that’s more prosaic and “down to earth” without literally being Earth.

This one feels like they wanted Minecraft kitsch, callbacks to the Dolph Lundgren movie, lifting story beats from She-Ra, and limiting how much of the world they had to build/dress/animate, particularly sets and extras. All this for a second- or third-tier memberberries property. I could be wrong, but I think it’s going to land with a thud.

Also sounds like an org that wants its event, which depends on visas for its players to happen at all and on visas for its fans to be a commercial success, to get special treatment from the Orange Menace.

Apart from all the deflection and Putin and Gilded-Age foreign policy policy theories, which may well be right, I think President Dingleberry also found out that Greenland is 1% larger by area than the Louisiana Purchase, which would make him the president that most embiggened America. How can you you deny MAGA if he literally made it greater (in size) than any president prior to him?

It’s also possible he has only ever looked at a Mercator and thinks Greenland is literally the size of Africa or South America.

https://youtube.com/shorts/UO_whAN302s

I bought Alibre Design, as it was a less oppressive situation license-wise, but these days I find I’m using it less than I might simply because I prefer staying in Linux for literally anything else. It was a bit pricy, but at least it was a perpetual license. I am hearing that while they don’t intend to support Linux, they’re moving away from some of the libraries that have prevented Proton from working.

The rest are varying degrees of oppressive lock-in and feature erosion. PTC/OnShape in particular has a huge “Fuck-You” attitude towards anybody who wants to consider throwing a design up on Etsy or selling a few trinkets without paying out the ass for a professional-grade subscription, and being the only fully mature web-based tool, it’s the only one that works properly in Linux.

Every single major commercial 3D CAD suite is still better than FreeCAD. FreeCAD is not the unusable beast it used to be, in fact it’s very much better, but it has technical debt and structural limitations that just keep it worse.

Dammit Jim! I’m doctor, not an alien reproduction of the mind of a space detective!

Yeah, it felt like a very flat take on the material. Like, Odysseus is an archetypal trickster figure, he’s supposed to be something of a smirking shit (Ulysses Everett McGill?), at least from time to time, and one who creates as many problems for himself as he solves by thinking he’s the smartest guy at the agora. This trailer just looks like The Revenant meets 300. Hope the actual movie is much better.

Theater lobby vs streaming lobby. YAY!

Frankly, as long as they stop memory-holing completed projects like Zaslav did, it will be at least a modest improvement.

There’s also a very real problem of Lucas not really caring to get the best out of them, and for the younger actors it’s disastrous. Natalie Portman is generally a bit better at picking solid projects than elevating them (IMHO), but she’s every bit as bad as the Anakins in the prequels. Only the veterans who could draw on prior experience, and especially the British-trained theater actors, could work with the abstractions of the set and chew the scenery convincingly without a lot of helpful guidance.

On ANH, George was still a young Turk in naturalistic New Hollywood, and anyway he had exactly one mainstream success under his belt, so people could push back; there’s also the sometimes exaggerated but very real contributions of the editing team picking good takes and splicing them together in a way that feels right, certainly in the moment. On ESB he did his best work by going with scriptwriters and a veteran director who’d done a dozen films. Even on ROTJ, the non-guild director was a guy who’d done a lot of intimate character work on British TV, and if the plot was straining under its weight, you still got solid line readings and some convincing emotion.

YMMV, which I guesses is a huge part of the issue. My company is pushing AI everything, and I can hear the people running them phrasing things specifically for the assistant. Also, my meetings are not particularly technical and are full of corporate bullshit that I’m sure is all through the training set. It works… fine.

Valerian. Recast both leads if you can, but in a pinch just DeHaan. Give Valerian himself a single iota of charisma and the movie ends up a slight but interesting lark instead of a slog.

There’s a line I’ve heard a couple times that if you swapped the pairs from Valerian and Passengers, both movies end up better, if maybe not quite “good.”

AI does a perfectly fine job summarizing my boring work meetings, but the entire point of those is to be straightforward and unambiguous and in line with previous similar meetings. You cannot trust generative AI to interpret anything with even a modicum of subtlety or novelty. At best it will give you a slop-rack of a framework you can wrestle into something mediocre but basically usable for a specific purpose.

But a twenty-percent efficiency upgrade with a low ceiling on its quality is not what they’re all selling. AI is real, it’s here to stay, but good god I can’t wait for the bubble to pop so LLMs can settle into the limited use cases where they add value.

And both are delicious.

You also know somebody is running on empty when a show or movie franchise set in the future or a fantastic world transports their characters to “the present” for any extended period. Now, whether that’s the writers, the cast, or the accountants, no one can say.

I love that podcast, and particularly when I’m driving, because while Kevin tends to repeat himself and speak slowly, it’s generally pedagogically sound, somehow in the service of his point and ensuring I don’t miss much if I get distracted. He’s also an attorney (probate, IIRC), so when he occasionally drifts into legal stuff, it’s doubly insightful.

Poppycock. It’s mispronounced German and Latin and Greek and French and… well… English, all with a delightful seasoning of mispronounced Dutch and Spanish.

STD will make you all warm and fuzzy.

On the other hand, if they do depart from a joyless slog from one plot point to the next, people scream “filler” like it’s a crime against humanity. I do have some sympathy for people writing shows, but I agree that too many of these shows began life as single-movie pitches that were padded (or at least never edited down) rather than a traditional mini-series, which is what they are, or a season of TV slimmed down to the high-points.