I think the argument is that even if you’re not consciously noticing it, your brain picks it up and that’s part of the unsettling feeling you get. Is that true? I don’t know. I was unsettled as hell watching Hereditary, but there’s a lot more unsettling content besides the quasi-noticeable woman in the corner of the ceiling.

I’m glad to see It Follows included in the essay though. Watching characters converse in the grass, in the sunlight, in a scenario that in almost all other horror movies would be a tension-relieving safe scene, until you notice another character, blurry and deep in the distance, walking robotically on a straight path toward the central characters, still gives me chills. It remains one of my favorite effects, and is a top-tier reason why I love horror movies even though I don’t love feeling tense or scared.

Because email federation is inherent to everyone’s understanding of how that service works. And perhaps more importantly, email “instances” are run by corporations. Laymen are not signing up on a “server” or “instance,” they’re signing up for Google, Apple, or Microsoft - the service they get aligns to a company that provides it. Nearly every single service that anyone has ever signed up for online has followed the same essential process: go to fixed url, create id and password, gain access.

It’s easy to underestimate, especially in communities like this, how enigmatic the entire infrastructure of the internet is to the general population. Think of those videos where people are asked what “the cloud” is: they pause and ponder and then guess “satellites?” because they’ve never even wondered about it. I’m guessing that for many people, something like Twitter is just something that lives in their app store that they can choose to “enable” on their phone by installing it.

People know that software is “made up of code,” but they don’t understand what that means. The idea that an “application” is a collection of services run by code, that there are app servers and web servers, that there are backends and frontends, is completely unknown to (I’d guess) a significant majority of people. And if someone doesn’t understand that, it’s honestly near impossible to understand what anything in the fediverse is.

And most importantly: this is not any user’s fault. IT and the Internet developed so quickly, and it was made so seamlessly accessible by corporations who at first just wanted their services to be adopted, and then wanted everything even more deliberately opaque so those users were more likely to feel locked in and dependent while the services themselves tail-spun in degradation.

We need more, and more accessible, and friendlier, tech literacy in general. The complexity of our world is running away from us (“I have a foreboding [of a time…] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues” - Carl Sagan) and we simply can’t deeply understand many of the things that directly impact us. But because of its ubiquity, IT may be the best chance people have of getting better at understanding.

I fear Matthew Vaughn has just lost his grip on the humanity that so brilliantly balanced the silly stories he likes to tell. Stardust is one of my all-time favorite movies, and Kick-Ass, X-Men First Class, and Kingsman are some of the most entertaining blockbuster flicks available, where the action is satisfyingly contextualized through excellent character work.

But his last three movies just don’t have the right equation. From what I remember, Argyle started out really strongly but seriously devolved after the halfway point. I think he’s indulging too much in the overwrought spectacle that he first toed the line of at the end of the first Kingsman.

Lincoln was a great biopic. Hyperfocusing on one pivotal moment in the man’s illustrious life, and using the complexity of those circumstances to explore his intelligence and charisma from all angles was so much more effective than the whole-life-in-fast-forward approach so many other biopics follow.

Plus Daniel Day Lewis in peak form. Just an indescribably good performance.

Thanks DeepSeek.

Disney’s creative integrity is dogshit. The MCU is overstuffed and meandering. I planned to be skeptical.

But goddammit if this trailer didn’t give me chills. Charlie Cox’s interpretation of Daredevil is quite possibly the best adapted superhero performance I’ve ever seen. I’d have watched this series beginning to end just to see him playing the part, but the tension, the action, the emotion, the score all worked in this trailer.

Despite my better wisdom I am fucking excited.

Does anyone know what is required viewing going into this? I watched She-Hulk but I think Daredevil was also in Echo or something? Anything else?

I’m new to this too, but the slide deck they have posted seems a good starting place.

The NGI is an initiative of the European Commission to fund “researchers, developers, startups, and SMEs” who are aligned with the “aim to shape the development and evolution of the Internet” according to the principles of:

• protecting personal data

• ensuring privacy and security

• combating disinformation

• guaranteeing access and freedom of choice

• respecting fundamental rights

• enforcing ethics and sustainability by design.

I’m a little less clear on what the 16 projects are (which are listed on slides 6 and 7), but I gather they might be specific objectives, defined by the NGI, within which their funding is categorized, e.g., if you’re doing research on democratizing search capabilities, that research would serve the NGI’s “Search” project and would qualify for funding.

I’m making a lot of assumptions but I’m reasonably confident in them.

Is that a Trump “Tim Apple” reference? I wouldn’t have even noticed if you hadn’t called it out.

OSS 117

A goofy, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-adjacent spy spoof from France. Stunningly, the same director and male and female leads wouldater collaborate on 2011’s Oscar winning The Artist.

A while ago, like mid-to-late aughts maybe, it was in vogue to joke about Ben Affleck being a shitty actor. I haven’t seen all his roles and granted I’m sure he’s had his duds, but the existence of the Dogma parking garage scene was always evidence enough to me that he had the chops.

No judgement on his skill as a producer but Kinberg sucks as a writer from what I’ve seen of his. He strikes me as a studio-friendly hack, and this is a dumb move to keep the franchise “safe” rather than trying better to make it interesting.

Deadline is a film industry trade paper, so success metrics like Box Office are of interest to it, especially insofar as those metrics guide the trajectory of industry trends.

I view the first in a vacuum because the others actually harm it

Lol I do the same thing! If I watch any of the sequels I view them essentially as fanfic. Your point about emotional payoff in the first is really good too. It’s easy to forget watching the sequels that the dramatic core of the first movie was John’s grief for his wife. The dramatic core of the sequels is little more, as I remember, than the convoluted bureaucracy and politics of John trying and failing to be left alone.

The best moment in the entire franchise is after the assassination squad is sent to his house in the first movie. I saw it in theaters and fully, unconsciously anticipated that when the police strobe lights started flashing through the windows, that we would get a tense scene of John Wick attempting to distract the cop and send him away without the bodies being discovered.

When instead he opens the door wide, and the cop casually peers past his shoulder, and just asks, “you working again?”, it’s such a delightful, comical, surprising reveal. The concept worked best when we as the audience expected the world to function familiarly, and it could playfully subvert those expectations in small ways. They dove so deep into the capital-L lore beginning in the second movie, that we no longer expected the world to function familiarly, and thereafter stopped being surprised.

The first flick is a bonified good movie. The rest are, varyingly, titillating scenes of artfully choreographed and executed action set pieces loosely strung together by indulgently juvenile nonsense.

forecasts ad revenue to hit $1 trillion

I didn’t go to the theater for a few years due to both the pandemic and a new baby. When I did return for the first time last year, I was truly shocked at how many ads there are now at the major chains before curtain draw. It used to be ads before showtime, then trailers when the lights dimmed at showtime. Now it seems like there are just as many trailers as there were before, but intercut by an equal number of ads, so the time between showtime and actual movie start is ridiculous.

Best theater experience I’ve had by far was seeing The Descent on release. In that crucial mid-movie moment, the whole theater freaked out, and after things settled down I saw someone climbing back over the seat they’d apparently jumped over when it happened.

I’m not convinced that cameras and Nextdoor are having a material impact on the vague idea of “trust between neighbors,” but I admit it’s hard to gauge because I only have my own experience, which exists on a potentially wide spectrum.

I’m barely on Nextdoor and was surprised to hear there’s apparently a pretty common use of it for public shaming. The potential for petty community conflict does seem heightened by some of these technologies.

Some of us buy printers because we have abuse and humiliation fetishes. My OfficeJet is the kinkiest product I own.