Stepos Venzny

I have that, too. Recently had a medical issue that was essentially a month-long open wound that obviously needed to be dressed the whole time. Absolutely brutal on the skin.

Tegaderm is less bad, I learned. Significantly more expensive but absolutely worth it for that situation. Showed up to the doctor with that on and was told “absolute overkill, stop using that” and then when I showed up the next time after following their instructions and using large Band-aids they took one look at my back and said “you should switch back to Tegaderm.”

Think about the end of the movie. Our protagonist is being crucified. A whole field of people up on crosses with him. And this happens on this scale regularly. There’s a tradition of sparing one and only one person out of these groups by request so as to pacify the citizens by giving them an illusion of power. And the citizens, rather than even trying to save one life, prioritize laughing over and over at a speech impediment.

But against all odds, our protagonist is chosen through that process to be spared. But he isn’t, because Rome cares so little about any of this that they make absolutely zero effort to verify who they’re sparing. Not that the guy they let down deserved to be crucified, either.

And a rebel group shows up to maybe save these people from, and I can’t stress this enough, being crucified. And instead they too die pointlessly. By their own hands. On purpose. And the movie ends on a jaunty musical number about how terrible everything is and frankly maybe it’s better to die than to be a part of this world.

When I look at the scene you’re talking about in the context of the rest of the movie, it looks less like “Rome is good actually” and more like “why are these the freedom fighters we have?” Whether being conquered by the empire also comes with perks isn’t the point and it’s meant to be frustrating that they chose this ineffectual argument.

You’re calling people with different visual preferences than you ignorant cultists. Surely that qualifies as you pushing back on personal enjoyment?

You know, filmmakers don’t always like the tech they’re using. Matching their equipment isn’t always the same thing as matching their vision. All art is comprise.

You remember the Hobbit trilogy? That was a pretty famous instance of a director going against the grain visually, giving it a higher than normal frame rate. Looking like a soap opera rather than cinema, as you put it. On purpose. Audiences hated that. He spent more money making it and they said it looked cheap. They could see motion in enough clarity that it looked like they were seeing a human with facial prosthetics rather than a dwarf. It looked objectively more real than a regular frame rate but that proved too real for most.

Now if I were the sort that likes to turn on motion smoothing, do you think Peter Jackson who tried to pioneer high frame rate theatrical releases would disagree with me doing that for his earlier 24 FPS movies, like the good Lord of the Rings? Or does making the motion look more real make the movie more like he wishes it always had been?

Me, I don’t like high frame rate movies either. If he came out and said motion smoothing is the best way to watch the older movies then I would still leave it off. That’s barely even a hypothetical, since he said the theatrical cut is the best way to watch yet I still prefer the Extended Editions.

If he said OLEDs were the best way to watch them, would you stop watching on a projector? Of course you wouldn’t. You like projectors better. Directorial intent is irrelevant.

The correct response to weird gatekeepers who talk shit about projectors isn’t to gatekeep back in the opposite direction, it’s to just continue enjoying what you enjoy. And when somebody asks for advice on their home theater, sing the praises of your beloved projectors. But this long and unprompted argument you just started against faceless masses with accusations that people who disagree with you aren’t capable of forming their own opinions, maybe don’t be doing that so much.

I grew up watching 4:3 movies with monaural sound on CRT screens that were roughly a foot tall and loved movies then no less than I do today on my modern OLED and surround system. Bigger and clearer is nice to have but there’s no reason to stress over what display is optimal.

No, they were totally fair in saying that. As much as Tomb Raider is a knockoff narratively, Infernal Machine is even more directly a knockoff mechanically.

The bad guys in Black and White were Pokemon rights activists and your heroic allies were watching them speak being like “everyone knows Pokemon love being captured and made to fight each other, these guys are a bunch of nutjobs!”

Then later it turns out the Pokemon rights thing was just a cover for something nefarious because nobody could actually believe what these people are claiming to.

An adult dressing like an adult feels completely appropriate to me.

Imagine the world as we know it is a work of speculative fiction: you’re reading a book about a world that has harnessed the power of electricity to achieve all kinds of incredible things. Electric power’s not just magic, though, right? This is hard sci-fi, there are technical limitations on how this fantastical technology works. There are ways to generate electricity enough for everyone to use but to actually use it they need the electricity to travel long distances from its source to their location and the route is required to be more or less contiguous.

Now electricity, according to this wild sci-fi premise, is a force that kind of wants to travel; it is possible for it to move, then it will. And I said “more or less contiguous” up there because it can actually cross small gaps as long as the rest of the route remains valid. And one thing it is possible for it to move through is a human body, which can be nightmarishly harmful to the human it travels through. Indeed, there is a history of intentionally placing humans into that route in order to execute them. And living creatures aren’t the only thing it can harm: electricity traveling through a flammable medium can start fires and, if misdirected in some way, can even destroy the very technology it’s being harnessed to power.

Even setting aside the destruction it can cause should it end up traveling where they don’t want it to travel, there is also the fact that if it fails to travel along the desired route then electrical technology that people have built their lives around will simply stop functioning. There are ways to generate one’s own limited supply of electricity as a stopgap until the main course is reestablished but most people in the setting don’t have that and it’s a temporary measure even if they do. And I don’t just mean stuff like their business failing to function, I mean that even the basic day to day operations of their lives will fail. They have stores of food kept safely cold by electrical technology that will spoil if the electricity stops, they have kitchens that run on electricity to cook that food even if the ingredients are still good, and most of them never learned how to do these kinds of basic things the old fashioned way and if they want to learn how then their primary source for information is itself a technology that requires electricity to function.

So you’re talking to a friend about this book you’ve been reading about this electrical world. And your friend asks you about these “routes” you told them the electricity travels along:

“How do they move this super dangerous yet super integral substance across such long distances that even people in the middle of nowhere have access to it?”

“For the millionth time, it’s not a substance.”

“Whatever it is, how do they get it from A to B?”

“Well… mostly they the put wires that conduct it on top of thirty foot tall wooden posts.”

“Wouldn’t those just fall down whenever there’s bad weather?”

“Yeah, ‘power outages’ as they call them are not entirely infrequent.”

“So these wooden posts that if they fall over could start fires or kill bystanders or, like, melt stuff. They keep all that away from where people are at least?”

“Well, okay, I was simplifying. There’s these bigger and sturdier metal constructions for carrying wire the longest distances and they build those in the middle of nowhere. These wooden posts that fall down easily are mostly situated around where people are, like roadsides. They were first on my mind because they’re more what’s present where the story takes place.”

“Didn’t you say earlier they’ve all got these individually operated vehicles on the roads that are measured in the strength of dozens of horses, thousands of pounds of metal that move faster than jungle cats? Wouldn’t they just hit the poles by accident and, like, demolish them?”

“Yeah that happens sometimes.”

“…I guess I’m being uncharitable. If I were in this scenario I’d probably be more excited and not thinking as clearly as I do from this distance. It makes sense that such a radical new technology would have some unforeseen negative consequences.”

“Actually it’s not new. Electrical power’s been commonplace for something like a century as of when the story takes place. The characters don’t remember a world without it.”

“And they’re still just… putting it on sticks?”

If my schedule was tight enough and the hotdogs were convenient enough, I could see myself doing that. They’re a classic street food, so it’s not like that’s an unthinkable scenario.

Why these feet were nearly a foot long!

The Terminator TV show feels the most prescient. They took a chess playing computer and said “This seems to play chess like a human would and that means it’s basically the same as human consciousness. Let’s try to teach it morality by talking to it and then have it run the military.”

Then it spent the rest of the series more interested in Lego Bionicles than Jesus and nobody on the project ever said “You know, maybe this thing that wasn’t at all designed to run the military is a bad fit for running the military.” They were just chilled by its indifference to their values and really hoped they could reason it into being something it’s not by the time they give it the power to kill everyone.

I mean how bad is it really to use a little filler?