In Australia Paramount+ has the A-League broadcast rights, so I subscribe purely for that. It is very cheap by streaming standards here ($7 for the base tier with ads) and has a pretty good collection of films too. TV series are really where it struggles.
One of the more recent examples from last year was Mozilla’s announcement of PPA (Privacy-Preserving Attribution). Essentially the organisation is trying to create a new system for click-based advertising where an advertiser can be notified that you clicked on their ad, helping them and the websites which host their ads, without compromising your personal privacy. The way it has historically worked is you click on an ad and give away a ton of your personal data, or you straight up block all these ads and their trackers which makes a lot of the web unsustainable (because it is funded by advertising). Anyway, like with this latest controversy a lot of people didn’t bother to read any of Mozilla’s statements and instead based their entire opinion off clickbait headlines like ‘Firefox’s New ‘Privacy’ Feature Actually Gives Your Data to Advertisers’ which made PPA sound like a reduction of consumer privacy, which it isn’t. And again, like this current controversy, you also had a lot of privacy activists who do not live in reality claiming that anything other than a 100$ rejection of all advertising online equaled 100% complicity and that Mozilla had sold out on one of its core principles.
It’s a film that you can enjoy on so many levels. You can appreciate the way they keep a story shot essentially in a single room so visually stimulating the entire way through, or the performances from the cast whose characters grow into the film as more is revealed about their lives, or the way the film makes you think at the end about the morality, the legal system, peer pressure and the human desire to conform, etc. If you’re honest with yourself it’s a film that can really challenge some previously automatic beliefs you had about yourself as a person. Like the first time I watched it in my early 20s, admitting to myself that I probably would have been one of the jurors to cave to the majority opinion purely out of peer pressure was a reality I didn’t really want to face.
12 Angry Men (1957)
I find reading books quite meditative and I like the initial challenge of maintaining my concentration for the first 10 minutes or so before I can relax and sink into it a bit. I sympathise with everyone else struggling to read as much as an adult though, it was so much easier for me during childhood. Sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed about how little I read now given how advanced I was as a kid. It feels like I’ve been wasting a skill/hobby that could have provided me with a lot of happiness and growth as an adult.
It would be amazing of course, and my entire attitude towards Firefox would change overnight if we had that kind of guaranteed security. At the moment I just look at it as the best least-worst option for the short to medium term future. I recently learned about Ladybird but that is still a fair way off, so for now my priority is to continue supporting Firefox and trying to avoid a future where Google has theoretical control over everything.
You’ve just explained that to make Firefox secure you need to watch some video of someone that you hope knows what they’re talking about.
No actually, I didn’t. I suggested that anyone who is not confident/literate enough to work this out for themselves through self-research online can access extremely beginner-friendly guides on YouTube that step-by-step walk them through the setup. Everyone knows how to use YouTube, please don’t insult my intelligence by implying it’s some kind of semi-mythical resource known only to the the biggest “nerds”.
In that case your entire argument for LibreWolf is a complete waste of time, because this theoretical user you’re referring to also wouldn’t bother to download an unknown niche privacy browser. LibreWolf is essentially just hardened Firefox for people who are too lazy to do it themselves. The crossover between completely tech illiterate but also privacy-focused is an insanely small market.
There is, just not in relation to piracy. The concerns are more over its financial incentives/ownership and privacy.
It’s not too complicated for a nerd whose hobby is computers or someone who has studied computers, but for the layperson it’s too much.
I’m not sure I buy this argument when there are videos visually walking you through every single step involved in hardening Firefox. Is that still too complex for your elderly parents or grandparents? Maybe. Is it too complex for Millenials and younger generations? Definitely not. The core problem here is just laziness. People are not willing to give up 10 minutes of their day to setup their browser for years of future use because “I don’t have time for that”.
and predictions saying Firefox is going downhill fast and that their forks won’t be maintained for much longer.
Possibly true, but abandoning ship is only bringing us closer to that timeline. People seem to be completely ignorant/delusional about how much work these forks will require to maintain if Mozilla’s full time employees stop working on Firefox. If you have a practical reason to use another fork (like maybe a feature Firefox doesn’t have) then I totally understand using that instead, but if you are simply making some kind of ethical protest change like all the new LibreWolf users who are so loudly virtue signalling at the moment then you need to think seriously about whether this course of action will ultimately end up hurting your ideals. Mozilla definitely has a big communication problem and I understand the desire to distance oneself from an organisation that repeatedly disrespects its supporters and never learns from its mistakes, as it is very fatiguing to endure their constant failures and the massive fall-outs from them, but ultimately I feel like switching away from Firefox is still an emotional decision rather than a rational one.
It’s definitely intentionally setup in such a way that the thought enters, and then exits, the audience’s mind at least once - as all great twists and reveals are. The best mysteries are always the ones that give you the solution, but do so in a way that make you second-guess your intuition and instead follow a bunch of red herrings and completely unrelated events down a different rabbit hole that ultimately lead to the wrong conclusion. My problem with The Prestige is that it repeatedly gives you the solution again and again throughout the entire film in an almost taunting/mocking fashion that insults the intelligence of anyone who figured it out, with the idea being that anyone who hasn’t will be completely shocked at the end when they see the montage of how many times they were presented with the answer. It’s so fixated with setting up the biggest “gottem” moment ever at the end that it doesn’t even try to re-engage the viewer like myself with the mystery. Your comparison to the bird trick scene with the young boy is quite accurate in a sense, because Nolan is sort of like the magician just going “oh well, you figured it out…don’t really care though because everyone else is dumb enough to believe me and think I’m a genius”. That attitude is what holds it back from being a truly great film.
A recent example is Conclave, which had an ending that felt very rushed and not really consistent with the tone of the rest of the film. I left feeling quite disappointed despite the majority of the film being one of the best I have seen. Another film I saw recently with almost the opposite problem was The Prestige, which I feel shows far too much of its big twist hand throughout the film and has an extremely predictable ending as a result. I think the thematic idea of the twist is very clever but it almost underestimates the ability of the audience to follow along. Although, having said that, there are seemingly a lot of very stupid or distracted people out there who had no idea what was coming and think it’s a masterpiece so maybe it was made for them and not me.
So true, Prometheus did a lot of the hard stuff right and then really made a mess of pretty basic things like dialogue and believable character motivations. Instead of tightening that stuff up in the sequel he just completely dumbed down the entire franchise again in Covenant to the extent that it is once again a complete waste of time (see Romulus).
I think that’s a good observation. I always felt like Holy Grail went downhill quite significantly after the first hour or so. Up until that point the narrative is fairly straightforward and the humour is consistent, but then they get to the animated montage time skip bit and everything after gets a bit boring. Most of the cast exits the film abruptly, the sets all look the same, and the ending undermines everything that happened up until that point. Which I guess is the joke, but The Life of Brian found a much better balance between satirical and absurdist humour and telling a cohesive story beginning to end.
Spotube’s Android client had a lot of performance issues last time I tried it (which was a while ago, to be fair) and seemed to be pulling everything from YouTube Music despite the name. I think RiMusic and InnerTune are a lot better, personally. InnerTune if you want a simpler, more traditional UI, RiMusic if you don’t mind something a bit more convoluted but also fun and different. RiMusic has some more traditional UI options now as well but I like the older one with the menu on the side - it feels like an app on an early smartphone, back when everything was weird and fun.
I think there is also an element of inaccessibility when it comes to lower budget films. Local cinemas are often dominated by long runs of the big budget action films, which can make it difficult for audiences to watch anything else. Given how badly the cinema industry is struggling, it would be in their best interests to create space for a greater variety of films or organise special “one night only” screening events. My local cinema takes part in a lot of film festivals and also runs a classic film club and special re-screenings of older films - these events always seem to attract significantly larger crowds and bring in a lot of extra revenue for them.
In the first season of Tokyo Vice, which is loosely based on the life of Jake Adelstein, there’s a scene where this choice is offered to a yakuza member. I wonder if the writers took inspiration from your piece of trivia or whether it’s just a common way of covering up murders over there.