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niktemadur

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niktemadur ,

While I don’t feel like a beacon of enlightenment myself, knowing that I have a certain inertia, with a set of blind spots and impulses - which sometimes I don’t even know what or where they are - I strive to become a more aware and empathetic individual, stumbling and failing often.

So many people sound so far gone up any myriad of disinformation holes that it makes me shudder that I, any one of us, could have been this person, or some republican q-anon type. And somebody creates and shovels this shit. They’re all over the goddamned planet, each source like a spore trying to spread, some with more resources and/or luck than others.

Misinformation weaponized and targeted at ignorance, with the aim of creating a plague of what I see as mental illness.

niktemadur ,

Live long, and may The Force be with you.

niktemadur ,

Laser blasts you in the face from his hidden pistol phaser under the table.

Also… shall we put that one on Riker?

niktemadur ,

…then walk away giggling, knowing that a minimum wage employee will have to deal with the turd, gagging and retching. LOL! Way to stick it to The Man™️!

niktemadur ,

One of Don Draper’s least successful pitches to clients, along with the Hawaii Sheraton “suicide” ad.

niktemadur ,

Wasn’t it Isaac Newton who said something along the lines of “If I have seen farther than anyone before me, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants”.

And that was nearly 400 years ago, when knowledge was so much more limited and narrow in scope than today.

niktemadur ,

EXTRY, EXTRY! READ ALL ABOUT IT! MEME IN PRINT GOES META! EXTRY, EXTRY!

niktemadur ,

Even then, as of now they still seem to have a 500 years head start over evangelical republicans.

niktemadur ,

In the late-70s/80s it was slasher movies. In the 80s/90s it was Rambo-style action movies, or Lethal Weapon and Fatal Attraction-style thrillers.
There have always been Hollywood bandwagons.

The difference is that back then the major studios made a bunch of films of all scopes and budgets, while today those same studios make fewer, more expensive movies.
If Scorsese was a young man today - or Robert Altman or William Friedkin, whoever - he probably wouldn’t get a chance to make a Raging Bull, he’d be steered towards a superhero film with - of course - NO final cut. The one exception is Christopher Nolan. And even he did an entire superhero TRILOGY.

Taking what Marty is saying and putting it another way - major studio content is not driven by a director’s creative vision in the current environment, but by producers… the suits and their market research.

niktemadur ,

Making lower budget films and giving artistic freedom to their directors allowed them to:

  1. Spread the risk.
  2. Catch lightning in a bottle, sometimes.

This was also in the days when a film could play in theaters for months, breathe and grow.
Now, they want every movie they release to make 200 million in the first weekend, with a marketing carpet-bombing blitz.

In Scorsese’s 70s heyday, a “modest success” was seen by the studio suits as a success, they made many of these and were happy about it.
Nowadays, a “modest success” is seen as a fizzle. Half a billion or bust.

niktemadur ,

El Risitas!

niktemadur ,

Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries.

niktemadur ,

So… hysterical and stubborn, unempathetic ignorance is bliss. Until it isn’t. Which is to say - until whatever toxic regressive bullshit they have entrenched themselves upon affects them directly.

niktemadur ,

It’s been a while since I’ve used a projector - when I screened films at a cultural center - and I seem to remember that even for a small space that would fit an audience of thirty, 2000 lumens was on the lower end of acceptability.

niktemadur , (edited )

Is this a photograph?
On the one hand I’ve never seen an image like this from this vantage, so I could imagine it’s a digital illustration, but on the other there’s at least two recent lunar missions, from the USA, from India, and I don’t know if Hayabusa from Japan is still operational, which would make it at least three.
I know russia tried recently and crashed.

EDIT: typo

niktemadur ,

“Mr Data, disable AdBlock.”
“Are you certain, Captain? I advise against it.”
“Proceed, Mr Data.”
“Very well, Sir…”

HOT LONELY SINGLES NEAR YOU IN >DELTA QUADRANT< ARE WAITING RIGHT NOW TO HEAR FROM YOU!

niktemadur ,

Mr Worf scoffing in disgust at the screen

niktemadur ,

Scotty letting out a long whistle as he unscrews the cap off his phaser-shaped whisky flask

niktemadur ,

You ever wonder why I only drink rainwater and grain alcohol?

niktemadur ,

When I learned that Corinthian Leather™️ is made-up marketing bullshit.

Corinthian leather, from Córdoba… jesss!

niktemadur ,

I’m sure some people are able to keep it fresh.
It happens in art, where some musicians are able to keep challenging and reinventing themselves. It happens in sports - I’ve read about it in baseball articles - where athletes who maintain a level of excellence beyond their early thirties talk about how they had to find a way to re-motivate themselves.

niktemadur , (edited )

And if you follow the logic of the written caption, those who have overthrown others, often purge those who may have the education to overthrow them. They also then do the exact same thing Linus says to Marcie Lydia.

niktemadur ,

Normally, I am not a fan of concert videos or film, prefer the studio albums from most bands.
But this… this is something else. This and “Plays Live” from Peter Gabriel are the only large-venue concert films or albums that I love.

The other type of live recording I love are bands playing live sessions for radio stations, or in small places like bars, where the acoustics sound intimate.
Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel can fill large spaces with an essence that is different from the studio setting and can make it equally compelling. That is a rare gift indeed.

niktemadur ,

Translation into “plainspeak”, filtering out all the deflection and projection:

We have an incompetent alcoholic military, with a toxic environment of forceful sodomy among our own troops abusing each other as well as others.

Yep… that pretty much covers it completely.

niktemadur ,

The worst offender I can think of is “Bohemian Rhapsody”. There is a scene where the record company exec meets Queen for the first time, and the frantic shots and cuts - what they focus on - make no sense whatsoever, creating a hollow tension to the point of being distractingly annoying. Shooting a regular dramatic scene like it was Michael Bay doing one of his headache-inducing Transformers action chaos sequence. Yet this mediocre thing won the Oscar for Best Editing, of all things!

niktemadur ,

He cracks himself up!
Just one knee-slapper after another. And another. And another…
It’s a late-night knee-slapper cavalcade!
He finds himself to be… the funniest guy on Earth!
Boy oh boy oh boy.

But you know what I see? I see the fake-smiley face of the 1%.

niktemadur ,

What about Cap’n Kirk reciting “Rocket Man”, then?

niktemadur ,

Yeah? Well I heard there’s some bootlegs circulating in and around The Neutral Zone. You didn’t hear it from me, but ask a Ferengi in the area, he’ll know someone who knows someone who might have a copy available.

niktemadur ,

My friend’s grandmother made something similar but with tomato sauce, back when I was a kid. I haven’t had it in decades, and I think this is my cue to do something about that.

niktemadur ,

It’s like I say: these people and their institutions turned their back on The Enlightenment, are still waist-deep in the mud of the Middle Ages, even when they have access to modern western technology, it’s still all magic ‘n’ goblins ‘n’ shit.

What's a skill that's taken for granted where you live, but is often missing in people moving there from abroad?

I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some...

niktemadur ,

He must be referring to riptides. In some spots the water hits the beach as waves. In others nearby, the water gets pulled back into the ocean, and those are the spots you need to avoid.
Then depending on the ebb and flow of the twice-daily tides, the riptides are stronger or weaker.

There are ways to see where the riptides are, yet many people from my own coastal town are oblivious to these dangers. Inland/landlocked tourists are even more oblivious and vulnerable.

niktemadur , (edited )

I mean… it IS a relentless barrage, isn’t it?
One blocks and blocks and blocks the instances, yet they just keep on comin’.

niktemadur ,

For my cat’s test results to come back negative.

niktemadur ,

THEY CAME BACK NEGATIVE!

niktemadur ,

It’s just a nasty inflammation on his shoulder, the vet thinks it’s from a tick bite, or a thorn.
Two weeks of meds, three times a day. I’m getting better at it, kitty does not resist as he did at first, it’s become a quick and painless thing to pop the pill right down his throat.

But yeah… I screwed up by forgetting to apply his Advantage flea and tick oil earlier this summer.

niktemadur ,

“Oingo Boingo” comes from an ancient Swahili dialect which means “thinking while dancing”.

Said Danny Elfman during an interview once. But in another interview I heard him saying it meant something completely different, something about hats.
Danny Elfman… mischievously unreliable narrator.

niktemadur ,

Was this in Baja California last week, just before the tropical arrived?

niktemadur ,

Just below you somebody posted that Barker was of 1/8 Native heritage.
Yet he grew up on a reservation, and even strict tribal elders should (and probably did) take into consideration Barker’s positive accomplishments for society in general, such as his campaign of awareness to spay/neuter pets to help keep the population under control humanely, and he was never afraid of using his microphone and airtime to remind his large audience every day, for decades.

What I’m saying is, even if 1/8 wasn’t technically enough, he could have made it in just like accomplished artists often receive honorary PhDs from prestigious Universities, even when they did not have (or finish) their formal education when younger.

niktemadur ,

Does anybody else find the manic performances of Jim Carrey exhausting after five minutes on the theater screen and sound system?

The same thing happened to me since the eighties with Robin Williams.
And Adam Sandler. Their manic personas fit television better for me, Carrey played much better in the short bursts of In Living Color sketches, Sandler on SNL, and while I never really got into “Mork & Mindy”, Williams always killed it in talk show appearances.
Yet their more serious cinematic performances have made for compelling cinema that I do love.

Most audiences, however, seem to disagree with me. For example, I was one of the few who saw “Punch Drunk Love” in the theater back then, and was mesmerized by it.

niktemadur ,

“Something Wild” is right up there, too.

niktemadur ,

A self-referencing metric tonne should be called a Metagram.

niktemadur ,

Run, kids! It’s the Indian Archipelago coming to get ya! RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

niktemadur ,

Your call is very important to us.

niktemadur ,

“Conservative bastion/icon”… the finest people! Just t’rrific!

niktemadur ,

Huh, seems to be one critter posting all this red pill shit. Thankfully, individual users can be blocked in Voyager/WefWef.

niktemadur ,

Hey, 1970s baseball slugger Oscar Gamble is in da house!

niktemadur ,

Back in October of '97, about ten days after Hurricane Nora had passed through the same region, I had myself a little solo road trip to the UNAM Astronomical Observatory in the Sierra De San Pedro Mártir, then down to Bahía De Los Ángeles… and had to turn back not long after the main highway junction to Bahía, even on a Ford Explorer with 4x4, the paved but destroyed road looked too chaotic and daunting to risk getting stranded alone.

Curiously enough, the dirt road to Bahía San Luis Gonzaga was in better, more passable shape, except for a widened (although already dry) creek where the road was destroyed but a few 4x4s had already created a path over the previous week.

Gonzaga is a wonderful place, the beach hotel Alfonsina’s a little rustic gem. But the place was full of flies. The hotel manager speculated the storm might have beached a whale somewhere nearby, out of sight but millions upon millions of flies had spawned and many had found their way to the sandbar beach settlement.

“The Godfather Saga” vs “The Godfather (1 and 2)”; which one do you prefer?

I recently watched the first two Godfather movies, and after a quick search I found out about the Godfather Saga (the 7-hour chronological cut). In your opinion, which way is the best to watch the first two Godfather movies? Do you prefer the 7-hour version with the additional scenes, or would you rather watch both movies...

niktemadur ,

The chronological cut was a much-hyped “special television event” spread over two nights, and that’s what I first saw from a friend who taped it on VHS.

Some years later, when I saw the original theatrical releases, I preferred them much more, as the De Niro/young Vito sequences work better in smaller segments, going back and forth to Michael in the 1950s and back, to put it all consecutively drags the pace from the very get-go.

Also, the trip to Corleone, Sicily to exact revenge on don Ciccio works best as a parallel coda to the whole Fredo, Frankie “Five Angels” and Hyman Roth outcomes. The pacing just works that way.

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