My Review Of Ready Player One -- A Fun Film, Though Also A Thin One With Some Problematic Thematic Issues.

Paizo, AI Art, and Copyright

So you may have seen that Paizo, the (unionized) tabletop roleplaying company behind Pathfinder, has decided to ban AI art and writing from both its own products and its community-created marketplaces. As you might expect, this has caused a certain amount of righteous indignation among pro-AI tech bro types. 

I think one thing that the tech bros who are screaming about Luddites and the inevitability of market forces and blah blah are completely ignoring is that we’re not talking about personal use of AI art and text - we’re talking about commercial uses of AI art and text. That means what really matters here is contracts and copyrights.

In case you haven’t heard, it is very well-settled law that art produced by non-humans cannot be copyrighted. More specifically, the U.S Copyright Office has repeatedly ruled that AI-generated pictures and comic book art cannot be copyrighted.

No matter how much you say that you “created” something by typing into a search bar and hit a button over and over again, if you don’t own the copyright to a piece of art, you can’t sell it because you don’t actually own it. Which means that Paizo isn’t going to buy it, because they can’t purchase the copyright to it as part of the contract, which means they can’t sell any products that use it.

it’s the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century.

you can only reblog this today.

Consider the god of salmon.

There is a god of salmon, somewhere in the gravel and the pebbles of the spawning redd. All salmon are aware of it as soon as they are born, in their own, private, fishy ways, and remember their god of salmon when they leave the spawning grounds and journey into the saltwaters beyond.

Theirs is the god of journeys and returnings.

Eventually, every salmon is struck by the urge to return to the holy lands of its ancestors. They pray to the god of salmon, asking for protection against bears and other predators on the journey.

“Deliver us from eagles,” the salmon pray.

All animals get their own gods, and those animal gods get their own prayers. The gods of mice and rabbits and other small, squeaking, hunted things usually get prayers along the lines of, “Oh please, oh please, oh please…”

Unlike those fickle gods, parishioners of the god of salmon get results.

Salmon get miracles.

A salmon returns to freshwater and discovers that it can breathe.

A salmon swimming against the current watches its spine curl, its teeth lengthen, sees grey scales turn red.

A salmon comes to a waterfall and discovers that it can fly…

Eventually the salmon complete their pilgrimage, and return to the holy lands of their ancestors.

Many raucous orgies are held.

Hallelujah.

And then, exhausted, the salmon die. The land flourishes as residual nutrients run through creeks and estuaries.

And the god of salmon continues, buoyed on the souls and prayers of millions of martyrs.

My review of Deep Breath, and why Madame Vastra is the best.

Well, except for Clara.

adulthood is just a never-ending cycle of So You Think You Can Wait Another Day To Do Your Laundry

classic cinema is such a great pastime cause you'll hear somebody say yeah this movie changed cinema forever and is still the standard 70 years later and you'll go into it like surely it can't be good and come out of it like wow no it is that good actually. like this every time

You are now trapped in the last movie you watched with the last person you texted. Reblog and put how screwed you are in the tags

please fucking vote

🤔🤔🤔

Zach Snyder Sandwich

I originally posted this on the cracked forums in a discussion about the new Justice League movie, in particular the very mixed reaction to Man of Steel and Zach Snyder's work in general.

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I think the things that make Snyder both loved and reviled by such a variety of people can be explained in a metaphor. Movies are like sandwiches. There are basically three layers on which movies work:

Style. The visuals, the music, the pacing, the swell of emotion, etc. This is the bread – it won’t singlehandedly save a bad sandwich/movie, nor is it absolutely necessary that it’s brilliant, but it adds a lot to the experience, and some people experience a movie primarily like this. 

Text. What the characters actually say and do, the story itself, and so forth. This is the meat, cheese, vegetables, condiments, all the substance. The actual quality and depth of the dialogue belongs here. 

Subtext. What the writer/director is actually saying under the surface, whether intentional or not. This is the nutritional content. You usually have to be looking for it to properly appreciate this level of storytelling (or sandwich making), but it makes it a richer experience. 

Most people experience movies in a mix of the first two levels. But people who really love movies and take the time to examine them tend to appreciate the third level a lot more. And different people care about different things. The film critic known only as Vern is the guy who wrote Seagalogy, which examined the movies of Steven Seagal for their themes, both individually and running, and took them seriously and critically as art. (It’s one of the best and most entertaining works of criticism I’ve ever read.) Like many Zach Snyder fans, Vern tends to be most interested in Style and Subtext, and wrote both a positive review and a later counter-post about some of the common arguments against it. The same goes for Phil Sandifer, who wrote an interesting defense of Man of Steel primarily on subtextual ground.

These levels can mix together different ways. Steven Spielberg movies are very consistent: the Style, Text, and Subtext are all doing exactly the same thing, and the result is a very smooth experience, regardless of quality (which is generally excellent).

But you don’t have to be that consistent to make it work. Take the Somewhere Over the Rainbow scene from Face/Off. The Style is beautiful and magical, while the Text is a kid watching a bunch of people getting brutally murdered. Consequently, the subtext is about how the pervasive tragedy and horror of violence affect even those who aren’t involved and may not even understand what’s happening, and the jarring contrast makes this all the more provocative.

Paul Verhoeven is a master of this sort of thing. Robocop, on the surface, is one of the most badass action flicks of the ‘80s. The text strongly resembles an unusually well-done Superhero origin story, with strong characters, memorable dialogue, and taut plotting. But the Subtext is a rich and hilarious satire of American culture that’s constantly criticizing its own story. It's a terrific movie on any of those three levels, but put together they become something truly special. It's like Judge Dredd enacting the life of Christ.

So a Spielberg Sandwich tastes different every time, but it’s always a perfectly balanced mix of ingredients, and it tastes exactly as healthy as it is (which also varies). A Verhoeven Sandwich tastes like junk food, but is surprisingly nutritious. A Michael Bay Sandwich is actually an entire bag of Oreos. The first bite is so delicious, but by halfway through you start to feel sick, by the end you actually are sick, and Heaven help you if you try a Bay marathon.

On those three levels, Zach Snyder is brilliant at Style, very clever at Subtext, but utterly clueless about Text, and ignorant about how the three fit together. Take Watchmen. It’s a gorgeously stylized realization of the comic, and all the rich themes are intact. But the violence (for example) is all wrong; one of the main themes is the awful pointlessness and tragedy of violence, and in the comic, it’s horrifying. That theme is still there, but Snyder shoots it fetishistically, Rodriguez-style, reveling in long fight scenes and beautiful splashes of blood and gore. The result is less provocative than confounding. Like, are we supposed to be having fun, or not? Similarly, the casting seems spot-on, yet the acting is incredibly uneven, because Snyder doesn’t adapt the dialogue to the rhythms that work when spoken aloud, and doesn’t adjust the flaws in the comic. Malin Ackerman got a lot of crap for her performance, but she plays Silk Spectre II perfectly as written. SS2 is a poorly-written character in the comic, spouting comic-book style dialogue.

Or Sucker Punch. It looks great, and thematically it’s an angry and brilliant condemnation of misogyny and sexism, but the characters are one-dimensional, the plotting is video-game level, and it fetishizes the characters too much for the criticism to actually stick correctly.

There’s probably no better representative of the good and bad points of Man of Steel than Jonathan Kent. Stylistically, Snyder’s vision of this small-town Kansas farmer is beautifully realized, full of gorgeous imagery and inspiring-sounding speeches about hope, all climaxing in his mythic death by tornado while saving others. And Kevin Costner pours his heart and soul into the role. But textually, he’s a stubborn jackass who tries to convince Superman to not save people. He dies because he goes back to save the dog, while telling Superman not to save him for no damn reason whatsoever. Meanwhile, the subtext is a provocative condemnation of the concept of small-town middle America being the heartland of the country; it’s turned ultra-conservative, and conservatism has degenerated into moral bankruptcy while loudly proclaiming its morality. So either the American heart is deeply corrupt, or Kansas ain’t in Kansas in more, if you catch my drift. (I’m not sure I catch my drift)

For some people, that imagery combined with Costner’s soulful performance makes the character work. For others, that subtext is intriguing enough to make it worthwhile. For the rest, it’s absolutely infuriating for obvious reasons – you hate him for being awful, and you subconsciously hate him for making the story so slow and pointlessly grim.

And, more to the point, doing all three of those together just doesn’t work. He can’t be the inspirational heart of the movie, and one of the principal antagonists, and also a satirical take on American Conservatism, while having anything remotely to do with god-like aliens punching each other over whose genocide is the morally correct one. The other problems largely fall into that.

So some people eat their Man of Steel Sandwich and go, “Man, this bread is off the hook!” (or whatever you kids are saying these days) Others say, “For something with this much junk in it, it’s surprisingly nutritious, and wrapped in a crust that’s quite exquisite.” And everyone else is like, “This is a terrible sandwich! Sure, the bread is good, but it doesn’t go with these ingredients at all! The meat is month-old bologna! The cheese is great (the cheese is Russell Crowe), but it’s only on the first half. There’s way too much lettuce, the tomatoes are bad, and the jalapenos somehow aren’t even spicy! And even if, for some insane reason, you actually want mustard, ketchup, mayo, and salsa on the same sandwich, you don’t drown the entire thing in all of them. By the end, you can’t even taste the bread!”

But hey, at least it’s not a bag of oreos.