well then let’s make them worse so they appear even more worse

the real question is when the marshall service starts doing their actual job

they forget because the corporations pay for propaganda to tell them it’s impossible

wait is that not how everyone does it 😂

microsoft pissed away all the brand recognition it ever had and turned it into teams. in 2020 it was poised to be the most important technology there was, but having received no updates in years, it was effectively already dead

This is a scenario where a single node VPN would reduce, not increase OP’s security stance. You do have to worry about NK hackers breaching your services because they’re all exposed through the single node VPN server. Same attack surface, less knowledge needed to hit the target with the payload.

VPNs are not a panacea by any stretch of the imagination. they are good for certain use cases but from OP’s description they would do next to nothing

yup, which is legit what rian johnson is saying here. the studios aren’t setting up movies to succeed for their creators because the studios make way more money fror streaming

I thought about it, but I didn’t see it so I didn’t feel qualified to list it. In a lot of ways we exist in a golden age of weird and interesting movies because we’re all so exhausted of safe movies meant for the lowest common denominator, but the hard part is finding out about those movies as they come out because movie promotion and distribution is so broken. The most common way for a movie to get promotion is a trailer in front of another movie. But we’re not really going to the movies anymore as a society because we’re tired of safe common denominator movies, but since we’re not going to the movies anymore, the studio system is leaning HARDER into safe movies they know will get some return and aren’t spending money promoting the weird shit because they don’t even know if we’ll watch the weird shit.

I’d love a studio to gamble everything on promoting a weird movie on network TV, the radio, and on billboards (the most effective forms of promotion) to reach people who want to see new interesting things but just don’t know what new interesting things are going on. I really think at this point movie execs fundamentally misunderstand the movie landscape in a post Avengers: Endgame world

It’s that platform juggling that rankles me about this streaming system, and the constant price hikes of the streaming services themselves, as well as the fact that sometimes as part of the juggling something’s just not available on the evening you and your partner want to watch something you liked. It’s the type of shit that has me shopping for a bluray player because WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING AROUND HERE, JUST LET ME OWN AND ENJOY THE MOVIES I LIKE FUCK

Their union fought extremely hard to get distribution shares from box office runs in the 00s and its still part of their collective contract. It’s an extremely meager share, but it’s still where their financial stability comes from. Yeah there’s more jobs available if more shovel movies in production all the time, but that doesn’t get them more stability, it aligns them closer to day laborers. The IATSE Local 44 (who most of hollywood’s studios’ workers of this variety are represented by) are expected to strike in 2027 because they don’t get as much from streaming films as box office films.

There’s so many good films that came out in the last 10 years that are to this day hard to find on streaming because they don’t fit into the Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+ model of “shut your brain off and shut the fuck up about the economy”

• Parasite
• I, Tonya
• Get Out
• BlacKkKlansman
• Sorry to Bother You (in bold because this is one of the most important films of the last 10 years, and no one fucking talks about it)
• David Byrne’s American Utopia (yes, I’m putting two Spike Lee joints on my list, IT’S MY LIST)
• Furiosa (WHY DID EVERYONE SLEEP ON THIS ONE!? IT’S ALL THE MAD MAX THINGS WE ALL LIKE AND IT HAS SOMETHING TO SAY I FEEL LIKE I’M GOING CRAZY)
• The Boy and the Heron
• Godzilla Minus One
• The Fabelmans (This one is incredible. All y’all let Steven Spielberg down. This movie has EVERYTHING that he’s all about and it’s a heartfelt introspection into who he is as a director, what his influences are, and why it’s important to make media about how Nazis suck)
• RRR
• Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse & Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
• Everything Everywhere All at Once

Some of these are very easy to find because they were too popular to be ignored, but some of these I saw in a cinema, and then that was it. I need to either wait for an independent theater to decide they want to rent a reel for a weekend for 2 screenings, or to save up $25 to buy the movie outright because it’s not streaming anywhere.

Honestly putting together this list made me feel like I’m actually going crazy a little bit. There’s been so many masterpieces in the last 10 years. To the extent that I left an entire Mad Max film off my list, and the one I left off is the one everyone likes.

The problem isn’t that no good movies are coming out. The problem is the studio system and the streaming services don’t promote the creative and innovative movies. They don’t fit into the overall system of propaganda that our media landscape is. Particularly any Boots Riley or Spike Lee film is going to be made to be seen by people who already know they’re generational directors because the studios expressly don’t want you to think about how America exploits Black art. If you did that you might do something about it, and that would disrupt the money streams.

Not trying to insult. Just saying Rian Johnson saying he would like it if his movie production staff were paid, and you telling him to go fuck himself, and you perceive everyone you interact with as rude might be related and indicative that you are abrasive to interact with. I’m willing to be wrong, but take it into consideration. Because Rian Johnson isn’t talking about you. He’s not telling you he need you to go to the cinema. But you sure took it like that, which is odd

it also benefits the technoligarchs if they strip any connection we have to eachother, culturally. it’s better for them if we get in and out of the theater without discussing what the propaganda meant to us. it helps them create an environment where we all live isolated in a media bubble all our own. there we’re more easily manipulated. the most right wing podcasts like the joe rogan experience being spotify exclusive isn’t a wreckless thing from spotify. it’s planned and on purpose. first they isolate your media pipeline, then they make their pool of content more right wing than anyone else’s, then they ensure the people hooked on the jre can’t go anywhere else for it where they’d encounter other media outside their understanding of the world,

where the people who made the movie get paid for their labor get paid for their work. he’s not even saying a theater is the only place he wants his film seen. he’s saying he wants his movie in cinemas for as long as it’s viable there. knives out 3 would still come to streaming. you’d just have to wait a couple more weeks to see it. it’s a minor inconvenience for you, but for a second line gaffer, or for a craft services worker, the cinema time might be their entire livelihood for the year.

if you think everyone is rude in a place you go, and this is the amount of effort you’re willing to put in to understanding what’s going on and what people are saying, i think it’s very possible that the reason is because you are abrasive to interact with

yup. that’s very similar to my stance

Phones used to be small enough to fit in your pocket, had features that made them useful, and came in a variety of form factors (remember sliding keyboards!?). This is not the future we were promised or the future that we wanted. Today every phone is a rectangular slab that most people can’t reach from the bottom all the way to the top with their thumbs. They are made flimsy so that you must buy a case to entomb your phone in if you want it to last. They have weird bulbous protrusions like google’s camera bar and apple’s lenses so that you even have to look for a case that makes the device ergonomic to have in your hand. They come with spyware you didn’t want, and battery draining features. It used to be a single charge could get your phone through a day and a half. Now they promise us batteries that will last 3+ days and deliver experiences that the battery is drained after 12 hours.

Smartphones are not for us. They are tools of the oppressor class. Kurt Vonnegut was terrified at the prospect of television as a mechanism for addictive control of the populace, but never could he have imagined the terrifying reality of the smartphone. William Gibson did though. He didn’t think it would be a compact rectangle that fits in our pocket, but he did think we would all become addicted to a massively online network of computers that we were never truly separated from even as we navigated the physical world. The problem is too many people read the Sprawl trilogy and thought they would be the super cool hackers that have lots of sex, failing to recognize that the main characters of those books are brutally depressed broken people who are addicted to sex, drugs, and the internet.

And I’m one to talk. I have my phone sitting here next to me. It was made by a big tech company using slave labor. It’s ensconced in a rubbery pink case to keep it from getting brutalized by the realities of my clumsiness. I have apps installed on it. I check it throughout the day. But I would get rid of it instantly if my work would provide me with a hardware MFA device. They will not because “it costs too much money.” It would cost them $60 to furnish me with one. “But that doesn’t scale to all of our employees and contractors.” We all get paid 6 figures and receive various benefits through the company. That when faced with a choice between furnishing us with MFA devices or requiring we own smartphones, they choose the latter. They even give us a $150 stipend to make sure we have a smartphone. They are spending more to make sure we have smartphones that it would cost to have MFA devices that they claim are too expensive.

Why? The only reason I can fathomably come up with is that a smartphone also keeps us shackled to our work. We can be out walking our dogs and get a notification ding on our phones and immediately be back to thinking about what we were doing at our desk. Nowhere are we free from work when we have a smartphone in our pocket. The administrative state has us at their constant beck and call. And what’s more, the law enforcement agencies love our phones, too. They have GPS, tower triangulation, and with 5G the towers are closer together and the triangulation is more precise. Never, so long as your smartphone is powered on, are you truly free from the surveillance state. And I don’t even think there’s any one person (except for maybe Peter Thiel) who likes every aspect of this system of power between the bosses, landlords, law enforcement agencies, and technocrats. I don’t even think each aspect of the system is aware of their role in the system. But nevertheless, the system of oppression and torture we live under persists to the benefit of 22 truly horrible human beings.

Manipulates you into going to the toy store and seeing that there is a boy’s section and girl’s section. And they are separate. Because there are two genders and they are in binary opposition to each other.

Marketing, propaganda, and politics is everything that you engage with all of the time. Any time you are in a group of three friends and you have to make a decision, the process by which you do it will be political in nature. The conclusion you reach will be based on the cultural context of the propaganda you were steeped in.

With this knowledge you can analyze the everyday politics and propaganda you encounter that you never even think about. You can make small changes to the politics you present and the propaganda you spread in the world. Every decision and action you take influences the people around you and all of that ripples out into the world. Something you do can inspire another person to act in a way that you would be inspired by. You may take an action and someone sees you and says “Yeah I’ve been feeling that, too! I was just too alone to say it, but now I know other people are out there”

android 4-7 were perfect. it all went to shit with Oreo, we just didn’t realize it at the time because we thought the changes were minor inconveniences we’d get used to. once md2 dropped, we should have realized we were cooked, but it was still… innocuous how small and mildly annoying the changes were. by 2020 though i had noticed: no good updates had come to my phone in almost 4 years and every update just broke something that used to work. then in 2023 google announced gemini was adding new features to the assistant. features that had slowly gotten broken but had worked back in 2015. this is our lives now. a constant churn of features being taken away and brought back

and the nature of their 1000s of experiments going at the same time isn’t methodical at all. they don’t actually know what iteration of google search was the best and most useful one. there’s no going back to what worked because at no point did they ever know what worked. the modern shitty google search is the best version we will ever get to use again.

google embedded them as a core piece of information infrastructure and then demolished themselves. now our information networks fundamentally do not work anymore