• 2 posts
  • 12 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: August 4th, 2023
  • Whatever replaces Tenor needs to allow for more specificity in searching. If I search “lemur” and I see 3 orangutans, a chimp and a 12 gibbons, and maybe 1 actual lemur, I’m still happy to have simians, but I really needed a lemur, man. I was quite fucking specific in my search term. Had I written “monkey” but it showed me a series of apes, I wouldn’t mind that so much.

    Also, “cat on skateboard” has fuck all to do with a poorly staged video of a dog playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with a set of gaming bongos. Again, glad to see it, but where’s my skateboarding cat??

  • I had a hilarious dream just last night! Remember recently when Quentin Tarantino was talking shit about the acting skills of Paul Dano? I dreamt that Paul was in a new movie, and was acting hard, like, really giving it insane levels of energy, and after every line he delivered he’d glance at the camera with an expression of exasperation on his face, as if to say “is THAT good enough for you, ya cunt??” directly to Tarantino.

  • Some early shock/gore site discussion below, spoilered in case you don’t wanna read about such things.

    spoiler

    rotten.com - nasty website hosting bizarre and violent tableaus of human suffering, pretty tame by today’s standards though.

    steakandcheese.com - another shock site, it hosted a clip that became quite infamous, showing a Russian soldier having his throat stabbed and cut by a Chechen rebel. I feel like that clip was a rubicon for the internet; after that, things got darker and more extreme, and now you can literally find clips of people being skinned alive. But that clip for sure ruined many a childhood.

    When the internet was first introduced to me in around '97 or so, in IT class in high school, the only thing I really did was look for URLs on products around the class or in my pockets. For example, Pepsi had a website, Peperami had one too. I also created an email account on Hotmail.com, and I believe we did some chat room stuff in IRC or ICQ or one of those things.

    One day during a lunch break at the same school, I looked up porn and actually found some, although I have no memory of what the site was called. I got scared though, and closed the browser as soon as I saw nudey ladies. I’m sure the teacher checked the browsing history (something I had no idea about back then) and saw what I was looking at, but he never said anything to me about it. Legend 🫡

  • I’m sure the obvious picks are already mentioned, so I’ll try to think of some stuff that might not be well-known:

    Shane Meadows has produced 2 TV series worth watching. One is the This is England collection. It starts with This is England (2006), which is a film, then 3 miniseries (This is England '86, This is England '88 and This is England '90) that continue the story. All of it together is about as good as TV gets. Might wanna check for triggers before watching on something like doesthedogdie.com.

    He made a second miniseries called The Virtues. It’s a difficult watch at times, but it’s a masterpiece. And it’s another one you might wanna look into before watching.

    There’s a show that was very popular in the UK and Ireland back in the '90s called Cracker. It stars the late great Robbie Coltrane (you probably know him better as Hagrid from Harry Potter). He plays a psychologist who works with the police to find and interrogate various kinds of pathological killers and sex offenders. It’s really, really good. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s ever been released on anything but DVD, so you’ll be stuck with SD quality.

    Say Nothing is a recent show that does a really nice job of dealing with ‘the troubles’ in N. Ireland. It’s based on real events, the most central of which is the abduction, murder and ‘disappearing’ of a widowed mother of 10 children by the IRA. Jean McConville is one of 17 people who were disappeared in this way, and is by far the most notorious given her circumstances. The story - based on the book by Patrick Radden Keef - follows Dolours Price, a female IRA member who was a significant figure in the conflict and who was involved in Jean McConville’s abduction. One of the better shows I’ve seen generally, and probably the best bit of media on the N. Irish troubles (there’s so much junk about this place, it’s refreshing to see something half-decent for once). If you need a palate cleanser after watching it, Derry Girls should do the trick!

  • I agree about Ricky Gervais. I actually liked him in The Office, but in everything else - before and after - he is just fucking awful. Talk shows, stand-up, speeches, podcasting, he is a desperate, strained and insecure performer. When he’s telling a joke, it’s like every word has had to be pressed out of a gland with a clenched fist before the next word can be milked free; it’s clear he’s just saying the words in the correct order, and not performing it. He is never present and ‘in the moment’, and seems to be in a perpetual state of panic about his own inadequacy. If he were actually a decent person instead of whatever the fuck he has become, I wouldn’t be saying this about him. But he’s a cunt, so, yeah. His imposter syndrome (which is entirely deserved in his case) makes the media he’s in unbearable to consume.

    To see just how truly awful the man is, watch that Talking Funny documentary. It’s him, Jerry Seinfeld (the least-funny paedophile in the world), Chris Rock and Louie CK all in a room together talking about comedy. Ricky is obviously feeling the full force of his imposter syndrome throughout. It’s probably the most glaring example of what I’m talking about.

    I simply don’t get his success. Like, I can understand the success of paedophile rings, but I can’t fathom how Ricky has made it so big. One of life’s great mysteries, I guess.

  • My girlfriend-at-the-time’s dirty, dirty ass. Thought it would be like in my fantasies, where it tastes like candyfloss and smells like a Yankee candle. Nope. Shit. Just shit.

    If you’re curious, shit tastes exactly as it smells. I wish I didn’t know that. Although I’m happy that now you, too, know that.

    And she had the nerve to dump me later. I deserve a Nobel peace prize for not recoiling in horror and instead just powering through in silence like a fucking GENTLEMAN.

    On the bright side, it became a great way to ensure future partners were cognisant of the issue. I’d drop it into the usual “what was your ex like?” gossip sessions that come with new relationships. It’s like saying “please wash your various holes if I’m gonna go rooting around in them like an ant-fiending aardvark” without actually saying it. A cautionary fable from days of yore to guide the next generation.

    P.S. I’m still pro-anilingus. Just… clean the fuckin’ thing first. I don’t need to be picking dingleberries from between my teeth, thanks.

  • I think what he did was heroic. I don’t know for sure that his motives were pure, like I can’t see into his soul, or know what his relationship with Russia was before doing it, but all in all I think what he revealed had to be revealed. The NSA were untethered by any sort of oversight or accountability to the public, and they proved beyond any doubt just how completely and totally an agency loses it’s fucking mind when no one’s watching. I doubt anything changed in that regard - they’ve probably just strafed into a different shadowy part of the landscape and are continuing with new/improved tools - but it at least taught us all that, yes, the government really is both capable and motivated to spy on every bowel movement and armpit sniff you perform, whether or not you’re a suspect in a crime. The mere affirmation that this sort of thing really goes on is worth having.

  • He’s one of the greats, I agree. Plus he has no rape/sexual assault allegations or abusive behaviour on-set over a 40+ year career, so that gives him a 900% boost in my estimation.

    He plays a lot of ‘safe’ characters. That is, characters that don’t require him to dig deep into his own capacity for human depravity or whatever, and I think this gives people the impression that he’s not in the same league as your De Niros or Pacinos. But I have never watched a film of his where he didn’t completely sell the performance to me, even if the movie itself was shite. He’s content and secure enough to not need to take roles that require him flay his psyche on-screen, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I love watching those intense performances of course, but he isn’t any less a master of his craft just because he has other focuses. It’s like guitar virtuosos such as Steve Vai, who can play just about anything with superhuman levels of skill, speed and precision, versus someone like BB King, who plays stuff that a beginner guitarist could use as great training material. No one, including Steve Vai, would say BB King is a lesser guitarist or musician because his music doesn’t require 12 fingers on each hand to play. Tom Hanks is the BB King of this tortured analogy, and someone like Gary Oldman is Steve Vai. Both great, but there’s more to it than mere ‘spectacle’.

    I would love to see him do something more dark and evil, if only once. If Robin Williams can play a serial killer, and can play it well, Tom Hanks would absolutely smash that shit. Especially now that he’s an older fella; I think he could get away with a lot more without damaging his ‘brand’. I wanna see him be a serial killing, necrophilic, EVE Online-playing demonic monster.

  • 2026 is gonna be the year I finally move to Linux. I have huge concerns about many aspects of switching, but they’re being overtaken by concerns about staying with Windows. I don’t even mind if my overall user experience is a bit worse on Linux (I am trying to have reasonable expectations that it won’t be the walk in the park Linux advocates on Lemmy like to claim), I just have much more faith in its security, privacy, customisability and - most importantly - the motivations and intentions of its developers.

On the one hand, it seems obvious that they would, to ensure that the digitisation worked. On the other hand, they’d probably get through 1 customer per month if they did that. So either they just dump the material to a file and send it, or they check every 10 minutes or so and watch a few seconds, but no more than that. Does that sound about right? 🤔

I have some stuff from 30+ years ago I’d like digitised, but I don’t know how I feel about a stranger watching 9-year old me be disproportionately excited to the point of tears about my Christmas gift of a life-size cardboard cutout of Wesley Snipes that my dad almost certainly stole from the video rental store. Some memories should stay memories.