Month: June 2018
Believin’
This is pretty great.
The guitar part on electric violin works amazingly well. (I love electric violin.) Why the video is scrunched (wrong aspect ratio) I haven’t a clue.
Tony the beat
Tell me your best stories about getting into a fight
— Drew Magary (@drewmagary) June 3, 2018
Guy at lunch table in the third grade (maybe fourth?) who bullied everyone, but me more than most. He kept flicking peanut butter at me. I told him to stop. He flicked more and punched me in the chest. I dumped a bowl of chili on his head, slamming the bowl on his head like a cap, and kicked his chair over. He stood up and punched me so hard (he was much bigger than me, and older) that I almost blacked out.
Then his friends attacked me, too, and it did not go well for me.
But dumping the bowl of chili on his head was very pleasing and worth my bruised head and ribs and busted lip. People remembered that for years and no one recalled that I lost the fight most heinously.
That was my first lunchroom brawl.
Fuck you, Tony, wherever you are.
Stunt
The stuntwork and fight choreography in Atomic Blonde, particularly on the stair fight scene, is very much worth watching. It’s impressive and brutal and it doesn’t cut wildly to conceal anything or in an attempt to make it more exciting. It feels just like real fights feel. Most particularly, it accurately portrays — unlike really any other movie — just how incredibly exhausted you get when you’re fighting all out. There are parts of that scene where the two (or more) combatants just cannot fight anymore, though they are trying to kill one another, because they are completely drained of all energy.
That’s absolutely accurate. I’ve been in fights before that I could not even stand up at the conclusion of, though I wasn’t severely injured, because I was so enervated. I could barely move. I couldn’t even raise my arms.
The part of the scene where Charlize Theron finds a weapon, tries to stand up, and then just falls over from utter exhaustion…so perfect. I’ve done that! The thing is, you are so keyed up on adrenaline that you don’t know how done you are so it’s a shock when you can’t stand up. Whoever choreographed that scene has been in a fight before in real life, I can guarantee it. So, so good.
Semiotics
This is why I am 100% for burqa bans and (mostly) for hijab bans as well. Liberals like to pretend that symbols don’t convey meaning, don’t express an ideology, don’t have any relevance except to and for the individual . Alas, however, that is all balderedash and we live in a world of warring symbols and interpretations that tell us what sort of people to be and what sort of civilization we should uphold as an ideal and as a practice.
The reason huge majorities of people of all faiths and genders all over Europe tell pollsters they want the burqa off their streets is that it affects all modern egalitarian civic-minded human beings. It is most damaging to girls and young women, who grow up witnessing the most graphic exposure of โ not the inferiority, but the nothingness of women, every day of their lives as they walk the streets of their cities.
Yes. If the burqa only affected those who chose to be constrained by it, so be it. However, it goes well beyond that. The doctrine of neoliberalism insists we are all atomistic individuals, completely disconnected consumption units, and the liberal disavowal of societal imperatives in the name of “voluntary” enslavement and subjugation to support individual “rights” is therefore nothing but neoliberal ventriloquism.
Western societies and burqas are incompatible — and if they are not, they should be.
That is a great post, and said in few words why burqas and hijabs (etc.) are so harmful to everyone — not just those directly subjugated by them.
Republican Obama
Want to know why I utterly despise Obama and his “achievements?”
I donโt think people realize the radical damage that Obama did to the economy by bailing out the banks and not rolling back the terms of bank credit to keep housing affordable. Obama basically said, โMake housing unaffordable. Make as many junk loans as you want. Donโt worry, because Iโll stand between you and the mob with the pitchforks.โ He didnโt jail any bankers. He didnโt regulate them. He created the situation that Trump inherited. Trump has just pushed it to a further degree, with full Democratic support.
That’s pretty much why — at least one of the main reasons. I’m so impressed, though, with Obama’s skill at having people still adore him completely whom he greatly, demonstrably harmed. I’d never really understood the dynamics of abusive relationships until I witnessed that en masse.
FA Garbage Again
The problem with this is that being overweight/fat exacerbates most (all?) chronic health problems, and often makes the treatments work more poorly or not at all.
The Fat Acceptance movement harms many, many more people than it helps or will ever help. If you have a chronic illness, in almost all cases it will benefit you to not be fat. I am sorry (a little) if brute facts hurt people’s feelings, but that’s no reason to stifle them. It’s better to have feelings hurt than to allow people to believe harmful feel-good rhetorical nostrums.
Left Space
Why are leftists/liberals so against space travel and space exploration? I can’t understand it. It’s such a rabid and oddball posture about something that such a tiny, tiny part of any budget (public or private) and that has such a positive effect on the world.
Well, when a mega-asteroid kills us all, we can (accurately) blame the liberals for putting the kibosh on space programs. Or (god forbid) when we actually need to resort to geo-engineering because we are all out of other options, guess what? A lot of that is going to need to be done in space, and we’ll need the know-how to do that.
The left’s opposition to anything to do with space is just fundamentally bizarre. I can’t comprehend it no matter how much mental effort I dedicate to it.
From the jump
Woman escapes kidnapping by jumping from trunk of moving car.
What a badass. And the article is correct: any car (in the US) built post 2001 has a trunk release in the trunk. It’s usually really easy to find. Her kidnapper might not have even been aware of this fact; many people are not. The releases, I believe, all glow lightly so should be visible even when the trunk is fully closed.
Fun fact about a terrible event that I couldn’t find in the press anywhere: that car is a 2013-2018 Altima. Can’t tell the exact year because they’re all of the same generation, but I’d guess a 2016 based on the wheels.
It’s been five years
How can Windows 10 and Office 2016 bite so much ass that Office 2016 applications manage to look blurry on two different monitors of different DPIs, when theoretically the application should be scaled correctly for at least one of the monitors? How can you fail on something this goddamn hard?
In this case, it’s not just my picky eyes. It’s a pervasive and huge problem Microsoft has been unwilling to fix (even though the fix should be relatively easy) for years.
This has worked correctly on the Mac, by the way, since 2013, without any real issues.
Office 2016 is basically unusable if you have monitors with different DPIs. This is a very large number of people and increasing all the time. It’s just ridiculous in a profoundly absurd way that no one from Microsoft planned for this or worked to correct this.