lommelun's comments

Probably something active like the Q Acoustics M20, Triangle AIO Twin, JBL 305P, or Kali Audio In-5 (though the last two are monitors so you’d need a dac/preamp of some sort).

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.

But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.

And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.

These are all undoubtedly great movies.

And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.

And 1992 is not an outlier.

In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.

In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.

In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.

And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.

In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.

I could go on.

And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.

Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.

The Wire was made within the window I was talking about. From about 1995 to about 2005.

The rest is a list of mediocrity.

So, point not made.

No. I was talking about movies. I agree that series are better, but with few exceptions I don’t think series are truly good.

> an absolute shitload of good-to-great films do come out every year.

Pick any of the last 5 years.

If there are shitloads, then you should easily be able to name 5 great films from that year.

What are they?

Note; I can easily do this for any year from let’s say 1990 to 1995, but personally I can’t for recent times. Am I just missing the quality? Maybe. Excited to see what you come up with.

I meant cinema.

I don’t watch TV, save for a few (less than 20) shows I don’t think anything truly brilliant has ever been made as a series, ever.

That said, I would agree that shows made between 2005 and today are generally better than shows between 1980 and 2015.

Though better is relative; shows with very few exceptions are junk.

They only “subvert expectations” in popular content.

First seasons and new IPs are fairly traditional and follow common writing tropes (although poorly, as if the knowledge has eroded).

It’s only when something gets popular that it gets the “updated for modern audiences” treatment.

I find this take absolutely incredible.

Take any of the last 3 years, and then let’s compare that to the past, and let’s compare what came out in e.g. 2022 and 1992.

That you think things have gotten better is one of those things that makes me lose hope for the future of humanity, because clearly we are so different that we’re perceiving completely, vastly different realities - we might as well be living in parallel universes and it’s just a perversion that we can perceive each other.

Democratized? It’s more centralized than ever.

Also, giving more projects $5m is not a victory if the cost of a proper production is $20m. It’s just an explanation for why quality is dipping.

Or following your logic and “hundreds of other films”, it seems like you’re under the impression that a good film can be made with $100k.

I’m finding more blind spots and jumps to conclusions in your comment than in the admittedly poorly written article.

Give that, it doesn’t surprise me that you’re one of the ones who are looking at what’s being served as tv shows and actually enjoying it.

If you ask me, “the golden age of TV” is a meme based on a handful of shows, all of them made at the onset of the new economy when the nascent methodologies of the new economy led to authors having outsized influence for a short period of time.

There’s something seriously brainwashed about looking at what’s at offer today and still concluding that because the Sopranos exists we’re still producing good content.

I will give you the enjoyable b-movies, but also remind you that those have existed always, and often in greater numbers.

You’re supposed to say “we should mandate all producers to only make organic food to achieve equality” and then only once you’re in power do you quietly ban organic food because your goal is impossible and it’s preferable to your ideology that more people suffer than to accept any kind of inequality. Especially if the right kind of people suffer. The ones who had it too good for too long.

But you’re not actually supposed to say the quiet part out loud. For the revolution to succeed it’s important that the misery, hatred, and sadism that spring from a constant and torturous sense of injustice is hidden behind a smile, otherwise people might resist the takeover, and then how will people like you ever get powerful enough to ban healthy food for the greater good?

If a massive industry was baffled as to how buildings could possibly be full, pointing out the reason is very informative. Just because the reason isn’t exhaustive, doesn’t mean that it isn’t the best reason we have.

There are massive incentives to keep looking for explanations that are politically convenient, like “it is absolutely not your fault at all that you are fat, we finally found the cause and it’s this environmental factor / pollutant”. Great, I hope we get there, but in the mean while it doesn’t seem crazy to suggest that people are getting fat because high calory foods, alcohol, and snacks have become common, at the same time as everything became automated and lives became mostly sedentary.

No one is going to research the correlation between obesity, IQ and impulse control, or publish that “people are getting fat because modern humans are weak willed comfort addicts unable to deal with even the slightest discomfort like not being completely stuffed 24/7”.

Maybe it is just that people are eating more calories than they burn, and that’s it? Maybe we should be teaching people that that should eat 1500 calories per day, and if you’re still hungry then deal with it, it’s a slight discomfort that you’ll get used to over a few weeks, not some insurmountable urge that is impossible to control. Maybe people are fat because we’ve made the concept of personal responsibility into a taboo?

“ sit on the couch watching TV and you're spending almost the same amount of calories as a walking person.”

Some quick googling tells me that walking burns 4x as many calories as sitting. Or maybe I missed your point and you were just claiming that the stated fact is as surprising as this fact would have been had it been true?

For a 22 year old that’s very impressive if true.

Well it's not really a question of what you should do, it was more a comment on what the ideal solution would be.

Is your platform as large as Twitter, is it one of the main communication platforms in society, does it allow users to wield social and political influence? Is it a proverbial public square?

If so, then in my view a wise and emotionally mature person would elect not to censor opinions, realizing that there are more important things at stake than hurt feelings.

Of course I might be wrong when claiming that censoring opinions and mandating a specific morality will lead to more conflict (see another comment I made in this thread for more on that). Maybe it won't. I guess we'll find out in the next decade or so.

People are upset because at the core of this debate lies a moral conflict between deontologists and utilitarians, where currently utilitarians are in control and wielding power with complete disregard for the fact that the majority are of different ethical persuasions.

So it’s more a question of how to maintain fair platforms, than it is of free speech. The free speech debate will likely be the dominant topic of the coming decade yet no one actually wants unmoderated public spaces. We just can’t agree to the terms. If this debate really was just about the rights of a few fringe groups of extremists, rather than perceived bias in moderation, it wouldn’t be popular.

You can solve this conflict simply by setting clear rules that everyone must abide by. Rules you’d assume any rational person would agree to. Let’s say: On public platforms you’re not allowed to target any individual or group with attacks. But then you’d also have to ban people who say that conservatives are evil. Which we both know is never going to happen - as just the suggestion would lead to political deadlock. The utilitarians believe in catharsis through the expression of justified hate and anger; no, we weed rules that censor not any division, but unjustified division. We need not rules that protect personal dignity, but the dignity of some over others. In Reddit’s term of service they ban abuse of minority groups; specifically because they don’t want to ban abuse of majority groups. The ministeries of truth of our time are staffed by blue haired ideological activists with a social engineering agenda who love science but only as longs as it’s produced by a faculty that’s struggling with a falsifiability crisis.

If you’re running the communications platforms at the heart of our modern societies you must either govern it from the center, or accept that your subtle guidance however well intentioned is driving us towards ever increasing conflict. You have to govern from the center even though your personal ideology tells you that everything is relative, that truths are only meaningful in context, and that ethics is a function of cause and effect. Because to people who rather view ethics as a categorical imperative _you_ are the one who’s is driving division and pushing us towards disaster. And regardless of who’s right or wrong; it’s arrogant and dangerous to allow yourself to become dogmatic.

Would I be ok with suppressing speech if I was an omnipotent being who knew the future?

Probably yes.

I agree with OP, opinions shouldn’t be censored, no matter how much we disagree with them.

Anything that’s not harassment, a direct threat or direct call to violence should be allowed.

To your example, if someone attacks you personally then that would count as harassment and be moderated out.

1) Towards the end of a production cycle mostly laborious work is remaining that doesn’t require as much creativity to produce. Not so much programmers working on an engine, but rather art teams working on finishing assets. For this kind of work you do get more output per hour worked, even if people are overworked. Some companies (many companies unfortunately) do plan for this crunch early on.

2) For a multitude of reasons, usually related to biz dev and budgeting, release windows are set way ahead of time. Then a marketing campaign starts months in advance to build up to release. A marketing campaign is extremely costly, and loses much of its effectiveness if it’s interrupted. it might be impossible to build up the same level of attention a second time, and most companies aren’t willing or can’t afford to take that chance.

3) The work remaining that does require creativity, responding to QA demands, porting, redesigns, bug fixing, etc ends up in a crunch by necessity due to 2).