Absolute hype. I didn’t even know a Denis Villenueve Bond movie was something I needed, but fuck it, I’m down. I’ve loved every one of his movies going right back to Enemy, and I know he can do one hell of a tight thriller (Prisoners is about as perfect a crime thriller as I’ve ever seen).

His upcoming movie I’m most excited about is Rendezvous With Rama, but that is so hyper-specific to my tastes that I’m honestly starting to think Denis making movies for me personally.

Wait, hold up… Denis is making a bond movie?!

I don’t want something that was crafted to my taste. I want something so irresistibly unique that it redefines my taste.

This really is the heart of the entire AI pitch; a world where everything is comfortable and familiar and safe and easy and fucking sterile. A world where you never interact with other people because your agents do it for you. A world where you read, watch and listen to endless generic slop tuned to what your tastes were at the moment that you froze them in amber and stopped actually living. A world where digital sycophants tell you how to live and dress and act and what to order at the restaurant so that your mind will never be troubled by a stray thought.

Fucking Christ, I need to go listen to Angine de Poitrine to get the taste of this out of my mouth.

deleted by creator

I love me some Michelle Yeoh, but yeah, I’m not really seeing anything that says it has a point to it beyond “Ooh, what if humans were the oppressed minority… How zany!!!” It’s got a real “Fox News telling you that straight white men are gonna get herded into camps” kind of vibe to it.

The Wachowski sisters are some of the most underrated filmmakers of all time. Everyone basically wrote them off as just, you know, the slow-mo kung fu people, and it’s absolutely tragic that they don’t get the respect their work deserves.

Jesus. Probably most of my media library? It’s genuinely a surprise when anything I really like is successful.

First thing that comes to mind is Blade Runner 2049. Film flopped hard, but it’s a god damn masterpiece. Absolutely perfect way to build on the ideas presented in the original, while also playing with a whole new set of notions on top of that. Gosling continues to be incredible, the soundtrack is pure magic, and Denis Villeneuve is one of the best filmmakers in the world.

My brother in Christ, this guy has apparently never met anyone in the military, period.

They’re all weirdos, all the way down.

A fucking fiver just for chips? Jesus Christ. I know I’ve been away from the UK a while but that still seems crazy.

Uh… No? 10% of category A and 10% of category B is still 10% of both categories together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKcNyMBw818

As the man said, “I helped her out of a jam I guess.” Now I wouldn’t exactly say that I “used a little too much force”, but I sure did over-achieve on the whole helping a stranger out thing.

Anyway, we’ve been married for five years now.

For anyone who reads this kind of stuff and gets worried (as if we don’t have enough real problems to worry about right now), let’s be absolutely clear:

1. NATO is not attempting to isolate Kaliningrad and never has been. This is posturing aimed at a non-existent threat.
2. Putin has been throwing around nuclear threats for years now, along with all kinds of other threats of escalation, because he knows they rapidly get traction in Western media. None of his “red lines” have ever amounted to anything yet, and none of them ever will, because…
3. Putin’s only goal is his own survival, and there is absolutely no version of starting a war with NATO - especially a nuclear war - that he personally survives. Russia fires one nuke, Moscow gets deleted. It’s a matter of dispersion. NATO is an alliance, there’s no one single command center. But there’s only one Russia. At a fundamental level there is genuinely zero chance that he will follow through on this threat.

This doesn’t mean that Russia isn’t a threat. Here’s what they’re actually going to do; they’re going to try to break up NATO. If Putin can do that, he’s no longer facing an alliance, he’s facing a weakened collection of European states that can individually be bullied into submission. Smaller countries like the Baltics can be absorbed, more powerful nations like Germany can be forced out of or into Russia’s sphere of influence as fits Putin’s purposes.

This threat you’re reading about here? It’s a part of that plan. Russia announces that they’re being “forced” to escalate in response to completely imagined provocations by NATO. Meanwhile their troll farms spread “NATO is Western Imperialism” and “NATO are just leeching off of us” propaganda online (the former for the left, the latter for the right). Credulous westerners hear that NATO is provoking Russia into nuclear war and think “Oh my God why are we even in this alliance?”

That’s the game he’s playing. And it’s going to get worse. There are going to be more direct provocations, from Russia, aimed at testing just how committed the alliance is to defending it’s weakest members. He’ll try to separate the little guys from the herd and pick them off, while eroding the major players trust in each other.

That’s the real danger. Not that Putin is going to go nuclear over a threat to Kaliningrad that he made up.

Gotcha. Totally fair answer. I’ll try to look into it more myself.

I guess that still just sounds like an insurgency to me? Sorry, I’m not arguing with you or doubting you, just clarifying that none of what you’ve said really conveys what’s new or unique about the situation.

I mean, you don’t owe me shit, if it’s too much to get into or whatever you’re free to just tell me to fuck off. I’m genuinely curious about what you’re seeing that’s different here, but it’s not not my place to make any demands of your time if you’re not looking to get into it.

I appreciate the reply either way.

I’d actually be interested in hearing you elaborate on that. What’s going on in Myanmar specifically that’s different from previous conflicts?

Signed

The part that really upsets the rest of us is that after discovering he was, in fact, absolutely terrible at the job you all decided to give him a second try.

It’s like you rehired the guy who took a shit in the ice cream machine because he thought it was a toilet and then stole all the cash from the register.

Exactly. He cannot grasp the idea of the public trust. In his blind that’s his money, he stole it so it’s his to do what he wants with.

Never mind that actual tariff revenues are a tiny fraction of the 1.3Tn this deranged bribe scheme would cost.

I don’t debate fascists. But for the benefit of anyone else who happens to read this far, overpopulation is a fascist myth propagated by people who, for some reason, never want to talk about exactly which people need to die in order for the rest of us to live.

The reality is that a) human population is already on a trajectory towards a stable equilibrium, and b) the Earth provides more than enough resources for all of humanity. We’ve never had a problem with sufficiency, we have only ever had a problem with distribution and waste. If we built our societies around the idea of giving people what they need, instead of on the notion of how hoarding and controlling resources can enrich a few, no one would ever go hungry or without shelter or medicine or anything else they require.

I’m on mobile right now, but I’ll try to provide some links later for anyone who is interested in learning more about this.