Further to that Andrew Tate thing from the other day:
Ouch. I only dimly remember Eve 6 being a thing back in the 90s, part of the post-grunge morass of bands I couldn’t tell apart, and I’m damned if I can remember what any of their music sounds like (I haven’t looked them up on Youtube or anything), and I gather this joke was even funnier to people who recognised it as actually paraphrasing a Third Eye Blind song… but I have discovered that their bassist, Max Collins, has carved out a bit of a side career doing this sort of thing on the band’s Twitter account. Seems to have a fairly solid sense of irony about himself:
Pretty solid lefty too, by the look of things:
I rather like the cut of his jib. I don’t actually want to follow new people on Twitter any more, but I may need to make an exception here…
Andrew Tate is conceivably one of the worst people currently living, and I for one find nothing tragic about his downfall except insofar as he was as successful as he was until then and he’s accrued quite a cult in the process. (I mean, this is the guy who said quite openly that one of the main reasons for his move to Romania was because of the corruption there… shame it doesn’t appear to be working for him any more, eh.) I see no reason to waste any sadness on him, even if the recent claim he has lung cancer is indeed true; I mean, I don’t actively wish cancer upon him or anything like that, but my sympathy remains limited even so.
Anyway, despite being in jail Taint still appears to have no problem getting Internet access, cos stuff keeps popping up on his Twitter account; I presume he has a cultist on the outside posting on his behalf, but I also remember the claim being made that he wasn’t permitted visitors so I don’t know how he’s getting the word out… Either way, whoever’s doing it, him or his “street team” should probably reconsider doing it; he was already roundly mocked a few days ago for a ludicrous tweet about being visited by a ghost in his jail cell and sending it to Hell, and, well, he went above and beyond that today:
My brother in Allah, THIS is your head of hair right now:
That’s Taint in the middle, snapped a few days ago while him and his brother Tristan (on the right) were on their way to court again where their latest request for the Romanian legal system to do what they want rather than, you know, carry out the law was denied. Whatever else you can say about his hair, that is not even remotely a full head of it. That’s a thinning thatch at best, and it’s no wonder he normally opts for the full shave instead (although I think the beard works for him and makes him look less like the shitty Anton LaVey clone he normally resembles). People on Twitter are justly mocking him for this as much they did the ghost silliness.
Incidentally, this is a podcast clip from something called “Jet Talk With Tate” that Taint apparently posted last June:
So if “females” don’t care about men’s hair, why does he care so much about his? Especially since, according to Romanian news, he was demanding a hairdresser in prison? Andrew Taint a hypocrite as well as a malignant narcissist? Surely not…
Found this interesting video the other day about why 3D movies don’t “immerse” you in them, and it’s not just because you have to wear those fucking polarised glasses (which is always an additional problem if you’re already a speccy git like me); it’s also down to things like focus and the darkness of the image. Consequently, 3D movies fail to immerse the viewer, the technology gets in the way of viewer involvement. They don’t really draw us in.
My own first encounter with 3D actually came in comic form; Eagle did a bit of an experiment with it in, I think, 1983, and around the same time I remember one of the TV stations (7?) making a fuss about showing an old William Castle 3D production called Fort Ti in actual 3D. And, of course, there was the 3D revival happening in cinemas at the same time, I remember seeing Treasure of the Four Crowns and Metalstorm on the big screen when they hit Australia. (Even as a not especially critical child, though, I felt both of them were shit.) Oh, and Starchaser (which I wasn’t a big fan of either) nearer the end of the 80s boom, and Captain EO (seen at Disneyland in 1987, I recall liking it more than any of the above-mentioned), but I don’t know how much that’s a “real” film as such.
Anyway, the problem I have with the thesis that 3D isn’t immersive is that, as far as I can tell, the whole point in the first place was that 3D came to you rather than trying to draw you in:
The 1950s 3D boom began by threatening the viewer with “a lion in your lap”. 3D was about things coming off the screen. It was about the lion in your lap, the tree branch hanging over your head, the arrow being fired at you, the hand reaching out, the paddle ball being hit at you… Years ago I watched a flat print of Douglas Sirk’s only 3D film, Taza Son of Cochise, in which I could still tell what the 3D gimmick shots were meant to be even though I was watching it flat. Cos that was what 3D did, as far as I was concerned, it jumped out at you. The Bwana Devil poster made that clear 70 years ago. Protrusion was the point. It was there in the very title of the 1981 film Comin’ At Ya!. It was technology overtly showing off.
I don’t know what post-Avatar 3D films are like, admittedly, because cinemagoing is not something I do any more for various reasons. So I haven’t seen any of the newer 3D films, I only saw Avatar itself flat on DVD, and I don’t know if they approach 3D in the same way as the old ones did. I remember thinking once I’d be more interested in 3D if it were, in fact, about drawing you in, if it weren’t so much about the foreground looming out of the screen at you as it were about extending into the background, taking you into the depth of the image… but as someone notes in the comments on that video, cinema already has plenty of ways of depicting that depth. Hugo Munsterberg noticed this way back in 1916, that the paradox of the cinematic image is that it’s flat but nonetheless we perceive things in the image as three-dimensional anyway (and camera movement produces a further impression of this flat image containing three-dimensional space). It’s not really necessary, in other words.
But either way I don’t care as long as those fucking glasses are involved, cos I think they’re still the ultimate reason why 3D doesn’t immerse you (particularly the red/green ones; possibly my eyes just work strangely, but even when I read the 3D strip in Eagle the effect never quite worked for me cos the two lenses didn’t quite cancel out their respective colours properly). They’re an additional imposition on the viewer, even if you’re not a speccy git like I said I am (and if you are they’re even worse). The last 3D film I saw was a Mu-Meson Archives screening in the oughts of The Bubble from 1966, which mostly served to remind me how fucking irritating the glasses are (particularly because of the red/green issue I mentioned); they took me out of the movie for the entire time. And if the point of cinema is, as the video suggests (and I think that point is itself kind of arguable), about drawing the viewer in and involving them in what’s happening on the screen, then it seems to me the glasses will always get in the way of that more than focusing issues and image darkness will.
There was a bit of excitement recently when a Chinese spy balloon was caught flying over the US and shot down, people freaking out about China having this sort of technology as if the US itself didn’t and hasn’t been using it against other countries… apparently, though, it’s ufologists who are most concerned:
Many in the UFO community — which ranges from science-minded investigators to faith-based believers — had been hoping recent moves in Washington meant the government was finally getting ready to spill the beans on everything it has collected over decades on unexplained aerial phenomena, even if that didn’t include evidence of extraterrestrial life.
But the downing of the balloon complicates their narrative and may lead many Americans to wrongly believe that every weird thing seen in the skies has a quotidian explanation, like balloons. […]
The latest report on unexplained arial [sic] phenomena from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released in January, includes 366 newly identified incidents. Of those, 163 were attributed to balloons, 26 to drones, and six to “clutter,” such as birds, weather events or airborne debris like plastic bags.
That leaves 171 “uncharacterized and unattributed” sightings, according to the report, which notes that some of those sightings “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities.”
But everything has a quotidian explanation of some sort eventually. I have always broadly agreed with Wittgenstein at the start of the Tractatus, i.e. that a thing either is or it isn’t. However, I also maintain that the sum total of “everything that is” is probably bigger than our stricter rationalists and atheists would insist. A lot of woo-y stuff is demonstrated bullshit, fuelled by fraud and/or delusion and/or drug abuse and so forth, but at the same time I like to leave open the possibility that some of it might not be.
But the point is that ultimately everything has a rational explanation, whether or not we presently understand it, including “every weird thing in the sky”. And one day we may well encounter something that is in fact some sort of non-human artifact… I just accept that the vastest majority of these things probably are perfectly ordinary, maybe even balloons, and I don’t automatically assume that those 171 uncharacterised and unattributed sightings are
which is the mistake I think a lot of ufologists make. It’s a sort of variant of the “God of the gaps” fallacy, i.e. we don’t a scientific explanation for how something works, therefore God did it. (Maybe in this case “Greys of the gaps” would be a better name for it?)
More from the article:
Some true believers in the UFO community think the government is lying about shooting down a balloon and claim it really shot down something alien, noting the government has released footage of the shoot downs and says it can’t find the wreckage. They note the “cover story” for the Roswell incident, after all, was that it was just a weather balloon.
Stephen Bassett, known as Washington’s only dedicated UFO lobbyist and the founder of Paradigm Research Group, is not one of them.
Bassett believes the government made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence decades ago and has been inching closer to revealing it, but he said he didn’t think the U.S. would shoot at an alien craft, “first, because you can’t hit them and second, because you don’t want to piss off an interstellar civilization.”
“It’s a distraction,” he said of the Chinese spy balloon. “We were making progress in a really steady way toward disclosure and this is not that. This is nuts. I don’t want distractions like this.”
…Why couldn’t you hit an alien craft, though? I can understand the not wanting to aggravate the aliens, cos if they can build better spacecraft than us they’ve probably also got better weapons than us, but the assumption that we couldn’t hit them strikes me as peculiar… Anyway, what would these people do if the US government actually did make contact with aliens and admitted it? Would they actually believe the government then? Or would they assume they were still covering up something even bigger? What do you do when you’ve built your identity on knowing a “truth” that the government denies (aliens, September 11, pandemic, whatever) but then they do admit it?
Nearly forty years ago Ronald Reagan made a kind of stupid joke about “outlawing Russia”. Now his political descendants in Florida are trying to do exactly that to the Democratic Party… and they’re not joking, as far as it appears. The shithead introducing the bill calls it “The Ultimate Cancel Act”, which frankly illustrates the mentality at work; the idea is that any party that ever advocated for slavery at any point in history would be deregistered, which would mean all registered Democrat voters would be re-registered as independents and the politicians would, at best, have to re-organise as a new group. Oof.
The Florida Democratic Party’s response was to call this asinine bullshit a stunt, which it obviously is; this is just some dickhead trying to out-loon Ron DeSantis, because, you know, the whole “Florida Man” thing. Problem is, Florida is such an increasingly fascist basket case that I wouldn’t rule out a law like this actually succeeding there; frankly I’m surprised DeSantis didn’t think of it himself. Or maybe he has at some point but he’s held off revealing the plan, and this Ingoglia character has lifted the lid on it earlier than he should’ve done? At the moment I’m not sure we should put anything past the Republicans, especially those down southeast…
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