Month: September 2024

Exploiting!

As is its wont, Youtube proposed this video for me:

I don’t believe I’ve heard of 6 of these films (the Child’s Play remake being the one I have), and certainly haven’t seen any of them either; the other exception is Street Trash, the only one of them not made this century, which I recall liking a lot more than our host, Hannah, one of whose main problems with it is that it’s… exploitation. I mean, sure, the film is fucking grotesque—one of its key scenes features a severed penis being tossed around like a football and kept away from its erstwhile owner—but exploitation? Well, again, sure, most horror films are on some level. For example, whatever points George Romero may have been trying to make about consumerism and so forth in Dawn of the Dead, we all know it was the violence and gore most people were there for. Horror has, after all, been one of the most reliable forms of exploitation cinema for decades, an easy way into filmmaking and all of that.

I find Hannah’s statement that she “wouldn’t willingly sit down and watch an exploitation movie” a little curious, therefore, especially since the next film she brings up, Nutcracker Massacre, looks like the absolute embodiment of that sort of thing. One of the executive producers has nearly 180 released films to his credit since just *2011* (and more than 40 waiting to come out), including that hideous-looking Winnie the Pooh slasher… he looks like he’ll tackle anything he thinks will make money, including westerns and Christian films (!), but the majority of his producer credits appear to be unspeakably shitty horror and action ripoffs (one of the latter is a ninja movie that, per IMDB, took a total of eleven hours to make and whose third-billed star, Danny Glover, only did the film because he owed the director some favour and earned only $37 for eighteen minutes‘ work. That’s 18 minutes on set, not on screen). And the director, Becca Hirani, looks frankly the same, not as many credits as such but some of the titles (anyone for Exorcist Vengeance? What about Witches of Amityville Academy? Pet Graveyard… no?) look like the same sort of dogshit.

So Hannah says she wouldn’t set out to watch an exploitation film, but I presume she willingly watched Nutcracker Massacre and no one forced her to do it? I don’t know. I don’t wish to be mean or anything, cos she at least gives reasons beyond just “ugh, this sucks”—indeed, she actually likes one of the films she brings up, just not enough to rewatch it—and I can certainly respect her choice not to support films where some of the people involved (like Ron Jeremy, alluded to in another video she’s made) have done worse things than just being in these movies. I disagree with her on Slaxx, which she features in yet another video on this theme, I liked it a lot more than she did whatever its faults (I can’t not respect a film about a possessed pair of jeans where the jeans get their own dance number), but I acknowledge that it does require a particular sense of humour not everyone has. I just find something a bit perplexing about her evident distinction between horror and exploitation, not exactly a big deal obviously but for some reason it’s moved me to write this gibberish that no one else probably cares about…

What’s he fucking up in there

Twitter’s gone transparent! And the numbers are… well, they are.

Today, X released the company’s first transparency report since Elon Musk bought the company, formerly Twitter, in 2022.
Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter would release transparency reports every six months.These largely covered the same ground as the new X report, giving specific numbers for takedowns, government requests for information, and content removals, as well as data about which content was reported and, in some cases, removed for violating policies. The last transparency report available from Twitter covered the second half of 2021 and was 50 pages long. (X’s is a shorter 15 pages, but requests from governments are also listed elsewhere on the company’s website and have been consistently updated to remain in compliance with various government orders.) […]
While some numbers remain seemingly consistent across the reports—reports of abuse and harassment are, somewhat predictably, high—in other areas, there’s a stark difference. For instance, in the 2021 report, accounts reported for hateful content accounted for nearly half of all reports, and 1 million of the 4.3 million accounts actioned. […] In the new X report, the company says it has taken action on only 2,361 accounts for posting hateful content.
But this may be due to the fact that X’s policies have changed since it was Twitter, which Theodora Skeadas, a former member of Twitter’s public policy team who helped put together its Moderation Research Consortium, says might change the way the numbers look in a transparency report. For instance, last year the company changed its policies on hate speech, which previously covered misgendering and deadnaming, and rolled back its rules around Covid-19 misinformation in November of 2022.
“As certain policies have been modified, some content is no longer violative. So if you’re looking at changes in the quality of experience, that might be hard to capture in a transparency report,” she says.

This is what it looks like when the new owner of a public forum fires most of the people responsible for ensuring the safety of said public forum, and cosies up to the far-right shits it had previously correctly banned. Not that we didn’t know things at whatsitsname weren’t worse than they used, but now have some concrete idea of how bad. And the other recent news about Oolong neutering the block function on Twitter doesn’t make the place any more attractive, does it.

Proving the point…

Spotted on Twatter:

And yeah, a remarkable number of the BT’s FB commenters do seem to have been more bothered about the erstwhile Fraser Island being given a new “woke” (i.e. indigenous traditional) name than the whale’s corpse being, you know, poorly treated. This was the case also in the comments of the tweet where I found this. Incidentally, there was another humpback spotted in distress in the same location after this (though at least this one had a happy ending cos the whale freed itself) and the Brisbane Times locked comments on the Facebook post before anyone could make any. I guess they learned a lesson from the previous one…

Logical… I suppose

Swiss Government Says Assisted Suicide Capsule Does Not Meet Safety Standards

I mean… if you want the most mirth-inducing headline of the day, this is almost certainly it, but the Swiss government isn’t laughing:

Killing yourself is not known to be a particularly safe or well-regulated practice but in Switzerland, it’s legal, under certain conditions. Unfortunately, people who want to end their lives via medically-induced suicide near the snowy Alps have to do it the right way. Creators of a euthanasia vessel learned that the hard way this week when the first known use of the device ended in multiple arrests and claims from government officials that it had violated government safety regulations.
The Sarco pod—a 3D-printed capsule that releases nitrous gas at the click of a button—is the creation of a group calling itself The Last Resort. The group, which claims to be made up of “a small international collective of human rights advocates (with a law, science, medicine and healthcare background),” says its mission is to “diversify (and improve) the assisted dying process in Switzerland.” The Sarco pod is designed to put its occupant to sleep in a matter of seconds via the nitrous gas. The gas then swiftly lowers the oxygen levels in the pod until the person expires. The whole process is said to take a matter of minutes. […]
The Sarco pod was originally given legal approval for public use in Switzerland way back in 2021, but since then controversy has dogged the device. It was used for the first time on Monday, when an American woman reportedly ended her own life in a rural area near the German border. The Last Resort announced the death in a short post on its website, and Nitschke said via social media that the woman’s death had been “an idyllic, peaceful death in a Swiss forest.”
While that may be true, the first use of the device seems to have been a total disaster for everybody else involved. As of Monday, multiple people have been arrested in connection to the woman’s death The Guardian reports, noting that a local prosecutor’s office had “opened an investigation into suspected incitement and aiding and abetting of suicide.” It isn’t yet totally clear who was arrested.

Slightly puzzled by the aiding and abetting bit if suicide is legal in die Schweiz, unless doing it this particular way is the problem. I don’t know. The safety regulations thing feels a bit odd too; if the whole purpose of the device is that it kills you, I’m not sure how you regulate it to be safe. How do you test if it’s unsafe? (And for that matter, how do you prove it works?) The thing that strikes me, though, is that Phil Nitschke invented this thing in 2017 but it’s taken until now for someone to actually use it. I don’t know what if anything that indicates, other than that people aren’t rushing to use it…

Reel around the fuckwit

Morrissey’s latest hissy fit in his never-ending battle against Johnny Marr took a kind of hilarious twist in the last few days… following Marr’s recent “statement” about the possibility of a Smiths reunion (said statement, you may recall, having been a photo of Nigel Farage in response to someone speculating on Twitter), Morrissey couldn’t resist escalating things by claiming Marr had more or less nicked the Smiths’ band name trademark:

On Sunday night, a statement written on Morrissey’s behalf titled “THE PLOT THICKENS” was posted to his website claiming Marr has “successfully applied for 100% trademark rights / Intellectual Property ownership of The Smiths name.”
“His application has been accepted on whatever oaths or proclamations he has put forward,” it continues. “This action was done without any consultation to Morrissey, and without allowing Morrissey the standard opportunity of ‘objection.’ Amongst many other things, this means that Marr can now tour as The Smiths using the vocalist of his choice, and it also prohibits Morrissey from using the name whilst also denying Morrissey considerable financial livelihood. Morrissey alone created the musical unit name ‘The Smiths’ in May 1982.”

All of which is interesting, obviously, but Marr responded with receipts to the contrary. According to him and the paperwork he provided, Marr discovered that no one in the band actually owned the trademark—apparently some unnamed third party had tried to make a claim for it, which was how he found out—so he contacted Steven Patrick about it; when the latter failed to respond, Marr acquired the trademark to make sure the aforementioned third party didn’t… on top of which Marr agreed to sign some document back at the start of this year that would actually give Morrissey joint ownership, but for reasons best known to himself (probably because he doesn’t want to share) the latter hasn’t signed on the dotted line yet. As for Marr touring as The Smiths with a new vocalist… I think that if he were going to do that, he would already have done it, given that he’s evidently had the trademark since 2018. And frankly I suspect Morrissey would be more likely to tour under that name with a bunch of ringers…

Anyway, the latest development is that now Morrissey has fired his management for reasons not yet stated, but presumably because it’s their fault he’s such a thunderchud and they had no idea how to stop him from behaving like his own stupid self. They had a client and then they were looking for a client, and heaven knows they’re probably glad to be shot of him now…

Indeed you shouldn’t

‘I shouldn’t have listened to those around me’: Janet Jackson on Michael, motherhood and how she’s taking back control

I wonder where she stands on the forthcoming election. After all, I say, America could be on the verge of voting in its first black female president, Kamala Harris.
“Well, you know what they supposedly said?” she asks me. “She’s not black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian.”
She looks at me expectantly, perhaps assuming that I have Indian heritage.
“Well, she’s both,” I offer.
“Her father’s white. That’s what I was told. I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days,” she coughs. “I was told that they discovered her father was white.”
I’m floored at this point. It’s well known that Harris’s father is a Jamaican economist, a Stanford professor who split from her Indian mother when she was five. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” Harris wrote in her book The Truths We Hold.
The people who are most vocal in questioning the facts of Harris’s identity tend to be hardcore QAnon-adjacent, Trump-loving conspiracy theorists. I don’t think Jackson falls into that camp, but I do wonder what the algorithms are serving her.

Poor Janet Jackson. Lost one of her big brothers recently, apparently lost her brain at some point too. This comes from a Guardian article obviously intended to celebrate an impending comeback, but… well, it’s become notable now mostly for this exchange. You may notice the URL has certain differences to the article headline quoted here, as if they were trying to not highlight that detail or something, but too late… I mean, with all due respect to her, one of her brothers was this guy. You’re not really the ideal person to be accusing a black woman of not actually being black, Janet…