Month: June 2025

The Sword (1980)

To be honest I’m not au fait enough with Hong Kong cinema to really understand what the HK new wave was about, other than that it mainly heralded a new crop of rising filmmakers rather than a big stylistic shift. I do know, however, that Patrick Tam’s The Sword is widely considered one of the chief examples of it, and that I’ve wanted to rewatch it for a very long time… I remember seeing it on SBS in the late ’90s when I was discovering HK cinema for the first time, but that’s pretty much all I remembered about it other than the shot of the villain flying at the camera during the last fight, so I’ve had quite some desire to see it again. I never taped it (that I remember) at the time for some reason even though I did that with almost all the other HK films I saw on SBS back then, and in any case I haven’t had a functioning VCR for 15 years, so Eureka’s recent blu-ray edition was welcome.

Anyway, the titular sword is the Harmonious Sword, which was clearly named ironically or sarcastically; its owner fears he has a cursed object and retires from martial arts, but our anti-hero still wants to test his swordsmanship against the old boy and winds up doing so with the Harmonious Sword… and, unfortunately for both of them, someone else is after the sword as well, which lives up to its reputation for bringing ill fortune. This was Patrick Tam’s first film after a few years in TV, and quite a debut it was; perhaps not quite as heavy on the action as old-school wu xia films—though it certainly delivers with the berserk climax when that comes—and more interested in the question of whether or not being the best swordsman in China is actually something worth going after, especially given the human cost of doing so. A solid piece of work, and good to revisit after all this time.

And meanwhile…

Remember this shocking statement?

Cos if not, you apparently won’t find it on Edolf’s Twitter any more, cos he appears to have deleted it. A little bit late, cos I’m sure every man and his dog took a screenshot of it in anticipation of him doing so, and he must’ve known they would… Where this leaves the current lovefest between him and Mushroom Cock I don’t know, and I don’t see the point in him doing it now. Unless Trump made an offer/threat even he couldn’t refuse? I don’t know. The childishness just gets more and more wearing. On which note…

…cos THEY’RE not cool with each other now either, not since Stephen’s wife is now working for Edolf, and I have seen further scuttlebutt—not actually substantiated as far as I know—that she’s doing, shall we say, more than just working for him, and that the putatively scorned husband was the one who leaked the “information” about just how many drugs his wife’s putative new man was on while at DOGE (as if this were another thing we were supposed to be surprised by and we hadn’t already known for ages). As for Katie, well, it must be nice having a choice of fascists like that…

Meanwhile…

Amazing that it took until now for things to reach this point in the US, but at the same time it’s nice to see people starting to take this much of a stand against the atrocities TrumpCorp are perpetrating. Or should I say MillerCorp…

…cos this current shit is largely down to him chucking a shit fit at ICE officials the other day:

During a tense meeting with ICE officials, Trump aide Stephen Miller strongly suggested that agents target convenience stores for undocumented migrants in an effort to up their arrest tallies, according to a report in The Washington Examiner.
The outlet spoke with three current and former federal immigration officials who recounted how Miller upbraided about a dozen ICE agents for their low deportation numbers and suggested where they might find more potential marks.
“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” an official told the news outlet.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recounted.
When one official spoke up to say they were targeting “criminals” and not the “general illegal immigration population,” as “Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV,” Miller reportedly exploded, demanding, “What do you mean you’re going after criminals?”

Not that he doesn’t want them going after criminals, of course, it’s more that he wants them going after innocent people too that haven’t actually done anything wrong except, frankly, not be white. Cos that’s the ultimate crime for this cunt; his own ancestors fled pogroms in Russia 120 years ago and he probably would’ve sent even them back…

Anyway, they’ve been going after Home Depot so at least he can be happy about that much. I presume 7-11 is the next stop…

Claws out!

There is no love between Edolf and Mushroom Cock any more, to paraphrase PWEI, since the former’s tenure at DOGE officially ended a week ago… as previously noted, he’s been pretty vocal about agent Krasnov’s “big beautiful bill”, and the latter has been vocal back, and it’s escalated in the last day or two, until, to cut a mildly amusing story short:

And people are getting really excited about these as if they were great revelations that no one had ever considered until now. I mean… if you didn’t think Trump was in the Epstein files, then you haven’t been thinking about them at all. OBVIOUSLY there’s something in there he doesn’t want to become known, it’s the same reason he refuses to release his taxes despite saying he would years ago… and if he’s not in there himself (unlikely), someone else is that he has some invested interest in covering their arse. On top of which, I feel somehow like Musk’s specifically invoking the Epstein to try and throw people off the scent of himself, cos I’d be surprised somehow if he werem’t also in there…

“Geelen who? Never heard of her…”

As for Bannon entering the fray, well, Edolf already kind of admitted a few months ago that there was, in his words, a “legal grey area” when it came to him going from being a student to the world-changing business genius we all know and love today… that grey area being that he was only on a student visa in the mid-90s when he dropped out and started a business instead, which, even though student visas were less vigorously enforced back then, was still illegal nonetheless. And he’s kind of admitted that, so again, not much of a revelation. But people are, unsurprisingly, enjoying the prospect of him potentially being deported and I won’t say that I don’t enjoy it too… though I do think it’d be the most terrible mistake Drumpf could make in a presidency of terrible mistakes; as long as Musk’s drudges are still in DOGE, and they are, they’re far more of a threat to the government than it is to him… As for where all this bullshit will leave J. Divans, well, I suppose we can only wait and see…

Wait until they hear about the rest of the Internet…

Tanzania announces shutdown of X because of pornography

Tanzania has decided to block access to social media platform X because it allows pornographic content to be shared, the information minister has said.
The content was contrary to the East African state’s “laws, culture, customs, and traditions,” Jerry Silaa told a local TV station.
Tanzanians have reported that access to X has been restricted in the last two weeks after political tensions rose and the police account was hacked, but there has not yet been a total shutdown of the platform. […]
In its post, the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) said that X, then known as Twitter, faced a similar shutdown in the run-up to the 2020 election, and the “recurrence” of restrictions raised “serious concerns about the openness of digital space” in Tanzania.
The popular social audio app Clubhouse and messaging service Telegram are also inaccessible without the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN), the rights group added.
It said it was troubling that while the minister confirmed the government’s role in blocking X, government officials and public institutions continued to use the platform.
“This inconsistency confuses the public and undermines the credibility of the government’s position,” LHRC added.

Yeah, but governments don’t seem to care about consistency as a general rule. Hypocrisy of some sort is almost invariably part of the package even with “good” governments.

In his interview, Silaa linked the ban to X’s announcement last year that it would no longer block “consensually produced and distributed” adult content.
The minister was quoted as saying that X has “permitted explicit sexual material, including same-sex pornographic content” in breach of Tanzania’s online “ethics guidelines.

Ahhhhh. And why do I feel like “same-sex pornographic content” just means “showing gay people just existing normally”, not even doing The Dirty, Dirty Thing? Tanzania’s unpleasant LGBTQ+ rights record may not be as bad as Uganda’s, insofar as Tanzania won’t kill you for being gay, but that seems to be about it. Either way, I can’t wait until they discover Pornhub now…

How about “fuck no”

Dems eye a villain-to-ally arc for Musk

ELON MUSK has been the Democratic Party’s boogeyman since shortly after President DONALD TRUMP deputized him as a top adviser.
But the billionaire’s recent breaks with the GOP — Musk ripped Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” as a “disgusting abomination” on X this week and threatened to “fire all politicians” who backed it — are complicating the party’s portrayal of him as a chainsaw-wielding, bureaucracy-breaking villain.
A few Democrats are eager to welcome Musk, who said he voted for former President JOE BIDEN in 2020 and gave a tour of SpaceX to then-President BARACK OBAMA, back into the fold.
Rep. RO KHANNA (D-Calif.), who represents Silicon Valley and has known Musk for over a decade, said Democrats should “be in a dialogue” with Musk, given their shared opposition to the GOP’s megabill.
“We should ultimately be trying to convince him that the Democratic Party has more of the values that he agrees with,” Khanna said. “A commitment to science funding, a commitment to clean technology, a commitment to seeing international students like him.”
Other Democrats are warming back up to Musk as he leaves the White House and starts to break with his former boss in ways that could benefit the opposition.
“I’m a believer in redemption, and he is telling the truth about the legislation,” said Rep. RITCHIE TORRES (D-N.Y.). But, he added, Musk has “done an enormous amount of damage” and “there are Democrats who see his decimation of the federal workforce and the federal government as an unforgivable sin.”

And, well, so they SHOULD. Edolf has helped to cripple the country as much as anyone actually in government, and this bullshit about “firing all politicians” only shows what he obviously thinks he’s in a position to do despite everything. The Democrats will never get this clown on their side, and if they did it’d be for HIS benefit, not theirs, and he’ll turn on them as soon he has no further use for them. Sometimes your enemy’s enemy is just a complete cunt who’s no good for either side.

Headline of the year so far

Via.

The tech world is reeling from revelations that Builder.ai, once hailed as a $1.5 billion (£1.11 billion), ‘AI’ powerhouse, now faces scrutiny as its highly promoted artificial intelligence facade crumbles, revealing a human-powered operation behind the cutting-edge AI automation.
Builder.ai, the British no-code AI startup that once garnered acclaim for its strategic partnership with Microsoft and secured a $250 million (£184.64 million) investment led by the Qatar Investment Authority, declared Tuesday that it is initiating bankruptcy protection.
As reported by Bloomberg, the company’s dramatic decline occurred after a key lender, Viola Credit, withdrew $37 million (£27.33 million) from its accounts, leaving a mere $5 million (£3.69 million) in restricted funds and effectively paralysing operations in five nations. […]
Adding to the troubles, Linas Beliūnas, Director of the financial company Zero Hash, recently exposed that Builder.ai lacked true AI, instead utilising a group of Indian developers who were merely pretending to be bots writing code.
‘It turns out the company had no AI and instead was just a group of Indian developers pretending to write code as AI,’ he wrote in a LinkedIn post. Beliūnas also highlights that Duggal reportedly presented false revenue figures to investors. Remarkably, the company managed to sustain this deception for eight years.

Wasn’t there some other big company recently that was found to be running a surprisingly human “AI” service? I forget who, and perhaps I misremember something, but I’m fairly sure this mob haven’t been the first to get caught doing this shit… whatever, full marks to whoever came up with the headline, beautiful thing that it is.