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- 6 yr. ago
- Posts
- 13
- Comments
- 524
- Joined
- 6 yr. ago
This dreadful country is bad enough without being further isolated on it. Same energy:
- Jump
Am I the only person who is terrified by Jared Kushner and the Saudi Arabian royal family buying EA?
I agree and I think that's the most likely outcome. I just was continuing on from the previous comments that if there's a cultural control over profit aspect to this as there has been in some of the other media spaces (social, news) it'd seem an obvious target. Generally though, especially with the majority coming from the Saudi investment fund, I think the motive is just just profitable assets and more soft power in sports.
- Jump
Am I the only person who is terrified by Jared Kushner and the Saudi Arabian royal family buying EA?
Agreed. I still wasn't convinced we'd actually see a new proper Mass Effect, never mind yet another Dragon Age, even before this rumor and then confirmation of a buyout.
But yeah, the Sims seems like the obvious target if they were gonna try and meddle in studio culture and go after 'woke' output. Maxis has rightly taken some criticisms for moving too slow on representation issues in the past but they're way beyond most big studios on inclusion when it comes to race, gender, trans-inclusivity, and increasingly differently abled and medical representation. A lot of the vibe of the studio and game is also extremely utopian-corporate, ultra-tolerance, progressive-lib in a way that's probably a bigger red cape for the de-woke-business types than even something/somewhere actually more leftist.
I'd prefer the not talking pillow
The vast majority of major newspapers are also dependent on his fund to keep operating their essential for image, but unprofitable investigative units too so they'll never write anything negative about him. Bezos bought a couple of papers wholesale, but Gates realised two decades ago that you could just buy up a load-bearing pillar in hundreds of papers around the world instead.
Also, the Superbowl is an evermore international event when it comes to broadcasting. Superbowl parties and all the marketing for it is huge here in the UK compared to ten years ago or so. And South America is massive.
Also because they can be made into valuable assets for the intersection of intelligence and finance via the contrast between their public image and their behind closed doors crimes - Prince Andrew being the prime example of the last thirty years or so.
It really is, although I feel like the tide is starting to slowly turn here, especially since Elizabeth II popped her golden clogs.
Us republicans have always been a sizable but definite minority, but basically no one likes Charles, people seem sick of the drama of the various royal children & wives, and Andrew is a constant, flashing fuck you in the face of even royalist sympathisers with the absurdity, openess, and obviousness his heinous crimes and deep stupidity while remaining untouchable.
Even the fact that headlines like this one run in the tabloids semi-frequently is a noticeable change from 10-15 years ago, never mind how it was back in the 80s/90s.
Honestly, despite having played the original two back in the day when they were new, this new one is how I'm going to picture them going forwards. Not just because I never liked tank controls, but because it feels like such a natural evolution, like the way the game would have been of they had the tech at the time.
I'm kind of amazed at how good it looks too. There's nothing actually very flashy about it and obviously it's a very 'last gen' game but the smaller scope and really careful, subtle detail to the environments really sells it. Early on in the sewers I was looking around randomly after realising I'd been so focused on the water (for obvious reasons) that I hadn't really looked up, and where there was a little industrial light there were maybe four or five little moths just fluttering around each other, crowding it. The attention to detail like that, somewhere 99% of people will never look, is just great.
The randomiser thing does sound cool and I could perhaps see myself using it in the further future, but I doubt I'll be jumping in for another run once I'm done any time soon. One of the things I'm really enjoying about it is playing a bigger budget game that is a much tighter, busy parent friendly experience and I'll actually probably finish the same week or two that I start it.
There's so few of those these days. Yet the weird thing about this is that I always think I've been playing for longer than I have. Not in a bad way, but in an engrossed kind of way. Each time I think, oops I've been doing this forever I bet it's after midnight already, I find a typewriter to save and discover I've only been playing for an hour instead of the two or three I've assumed. I'm not sure whether it's an engrossing atmosphere thing, a pacing thing, the steady but simple pace of progress or what. It's a strange sensation but very liberating when you're old and busy.
No worries. If you get around to watching some of them I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on them. Some of these I know backwards and others I haven't seen in like 10-20 years.
I've had some time off this week and whether it's just the spooky season looming or the fact that I never played it when picking it up cheap years ago, I've been playing through Resident Evil 2 Remake and really enjoying it. Admittedly I'm playing on a low enough difficulty to not worry too much about saves, ammo conservation etc, but that's letting me just soak up the atmosphere, small details, and ghost-train vibes of it when it does actually manage to surprise or challenge me. It's a great modern remake of a classic that I almost have more nostalgia than actual memory of at this point.
On the other end of the scale, I've been playing a bit of the new Skate with extended younger family members online. That core trick and control system that Skate always had is still really good and just skating around chatting (or occasionally listening to a podcast) until you find an interesting spot and then trying again and again to try and do a cool thing there or compete for the best line is still great and genuinely reminds me of what little skateboarding in my more youthful days.
The problem is everything else. It's riddled with AI garbage from board designs, to writing, to voiceovers, to dozens of "songs" all just credited to Universal Music Co instead of an artist amongst the actually otherwise pretty varied and good but much shorter soundtrack. The whole vibe is bland, corporate, and completely fucking souless. The new Stunt challenges built around ragdoll physics are obviously supposed to be a slightly silly streamer hook, but they still suck and are incredibly dull. It feels very feature incomplete too (it's Early Access but what does that even mean for a free live service game that already has founders packs and paid shops and live seasons?) even as a multiplayer sandbox too with the few things like co-op challenges that are in the game poorly implemented.
This is true, but from the looks of this one I'd guess it's a hastily snapped picture from a bystander keeping a decent distance away (the low res zoom, bad framing etc).
OK, kind of a big list incoming...
Basically any Wong Kar-Wai movie except for Blueberry Nights (his only US film) & his wuxia movies. All his movies are about his deep relationship with Hong Kong and it's history, character, and psychogeography. Usually with the help of cinematographic genius Christopher Doyle his movies are unremittingly beautiful (although not always glamorised) visions of HK. Some good ones to start with might be... -In The Mood For Love: two broken people find comfort and connection in a visually stunning 60s HK
- Chungking Express: two mirrored stories about romance in one of HK's more 'underbelly' neighbourhoods in the 90s -Fallen Angels: two thematic stories of loneliness & alienation within the criminal/underclass of HK, with a darker tone & palette but just as amazing visually as the other two
Everybody knows John Woo, especially after his successful but less brilliant Hollywood stint, but his HK classics are still genre staples for a reason...
- The Assassin is really the blueprint for his morally complex HK action hero archetype and his bombastically stunning visual & choreographic action style. Hard Boiled takes the action up a notch further and is relentlessly entertaining as 'gun-fu' movie.
- A Better Tomorrow has some more complex characters and themes, following a criminal who goes to prison and comes out to find the world and the people he knew have changed but not without new problems.
- Bullet To The Head is perhaps the most thematically and contextually interesting as it follows a group of friends all made and scarred to various degress by their experiences during the war on Vietnam and is very much a movie about the ongoing violence that the experience of war inflicts on everyone.
JohnnienTo's Election 1 & 2 are great HK gangster movies that, whilst containing bursts of brutal violence, are incredibly detailed looks at how the organised crime structure works and is influenced by the powers in society, whilst also having a good amount of satire about both the mainland and the shallowness of the West's capitalistic-driven ideas of '"democracy". All through the narrative of a Triad organisation election as the HK handover looms. Any of his 80s hero movies or 90s gangster classics are worth a watch too, but this double feature is the most interesting (and different) of his newer stuff.
Infernal Affairs is the modern HK crime epic that Scorsese just outright remade for The Departed, but honestly the original is superior in my books. It's tenser, quieter, has more depth and less Boston accents. The sequels are good too and expand the backstory and side characters, but not essential.
Mad Detective is a bold, brilliant, and very ungeneric crime movie about an apparently insane former detective, who claims he can see people's inner demons, trying to crack a case. It's very much a psychological drama wrapped up in the genre stylings of a neo-noir detective plot.
If you don't fancy more crime films (it's a lot of Hong Kong cinema in general and even more of what gets released elsewhere)...
House of 72 Tenants definitely feels old since its from the early 70s, but based on a comedic play from the 40s, but when I last saw it you still couldn't go wrong with a story of solidarity about neighbours trying to turn the tables on the villains of landlords and corrupt law enforcement.
A Simple Life is a gentle and warm slice of life intergenerational drama about an elderly former housemaid being cared for now by on of the son's of the family she worked for. It's sweet, sentimental, lightly funny, not too heavy handed, and has a fair amount of class and generational politics just beneath the surface.
For just enthusiastic embracing of cartoon fight choreography and wacky fun, Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle are both thoroughly entertaining, deeply deliberately silly early 2000s comedy watches.
While I'm not particularly big on Hong Kong horror really, there's a couple of non-generic ones that might be worth looking into.
Mr Vampire is probably the reason you have come across the myth of the Chinese hopping vampire (assuming you have) as it took an old idea and repopularised it in this 80s horror-comedy that I remember being brashy bizarrely great fun.
Stephen Chow's Out of the Dark is a genuinely comedic 90s horror where he plays a former mental patient turned ghostbuster who teams up with a little girl and some building security guards to get rid of evil spirits. It sounds a bit Ghostbusters but it's actually kind of a parody of Luc Besson's Leon: The Professional.
A double bill I was considering revisiting this October for the first time since they were new is Tales from the Dark 1 & 2 because I love horror anthologies/vignettes and whilst I remember the quality of the individual stories being uneven they're movies that are very much about Hong Kong as a city throughout the decades as much as just spooky stories.
There's almost definitely more, but I've been typing too long and it's getting late here.
I was glancing at the reviews and there appears to be a review left on the Amazon listing for the book, by his former sister in law, suggesting that maybe he was already engaging in paranoid fantasy and used a photo of her being happy he was making a recovery in some sort of negative light.
Yeah. Generally I'd say this was a silly way to do it obviously (and that's probably still the case here) but it might not be the worst idea if you don't want anything linking back to the original phone like a photo message in your chat history etc. So long as you scrub the exif/photo meta data it doesn't risk a link with the person whose phone screen the original picture is on.
Great band. Great tune.
Another very democratic European country protects it's democracy very democratically. How many is that now?
Then fucking leave.
It's awful, but I don't remember the kids that got blown up attending an Ariana Grande concert claiming it was because Britain was uniquely hateful towards Ariana Grande fans. Imagine taking an actual terrible act of violence and blaming everyone but the person who actually did it, laid dead on the ground in front of you.
Outside of Israel you literally couldn't find a more inherently pro-Zionist country (and we all know Zionist is what this person meant), so if that's not enough for you pack your fucking bags.