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goldteeth

@ goldteeth @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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3 yr. ago

  • The Warner-Netflix Deal Is Worse Than You Think

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  • Probably not, but given the choice (term used loosely) between "ignore it at best, get rid of it at worst" and "fire the journalists and replace them with state-funded sycophants", the apathetic option suddenly seems more appealing. Obviously the preferred option is "stop letting the big companies eat all the smaller ones," but I don't see any formal crackdown on that any time soon, what with that slime mold and all.

  • The Warner-Netflix Deal Is Worse Than You Think

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  • Oh, make no mistake, it's still a bad merger. It's just that someone was going to buy Warner either way, and the main competing bid was from Paramount-Skydance with the express purpose of gutting CNN to appease the strange grayish-yellow slime mold that's been growing in the White House, because the news won't stop telling people how slimy it is. Which, of course, gives the adherents of the slime mold reason to try and turn public favor against Netflix's acquisition. Or something along those lines, I'd be lying if I said I was all the way in the loop myself. Maybe there's some other reason it's propaganda, I don't know. It does certainly seem to be echoing the same victim complex that cinemas have been playing up since COVID, but I'm not sure "theater propaganda" is really a thing.

  • The Warner-Netflix Deal Is Worse Than You Think

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  • I may be inclined to more sympathy had theaters and cable providers made any effort to stay competitive in the, what, 15 years since streaming started to take off? These guys are about to get hit by an oncoming train that they've been standing motionless in front of for a decade, have made no effort to save themselves - barring, perhaps, having Nicole Kidman politely ask the train to stop - and are now at the last possible minute begging the engineer to switch tracks, even though it would run over like a dozen other people in the process and, really, there's no guarantee the train would actually be going fast enough to hurt them beyond the word of some people that have, again, been sitting in front of an oncoming train for 15 years, one of whom is the guy in the tophat and handlebar mustache that tied all those other people to the tracks in the first place. Sorry fellas, you woulda had my condolences six years ago but now you're on your own. I'll be over here in my much cheaper boat with a five-meter-high stack of DVDs, which in this metaphor represents a five-meter-high stack of DVDs.

    Also, I can't make this fit the train metaphor, hasn't Netflix been doing more theatrical runs recently anyway? Like, as recently as last week? Am I just completely misremembering that one K-Pop movie having to add screenings because too many people bought tickets, drawing a bigger audience than the competing Disney and Dreamworks movies in the process? If anything, these guys have got to be salivating at the idea of being able to charge people $19.99 for one movie plus arbitrary processing fees and 30 minutes of unskippable preroll ads.

  • Ask me a science based question, and I'll research a good answer. Then edit your comment to make me seem like a terrible person.

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  • What can I say, I like me a big casserole.

    Shame the nephews won't be there to enjoy it...

  • "Sonny, true love is the greatest thing in the world - except for a nice MLT."

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  • Specifically, one where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato's ripe.

  • Ask me a science based question, and I'll research a good answer. Then edit your comment to make me seem like a terrible person.

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  • What's a good way to give my green bean casserole a little extra kick this holiday season?

  • TIL Howling Mad Murdock from the A-Team (1983) is also Lt. Barclay from Star Trek: TNG

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  • learned quite a bit about being a whackadoodle from playing murdock, though

  • What TV series bungled a great concept that you'd like to see tried again?

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  • You know what, I already did one but I'm gonna do another one: Lovecraft Country.

    First episode did just about everything you'd want out of a Jim Crow-era supernatural horror road trip mystery. Felt like they really had a handle on the whole "fear of the unknown and incomprehensible" vibe that you don't see done well very often, the cast had great chemistry, and the whole theme of "the real incomprehensible eldritch abomination threatening human sanity is racism" was executed flawlessly. They walked a very fine tightrope between homage and condemnation of Lovecraft's whole... deal and nailed it in one.

    And then the main mystery is resolved by the second episode and the whole thing devolves into a very uneven anthology of psychic snakes and angry ghosts and like, Nazi wizards worshipping what I think was just the regular devil and overall very known and comprehensible horrors that didn't really hold my attention for long enough to see if they even tried to tie them all together.

    Man, all I wanted was a long-form cosmic horror story wrapped in a character-driven prestige TV period drama with some biting social commentary that doesn't suck. They don't make a lot of those!

  • What TV series bungled a great concept that you'd like to see tried again?

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  • It's a show that relies a lot more on plot twists than actual plot, and they're the sort of twists that heavily recontextualize the story in such a way that everything that happened prior is rendered kinda irrelevant and thus never followed up on, which kills a lot of the narrative momentum before it even really has a chance to build. There's maybe one halfway-decent "oh shit" reveal followed by a long series of "huh?"s and a big final "where the fuck did that come from?". And by the time it's two or three twists in, anything that seemed unique about the concept gets sidelined in favor of some increasingly credibility-straining political intrigue with token sci-fi elements.

    And in general I kinda thought they did a poor job of making the spaceship feel like a spaceship, making the descendants of the Red Scare people feel like descendants of Red Scare people, and making the 1960s Space Race technology feel like 1960s Space Race technology, but in that annoying way where it's clearly not from a lack of budget, just from a lack of imagination. It's all just some very generic people with generic sci-fi technology living in a generic sci-fi city that just so happens to be shaped like a spaceship. And it's one of those shows where the main plot (term used generously) grinds to a halt every couple act breaks so everyone can fuck and backstab each other for no reason other than the characters that aren't part of the plot right now need something to do. And then the whole thing kinda just... stops.

    All in all I found the whole thing dull, generic, more than a little frustrating to watch and harder to get invested in the longer it went on. The main characters weren't all that relatable, barely likeable and not particularly memorable; the mystery at the very heart of the premise was handled in a way that made it very uncompelling, and the ending fails to justify about 70% of the story that preceded it.

  • What TV series bungled a great concept that you'd like to see tried again?

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  • There was a miniseries on the SyFy channel called "Ascension" that, ostensibly, had the premise of being a murder mystery set on a massive generation ship launched at the height of the Cold War, which sounded fun in theory. 1960s Space Race technology, generations raised on Red Scare values despite the Soviet Union being a distant memory in every sense, a bunch of already-paranoid people trapped with a murderer with safety literally decades away - seems like there's a lot of room for a story there, right? Well, if the words "miniseries on the SyFy Channel" didn't tip you off...

    They solve the murder by the end of the second episode, or at least they think they do. The subplot is nonetheless dropped entirely.

    Turns out the ship never left Earth. It's in an underground bunker. The entire thing was a ploy to trap America's greatest minds in a self-contained generational think tank and steal all the super-cool technology they invent. Which also eliminates the 1960s Space Race aesthetic because the ship is now, by design, more technologically-advanced than modern Earth, leaving... exactly none of the original hook intact.

    Except two episodes later they reveal it wasn't even that, it was actually part of a top-secret government eugenics program designed to breed telepathic super-soldiers, and the show ends with a child super-soldier using her nascent psychokinetic powers to teleport all the bad guys into space for realsies. And the real murderer is some guy we'd never even heard of working for the, again, top-secret government eugenics program, and his motives were... Either never explained, or explained after the part of the show where I stopped watching.

    So anyway, a show that actually stuck to that premise would probably make for a pretty compelling yarn.

  • The last known survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade could have made it back to Africa in an airplane.

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  • This would presumably be after teaming up with a samurai, a pirate, and a cowboy to send a fax to Abraham Lincoln.

  • I'm blue ba da ba da dee da ba dieee

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  • no, but it does pass the Smurfdel Smurf

  • Assuming direct control...

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  • nah man, if you got people in meat pods, glowing yellow psychic hologram terminals, a bay full of easy-to-steal fighters with no windows and a big slimy dude trying to punch his claws through your sternum, what you got there is a wraith hive-ship

  • Removed

    America could have avoided all of this with a functional justice system

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  • God, we were truly robbed of one of history's greatest power vacuums. That shit would've made the Death of Stalin look like a church picnic. It starts with Vance saying he should be the obvious front-runner because he was totally the pick for VP, you just gotta trust him guys, he doesn't have anything in writing because it was a secret handshake deal but he was totally gonna be the VP, ask anyone, and it ends with Ron DeSantis burying Mike Pence in cement while Nikki Haley soaks the convention center in gasoline.

  • We can beat Trump together — but there's only one way to do it

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  • I was thinking a sock full of old batteries might be cheaper if you buy in bulk.

  • Something about incentives

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  • Better close your fuckin eyes then 'cause I don't play this game

  • Alex Jones sports Hitler mustache in shocking broadcast: 'It had a wild effect on women'

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  • one brief incident in '94 notwithstanding

  • Drama!

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  • thank heavens that 21x9 bar of white noise was there or I might've become briefly aware of the concept of human mortality.

  • TIL Vatican City has a national football team

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  • Call me when they get a baseball team. I wanna see the St. Louis Cardinals square off against the Actual Cardinals.