erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
Cross-posted from /r/rational:
Fall (2022 Film): When two best friends who climb a 2,000-foot-tall television broadcasting tower become stranded at the top, it is up to them to think of a way out.
Holy shit.
When I put on Fall this afternoon, I was expecting another random Netflix movie; low-budget, second screen dialogue, ham-fisted politics, etc. But it was about to leave the platform, and I've always been a sucker for stories about characters trapped in a survival situation, so I decided to give it a chance. I was not expecting... this.
The movie begins with a trio of adrenaline junkies climbing a cliff. They consist of married couple Dan and Becky and their friend Hunter. Unfortunately, Dan has an accident and falls to his death. A year later, Becky is an alcoholic mess, still unable to deal with Dan's passing. Hunter, who has since become a YouTuber, persuades Becky to climb an abandoned television tower with her and spread Dan's ashes as a way of moving on. Inevitably, things go wrong, and the girls get stuck on top of the antenna. It is now up to them to find a way out before they succumb to thirst, hunger, exposure, wildlife, or simply fall off the edge.
Okay, so right off the bat I was impressed by the way the girls reacted to their predicament like level 1 intelligent characters. They remain calm, or at least as calm as they can realistically be under the circumstances, and they keep looking for ways out. They don't break down crying or get into emotional fights or throw down precious resources in a fit of rage to create a dramatic moment. This already makes them better than most Hollywood movies.
But what made me post this on /r/rational proper instead of the Monday Recommendation Thread is when the characters started solving problems with previously foreshadowed materials and mechanics. Not just things that were mentioned once briefly, but things that were mentioned over and over again or were given prominent focus. For example, Hunter's push-up bra is brought up early, and her huge tits take up a lot of screen time, but it is not just fanservice;
On top of that, they are fucking awesome. Hunter is great from the beginning, encouraging Becky to get out of her funk and doing crazy stunts like hanging off from the tower's platform one-handed. Once things get serious, she is the one doing risky maneuvers to increase their chances of survival, like
And then there is all the other things. The dialogue is very strong, naturalistic and witty; no second screen here. The girls had great chemistry, to the point where I kept wondering if they were going to lez out. The background shots are gorgeous, with luscious visuals from 2000 feet in the air. The film has a great sense of tension; it's basically r/SweatyPalms: The Movie. And the music was just right, from the diegetic cellphone videos to the credit sequence.
Flaws? The twist that
TL;DR: This movie is fucking awesome and you should watch it immediately before it leaves Netflix.
Other movies I have watched recently:
The Last House (2026): Again, I have a weakness for isolated survival movies. But this one was a disappointment. I couldn't take the disaster seriously (everyone is locked up inside by magic rain), a lot of the survival stuff is opaque (like the building of traps and weapons), and the ending displays the worst tendencies @KulakRevolt called out in "Hollywood Anti-Justice: The Morality of Modern Depravity". At least the CGI was decent. Only reason to watch this film is if you are into WMAF couples (with children, even!).
Labyrinth (1986): Watched this one more because it was an old fantasy movie than for any other reason. Huge letdown. The special effects mostly hold up (except the battle against the robot gate guard, which seems to happen in slow motion) but the writing is atrocious. The supernatural elements get introduced with no buildup, the protagonist is an annoying brat who does nothing to make me root for her, there are no rules which means anything can happen which means I have no reason to care what happens (at one point, the Goblin King alters his own arbitrary deadline!), etc. The most interesting thing to appear onscreen is a basic-bitch knights and knaves puzzle. Maybe if I was a tween girl who could shlick to David Bowie's enormous package I would have enjoyed it more, but I'm not.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
The Mormons are not Red Tribe. From "I Can Tolerate Anything except the Outgroup":
The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.
Does that sound like a Mormon to you?
Funny you should mention Evelyn Carnahan. I was browsing the top posts in the sub when I came across "What is 'Romance for Men?' Go Watch 'The Mummy Returns'". And my immediate reaction to that title was "this is obviously bullshit, but I'm going to take a look just to see the argument". So I started reading and... turns out, it wasn't bullshit. By the time I was finished, the guy had convinced me; The Mummy Returns is an /r/Romance_For_Men GOAT.
Well, man, don't hold out; what field was this? I'm sure there are plenty of us here that would love to hear about a career where an IQ test is the major barrier to entry!
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Dude, get a blog. Or a diary. Or a journal. Or literally anything other than dumping random vignettes about your life in the latest weekly thread. How is this not a violation of the rules?
Reddit was very much grey tribe libertarian in its early days. As late as 2012, people were voting for Ron Paul, /r/atheism was huge, etc. Back then, Reddit was a bastion of free speech, with subreddits like /r/FatPeopleHate that would not last five minutes today being allowed to operate in peace. One hundred AR-15s were engraved with the Reddit logo as part of a licensing deal, but then the New York Times did a hit piece and /r/Gunsforsale got banned.
As for WordPress, the original Heartiste blog was hosted there until 2019. Heartiste was one of the big three of the manosphere. The banning spooked Spandrell into moving elsewhere.
"Biblical Monsters" is pretty good. Same author also wrote "The Writing on the Wall", which is an incredible bit of rational horror.
I think my favorite first contact ponyfic is Message in a Bottle, which is basically Greg Egan meets John Ringo (meets Lauren Faust).
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Oh, so a total extermination class war is perfectly fine, but a total extermination race war is suddenly "Whoa, not so fast, bucko!".
Let them die. We don't need right-wing colleges, we need to destroy college as an institution. The idea that everyone should spend one fourth of their life in school is fucking mental.
From "Against Tulip Subsidies" by Scott Alexaner:
If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I don’t care.
From "You wake up on the morning on the 20th of January to find that you are now Donald Trump, on the day of your inauguration as president." by the same:
Declare War On College. Forgive all existing student loans, then refuse to give out any new ones. Prohibit the government from asking about college degree when hiring new employees, and put pressure on private industry to follow suit for any position less absolutely-requiring-of-specialized-knowledge than doctor or engineer. Increase government loans to boot camps, online courses, et cetera.
And from "A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"", idem:
War On College: As it currently exists, college is a scheme for laundering and perpetuating class advantage. You need to make the case that bogus degree requirements (eg someone without a college degree can't be a sales manager at X big company, but somebody with any degree, even Art History or Literature, can) are blatantly classist. Your stretch goal should be to ban discrimination based on college degree status. Professions may continue to accept professional school degrees (eg hospitals can continue to require doctors have a medical school degree), and any company may test their employees' knowledge (eg mining companies can make their geologists pass a geology test) but the thing where you have to get into a good college, give them $100,000, flatter your professors a bit, and end up with a History degree before you can be a firefighter or whatever is illegal. If you can't actually make degree discrimination illegal, just make all government offices and companies that do business with the government ban degree discrimination.
Stop the thing where high schools refuse to let people graduate until they promise to go to college. End draft deferment for people who go to college - hopefully there won't be a draft, but do it anyway, as a sign that studying at college isn't any more important than the many other jobs people do that don't confer draft exemptions. Make universities no longer tax-exempt - why should institutions serving primarily rich people, providing them with regattas and musical theater, and raking in billions of dollars a year, not have to pay taxes? Make the bill that does this very clearly earmark the extra tax money for things that help working-class people, like infrastructure or vocational schools or whatever."
erwgv3g34
2d ago
I was not aware that we had lost it.
Are you kidding me? There was a whole decade where anything to the right of Obama got deleted from Reddit and WordPress and YouTube and Twitter. Thought criminals were forced to flee to 4chan and invent alternatives planforms like Bitchute and Gab and The Motte just so we could keep talking to each other.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Google thinks it's the murder of Scott Amedure on The Jenny Jones Show.
The Chinese models are a few months behind the American models, and in AI, a few months is a lifetime.
Apartments are a necessarily evil but are considerably worse for human flourishing than even small houses, and if there are ways to address the failure of the housing market without building more of them, we should take them even at a significant premium, for the sake of our species' dignity.
There aren't. Pigeonhole principle; if you have housing for 1,000,000 people but 1,500,000 people want to live in the city, 500,000 of those will either be homeless or forced to live elsewhere, and the 1,000,000 winners will have to spend all their money bidding up against each other for the privilege.
Yes, houses with backyards are much nicer than apartments, all else being equal, but all else is not equal. Giving every family their own detached home and backyard is not possible. It's like trying to make sure all kids are above average. The fertility and quality of life hit from young adults not being able to afford housing is much larger than the fertility and quality hit from not having backyards. And since most people don't need a whole house to themselves, most people living in detached family housing end up becoming roommates, which is its own indignity against the human spirit.
The great-uncle comment by @The_Nybbler already covers some of the things companies would do to get around this; laying off higher-paid workers and hiring new workers at lower wages. Another likely consequence is that companies would be much less willing to give raises when times are good, because now raises are a much bigger commitment. And if a company is unwilling or unable to do these things, it might well go under because it simply is unprofitable at higher salaries.
Now, what happens to the newly unemployed workers? If they are willing to work at a lower wage, they can probably find new work soon enough, but now they have to eat the transaction cost of switching jobs; if they were willing to take lower wages in the first place, they could have just stayed with the same employer. Alternatively, if they are not willing to take lower wages, thinking themselves too good for them now that they have been employed at a higher wage, they end up in a sad imitation of Latrell Sprewell refusing a $21 million deal because "I have a family to feed", and the world has to do without their labor until they get desperate enough to change their minds.
This can all be avoided by simply letting real wages vary up and down, and the easiest way to do that is to inflate nominal wages less or more; that way, the number never goes down.
If the government is doing its job, the salaries will go down anyway, in real terms if not in nominal terms. That's why a small amount of predictable inflation is considered good for an economy; because it lets wages adjust without ever having to go down in nominal terms; you just grow some of them slower than others!
At that point, whether the job will still let you survive next year or not depends on how much your salary went up (if at all) compared to the price of other things; it is very much not guaranteed. Which is exactly the same as if the nominal wages had been allowed to go up or down without inflation; the mechanism is just hidden as a concession to human nature.
The alternative is that salaries never go down in real terms, which is actually really bad when you think about it? Solve for the equilibrium.
Most people, even often intelligent people*, approach economics with the mindset of a medieval peasant.
That is to say, they see it as a zero-sum, moralistic story. If the travelling merchant doesn't make anything but sells cloth for two ducats a yard while buying it for one ducat a yard, he's a greedy middle-man who doesn't do anything of value (although I'll still sell him my cloth because nobody else will buy it...).
I'm convinced this is the default way of thinking about things. Just as we hate the rich because he evolved as hunter-gatherers who had to share meat with our tribe-mates, we struggle to understand positive-sum interactions, prices as signals, and other essential economic concepts.
Agreed. Economics is as counterintuitive as quantum mechanics or general relativity. Except, of course, that most people have no reason to go around thinking about modern physics, but everyone must interact with the market.
Try explaining to people that wages are the price of work, and just as the price of meat must go up or down depending on whether there is shortage or a surplus of cattle, salaries should also go up or down depending on how the labor market is doing, and they will look at you like you are the villain of a fantasy novel. Hence, nominal rigidity, and the necessity of inflation.
I'm not a fan of the general impulse of 'things I value should be on the national curriculum because then other people would think like I do', I don't care about forcing kids to do art, music, literature, foreign languages etc.
But economics should absolutely be taught to children. We can't trust leaving our elites alone to understand economics since they've burned that trust on things like open borders and abolishing the police, so normal voters should understand (or at least be able to repeat as a maxim) that building houses causes house prices to go down, or that nothing in economics can be explained by 'greed'.
This would go about as well as forcing everyone to learn algebra does now. The course would be watered down until the average student could memorize enough answers to get a C without understanding the concepts, then immediately forget everything after graduation.
Maybe if you made it a general education requirement for college students, that would actually do something... although even they often fail to absorb the concepts.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Voting used to be limited to white landowning males, which worked fine, except that inevitably some of those men saw a political opportunity in expanding the franchise to other groups in exchange for the implicit promise that they would vote for them, and after a few iterations of that game, here we are.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
And yet they were much skinnier than we are. In some sense, their diet must have been healthier than ours is; it must have lacked the orange soda.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
I'm not a programmer either, and I do get annoyed at the way 90% of AI discussion is centered around coding, but come on. Software is eating the world. Anything we do, we do with software. Cars have software, TVs have software, phones have software, books are increasingly read in e-ink readers, etc. Software is as fundamental to our life as oil, or electricity. Imagine a technology that made oil workers 5x more productive, and thereby made oil cost 1/5th as much. It would not just be about how much you save at the pump; it would mean cheaper groceries and plastics and plane tickets and probably entire new applications that nobody has ever implemented because they did not make sense at the previous price level. That's what AI is.
I stand by my assertion. There are plenty of young men in minimum wage roles who would love the chance to give thieves a good beating if the only risk were physical; if they knew for a fact that they would not be arrested or fired or sued after the act, but given a pat on the back and told "good job!".
Take a look at /r/crazyfuckingvideos. You can see several examples of employees fighting back against robbers, and people in the comment section cheering them for it. It is not in the nature of men to stand by with folded hands and meekly watch some asshole get away with defecting against the social order; it is as infuriating as it is emasculating.
Police and judges exist to protect criminals. Honest people know how to keep order; lynchings.
You're right. That bit of evopsych wouldn't have fit an /r/rational review, but I should have mentioned it here.
A lot of people think the girls are stupid for climbing the tower in the first place, but I'd file that under "the utility function is not up for grabs". Like I said, they are adrenaline junkies; they think life has no meaning unless you are willing to risk it all.
Everything that happens after they get trapped is the opposite of a coffee moment.
More options
Context Copy link