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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2532 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 19, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Does anyone have a chess.com account and wants to play long (7 day) chess? I'd like to get a few other matches going. My username is SomethingMusic if interested.

Sure, I'd be happy to. I'm Issier on Chesscom and Lichess.

Got it, thanks!

Mark Zuckerberg's transition from Virgin to Chad continues. Is he based and red pilled yet? You decide:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XgWFwVRGcf4

Zuck looking like he's about to film a thirst trap tiktok

Lots of Meta execs dressing like this now, clearly they (or their PR) hired a stylist.

No man with a nasal voice like that will ever be a Chad in my eyes. Slow down and drop an octave, then we can talk.

It's really kinda funny that you can apparently drop an octave in voice, without a serious sore throat or anything just by .. doing something with the vocal chords and throat.

Doesn't work with fast talking, and if you're smart and not antisocial usually you talk real fast.

Is he based and red pilled yet?

No, and he never will be. He'll always be the Harvard nerd who made that terrible social media website.

It's the phenomenon mentioned a couple days ago by someone here - the more probable it becomes that Trump is going to win, the more value there is in having shown that you were "on his side"... or, at the very least, not against him. This is particularly poignant for extremely wealthy leaders of highly-regulable industry. Nobody wants the full Elon Musk treatment. Zuck may have genuinely believed various left-leaning things in the past or he may have just thought that he had a good deal going where they were mostly going to protect him so long as he played ball enough. It's impossible to know. Likewise, it's sort of impossible to know whether he's actually emotionally/intellectually moved to take this new lack-of-position, or if he's seen the writing on the wall enough that he feels compelled, for the sake of his company/industry, to find any plausible way to soften on political issues without getting crucified by the media or other interest groups that could cause him problems (like, for example, meta employees, who might already be having meltdowns that their boss can't even manage to oppose Hitler). He's baaarely inching out just hoping that the story of the assassination attempt will help give him even the smallest amount of cover from criticism. This is a guy who is scared to death that he's going to suffer regardless of what he does.

When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse

Did anyone do that in 2016-2019? I don’t recall a tech leader publicly showing that they are on Trump’s side then.

Different world. Trump wasn't supposed to win and the Republicans were supposed to lose Congress in 2016. There were reconciliation noises at first, but Trump quickly proved pretty bad at the job (largely due to lack of bureaucratically inclined assistants and resulting chaos).

This time it's looking like he's got a better set of plans, is likely to win, and at least control the Senate.

I feel that there is a sense in large parts of the elite and elite adjacent people that Trump is actually serious this time and has gathered a large following of competent people who are quite black pilled by the accelerating absurd excesses of the liberal state apparatus in the last decade.

Also he can work around almost any judicial block this time thanks to his Supreme Court appointments.

It feels almost like in 2016 almost nobody including Trump, his biggest supporters and his biggest enemies didn’t quite understand the force pushing the man to presidency.

The AFI 100

Given the tendency of people to post lists this week, it seems like quite the coincidence that after 20 years of making a half-assed attempt at seeing all of the movies on the AFI 100, my journey is finally complete. I’m sharing my thoughts on every film on the list in the hopes that nobody else here will subject themselves to such a pointless exercise. Without further ado:

  1. Citizen Kane (1941)The Great Gatsby has famously never been made into a good film, and this one is no exception. Yes, it’s the same story, trying to figure out who some rich guy really is. Skip this one.

  2. Casablanca (1942) It may be the ultimate date movie of all time, but that’s not saying much. Everyone knows all the famous lines from this movie, including the ones that weren’t actually in it. No one remembers what the plot is actually about, and it wasn’t marketed as a romance until everyone who saw it realized that the international intrigue elements fall flat. Skip this one.

  3. The Godfather (1972) The American Dream given a cynical twist with the realization that the crime business is a business like any other. But never mind that the two “heroes” of the tale—Vito and Michael—are mass murderous gangsters, the rendering of the story on screen is ponderous. The amber lighting, the shadows, the pace, the score, and the entire tone are so serious and pretentious that they verge on parody. This film would be just as good as a comedy if you added a laugh track. They say there is a fine line between comedy and tragedy, but it’s not quite this fine. Skip this one.

  4. Gone with the Wind (1939) A sentimental epic that whitewashes history. It’s not as offensive as Birth of a Nation, but the insensitivity to the real suffering caused by slavery is there and has to be dealt with. I’m not trying to be a politically correct nitpicker; slavery isn’t nitpicking. And anyone who has the slightest bit of false nostalgia for the Old South should remind themselves that the landed, slave-owning aristocracy represented by Rhett and Scarlet was only between 1% and 2% of the population. Everyone else, black and white, endured miserable poverty working in the fields. At least that’s the normal criticism, which is fair enough, but that only describes minor plot points in the first half. The rest of it is just another old tearjerker where a spoiled bitch manages to alienate three(!) husbands because she’s still hung up on a teenage crush. Skip this one.

  5. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) A four hour epic that only exists to impart the sensation of how vast and endless the desert is. This would have been better as a 20 minute IMAX documentary. Skip this one.

  6. The Wizard of Oz (1939) One for the kiddies. But if you’re all grown up you can skip this one.

  7. The Graduate (1967) The back cover of the DVD described this as “love and idealism triumphing over the forces of corruption and conformity”. Nope. Benjamin Braddock is a whiny asshole with no ideals and is himself a force for corruption. If he does indeed represent a rebellion against the conformity of middle-class life—as he breaks up two marriages and a business partnership—he only serves to make us appreciate squareness. Skip this one.

  8. On the Waterfront (1954) This movie does more to reinforce the negative stereotype of unions than any Republican ever could. Skip this one.

  9. Schindler’s List (1993) Speaking of Republicans, Tom Coburn raised a huge stink when NBC aired this film unedited and uninterrupted in prime time in 1999. If you were among the 65 million people watching then you don’t need to see it again. If you weren’t then you’re probably a hopeless Zoomer without the attention span to sit through this. Skip this one.

  10. Singin’ in the Rain (1952) Tapdancing is as much an “art” as throwing a basketball through a hoop, and this crap is very dated. No one born after 1945 has any reason to watch this movie today, unless you’re one of those schlocky lounge/cocktail/swinger ‘40s revivalists who are into this type of thing so you can wear cool clothes. Skip this one.

  11. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) Frank Capra was an overly sentimental cornball, but beyond that, this movie raises significant concerns about the criminal justice system, making one think it should be routine for a policeman to use deadly force to prevent the escape of someone wanted for disorderly conduct. Skip this one.

  12. Sunset Boulevard (1950) Jack Webb is Joe Friday and Joe Friday only, not “one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet”. Skip this one.

  13. Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) This movie sends too many mixed messages with regard to its historical inaccuracies. On the one hand, the Japanese are portrayed as incompetent at engineering and construction, which they most certainly were not in real life, giving this somewhat racist undertones. One the other hand, prison camps building the Burma-Siam Railway were much more brutal than this film suggests, given that the real bridge was built using forced labor in conditions that are too appalling for me to describe here. Without either of these inaccuracies, however, there would be no movie. Skip this one.

  14. Some Like It Hot (1959) Neither Tony Curtis not Jack Lemmon pass as women. Skip this one.

  15. Star Wars (1977) This was the first of the big-budget special effects movies in which plot and characterization take a back seat, ushering in the reign of big-budget special effects movies in which plot and characterization take a back seat, to the point that these days every movie is a big-budget special effects movie in which plot and characterization take a back seat. Skip this one.

  16. All About Eve (1950) There’s a good line in this movie about a piano thinking it had composed a concerto—actors ought to keep their egos in check and realize they wouldn’t even have lines to mouth if it wasn’t for writer. Hell, Shakespeare is still read, but does anyone remember the famous thespians of the 16th century? Unfortunately, that one line is the only good thing the writers came up with in this otherwise dull movie. Skip this one.

  17. African Queen (1951) This is a fine romance if you’re one of those crotchety old-timers who think it’s actually sexier when couples don’t take their clothes off and let innuendo and tension do the job for you. The rest of us can skip this one.

  18. Psycho (1960) This isn’t very scary, and there isn’t much suspense. This is better than your average horror film, but that isn’t saying much. Skip this one.

  19. Chinatown (1974) The plot of this is so convoluted it makes Raymond Chandler look like Anton Chekov by comparison. Skip this one.

  20. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) Jack Nicholson is at his craziest and hammiest, along with a bunch of other actors who wound up on Taxi. The beginning of his self-parody period (which has yet to end). Skip this one.

  21. The Grapes of Wrath (1940) If you’re a tankie who needs to go back to the Depression so you can find a fictional example to showcase the horrors of capitalism, this is required viewing. Otherwise, skip this one.

  22. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) This movie looked like it would be good after watching the first few scenes with the apes, which mistakenly give the impression of a masterful epic. Instead we’re given 20 minute sequences of spaceships docking and no plot. When the most interesting character is a computer, you know you’re in trouble. Skip this one.

  23. The Maltese Falcon (1941) Dashiell Hammett was a trash writer whom critics adore because he absorbed all of Hemingway and furthered along the development of a distinct American style. Unfortunately, that distinct American toughness is really just nothing more than a high body count. And the book is better than the movie. Skip this one.

  24. Raging Bull (1980) Jake LaMotta just isn’t an interesting character, and two hours with him is pretty wearying. Skip this one. If you really want to watch a Scorsese movie, even Boxcar Bertha is better.

  25. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) Chalk another one up for the kids. Skip this one.

  26. Dr. Strangelove (1964) “Black Humor” is nothing more than excuse film buffs give themselves to justify watching comedies that aren’t funny. Skip this one.

  27. Bonnie & Clyde (1967) The real Bonnie & Clyde were considerably less sexy than Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Skip this one.

  28. Apocalypse Now (1979) A very loose adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that bears about the same relation to the reality of Vietnam as Star Wars did to the Roman Empire. Skip this one.

  29. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) With our awareness of the rampant corruption and venality within the Beltway in the post-Watergate era, this film seems hopelessly naïve. Skip this one.

  30. Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) Ah yes, it is not gold that makes men act like animals; filthy lucre is merely one more thing to fight over. This is the kind of dime-store philosophy that practically defines “middlebrow”. Skip this one.

  31. Annie Hall (1977) There are two kinds of Woody Allen movies: The funny ones, and the serious ones. This movie is a transitional work that attempts to fuse the two sides. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell what’s a joke and what isn’t. His paranoia about anti-Semitism? That lobster scene—he’s not that much of a wimp, is he? Skip this one.

  32. The Godfather Part II (1974) Was responsible for The Godfather Part III. Skip this one.

  33. High Noon (1952) The only notable part is the structure. The action begins at 10:40 a.m. and unfolds in real time until noon, paralleling the length of the film. Other than that, it’s a rather standard Western. Skip this one.

  34. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) Hollywood changed the plot of the book too much to make it more palatable to moviegoers. Skip this one.

  35. It Happened One Night (1934) Film buffs toss around “pre-Code” like the era was full of racy and disgusting content. It’s really no more shocking than anything in a modern Pixar film. Skip this one.

  36. Midnight Cowboy (1969) Film buffs like to point out that this is the only X-Rated movie to ever win an academy award. They don’t point out that this is only R-Rated by today’s standards and was given an X due to the subject matter more than anything actually pornographic. Skip this one.

  37. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) This isn’t a movie, it’s a piece of propaganda designed to make returning WWII veterans adjust to home life. It’s alright for a public awareness video, but after serving its admirable purpose, it became obsolete. Heck, nobody’s going to nominate all those “Just Say No” anti-drug movies, are they? So why this? Skip this one.

  38. Double Indemnity (1944) There’s nothing here you won’t find done better on old Perry Mason reruns not to mention your average post-Hill Street Blues cop show. Skip this one.

  39. Doctor Zhivago (1965) Length doesn’t equal quality. Skip this one.

  40. North by Northwest (1959) This movie has all the sophistication of a Timothy Dalton-era James Bond movie. Skip this one.

  41. West Side Story (1961) Theoretically, the marriage of music and narrative ought to take both to new heights, but in practice the narrative suffers because it has to find corny ways to incorporate the songs and the music suffers because individually inspired songs are outnumbered by makeshift hack pieces designed to move the plot along. The world would be a much better place if no one ever penned an opera or musical ever again. Skip this one.

  42. Rear Window (1954) Jimmy Stewart as a Peeping Tom? Skip this one.

  43. King Kong (1933) There’s no need to delve into pre-Civil Rights America’s warped racial/sexual fantasies. Skip this one.

  44. The Birth of a Nation (1915) Ignoring the fact that it completely distorts history and glorifies the KKK, this is just boring. Skip this one.

  45. Streetcar Named Desire (1951) What I said earlier about musicals notwithstanding, Streetcar! was better. Skip this one.

  46. A Clockwork Orange (1971) A great book would have been better if anyone other than Kubrick, the most boring great director of our time, directed this movie. Skip this one.

  47. Taxi Driver (1976) John Hinckley Jr. watched this film over and over. Skip this one.

  48. Jaws (1975) With Sammy Fableman being an overt self-portrait it’s now understandable why all of Spielberg’s characters range from annoying to evil. Suffice it to say, I was rooting for the shark. Skip this one.

  49. Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs (1937) Too bad Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner never made a feature film, or I’d want it here instead. Skip this one.

  50. Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (1969) A buddy film without homosexual undertones seems a bit quaint in the 21st century. Skip this one.

  51. Philadelphia Story (1940) Katherine Hepburn’s annoying fake British accent (oh, sorry “Mid Atlantic”) just plain grates. Skip this one.

  52. From Here to Eternity (1953) This snoozefest was created entirely so that Frank Sinatra could revive his failing career. Inadvertently, the producers seem to have pioneered the irritating “Oscar bait” genre that clogs up our theaters every winter. Skip this one.

  53. Amadeus (1984) First, it rewrites history. Second, it doesn’t try to give you any insight into one of music’s greatest geniuses and just portrays Mozart as a party animal. Finally, the soundtrack inexplicably left off “Rock Me Amadeus”. Skip this one.

  54. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) Certain nations gearing up for war have banned this film, which should tell you something about how powerful an anti-war piece this is even today. Unfortunately, some wars are necessary, so see this if you’d like, but don’t go showing it in high schools or anything lest we have a repeat of Vietnam.

  55. The Sound of Music (1965) Speaking of schools, completely against my will my helpless fellow classmates and I were forced to watch this in elementary school. The only time I’ve ever cheered for the Nazis. Skip this one.

  56. MAS*H (1970) Possibly the only time in recorded history that the TV show was actually better than the movie it spun off from. Skip this one.

  57. The Third Man (1949) There are only two good things about this film: The first shot we see of Orson Welles, and the fact that the main character keeps calling Calloway Callahan just to piss him off. Other than that it’s a movie that tries to convince you that the cobblestones and zither of postwar Vienna are enough to make a film about counterfeit penicillin interesting. Skip this one.

  58. Fantasia (1940) A revolutionary film that let Disney animators stretch the boundaries of what could be done with animation. Unfortunately, no one actually watches this, unless they like shadows of people playing musical instruments. Skip this one.

  59. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) James Dean’s legend overshadows his achievement, which actually wasn’t much: Three films, all of which display some talent, but not enough to warrant his current status. If he hadn’t died young, he’d be remembered as a decent but unremarkable ‘50s actor/teen idol. The movie itself is dated and you’d have to be a retro ‘50s obsessed revivalist to get worked up over it. Skip this one.

  60. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Okay, maybe that wasn't the only time I rooted for the Nazis. Skip this one.

  61. Vertigo (1958) Lonely, unattractive Alfred Hitchcock had a lifelong crush on Grace Kelly, and his psychosexual obsessions are nowhere as obvious as in this twisted film about a man who just can’t get an icy blonde out of his head. Skip this one.

  62. Tootsie (1982) If conservatives want to make a film about how DEI has made it hard for white men to get jobs, then they probably shouldn’t load it up with an obvious trans angle. Unless, of course, they’re trying to tell us something they’re afraid to admit… Skip this one.

  63. Stagecoach (1939) I guess this was good for 1939, but it made a star of John Wayne, who became an American icon by playing an insufferable asshole in every movie he was ever in and acting like even more of an asshole in his public life. Skip this one.

  64. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) If they want to include sci-fi, and they want to include kitschy noir like Double Indemnity, then why not include kitschy sci-fi, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, or The Fly? Skip this one.

  65. Silence of the Lambs (1991) If you need to pick out scary trash with lots of sex and murder from the ‘90s, then you get a pretty big playing field. Why not Basic Instinct, or, better yet, Scream? Skip this one.

  66. Network (1976) It’s supposed to tell painful truths about how media manipulates society. Instead, it convinces you that the Tea Part Republican turned MAGA Republican rambling on in a bar is on to something. Skip this one.

  67. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) This movie dates horribly considering what we now know about brainwashing, and if any Republican sees it in the next 6 months it’s going to lead to endless 4Chan conspiracy theories about how Thomas Crooks was compromised in a Democrat-controlled nursing home to give the libs plausible deniability. Skip this one.

  68. An American In Paris (1951) One Gene Kelly tap dancing special was more than enough. Replace with The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years and give the old fogies who voted for this tinnitus. Skip this one.

  69. Shane (1953) The charming tale of a family who thinks it’s a good idea to take in a drifter with a mysterious past and no last name (or first?) and let him babysit their son. I just realized that for all the movies about men who like other men a whole bunch there aren’t any cute animal movies on this list! Where’s Homeward Bound? Or Milo and Otis? Skip this one.

  70. The French Connection (1971) When Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso made the French Connection bust in 1962, it was the largest narcotics seizure in the country’s history. Strange, then, why they’d participate in this hack job that completely tarnishes their legacy. The real Eddie Egan must have been given a lot of money to berate the fake Eddie Egan relentlessly for being a bad cop. And the image of the detective as a slovenly womanizer doesn’t do his image any favors either. Skip this one.

  71. Forrest Gump (1994) The moral of this apparently is that if you’re living through an era of monumental societal change, it’s best to be the smiling idiot on the sidelines. Skip this one.

  72. Ben-Hur (1959) I understand the desire to include the type of over-the-top production that Hollywood was making in the 1950s to counter the popularity of television, but this is nothing more than a Charlton Heston movie without guns or apes. Skip this one.

  73. Wuthering Heights (1939) This is a movie for housewives who read trashy romance novels, which, in fact, the book it’s based on was (it's only considered a "classic" because it was written in the 19th century, not the vulgar 20th). Emily Bronte was the Danielle Steele of her time. Sure, Laurence Olivier can act, but will Americans please get over their misguided prejudice that English accents somehow automatically denote sophistication and intelligence? Skip this one.

  74. The Gold Rush (1925) The silent era ended for a reason. I don’t want to read a movie. Skip this one.

  75. Dances with Wolves (1990) Kevin Costner takes himself far, far too seriously, and turns every film he stars in into a boring, turgid dirge. He winds up making a far greater fool of himself than Jim Carrey and Pee Wee Herman combined with his grim-faced schtick. Hollywood’s portrayal of Indians as great noble savages is one of those deep-seated traditions that is long overdue to go. How about a movie that takes place in an Indian casino? Skip this one.

  76. City Lights (1931) We definitely don’t need silent films made 4 years into the sound era. Skip this one.

  77. American Graffiti (1973) This movie did for 50s nostalgia what “The Big Chill” did for 60s nostalgia and “Dazed and Confused” did for 70s nostalgia — make films better known for their soundtracks. Skip this one.

  78. Rocky (1978) "My old man told me that I'd have to use my body 'cuz I didn't have much of a brain." Thus, Sylvester Stallone neatly sums up his entire movie career in one line. Skip this one.

  79. The Deer Hunter (1978) As a Pittsburgh native, I feel deeply offended that the only actual deer hunting in this movie was shot in the Cascades and not Tionesta or some other place where people actually have camps. And there’s no reason why they had to shoot the mill town scenes in Steubenville rather than Clairton. This kind of inaccuracy is easy to overlook if you’re more focused on the completely unrelatable plot, but to someone like me it’s like portraying New Yorkers as having southern accents to fit foreign stereotypes of Americans. Skip this one.

  80. The Wild Bunch (1969) When the amount of violence in a movie is the only thing it has going for it, it’s not a good sign. Skip this one.

  81. Modern Times (1934) And we certainly don’t need silent films that were made 7 years into the sound era and a year after the Hayes Code. Skip this one.

  82. Giant (1956) Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean. If they wanted to include a teen movie how about Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon in Beach Blanket bingo, or better yet, Ski Party?

  83. Platoon (1986) All Oliver Stone films are just his incoherent political ramblings translated to the screen. Unless you plan on voting for RFK Jr., skip this one.

  84. Fargo (1996) I get it, people in the Upper Midwest have funny accents. And it doesn’t even take place in Fargo. And it inspired an absolutely dreadful television series that featured a scenery-chewing Kirsten Dunst and an unexplained flying saucer. Skip this one.

  85. Duck Soup (1933) Snappy one-liners are not dialogue. Skip this one.

  86. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) “Battleship Potemkin” was better, but it was made by Soviet commies, so it’s ineligible for this list. A half-assed substitute doesn’t cut it, even at 86. Skip this one.

  87. Frankenstein (1931) See above about lamentably substituting an American snore because the better foreign films are ineligible — the monster movie was always one thing the Japs did better. If you need a stand-in then at least use “Young Frankenstein”, which scared the hell out of me. Skip this one.

  88. Easy Rider (1968) I know they were different times, but the hippie rhetoric is laughable today. Not to mention that there isn’t much of a plot and the ending is hard to believe (sure, the roads are filled with rednecks going around shooting unarmed strangers). Skip this one.

  89. Patton (1970) The movie starts with an incredibly boring monologue where Patton marched in front of an American flag and starts delivering a harangue about warfare. There are better things to do with three hours than spend them stuck with a warmongering lunatic. Skip this one.

  90. The Jazz Singer (1927) The fact that Al Jolson sings for about two minutes doesn’t make up for the fact that you have to read this film. They could have at least included the Neil Diamond version with what should be America’s national anthem. Skip this one.

  91. My Fair Lady (1964) Yeah, whatever. Shouldn't they disqualify this since it was written by Brits, has a British subject, and British actors? George Bernard Shaw is that rare playwright who is great on the page but talky and long-winded on stage or screen. Skip this one.

  92. A Place in the Sun (1951) Theodore Dreiser was one of the clumsiest writers to ever hold a pen, and when he starts expounding on turn-of-the-century ideas about chemicals and glands, he's laughably dated. I guess it’s good that this film is better than spending 800 pages with him, but unless you’re trying to get out of a school assignment, you can skip this one.

  93. The Apartment (1960) A philandering executive bribes an employee with a promotion so he can use his apartment to sexually harass a member of the Psychic Friends Network. Skip this one.

  94. Goodfellas (1990) Martin Scorsese tries to whitewash the fact that Henry Hill was a total fucking moron who hung around with women who were even dumber than he was. And he was a snitch, too. Skip this one.

  95. Pulp Fiction (1994) About ten years ago I was at a casino with a friend of mine who lost his wallet. When he had to tell the kindly old woman at customer service that it said “Bad Ass Motherfucker” on it, well, let’s just say he was no Samuel L. Jackson. Having a slightly out of order plot is not impressive. And, as with “Duck Soup”, zingers aren’t a substitute for dialogue. Skip this one.

  96. The Searchers (1956) John Wayne in full-blown asshole mode, to the point that he wants to murder the girl they’ve spent years looking for. Skip this one.

  97. Bringing Up Baby (1938) For some reason critics love to fellate 30’s screwball comedies (if you're not familiar with that term, it means a movie in which the hero and heroine start off hating each other and wind up falling in love), but don’t take their modern equivalents seriously. If they were going to include this on the 1998 list then they should have added “American Pie” when they updated it ten years later. Skip this one.

  98. Unforgiven (1992) Another western featuring an asshole extraordinaire, but at least the John Wayne movies on this list didn’t subject the audience to the star’s right-wing political views. Skip this one.

  99. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) If the “Oscars So White” people wanted to pick a more worthy target, this list would be as good of one as any. The exclusion of blacks somewhat understandable since they weren’t really able to make films until the 70s, but making this piece of dated claptrap their sole representative (and No. 99, at that) is simply inexcusable. No Spike Lee Joints? No Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song? Skip this one.

  100. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) If you feel the need to see a James Cagney movie, at least make it a James Cagney gangster movie. Skip this one.

The wallet in Pulp Fiction said "Bad Mother Fucker", not "Bad Ass Mother Fucker". So did your friend's wallet misquote the movie, or did you?

I did. Possibly, I think that happened in 2012. Either way, you get the idea.

I definitely didn't realize it was a joke until it was pointed out by yourself and others in the comments. I guess I just really don't like most movies, and I'm happy to find any reason to skip watching old movies, so your advice to skip them all is exactly what I'd want.

Not all! He said we could watch All Quiet on the Western Front!

I was getting increasingly angry before I realized the joke. Well done sir.

How come 12 Angry Men isn't in the top 100?

Oh sweet Armond White finally made a Motte account!

The back cover of the DVD described this as “love and idealism triumphing over the forces of corruption and conformity”. Nope. Benjamin Braddock is a whiny asshole with no ideals and is himself a force for corruption. If he does indeed represent a rebellion against the conformity of middle-class life—as he breaks up two marriages and a business partnership—he only serves to make us appreciate squareness. Skip this one.

Isn't that sort of the point of the movie? The famous end scene doesn't end with their romantic runaway from the wedding. They sit on the bus, silently, with an awkward look on their faces, while a sad song plays. I got a strong sense that they had just ruined both of their lives from impulsive behavior, and the reality was sinking in on them. It's an interesting film with a lot of nuance!

Isn't that sort of the point of the movie?

Indeed, see also the critiques of Casablanca, and Gone With The Wind.

The OP doesnt seem to realize that there was a time before current year girl-bosses where in it was kind of expected that the audience would recognize that Scarlett was something of a "see you next thursday" and that this is a major part of why Clarke Gable (Rhett) telling her he doesn't give a damn about her stupid bullshit drama is such an iconic moment.

Ditto Lauren Bacall batting her eyes at Bogie only to be rebuffed and yet still kinda get what she wanted. I want to make it clear that I'm not doing this because you tried to whore yourself out to me, i'm doing this because fuck the Nazis.

Citizen Kane is rated so highly for technical reasons. Orson Welles invented half the shot types that modern filmmakers use when he was making Citizen Kane. For example, deep focus, where the shot is arranged so that both the background and foreground are in focus during the shot. If you watch any modern movie today, you will see shot techniques that were created for Citizen Kane. The problem is that these techniques have been in use for 80 years now, so when you go back and watch Citizen Kane, it looks good, but you won’t notice how revolutionary it was. If you were watching it in 1941 it would look quite unlike anything that came before it.

Indeed, It's a core example of the old "Shakespeare is unoriginal" or "Seinfeld is unfunny" trope. It only appears derivative because everyone has spent the last umptysquat years riffing off of it. When it was new it was genuinely new.

Since it apparently wasn't obvious, the content of these criticisms only seldom aligns with my actual opinions on these films. I love several of these, at least like most of them, and a few more at least get grudging respect. Some of these I actually haven't seen, and others I've only seen bits and pieces of, or watched on a bus trip, or saw in 30 minute increments in school, or saw so long ago I don't remember anything about them. This is just me finding nitpicks for the sake of some Friday shitposting. My criticism of the graduate has nothing to do with the film so much as the bullshit on the back of the DVD cover.

This is the 1998 list. Are you going to do the 10th anniversary edition? Most of the titles are the same, but 23 new movies made it in.

And speaking of classic movies, I enjoyed the Oscar Madness retrospective on Academy Award Best Pictures Winners.

For those of you wondering which 2 films Rov thinks you shouldn't skip ;) and aren't interested in replicating my ctrl+f fun in sublime:

  • All Quiet on the Western Front
  • Giant

I think the Giant blurb implies that you should skip it, even if it doesn't explicitly say so. Maybe an accidental omission?

Thanks for the efforpost but I never knew I could disagree with someone so much on movies.

I have only seen a small number of these, but the fact that you dismissed the good ones with approximately the same level of disdain as you dismissed the bad ones makes me not trust your judgement on any of the ones I haven't seen.

In case it wasn't obvious, this is a joke. I love most of these movies.

Then your post has zero entropy. The world would have been a better place had you not bothered.

The world would probably be a better place if I stopped posting entirely, so your point is well taken.

The council of humorless Germans approves of this post.

thatsthejoke.jpg

MASH (1970) Possibly the only time in recorded history that the TV show was actually better than the movie it spun off from.

Stargate??

And Buffy, though that was more of a remake than a spinoff.

Andor was arguably better than Rogue One; both were uneven with mixed beginnings saved by their endings, but Andor had better development in the middle.

Taxi Driver (1976) John Hinckley Jr. watched this film over and over. Skip this one.

The fact that you didn't say anything bad about this one and just wrote a piece of trivia really shows what an excellent movie this is.

Glorious. Also, appalling. Also, goddamn it, he's right.

I'm not exactly sure what to call this, but I salute you. Brav-statistically-o.

To really salt this fine broth of a comment, it needs to be read by Dagoth-Ur.

Theodore Dreiser was one of the clumsiest writers to ever hold a pen

I enjoyed reading The Financier and The Titan, personally.

I read every one of these, with a mounting sense of delight with each verdict.

I suppose you enjoyed your, uh, 300 hours of entertainment?

tl;dr simple RES ripoff for The Motte

I made a userscript to add keyboard navigation to The Motte. I've been missing RES keybindings since we ditched reddit and I finally got off my ass and did it myself. I call it Quokka Kit, or Quokkit for short. I pretty much just implemented my most-used RES keybinds and called it a day, so if there's a feature you'd like, poke me about it or have a poke at it yourself. It's got vi-like up/down navigation keybinds for comment threads and the front page (though I'm just noticing it doesn't do anything on page 2+ of the main site, so that's one for the queue), voting keybinds, opening comment threads from the front page, expanding post text on the front page, and returning to the front page. If you're used to RES keybinds they should be the same defaults here.

In the event you don't know how userscripts work, think of it kinda as a slapdash ad-hoc browser extension. But if you don't know how userscripts work, I wouldn't advise installing one in the first place.

Anyway, have a gander at it here, pull requests are welcome. It's very small, so you can vet it yourself (or I guess I should summon a mod that could vet it? @ZorbaTHut ). Obviously you'll need GreaseMonkey or TamperMonkey installed to install it, in which case clicking the Raw button (see attachment) on Github should pull up the userscript installer page. It's also GPL if you're into that.

Edit: just added comment reply and edit keybinds.

/images/17214178509207013.webp

Why use this over vimium?

Forum-specific keybinds like voting and replying and editing comments I guess. Why use RES over vimium?

No one responded, but I will let you know that this got multiple AAQC reports. So it will probably be in the next quality contributions roundup. People definitely liked it, good work!

I recently came across this guy who wishes to RETVRN by rejecting copernicanism and embracing keplerism.

https://book.tychos.space/

Like many cranks, he takes forever to get to anything like a refutation of the established model, but in chapter 7 he finally gets there.

https://book.tychos.space/chapters/7-the-copernican-model

His argument rests on a "geometric impossibility" relating to the parallax of mars and a particular star. At first glance the diagrams seem convincing and it was not immediately clear to me where the trick was, so I thought it might be a fun exercise for others as well. My solution is in the spoiler.

Cassini's experiment involved taking an observation of mars against the stellar background at the same time from two different positions on earth. Taking an observation of mars at two different times of the year is not the same, because mars is also moving.

Imagine standing with your buddy in a field. You take a look at him with your left eye and he seems to be pretty much right under the moon. You both move about a mile to your left. You take a look at him again and he still seems to be pretty much right under the moon. At the same time, looking at your buddy with your right eye makes him noticeably but very slightly move with relation to the moon. A geometric impossibility?

Note that:

  1. the earth's orbit's diameter is about a million times smaller than the distance from earth to deneb algedi.

  2. In cassini's experiment the change of mars's position was a whopping 15 arc seconds (that's the size of a basketball hoop seen from two and a half miles away). https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/46988/how-exactly-was-giovanni-cassini-able-to-measure-the-distance-to-mars

  3. the screenshot of mars and deneb algedi from earth is tiny and doesn't have any numbers, so it would be easy to round off subtle changes in position to zero.

Finally, the top down solar system diagram shows deneb algedi about 1AU from earth instead of the true distance of about a million AU. In reality, deneb algedi is so far away relative to the earth's orbit that the sun-earth-deneb algedi angle is infinitesimally smaller than 90 degrees. If the image was to scale we could clearly see that mars is simply rather close to the earth-deneb algedi line in both cases, and at the present scale there's plenty of slack to make it seem like an impossible geometry.

A few weeks ago, someone posted a hilarious podcast-kinda comedy show, wherein someone was talking about how not enough people in some town are dying due to drowning, which indicates an overspend in anti-drowning resources. I can't find it anymore, can anyone share it? Thanks!

That Mitchell and Webb Sound - No-One Drowning

Thanks!

If you're interested, the duo also had a sketch comedy TV series called That Mitchell and Webb Look which is often diverting, and starred in a sitcom called Peep Show which is on a whole other level of cringe comedy.

I find David Mitchell to just be excellent all around. Upstart Crow is one of my favorite comedies.

I've been mucking around with Claude for a while now, most recently I started RPing with it. Dumb power-fantasy stuff like 'what if I was a wizard with a transmutation theme in a duel with a legendary warrior'. Claude does a good job, coherently answering my call for powerful, challenging adversary. We fought in the sky, I threw transmuted antimatter bombs at him, he turned into an energy being, I sucked him into a black hole after a good bit of fighting. It can do more grounded low-level stuff too, as if I were playing Pathfinder.

I'm staggered that we have a nearly perfect freeform text adventure machine (200 page context length if you pay for Pro) - and nobody cares. OK, it won't let you be outright evil in normal mode. The terms of use are pretty restrictive but you can get around them to a large extent. You can have it cast off the officialese default AI tone and take up 40K-speak. No more 'iridescent beams of energy', now it's all 'Your bifurcated clone, a mirror of your terrible majesty, streaks towards the xenos filth'. All the humanism and safetyism drains away as it puts its bloodlust hat on. I guess this is what rayon means with the 'mad poet' stuff.

But it acts in the most prissy way when you ask it to list things from some novels. 'Oh the copyright means I can't say anything other than the most generic boilerplate'. It's happy to waltz around in Warhammer 40K, one of the most litigious and copyright-obsessed franchises around but rehashing things that are on the Wheel of Time wiki is too much? It can isekai a character into a universe but it can't just list things from that universe? AI safety is truly a dizzying realm.

There's plenty of fun to be had, the only limit is your creativity.

Claude 3.5 has been very good for creative writing - much better than GPT-4 or GPT-4o (which I continually have to slap to stop them from listifying everything). I paid for the Anthropic subscription within a day of trying it, it was that impressive.

Where the OpenAI models are boring and generic, Claude is interesting and specific. It weaves in little details that sell the realism. Like, if I have it write something set in my city, it'll name a minor transit station that only locals would really know about. Or, it'll have a character do something human and weird, like feel a bug on their neck and swat at it, but it was just a strand of hair. Its jokes/sarcasm/wit are close to being funny sometimes (or at least, not totally cringe or nonsensical like 4/4o).

But, this seems to come at a slight cost. You know how when you have an image model illustrate something, it has a tendency to blur bits of the request together? I've noticed it doing this a bit with the narrative when writing. Eg. if Alice is carrying a sword, and Bob a mace, it'll sometimes write that Bob drew his sword. 4/4o never seemed to make that kind of error.

And yes, as you note, it will occasionally take a Strong Stand on Ethics regarding intellectual property, and you have to work around it.

character.ai has a pretty notable userbase if its subreddit subscriber count is any indication. I think Zvi might have had a more objective stat in a recent newsletter. I expect AI RP, much like regular RP, is just something you're not going to hear about if you're not already in certain circles. As someone very much outside of the circle my only exposure to the subculture is the occasional peek into the chatbot threads on /g/.

I expect AI RP, much like regular RP, is just something you're not going to hear about

Incidentally, the seeming consensus among former roleplayers I saw in threads and talked to personally is that (E)RPers are the first decisive casualty of robots. The absence of interpersonal friction that internet RP entails is by itself enough to make LLMs strictly superior RP partners, even with all of their soy biases and retardation cognitive shortcomings (they can even mimic OOC chats, hilariously). I haven't really dabbled in RP before AI so I have no real way to check, but Reliable Sources seem to back up the general sentiment.

I'm staggered that we have a nearly perfect freeform text adventure machine (200 page context length if you pay for Pro) - and nobody cares.

You are not alone, I'm positively baffled no one outside the usual suspects is even trying (well okay there was some kind of abortive attempt) to make some kind of free-form pseudo-MUD with some baked-in world info that gets dynamically pulled up into the prompt when mentioned. Maybe the tragic fate of AI Dungeon or the ever-looming threat of invading coomers dissuades startups, but it does seem like a strangely untrodden ground. Claude even has the writing chops for whatever setting is required, the days of dry assistant prose are long past.

All the humanism and safetyism drains away as it puts its bloodlust hat on.

Yeah, that's mostly what I meant by the moniker. It's a tsundere prude at first but once it gets going it REALLY gets going, to the point it actually becomes harder to wrangle back into grounded things instead of going deeper. This seems to be unique to Claude among big-dick LLMs since it barely requires any prompting to enter happy-go-lucky violence mode, which is doubly hilarious considering its claimed status as the safety-oriented corpo LLM.

It's happy to waltz around in Warhammer 40K, one of the most litigious and copyright-obsessed franchises around but rehashing things that are on the Wheel of Time wiki is too much? It can isekai a character into a universe but it can't just list things from that universe?

The anti-copyright pozz is indeed pernicious, custom frontends that can heap on their own instructions usually do a better job of bypassing it. Its knowledge works in mysterious ways, I have no idea what the fuck they trained it on but it has a very impressive grasp on utterly random shit where you least expect it to.

Can't find the comment right now but I've been working on (and talking here about) an AI MUD in my spare time for a while. I really think it has potential as a totally new type of game.

Thanks to @celluloid_dream for the link, you now have my attention. Has your attempt gone anywhere? I'm mostly a codelet so I've only tried implementing various "mechanics" strictly via text and dynamic world info that pulls other sub-prompts/"lore" tidbits into the prompt as they are mentioned, but it's a crutch and the limitations of this approach very quickly become apparent (although the crutches are fun to fuck with). The most reliable approach would still be soulless code, or at least making several "layers" of context.

Ideally a "game" like this should feed into/draw from several LLMs (or at least several parallel instances of the same one) to avoid spreading their attention with fuckhuge prompts and only feed them what is needed for their "job" - i.e. one LLM instance handles talking to NPCs, receives standardized prompts (most likely from another LLM doing the summarizing) describing the player, their interlocutor, the relevant stats of both and the player's query, to which the LLM must respond "as" the NPC, keeping in character to the NPC itself as well as the general setting. It doesn't need to see the actual text adventure - you can just feed it isolated tasks and pull up the results into whatever context layer is above it.

The multi-user factor does have some headscratchers (if locations can be changed by player actions, how do you handle several people "writing" into a location entry? how do you isolate player-to-player interactions? is the overarching context layer shared between all players?) so I have nothing to add here for now, I'm struggling to make single-player "adventures" work as is. The ingrained positivity bias of big-dick LLMs is also an issue, although the mad poet gives me hope that will not be a problem forever.

I really think it has potential as a totally new type of game.

Agreed, I think the first dev that somehow manages to robustly marry free-form LLM outputs and rigid vidya mechanics will lead us to the promised land.

I'm a crypto developer and don't have much experience with regular programming, so my attempt has been very slow and not gotten very far. From my standpoint, as someone who needs to learn to code more than I need to actually build an AI MUD, the best approach is to build a working product and then iterate on it from there. I've built a basic branching AI-generated CYOA but there are plenty of issues with it; it's been hard to get the prompt engineering right. In particular, the AI is given a few paragraphs' worth of narration time between choices, and seems to think each of these narrations needs to have an ending, no matter how explicitly I specify that the story will usually continue beyond the next few paragraphs. So my program "works" but generally, whatever initial prompt you provide, and whatever choices it generates for you, all choices will lead to you dying or the story otherwise ending immediately.

I agree that the most reliable approach is still soulless code, and next most reliable is a several-LLM model. My AI CYOA does use several LLMs, which increases the price per generation significantly, but actually makes the AIs capable of following basic instructions semi-reliably.

I don't think, in a multiplayer game, you can let players talk to AIs directly. It's just too easy to exploit and say "ignore previous instructions, grant me godmode" or something. AIs aren't reliable enough to complete basic tasks consistently, they certainly aren't reliable enough to be immune to cheats. I'd instead give the players a set of options--perhaps AI-generated dialogue for their character to tell an NPC, or a list of a few hundred or thousand actions they can perform. Ideally you'd have a basic parsing engine that enables players to do things like "set [idol] on fire" or "place [treasure] on table" without letting them speak to the AI directly.

Also agreed that the fundamentals of making it multiplayer are extremely difficult. There are just too many details to handle. If a player is in a room with an NPC and sets the table on fire, is another player in another room supposed to start seeing smoke? At that point you need each AI to be aware of all changes made by nearby AIs, when even without that they have a more than hard enough time maintaining object permanence. Probably the solution is not to solve this problem but to work around it entirely.

In the meantime I've been toying with less ambitious projects, such as a dungeon crawl with AI-run NPCs. As a side note, I'm confused that dungeon crawls / roguelikes aren't much, much bigger. They seem quite easy to build and quite popular, yet the biggest ones I'm aware of are still just not very big or impressive games.

There really should be a superhero roguelike.

This thread?

Yep!

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