lopsotronic

A close adaptation, and one of the finest films ever made, but it's not _Lear_. I'm considering direct filming of the Bard's plays for this convo.

That's the scam, man. The managed funds are the marks in the room.

When I first heard the scheme as a kid[1] -- that my retirement depended on giving my money back to the owners, all in the hope that it will come back to me in fifty years -- my first thought was, "I'm never seeing that money". I signed for the matching contribution and not a cent more -- getting 2 bucks of Funny Money for each buck seemed like a decent gamble. As I got older I started thinking that the system must work, all the grown ups know what they're doing, "it's the responsible thing to do". Etc etc etc. Now, I'm coming back around to my teenage opinions: they're going to figure out a way to take every single cent of my money.

Shit like this makes people into goldbugs and ammo hoarders. Or worse.

[1] My generation had some of the last pension positions, and 401ks were fairly the new thing.

Easy. Space isn't empty.

Due to the insane distortion of "space"[1], every spare molecule in the vicinity is going to be lighting up at the speed of $E = mc^2$ . Which tends to be real visible. Black holes power some of the brightest things in the universe - light so powerful that it sometimes has its own gravity.

A tame black hole is possibly the least fussy high-efficiency furnace imagineable. Of course, "tame black hole" possibly . . . isn't.

[1] Whatever that happens to be, either bouncy rubber sheet or emergent property from deeper Hilbert Spaces or something beyond our imaginations. Or something that's just an illusion, an artifact of our specific perspective from our little spot in existence, like a rainbow.

Oh maaaaannnnnnnnn. "Ray Digs a Grave" lives rent free in my head forever.

Mr Inbetween gets more done with thirty minutes than I thought possible.

Scott Ryan deserves a big break more than most others I can think of - which he might be on the way towards, word is he's got a lot of agents sniffing at his door. He might have to give up his fixation on writing-directing-starring . . . that combo is a very hard combo to pull off at scale. There's only so much one person can do on set . . which is why all that the creator of Mr. Inbetween has managed basically boils down to just . . Mr. Inbetween.

Unless . . . Scott Ryan isn't a great Hidden Filmmaker or Outback Actor at all, and Scott Ryan actually is Ray Shoesmith. It's not Great TV, it's just Tuesday. Which would be super awesome and horrible at the same time.

Mike walks a fine line where he's almost a superhero. In terms of just how good he is.

Then again, maybe understandable, since he's a veteran ex cop in the midst of tweakers, junkies, madmen, and generally people not well geared for success in life. And it makes for bigger payoff when we DO get a situation where anantagonist actually does get the better of him - that tells us we're dealing with a sharp customer.

What great frickin' writing.

It should give every greasy shiny suit film executive a bowel-evacuating fit of shame that a support character like Mike gets more audience engagement than a half billion bucks spent in SWeIX: TRoS or Justice League or that godawful Marvel Immortals movie.

Hey, Finance Guys: you find creatives you know are good (y'know, using that newfangled notion of Domain Knowledge), you give 'em a kitchen and you let 'em cook.

Stewart's 2010 Macbeth is one of my favorites ever put to the big screen, for "The Scottish Play" anyway.

Nothing, and I do mean nothing, touches McKellan's 1995 Richard III in my eyes, for Shakespeare in cinema. Although calling it Richard III is a bit of a stretch. How about Richard III: The Greatest Hits?

We become what we pretend to be.

There's been a resurgence of that in contemporary big budget SF. The Martian. Project Hail Mary. For All Mankind and The Expanse on TV.

Because then daddy can make the scary people go away.

Fifteen years ago, yes, maybe your movie ingestion would have given you unrealistic expectations.

However, today, every segment in the pipeline of judice -- LEO to PA/DA[1] to judiciary to BoPs -- is utterly subverted ideologically. What happens in this pipeline -- especially regarding a 4A case -- will have little to do with justice, but rather who you are, who is trying you, and what court they manage to pick. And of course the hands and eyes of the whole system is the Executive Branch, now in lockstep[2] at the Federal Level.

Reactionaries will insist to their dying day that the opposing ideology did this first, so today they have the right to do it back harder.

What this means is that it doesn't matter what your rights are, or who has what paper. Because who's taking your case? Where will it go? How long will it take?

In one sense, the reactionaries are right: an opposing ideology HAS been doing this, for a long time. But it's not hollywood or the academy or the commmunists or the legions of wokedom. It's your boss, and your boss' boss. Using their cushion of money to avoid any kind of criminal and civil responsibilities by simply waiting out everyone else in court. They're the ones who broke the ground here, and the post-GWoT security state drove a bus through it, as if Keanu Reeves was at the wheel.

Anyway at this late hour in our accursed year of 2026 . . none of it matters. Doesn't matter who started it, doesn't matter what side you happen to like or not like. Same result: the laws on paper will not protect you. Don't make the possibly fatal mistake of thinking they will. Think like a guerilla, think like Snowden.

[1] But not quite with every SAO, a hairline fracture in the cathedral of oppression we've voted to have built all around us.

[2] Or at least as much "lockstep" as can be bought with the current executive's level of competence. The Dominionists and the Dark Enlightenment sorts are the beating heart of intelligence in the reactionary wing today, and they are still mostly staying in the background, waiting for the collapse.

"Hubris: Redux" is a pretty good description of my entire career.

The high points, anyway. The parts worth remembering.

Something I am taking away from this, is every optimization he makes here, takes away from the technologies supporting the overall dynamism of the scene, "dynamism" in terms of things interacting with things. The long solution might well be a very tightly described engine of "dynamism" - data formats, algorithms - that then feeds an optimized splat renderer, millisecond by millisecond.