Exactly. The story still works fine without them landing because they are ancillary to it. They had something to say besides "remember this other thing?".

It's mostly about David Foster Wallace and Quentin Tarantino, but talks about how TV media culture in particular has brought this sort of channel surfing aesthetic as a form of cultural commonality in media consumption (as opposed to snooty deep analysis, etc). It's kind of interesting if you are acquainted with their works, but overly long otherwise.

https://youtu.be/7j0gj-UIo9g

It also gets some bonus points for calling out QT's zionazi arc quite clearly early on.

Watched a video recently that was talking about how media has become quite dominated by referential tropes at the expense of actual narrative construction. Basically the plot has become just a structure that supports the arrangement of references to well worn moments in other media. Examples would be stuff like Family Guy and later Simpsons, but it crops up in all sorts of stuff now. Instead of media literacy being about understanding the structure and dynamics of a story, the new discourse often focuses on tracing references across different media products. It's much like "remember-berries" but across the whole of media culture, and it often can decontextualize effective storytelling into a collection of tropes via surface level discourse.

The End of The Sun

https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_end_of_the_sun

Looking at the screenshot gallery I saw at least 3-4 black sun symbols along with a few other questionable ones. Wonder who funded and made this.

A cyclist friend of mine has started using cargo-spec chains because they mash the pedals really hard most of the time. A bit of extra weight but longer lasting chains is an acceptable trade-off for them.

There are certainly very few options for high torque with internal gear hubs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_hub_gears

"upholding the ideals of western cultural values"

Fallout? That's pretty funny.

You make ONE movie where the roles are reversed, where it's Iraqi freedom fighters fighting back, and the side characters are literally family, friends, neighbors, who will die and be tortured, and EVERYONE will be able to naturally feel how realistic this movie is because it's obvious on its face how realistic it is, and yet the media will jump down your throat about it.

Literally why Lucas made Star Wars a "scifi" film. There's this thing I heard about in relation to how John Carpenter was able to get They Live made, about how due to the way the Hollywood studio system works making a film that critiques the US/status quo has to be done via what was labelled "trojan cinema". The creators have to sneak in this critique under the cover of some contrivance. This is the essence of allegory in scifi, fantasy, etc.

This doesn't seem to work very well as most US movie watchers have terrible media literacy unfortunately. Maybe just doing it as you suggest without contrivance muddying the waters is the better approach. I think this works pretty well with films that are retelling historical events, but it probably won't get funded/distributed if it was done in a realistic but fictional story.

The cinema mind can handle a "we used to be so bad" story, but something blatantly using the US as the evil empire in a realistic, contemporary but fictional setting is too triggering of cognitive dissonance. I feel like that there could be a good sized audience for it now, but the gatekeepers of film making in are unwilling to take that chance.

The Awful Tower

Getting a 25k$ discount on buying a truck as president of a country is so quaint in comparison to the graft in other countries.

tfw trying to lie to your bros after getting ghosted