bleu-guacamole

[bleu-guacamole]

daniel radcliffe calling out j.k. rowling on her bullshit is big dick energy

[bleu-guacamole]

absolute fucking king weird al encouraging proper means of watching his new biopic

[bleu-guacamole]

i’ve started looking at weight and health the way i look at class and income and it really puts a lot of things into a new perspective.

let me explain: in america at least, the lower class have significantly worse health outcomes, even when accounting for other factors. just being poor is enough to make your overall health worse. we don’t know that being fat makes your health directly worse, like the data just isn’t there, but for a moment, pretend it does.

imagine going to the doctor with a health problem and the doctor looking at your chart and saying well, this problem will be less severe if you go up an income bracket. have you thought about becoming rich? it would really help. start by saving a little money every month.

ridiculous, right?? very few people successfully go from working class to rich, it just doesn’t happen on a large scale in society. maybe for a time you pick up some overtime hours, spend a little beyond your means, and appear rich. but eventually you burn out, your car needs to be repaired, and you return to being working class.

we do have this data: only some people can successfully lose large amounts of weight, and only a tiny fraction of people who lose that weight actually keep it off for more than a year. telling people to lose weight for their health is just absurd because they almost certainly can’t do it any more than they can double their income for their health.

and yet i see it everywhere. a little poster in my work breakroom tells me to improve my blood pressure by losing weight! a psa on the radio says you need to take care of your heart by losing weight! we can’t even conclusively prove that weight is the cause rather than just correlated with a lot of these problems but here it is offered anyway: have you tried being rich?

[bleu-guacamole]

This whole thing about scanning your face to prove tour age is making me remember, in 2018 while out in paris we got our wallet stolen during a particularly busy night at a lesbian bar. It was very late and with no money to buy metro tickets we were effectively stranded, but some people helped us and we ended up staying the night at a really sweet older man's place. His face was deeply scarred and he was missing an eye. We chatted on our way and he told me about his life, probably to help calm me down. He explained he had been stuck in a house fire 20 years ago and had had multiple rounds of facial reconstruction and a skin graft, but there's only so much surgery can do so he just learned to live with it. I remember he said he liked the queer bars because they're the only place people don't really stare at him.

At some point I took out my phone, and at the time I was using face unlock. This prompted him to tell me all the ways this technology doesn't work on him. How his phone selfie camera doesn't focus right because it's not detecting a face. How he had to update his ID the old fashioned way, because the website kept rejecting his photos. And how it was becoming more and more common, and how it was making his life way harder.

This was 7 years ago, and now whenever I see this sort of technology I think of how that guy can't use it. And how house fires are pretty common, and how anything from being born this way to a skin condition to heavy tattooing can probably cause the same issue. Can these people get age verified ? Will they just lose access to all social media, which are increasingly necessary in society, if this becomes the norm ? These are people who are already driven out of public spaces due to how they look, and they're getting pushed out online too all in the interest of companies wanting more money.

[bleu-guacamole]

FINALLY got around to dumping Spotify after their CEO continued to prove he's a fresh turd. (As if being a billionaire, not paying musicians, shoving AI garbage at us, and having an atrocious carbon footprint wasn't bad enough, he's now the chair of a AI-based weapons manufacturing company.)

I used TuneMyMusic ($24 annual fee you can cancel immediately, effectively paying only once) to transfer almost every single song from our Spotify account to Tidal. Tidal already has much better sound quality and they pay their artists much better. It migrated over 99% of our music, too, so there wasn't a huge loss.

[bleu-guacamole]

so guys turns out that being raised by queer people alienates me from the queer experience. probably not a good thing

[bleu-guacamole]

they are barring wikipedia. they are barring spotify. they are barring important news - both national news and world news. they are barring mental health forums and LGBTQ related things and so much more. this is not about protecting children, it has never been about protecting children.

the online safety act is an insane privacy breach, and if that does not scare you then you need to think harder about it. it is going to end up in a massive data leak - all the information is getting collected by random third party systems. can we trust them? no. can we even hold them accountable? no. because the government couldn’t even make their own system to do these age checks.

and i hear you - it is important that kids don’t see porn. but even if all this was about protecting kids, it’s sloppy and useless. it’s easy (for now) to get around with a vpn and the only thing the act doing is censoring things that it shouldnt. if the government wanted to protect kids, they would do something concrete about it - they would be putting more funding into education, for example.

of course the policy isnt called “national surveillance”. they’re not going to call it that. everything will be hidden behind things that people want.

so email your MP, and tell other people that this is WAY more than blocking porn from children - this is the first step towards national surveillance.

[bleu-guacamole]

[bleu-guacamole]

[bleu-guacamole]

i love the specification of "alive" in the people magazine "sexiest man alive" award. clearly they're worried about ötzi the iceman sweeping the competition. as they should be.

[bleu-guacamole]

John Oliver gets it, as usual. AI Slop is one of the best episodes of Last Week Tonight I've seen so far. Gen AI is theft. Those who use it are not authors or artists, they're grifters profiting from real creatives.

[bleu-guacamole]

"Maybe I'll kill that reporter who does all your interviews. Maybe I'll kill Clark Kent."

This is the most important line in the movie. I'm 100% serious. It tells you everything you need to know about Lex Luthor's character. It shows the audience that, despite being almost omnicognizant from the get-go, Luthor clearly has no fucking idea who Superman is, only what he does.

I've never seen anyone go from All-Knowing Evil to Absolute Fucking Loser so fast. In fifteen words he went from unstoppable criminal powerhouse to flailing manchild moron. He gave his Evil Dictator demonstration and then turned around, dropped his pants and showed his entire ass. He proclaimed his manifesto of unrelenting ego, turned around, slipped on a banana peel and landed on a whoopie cushion.

And he was so mired in his own sense of superiority that he never even knew it.

Lex Luthor, folks. Ten out of ten, no notes.

[bleu-guacamole]

just saw the new Superman and yknow what I keep thinking about?.. when he’s fighting Luthor’s diversion in Metropolis, Clark is making every effort to isolate it to a relatively open space (the park). damages are at a minimum. but that takes time, it’s not efficient enough, so then the corporate-funded Justice Gang shows up - and oops, suddenly buildings are being swept off their foundations, civilians in direct line of fire, the city core is getting ripped apart. he’s scrambling to save children, squirrels, people caught in the red zone while the others are more interested in punching the big monster. the story makes it absolutely clear that corporations don’t care about life or harm reduction, and in a world in which superheroes are already normalized, this kindness is what sets Superman apart

[bleu-guacamole]

“I asked ChatGPT” “I asked Grok” yeah well I asked General John Macnamara of the United States Military and he said wear a watch, time is a precious thread in the fabric of the universe it deserves its own tool of measurement

[bleu-guacamole]

The next time you want to call a sequence “Well animated” do yourself a favour and rewatch it with the sound muted. Often times ir’s only after you remove sound from something that you can truly see if the animation underneath is actually good or not, or if the music/acting is manipulating you.

….but on that same note, “Well animated” does not mean “Fluidly animated”. Because something can be VERY well animated and have few frames if those frames are in the right place, or have a shit ton for frames and be badly animated because it’s over-animated and moves way too much.

[bleu-guacamole]

The way Superman depicted complicit civilians is gonna stick with me.

Because usually when you have your villain, usually the civilians working for them are gonna be largely faceless or cowed. And then when the hero crashes the scene, only the armed goons are taken out while said civilians flee to remove any questions.

In here though, you can tell they all enjoy working for Luthor. The technicians in his hq have fun plugging in directions to Ultraman. And those in the base camp wear tropical shirts while listening to music and playing games on their downtime. Nobody is working with rigid confirmity nor are there moral reservations (the only objection shown was when his obsession almost got them killed).

So when Mr. Terrific arrived on the scene, it is actually fitting that he wiped out the workers alongside the armed goons.

Also the way Superman's fellow prisoners not only attempted to snitch on him but actually tried to out snitch each other deserves a whole other analysis.

[bleu-guacamole]

Been thinking about how the new Superman movie did a really good job of giving Clark interests beyond “Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow.” He likes pop punk rock. His favorite meal is breakfast for dinner. Clark does a little dance when he gets the front cover byline. He likes to doom-scroll. Unclear if he’s a dog guy. His girlfriend makes him hot cocoa when he’s sad. So often Superman in film has zero personality beyond tortured alien that must guide humanity. Giving him these small details made the character feel so much more real. He really is just a guy doing his best.