#nick thiel

[moviemosaics]

Theater Camp

directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, 2023

[rickchung]

Theater Camp (dir. Molly Gordon & Nick Lieberman).

What [it] gets so right is the very specific personalities and eccentricities of children deeply enmeshed in theatre culture and their young adult counterparts. There's so much inherent drama mixed with codependency in the name of putting on a show and chasing the high of a performance. Gordon and Lieberman's naturalistic yet heightened sense of artistic melodrama is hilariously on point.

[twenty-words-or-less]

Theater Camp

Summary: After AdirondACTS's founder Joan (Amy Sedaris) falls into a coma, her son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) must team up with Amos (Ben Platt), Rebecca-Diane (Molly Gordon), and the other camp teachers to come up with a solution to prevent it from closing.

Sharp mockumentary that functions as redemption arc for Ben Platt’s acting career. Molly Gordon thrives as co-lead, co-writer, and co-director.

Rating: 4/5

Photo credit: Variety

[altwritewegner]

In Zeiten »anarchokapitalistischer« Staatsoberhäupter, aufstrebender US-Nachwuchspolitiker mit betont illiberalen Ansichten (etwa J.D. Vance, Blake Masters oder Vivek Ramaswamy) und dem Wirken nicht nur wirtschaftlich, sondern auch kulturell und politisch disruptiver Tech-Milliardeninvestoren wie Elon Musk und Peter Thiel kommt oft die Rede von einem neuen Feudalismus oder gar einer »Neoreaktion« (NRx) auf. Was genau soll das sein?

Alles geht zurück auf einen hochbegabten, aber arbeitslosen Informatiker namens Curtis Yarvin (alias Mencius Moldbug) und den antihumanistischen Philosophen des »Akzelerationismus«, Nick Land. Mit meiner kleinen ideengeschichtlichen Analyse kann der deutschsprachige Leser nachvollziehen, wie Yarvin ab 2007 um seine persönliche Auslegung der europäischen Geistesgeschichte eine »Cloud« hochintelligenter Autoren und Denker voller Skepsis gegenüber Demokratie und Liberalismus scharte, und wie der ehemalige Philosophiedozent Land fünf Jahre später darüber den Horizont einer »Dunklen Aufklärung« aufspannte. Ich präsentiere die wichtigsten Figuren der digitalen Reactosphere, erläutere die zentralen Begriffe von Cathedral bis Bioleninism, stelle NRx in den Kontext der intellektuellen US-Nachkriegsrechten und zeige, in welchen Phänomenen wir im Jetzt und Hier das Erbe von Dark Enlightenment und Neoreaction sehen können.

Wer herausfinden möchte, ob überall, wo »Reaktion« draufsteht, auch Reaktion drin ist, und ob das überhaupt erstrebenswert wäre, der sollte spätestens nach der Lektüre von »Neoreaktion und Dunkle Aufklärung« im Bilde sein.

[stuff-diary]

Theater Camp

Movies watched in 2024

Theater Camp (2023, USA)

Directors: Molly Gordon & Nick Lieberman

Writers: Noah Galvin, Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman & Ben Platt (based on the short film by the same team)

Mini-review:

Wow, I didn't expect to love this so much. I basically watched it because I love the cast and I needed some lighthearted entertainment, but it really was much more than that. For starters, it's just so, so funny. All the jokes are clever and perfectly delivered, and they keep coming and coming, which is seriously impressive. I guess its sense of humor won't suit everybody's taste, but I completely connected with it, and I can't remember the last movie that made me laugh this much. And every single member of the cast is pitch-perfect, from the adults to the kids. You can tell just how much passion they have for the world of theatre and musicals. Speaking of musicals, there are quite a few stunning musical numbers and songs, which is particularly remarkable when you take into account this is not a big-budget movie, by any means. So yeah, Theater Camp was a very pleasant surprise, and I want to watch more. I would give anything for a sequel or some sort of TV adaptation. Don't be surprised if it ends up in my yearly top 10.

[milliondollarbaby87]

Theater Camp (2023) Review

The staff of a rundown theater camp in upstate New York must attempt to keep it afloat when the beloved owner is takeen into hospital and her uninterested son attempts to destory everything she had built. ⭐️⭐️ Continue reading Untitled

[watchingalotofmovies]

Theater Camp

Theater Camp    [trailer]

The eccentric staff of a rundown theater camp in upstate New York must band together with the beloved founder's bro-y son to keep the camp afloat.

I'm not enough of a theatre geek to fully enjoy the feature-length version of this mockumentary. For me the short this is apparently based on would probably be the better choice.

But even I can appreciate the enthusiasm and effort the creative team put into this film in order to make it on what I suspect was a very small budget.

[genevieveetguy]

Theater Camp, Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman (2023)

[jmunneytumbler]

Are You Ready to Book Your Spot in 'Theater Camp'?

Are You Ready to Book Your Spot in 'Theater Camp'?

Which one’s Theater and which one’s Camp? (CREDIT: SearchlightPictures/Screenshot) Starring: Molly Gordon, Ben Platt, Noah Galvin, Jimmy Tatro, Nathan Lee Graham, Ayo Edebiri, Owen Thiele, Caroline Aaron, Amy Sedaris Directors: Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman Running Time: 93 Minutes Rating: PG-13 for Middle Schoolers Dramatizing Adult Themes Release Date: July 14, 2023 (Theaters) What’s It…

[whimsigothwitch]

I'm curious, what kind of music do you listen to?

I grew up with a lot of music thanks to my father, who collected records that he always played. I love listening to 60s, 70s, psychedelic rock, but I do also love punk, grunge and goth music!

Artists/groups I love; The doors, Donovan, The runaways, Joan jett, Siouxsie and the banshees, Stevie nicks, Fleetwood mac, Cream, The electric prunes, The art of lovin', Electric light orchestra, Shocking blue, Kate Bush, Creedance clearwater revival, David Bowie, The Beatles, Mazzy star, Hope sandoval and the warm inventions, The mamas and the papas, The rolling stones, The sweet, Eagles, Billy Idol, Led Zeppelin, The hollies, Blondie, Pink Floyd, Duran Duran, Doe maar, The cranberries, The moody blues, The cramps, The velvet underground.

Being pagan, I also like to play these artists during the turning of the wheel to connect more with each sabbat; Lisa Thiel, Libana, Spiral Dance, Kellianna (elemental)

[tagedeszorns]

Aeonid Thiel on ravaged Calth

This one is for @vlka-fenryka.

Thiel is best vowel guy.

Since I love Nick Kyme's "Censure"-story, I decided to draw rugged, unkempt guerilla-Thiel. Wandering the radioactive wastes of Calth, crawling through the tunnels and being a nuissance to everybody (that's his biological niche).

He already has a lot of his tactical scribbles, that may or may not become part of the codex later, on his pauldron.

The sheer irony of this unorthodox guy unwittingly paving the way for this whole insane chapter-thing is very funny to me. But it isn't the first nor the last time the Imperium of Man has taken some writing wildly out of context and turned it into something truly strange, for the sake of adding more dogma to anything. So you can dogma while you dogma.

[ravenkings]

"The ideology of Silicon Valley is clear: move fast and break things, scale at all costs, pump and dump. The lingering earth-flavored utopianism of the California Ideology softened the edge, and American two-party politics ensured at least a facade of responsibility, but both have largely fallen away over the past year.

I can point to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, tech company layoffs, general societal Jokerfication post-Covid and the takeoff of generative AI as proximate causes, but the root cause is an unsustainable concentration of power among frustrated young men; more specifically, among engineers.1

C.P. Snow famously described the cleavage between The Two Cultures in Western society, between science and the humanities. In 1959, Snow observed the social supremacy of the humanities—his argument was that they needed to learn to understand the other culture, for the benefit of society.

But now the engineers are in charge. Universities are STEM departments and professional schools, with humanities a luxury curiosity. Television and now social media has devastated literary culture. We no longer believe in the rule of law or in liberalism more broadly.

So now they’re openly talking about Accelerationism, “effective accelerationism,” even, leaping into the gaping hole in vibe space left by the implosion of FTX/Effective Altruism. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has been pushing this for many months, and yesterday released

“The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”

The content is far too stupid to engage with; it takes 10x the effort to refute bullshit than to produce it. Instead, we should think about this document as post-textual. The medium is natural language, but what it encodes is not linear, conceptual reason but vibes. The concluding list of thinkers and fictional characters is simply a clout bomb.

This is a collection of tweets: pure discourse, responding to The Discourse that came before it. In contrast to the idea of individual agency at the heart of liberalism, there is no agency here: the writing is driven entirely by discourse and vibes. It is all implied by what came before it. None of means anything."

[...]

"But Andreessen is more interested in the right hand of cybernetics—he specifically and repeatedly endorses the philosophy of Nick Land, the most famous proponent of Accelerationism. I can’t believe it’s come to this.

Thiel famously said that capitalism and democracy are incompatible, and chose the former.

Land’s Accelerationism says that (techno)capitalism and humanity are incompatible, and yet he still chose the former.3

So make no mistake. Accelerationism is terrorism.4 It violates what Ortega y Gasset calls “man’s most fundamental right...the right to continuity.” Technological accelerationism aims to eliminate the human and instantiate the world of the inhuman functionary. The current rate of change is already incompatible with human dignity, and they want to speed it up. From the manifesto:

We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns.

For people who valorize “The Scientific Method,” they don’t seem to understand what a “Law” is. If this is a Law of Nature, it’s odd that humans have to “fulfill” it. If it’s a human Law, who passed it? Can we overturn it?"

[female-malice]

Over the past two decades, a small group of theorists mostly based in Oxford have been busy working out the details of a new moral worldview called longtermism, which emphasizes how our actions affect the very long-term future of the universe – thousands, millions, billions, and even trillions of years from now. This has roots in the work of Nick Bostrom, who founded the grandiosely named Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) in 2005, and Nick Beckstead, a research associate at FHI and a programme officer at Open Philanthropy. It has been defended most publicly by the FHI philosopher Toby Ord, author of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020). Longtermism is the primary research focus of both the Global Priorities Institute (GPI), an FHI-linked organisation directed by Hilary Greaves, and the Forethought Foundation, run by William MacAskill, who also holds positions at FHI and GPI. Adding to the tangle of titles, names, institutes and acronyms, longtermism is one of the main ‘cause areas’ of the so-called effective altruism (EA) movement, which was introduced by Ord in around 2011 and now boasts of having a mind-boggling $46 billion in committed funding.

It is difficult to overstate how influential longtermism has become. Karl Marx in 1845 declared that the point of philosophy isn’t merely to interpret the world but change it, and this is exactly what longtermists have been doing, with extraordinary success. Consider that Elon Musk, who has cited and endorsed Bostrom’s work, has donated $1.5 million dollars to FHI through its sister organisation, the even more grandiosely named Future of Life Institute (FLI). This was cofounded by the multimillionaire tech entrepreneur Jaan Tallinn, who, as I recently noted, doesn’t believe that climate change poses an ‘existential risk’ to humanity because of his adherence to the longtermist ideology.

Meanwhile, the billionaire libertarian and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who once gave the keynote address at an EA conference, has donated large sums of money to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, whose mission to save humanity from superintelligent machines is deeply intertwined with longtermist values. Other organisations such as GPI and the Forethought Foundation are funding essay contests and scholarships in an effort to draw young people into the community, while it’s an open secret that the Washington, DC-based Center for Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET) aims to place longtermists within high-level US government positions to shape national policy. In fact, CSET was established by Jason Matheny, a former research assistant at FHI who’s now the deputy assistant to US President Joe Biden for technology and national security. Ord himself has, astonishingly for a philosopher, ‘advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister’s Office, Cabinet Office, and Government Office for Science’, and he recently contributed to a report from the Secretary-General of the United Nations that specifically mentions ‘long-termism’.

The point is that longtermism might be one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities and Silicon Valley have ever heard about. I believe this needs to change because, as a former longtermist who published an entire book four years ago in defence of the general idea, I have come to see this worldview as quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today. But to understand the nature of the beast, we need to first dissect it, examining its anatomical features and physiological functions.

(continue reading)

–

Rather than solve climate problems now, governments are focused on putting humanity in sci-fi virtual reality pods in 500,000 years.

We've seen this over and over again throughout history. Crazed emperors use up their nation's resources hunting for immortality. Hunting for the philosopher's stone.

Longtermism is our modern day philosopher's stone.

[ladymirdan]

Mirdan’s 40K headcanons

So on the topic of Aeonid Thiels gene-seed.

I know that both Guy Hailey and Nick Kyme have hinted at that Cato Sicarius have Thiel’s gene-seed and that the two are very alike.

While I LOVE both of these boys I think I have to disagree; they do have similarities but not enough to be a definite “Cato got his ADHD from Thiel.”

I have also heard fan theories that it could be Ventris who has it, and that is a big fat no for me. They are nothing alike in their core.

So where do I believe it ended up? Well, in the person influencing both of these boys to think outside of the box.

Both Cato and Uriel are the classic “follow the rules”-Ultramarine at heart. Both of them have doubts every time they bend or break rules even when its absolutely necessary.

They are nothing like Thiel’s primal instinct to do what is smart and right and then think of the consequences afterwards.

We know one Ultramarine in 40k who embodied this and that would be Idaeus, Uriel’s and Cato’s former mentor.

But that would also mean that his gene-seed is lost now. Or worst/best scenario, in the hands of Night Lords.

[saturdaynightmatinee]

CALIFICACIÓN PERSONAL: 4.5 / 10

Título Original: Fire Birds

Año: 1990

Duración: 85 min

País: Estados Unidos

Dirección: David Green

Guion: Nick Thiel, Paul F. Edwards

Música: David Newman

Fotografía: Tony Imi

Reparto: Nicolas Cage, Tommy Lee Jones, Sean Young, Bryan Kestner, Dale Dye, Mary Ellen Trainor, Peter Onorati, J.A. Preston

Productora: Buena Vista Pictures, Nova International Films

Género: Action; Adventure

TRAILER:

[altwritewegner]

ES IST SOWEIT! 🤩

Musk, Thiel, Trump und die rechtslibertäre Versuchung: Viel ist in den vergangenen zehn Jahren über die sogenannte Neoreaction mit ihren Galionsfiguren Mencius Moldbug und Nick Land geschrieben worden. Für den Jungeuropa Verlag durfte ich nun die erste deutschsprachige Einführung und Klärung zum Thema verfassen – vorbestellen kann man ab sofort, erscheinen wird das schöne Stück im Februar!

https://www.jungeuropa.de/detail/index/sArticle/378