#stop doing the work of a billion dollar industry for them

[maroononthemoon]

"ARA stands for animal rights activists and that is *wild caricature not actually based in reality*"

"Think PETA *an organization that cares more about money than anything else and most actual activists do not support, and even then you have to parrot literal meat industry propaganda to make them sound more unequivocally evil than they already are* that's what the typical ARA believes"

I am so sick of seeing these posts reblogged by otherwise intelligent people who advocate critical thinking and social justice in every context except apparently animals.

This is what climate deniers and the oil industry did to environmental activists. Do you realize that? Spread lies to paint the movement as unhinged and ridiculous and dangerous. Create a boogeyman to make the industry look better than it is and make everyone else who at least acknowledges the harms of the industry feel better about not doing anything about it because 'at least you're not like those crazy activists' right?

You don't have to be a vegan. You don't have to be an activist. But please for the love of fuck, stop swallowing and spreading bullshit. Stop going out of your way to undermine a movement you can't be assed to actually learn about.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

i mean. medical technology is all about stopping "natural" things from happening to our bodies. from external diseases to internal parts of our bodies not working the way we need them to (our brains, our organs, our immune systems), medicine is all about interfering with things that have naturally gone wrong in our bodies--and that for the first time in history, we might have a way to fix. and that's not even getting into cosmetic stuff--the billion dollar industries to remove acne and body hair for instance. natural things that happen to our bodies, that we have decided are unpleasant and that we have the right to change. and that's fine, because these are our bodies, and we have a right to change them, natural or not.

so stop pretending that depriving trans kids of puberty blockers and other medical care is okay, because growing irreversible secondary sex characteristics that they do not want is "natural"

[robertreich]

Should Billionaires Exist? 

Do billionaires have a right to exist?

America has driven more than 650 species to extinction. And it should do the same to billionaires.

Why? Because there are only five ways to become one, and they’re all bad for free-market capitalism:

1. Exploit a Monopoly.

Jamie Dimon is worth $2 billion today… but not because he succeeded in the “free market.” In 2008, the government bailed out his bank JPMorgan and other giant Wall Street banks, keeping them off the endangered species list.

This government “insurance policy” scored these struggling Mom-and-Pop megabanks an estimated $34 billion a year.

But doesn’t entrepreneur Jeff Bezos deserve his billions for building Amazon?

No, because he also built a monopoly that’s been charged by the federal government and 17 states for inflating prices, overcharging sellers, and stifling competition like a predator in the wild.

With better anti-monopoly enforcement, Bezos would be worth closer to his fair-market value.

2. Exploit Inside Information

Steven A. Cohen, worth roughly $20 billion headed a hedge fund charged by the Justice Department with insider trading “on a scale without known precedent.” Another innovator!

Taming insider trading would level the investing field between the C Suite and Main Street.

3.  Buy Off Politicians

That’s a great way to become a billionaire! The Koch family and Koch Industries saved roughly $1 billion a year from the Trump tax cut they and allies spent $20 million lobbying for. What a return on investment!

If we had tougher lobbying laws, political corruption would go extinct.

4. Defraud Investors

Adam Neumann conned investors out of hundreds of millions for WeWork, an office-sharing startup. WeWork didn’t make a nickel of profit, but Neumann still funded his extravagant lifestyle, including a $60 million private jet. Not exactly “sharing.”

Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of fraud for her blood-testing company, Theranos. So was Sam Bankman-Fried of crypto-exchange FTX. Remember a supposed billionaire named Donald Trump? He was also found to have committed fraud.

Presumably, if we had tougher anti-fraud laws, more would be caught and there’d be fewer billionaires to preserve.

5. Get Money From Rich Relatives

About 60 percent of all wealth in America today is inherited.

That’s because loopholes in U.S. tax law —lobbied for by the wealthy — allow rich families to avoid taxes on assets they inherit. And the estate tax has been so defanged that fewer than 0.2 percent of estates have paid it in recent years.

Tax reform would disrupt the circle of life for the rich, stopping them from automatically becoming billionaires at their birth, or someone else’s death.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing against big rewards for entrepreneurs and inventors. But do today’s entrepreneurs really need billions of dollars? Couldn’t they survive on a measly hundred million?

Because they’re now using those billions to erode American institutions. They spent fortunes bringing Supreme Court justices with them into the wild.They treated news organizations and social media platforms like prey, and they turned their relationships with politicians into patronage troughs.

This has created an America where fewer than ever can become millionaires (or even thousandaires) through hard work and actual innovation.

If capitalism were working properly, billionaires would have gone the way of the dodo.

[infrared135-36]

also the fact that a good amount of people are talking about kuro games like they’re some poor indie devs that just want their little game to succeed is insane. this is a billion dollar company creating one of the most exploitive types of game. and the people saying shit like this do NOT understand gacha

the person spending $100 for a weapon is “playing” the game AS IT HAS BEEN DESIGNED. This isn’t some random one-off moron. every part of this game is designed so you drop big money. the amount of freemium currency they give, how the game itself is played and the time it takes to play it, the rolls you need to hit “pity”, being able to see people’s builds in co-op, the gacha 5-star animation, these are just some of the ways these games are designed to get you used to spending money. The psychology has been studied extensively. These aren’t some random game mechanics the developers just decide to slap into these games. Your typical first timer who spends money will probably follow a process like this- get “just enough” freemium currency to sink into a banner(this is why I cannot see getting free currency as being truly generous) + “I want it now” (the game is designed to bank on this, it does not matter if you can “grind it out” over multiple days) + “I spent this much and I’m close, better just keep going” + the gambler’s high you get from seeing the 5-star animation that many people will get addicted to + “I spent this much, I might as well keep playing” (or sunk cost). then the cycle repeats itself over however many new gacha banners there are. You may feel disgusted with yourself after dropping a large amount of money for digital goods in what felt like an altered state. Again, these mechanics are implemented in a way that manipulates you into doing this. Some people may stop completely after experiencing this, some may put themselves on a tight budget, but many will become addicted and repeat the process over and over and over. That’s the game working as intended. This goes for not only all gacha but the more western loot-boxes as well. It doesn’t mean these games are some unique evil in the industry, it doesn’t make you an idiot for playing them and it doesn’t mean there aren’t talented artists and writers working on them. But you need to recognize how this type of game works if you’re going to engage with it.

[gothicprep]

so, apparently marvel is in disarray. ahead of the marvels coming out this weekend, variety dropped a bomb on the studio's somewhat dire state of affairs, as the franchise has hit its first real rough patch since the release of iron man 15 years ago. among the issues: jonathan majors, whose domestic violence arrest continues to hang over marvel's plans to make his character the thanos-like heavy for the next sequence of movies, the weak box office projections for the marvels (which some have said is tracking lower than recent bombs like the flash), the unending flood of hashtag content on disney plus which is overwhelming audiences who are finding it harder to keep up with the interlocking stories that have served marvel so well over the years, shoddy visual effects, spiraling budgets such as the reported $25mil an episode for she-hulk, a show that looked terrible because of the shoddy effects work aforementioned, behind the scenes chaos as kevin feige works to slash budgets and kill projects that aren't coming together. one movie at risk is the forthcoming blade reboot with mahershala ali, which has gone through rewrite after rewrite including reportedly one draft in which blade was the fourth lead in, quote, "a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons".

that last line has provided a lot of laughs for people like jay gothicprep, and critics who insist that marvel's efforts to diversify the lineup have led to much of this disaster, indicative of disney's overall failure with things like indiana jones and the dial of destiny or animated projects like strange world or lightyear. while this is potentially true (i guess, it's possible) it doesn't seem true because this certainly wasn't the case when black panther and captain marvel were both cracking the billion dollar mark a few years ago. rather it just seems, more simply, that marvel has run its course. marvel was hit by a double-whammy of endings. the thanos storyline that'd dominated the first ten or so years of the project came to an end. at the same time, the pandemic began and disney plus started flooding the zone with content, creating a natural break point for audiences that had no desire to watch hours of tv to understand 1.5 plot points in whatever the next movie that's coming out is.

this preamble is getting kind of long, and i have a lot more to say, so i'm going to continue to thought dump about this under a cut.

first of all, i'm still laughing like a week later at the women led life lessons description. no one has disputed that it happened. that description is the funniest thing i've ever read in a trade industry report possibly ever. what in the hell, my friends. did a writer even talk to a producer about what blade was? it's a movie about a guy with a sword who kills vampires! it's pretty straighforward! that sounds like something i want to see! there were three of them already, and two of them were pretty good!

anyway, i think you can take that incredibly ridiculous description of a draft that maybe wasn't the main draft – this movie has been through tons of writers and directors – and see some of the real problems with marvel's creative direction, which is that they've stopped making movies that highlight the core concepts of their characters. there are other problems as well, but when's the last time they put out a movie that was like, "iron man. he's a guy in a metal suit and he fights a bad guy." or "spider man. it's a guy in a spider suit with spider powers. he's got girlfriend problems and he fights crime around manhattan and maybe there's dr octopus." they don't do that. their recent stretch of movies have all been these impenetrable multiverse stuff with ties to tv series that you haven't seen and maybe won't ever see. there was a whole 25 minute section in black panther 2 that was setting up armor wars and ironheart. and like. who needs that sequence, which was boring and looked like total garbage? and now armor wars is being redeveloped lol. they've just departed from a lot of the core concepts that powered their earlier films.

they have some other problems. they've leaned into a slate of characters that is not all that well-known or inherently super popular, even for marvel being able to deliver on making billion dollar films out of guardians of the galaxy and such. maybe with the exception of spider man, which they don't get a full cut from because sony owns the actual movie rights. then there's the fact that the streaming series, by all accounts, aren't great but you *feel* like you need to have seen them. they're all real big problems. marvel needs to go back to making movies that are named after a character who's a superhero with a clear concept. guy with spider powers fights crime in his neighborhood. even though those movies got kind of repetitive, they did well enough because they didn't stray too far from the character concept.

i think, too, as a viewer, when you have a studio churning out so much stuff that's not good, you get the impression that the superhero industry feels entitled to your time and entitled to your money while not delivering.

this summer also represents an interesting counterpoint to what's happened with marvel and dc. the sheer amount of stuff that you devote every waking minute to keeping track of the damn things got exhausting and made movies stop feeling like events. this summer we've had barbenheimer and the eras tour, and those have been both big events and felt exciting. barbie was a chance to be campy, oppenheimer was a chance to see something serious and cinematic, the eras tour was exciting for fans of taylor swift who couldn't afford to spend $3k on taylor swift. and they felt this way because they were all unlike anything you'd seen at the movies in recent years. they had a high standard of quality, and going, it genuinely felt like people were there because they wanted to be, not because they were being force marched by a cultural behemoth to be there. you can't summon that same kind of energy for a marvel movie when it both feels obligatory and you expect it to be bad.

it also feels like there's a certain contempt for the audience where it concerns quality problems. i mean, i don't think that this is the intention. marvel isn't saying "we can deliver this stuff that's garbage and people will see it anyway". but one of the things i thought was the most damning about that variety story was the fact that, on some of the marvel tv shows, the final effects were inserted after the shows were released. so if you watched the show on opening night, you probably didn't see the final effects work. the arrogance involved in that is insane. it speaks to a total vanished pride in putting out a good product.

even some of marvel's better regarded films were heavily edited and heavily worked on right until the end, in part because kevin feige would come in and fix things, so stuff would have to get reworked. that's why effects deadlines were super tight and people were always crunching at the very end of this. there was that incredible quote from sam raimi from a couple months before the second doctor strange came out where he was like, "i think it's done but i'm not sure. marvel, they work on their movies until the very end." the director didn't even know if his own movie was locked or not because he clearly wasn't the one making the decisions about what the final print would look like.

that can work if you're making two movies a year and have a supervisor that comes in during the process and says, "i need you to redo this, in this way". but when you stretch that out to three movies a year, plus god knows how many episodes of television, there's no way to do that and make it a high quality product.

an instructive lesson comes from the book "disneywar", which chronicles michael eisner's time at disney. and one of the things in this book was the development and deployment of "who wants to be a millionaire" in america. bob iger is head of abc at this time. the guys making this show do it for a week. audiences love it. it's putting up huge numbers. everybody is excited. it's crushing it in the ratings. and the people who made it wanted to keep doing special week or two week long engagements that people would show up for. and iger was like, "no. i want this every week, three times a week, forever." and audiences got burnt out on it quickly, because it was something that only really worked as a special that ran for a week and disappeared for a few months. that's what the disney plus strategy feels like with marvel.

[zeldadeservesabreak]

I thought people would be smarter about the news of a Zelda movie, but nope… we are descending into Mario Movie levels of hysteria over nothing.

And I do mean nothing. Miyamoto just announced they’re beginning development on it. Not production… development. That’s industry code for pre-pre-production. No one has been cast. No one has been enlisted to make the costumes, sets, visual effects, or even script yet. This is literally just the beginning talks about how and what they want to do.

Nintendo is a very SAFE company. They don’t generally take big risks if they can help it. That’s exactly what they did with the Mario Movie. They played it safe. They got big name actors who all played their roles as safely as possible, and the film made a BILLION DOLLARS. They did the same with Detective Pikachu. Not a bad movie, but a bit of a sleeper hit.

And that’s what we are going to get out of a Zelda film. Big name actors, fantasy special effects and cgi, Link will talk and he’ll sound completely normal, and the writing on par with other Nintendo made films. It will be a solid B+ to A- film at its worse, and a A++ at its best.

This is being produced by someone who helped work on Into the Spiderverse and it’s being written by someone who wrote Detective Pikachu. Nintendo has favorable relations with both parties already, which is why they trust them to work with. This is what I mean about Nintendo playing it SAFE. They’ve already worked with these people before so they know what to expect and what they’ve produced has been good.

Remember that producer and writing credits are not quantifiable metrics. The guy who wrote Superhero Movie and The Hangover also wrote Chernobyl and The Last of Us.

And for those people freaking out about Marvel and Tom Holland… stop it. No, seriously STOP it. No one has been cast in this film yet, but because you dumb-shits are having aneurisms about Tom Holland all of the news ai bots are picking up on your chatter and reporting it as news. And if enough of those reports get picked up by news outlets, Tom Holland’s agent will probably submit him as a contender for real. So if you REALLY don’t want him to play Link… STOP MANIFESTING IT TO HAPPEN!

I’m so annoyed right now.

I’m annoyed at the internet and it’s ability to cause people to freak out over nothing and turn what should be a good thing into a nightmare for no good reason.

I genuinely don’t understand how fans of Nintendo can’t see beyond the last 5 minutes. ANYONE with a basic knowledge of Nintendo’s history will understand that this is 100% completely on par for them. There’s nothing to worry about. You’re repeating the Chris Pratt is Mario freak out all over again, and that ultimately turned out FINE.

So please….Stop it.

[chaoskirin]

"But I WANT Chat GPT To Finish this Fanfic! :( :( :("

The most frustrating thing about the rise of the techbro is that they don't understand copyright because they've never had to. It's never been a concern for them, so why would they have ever thought about it?

This leads to a plague of asshats with chronic Dunning-Kruger-itis just deciding they know more about copyright than people who have been well-versed in it for their whole lives.

That's why you get these clueless AI users saying things like "you don't own fanfic, haha got youuuu" because they only have a vague, transparent understanding of IP and how content works.

Here's some actual truth: The reason writers, showrunners, producers, and actors don't read fanfic is because if they do, and they get an idea from your work, and then that idea APPEARS in the media, they have to prove they didn't steal it. (actually, because of the mega-billion dollar entertainment industry, the accuser has to prove the company DID steal it. Harder, but not impossible.)

If it turns out to be stolen, the company MIGHT HAVE TO PAY THE FANFIC AUTHOR FOR THEIR CONTRIBUTION AS A WRITER. This depends on how the court case goes and how similar your work is to the "official" work. Generally, even though it's a fanfic, there's a LOT of original content in that writing, which does NOT automatically belong to the IP.

The original content belongs to the writer, unless the company buys it.

SO! If you, as Techbro McDunning-Kruger, loads that shit into a chatbot or AI text generator, the ONLY shit that doesn't have a natural copyright is anything that VERY SPECIFICALLY pertains to the media itself. Generally, this includes names and extremely unique concepts. Everything else is stolen.

You want to know how I know?

Fucking 50 Shades of Gray.

It's a fanfic, where only the names and hard concepts from Twilight have been changed. It's still being sold, and no money is being paid to Stephanie Meyer.

There's other examples, too. 50 Shades is just the most well-known.

Fanfic is protected. The original material in that fic is copyrighted to the original author. If they tell you you can't use it, you can't use it.

In conclusion: I don't care how much you scream and pound your fists on your chest and piss on trees to assert your dominance. Spewing this nonsense about how fanfic is public domain and you get to use it because you want to is theft. Stop doing it.

[sincerely-sofie]

still cant get over travailshipping. i remember when you first tested the waters with it (which i believe was some time before the tpiag chapters started coming out?) and at first i thought it was pretty funny. ark slowly but surely falling headfirst for twig, who if she had a tagline it would be "if i could turn my feelings into weapons, mine would be a goddamn nuclear bomb", and her at first just being oblivious to it and thinking that the letters that expressed love and care that were written in cursive in her mailbox were just funny and she wanted to show them to ark with the guy just looking at her with the most "well that backfired in the weirdest way possible". but when tpiag finally ended i finally connected the dots as to why these two are just. augh. i wont go into detail here in your askbox but i wanna know is: HOW DID YOU DO IT. HOW DO YOU KEEP MAKING SUCH GOOD IDEAS FOR THE FUNNY DIGITAL ANIMALS. TELL ME.

(thinking to myself) "Ugh I should stop posting so much travailshipping stuff... It's probably so annoying to everyone who sees it. I feel bad for my poor followers. I'll check my inbox real quick and then commit to shaking up my content by—" *gets obliterated by your niceness*

Oh man. I remember posting that poll where I hesitantly described a possible Darkrai/Twig pairing in the tags while proposing Twig/Kip as an alternative route, despite it not being the direction I wanted to take the characters, because I was so scared of what people’s reactions might be. If I remember right, I posted it a little bit before I had just barely reached 5k words in the first draft of TPiaG.

I've been trying to write up detailed responses to how I come up with good ideas for travailshipping in particular, but there's one rule I use that defines everything after it and speaks for all of them: I have fun with the characters.

That's it. That's the rule. If I don't want to write a subject, I don't. I stick with what I find enjoyable and resonant. Does a joke make me laugh? Does a scene make me cry? Does a villain make me punch a hole in my wall? Does a cute gesture make me squeal? If so, then into the project it goes. I think people can feel when someone is having fun with their work, and that fun radiates out into their own experience consuming that work. It's like laughter— joy is something we're sharing with others as long as we feel it. Fun is contagious.

Also: when you don't force yourself to make things you hate, you attract people who like the same things as you. These people will find your work even more fun— because not only did you have fun making it, they're having double fun consuming it.

An important tangent I'll go off on is that I think that every creative project idea is a good idea. There's so many beloved bizarro ideas in the world, even the ones who try to be cool about how weird their premises are. There's this weird show where the main character works as a service industry worker in an underwater setting that's ruled by a Roman deity— he lives in a piece of fruit, and his pet gastropod makes cat noises. This show sounds like word salad garbage on paper and could be tossed out for its nonsensical nature, and yet SpongeBob SquarePants has made Nickelodeon over $13 billion dollars and is a treasured part of many childhoods. There's also a character who spends his time locked in intellectual and physical combat with a wannabe clown and wears a costume with bat ears while doing it. Batman's been an icon for over 80 years.

All of this is to say:

Ideas are always good ideas by virtue of existing. They don't derive their goodness from external sources. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Make more of what you love. Don't make things you hate making.

If you have fun while making the thing, people will have fun while they consume the thing's content.

I hope this makes sense. I didn't touch on idea generation as much as embracing existing ideas. Fingers crossed that was the right response. I'd just woken up from a nap as I was writing it, so hopefully it's not too meandering and managed to answer the question and—

— Oh shoot. Was that a hypothetical question??? Uh. Sorry if I went off on this rant when you were just trying to voice your niceness. Oops. 🫥

[rawliverandgoronspice]

Hello.

You and gay-jesus-probably have successfully made me question everything with your view that Tears of the Kingdom is imperialist propaganda, so that's been fun.

Anyway, I decided to share this discussion with the Zelda fans on reddit, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of them disagreed. Here is what they said (I'm Alarming_Afternoon44):

So what do you think? Have I and all these other people just been duped by the game's manipulative framing? Or do they actually have a point?

And if you'd rather not answer this, or would prefer if I censored the usernames, just tell me and I'll delete this.

Hey! Thanks a lot for reaching out, and I'm glad it made you think stuff through!!

Honestly, as I mentioned in this post, I am not super interested about in-world conversations about who oppresses who, because what can be assessed from the game is super vague and more vibes-based than evidence-based. Within the text, of course that the Good Zonais are good and the Bad Ganondorf is bad! But that's my whole point! The narrative has been deliberately crafted so that the zonais and Rauru (and Hyrule) are as blameless as possible (and it's not doing a great job at it overall to be frank; we would not be having these conversations about how offputting it all feels for a non-zero number of people if it did do a great job). More importantly, I want to focus on what sort of real-life narrative it all parallels. Because people make stories, and people live in the real world.

Not going after everyone's throat here, gamedev is hard and the hydras that are AAA game production do end up doing super weird stuff, especially since the thematic ramifications are absolutely never prioritized (and it's also always the same kind of people who make the final calls and push out what can and can't be talked about also). And as fans, we tend to have trouble stepping outside the lens of lore and take a look at the bigger picture sometimes; not as an attack on any individual part of that decision-making process but to just pause, stop, and question our standards, our priorities and the kind of reality (or skewing of reality) the stories we tell each other reflect.

Again: do we want to take videogames seriously or not? If we do, then we need to accept they are a vehicle for ideology, just like any other artform. And sometimes, you push out questionable ideology, sometimes without meaning to, because you didn't unpack your own biases as you did. And it's even fine to do it, nobody is perfect, a 300+ people team spread over 6 years certainly will not be that. But that it wasn't prioritized is, in my opinion, a problem. As a narrative designer, I want games (at least the narrative side) to be held to a higher standard than this. It's literally my job to work with the industry so it can hold itself to higher standards of quality --so the whole TotK situation is quite frustrating to witness from a very pragmatic, work perspective where I already spend my days trying to convince people that things mean things. I have a vested interest here in not having the companies I work for being given a free pass by gamers to do literally whatever as long as it's fun, especially when we're talking about a billion-dollars company suing its own fans left and right for any perceived slight. Nintendo are not underdogs here. It's fine to point out they cut corners and maybe promoted messy ideologies, voluntarily or not.

So long story short: no I don't believe anyone here has a point in regards to what I think is actually important, which is why these choices were made in the first place. If you look at an imperialist text expecting the text to tell you that it's imperialist instead of recognizing a framing used for propaganda by yourself, you're never gonna find any imperialist text ever, obviously not!! I'm sorry if I sound a little gngngn here, but I don't know why audiences have, at large, this feeling that lore and story beat decisions materialize themselves already formed and without any human bias, meddling, intervention, internal politics or approximations (it seems that people can only conceptualize this part if they have actual names to attach to the story, but without clear authors it's like there are no authors and so no bias, which is... a very strange bias in itself). I can promise you that it does not work that way in practice: every narrative department on every big game is a battlefield --some nicer than others, but all of them very emotionally draining either way.

So yeah, I guess that on these grounds, I disagree with every point raised here. Sorry Reddit :/

But thank you for the ask and sorry if I didn't go more into details as to why. The big Why I Dislike Rauru Post and the Gerudo Post might have some more specific rebuttals, but I am not super interested in debating small detail stuff tbh. I feel like it's no use if the frame of reference isn't being understood in the first place.

[coochiequeens]

Ladies please reblog to spread the word about these ladies and their fight to protect their homes from the destruction of the Oil industry

BY NEMONTE NENQUIMO AND NONHLE MBUTHUMA

DECEMBER 15, 2022 7:00 AM EST

Nenquimo, co-founder of Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance, is a Waorani leader who has won the Goldman Environmental Prize. Mbuthuma is a leader of the amaMpondo people in South Africa and spokesperson of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, a collective that defends her community’s rights to steward their ancestral land.

We are two Indigenous women leaders writing from the frontlines of the battle to save our oceans, our forests, and our planet’s climate. We have good news to share: We know how to beat Big Oil.

From the Amazon rainforest to the shores of the Indian Ocean in South Africa, we have led our communities to mighty victories against oil companies who hoped to profit off our territories. In September 2022, we succeeded in getting a court to revoke a permit that would have allowed Shell to despoil Indigenous farming communities and fishing grounds along the pristine Wild Coast of South Africa. Just a few years earlier in April 2019, we organized Indigenous communities deep in the Ecuadorian rainforests to resist the government’s plans to drill in pristine rainforests and were victorious, protecting half a million acres of forests and setting a legal precedent to protect millions more.

Both were David vs. Goliath victories—and both were opportunities for us to learn where to point that fabled slingshot.

Big Oil has the deepest of pockets and a horrific track record when it comes to corruption, scandal, and environmental crimes. Across the world, Indigenous and local communities know that once the industry gets a foothold in our lands, it leaves ruin in its wake. For instance, the A’i Cofán people of Ecuador’s northern Amazon have borne the brunt of decades of oil industry contamination, deforestation, and health impacts. And the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta have lost their fishing and farming lands to polluting oil operations, and have seen their leaders threatened and murdered when they dared to speak out.

As frontline communities, we must work together to stop Big Oil before they enter our lands. But this, in itself, is no easy task. The industry offers alluring promises of “progress” and “development.” And they have people—in government, the military, police forces, shadowy paramilitary groups, and sometimes in our own communities—who are willing to intimidate, harass, and even kill leaders like us who have the courage to stand up to them. They also have billions of dollars riding on getting permits to suck the oil out of the ground and sea.

So, how did we stop them?

First, we kept our communities together. We fought against the industry’s “divide and conquer” tactics by grounding our battle in our own sacred connection to our lands. Our ancestors and elders understood, as we do today, that Mother Earth is sacred and worth fighting for. We are connected to her through our breath, our stories, our dreams, and our prayers. She gives us everything: water, food, medicine, shelter, meaning. And in return, we protect her.

We also helped our people cut through the false promises and threats by exposing Big Oil’s lies and abuse around the world. That is, we made sure our villagers could learn from the A’i Cofán people of Ecuador, the Ogoni of the Niger delta, and the countless other frontline communities that have suffered at the hands of Big Oil.

As Indigenous women leaders, we know that if we can keep our sacred connection to the land and keep our people united, then we have a fighting chance against any oil company in the world.

We also have the law on our side, which makes Big Oil really vulnerable. In 2007, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which recognized our right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) for any activity that affects our ancestral lands. Our shorthand is “Nothing About Us Without Us.” We, Indigenous peoples, the ancestral owners of some of the most biodiverse, carbon-rich places on the planet (the places that the oil industry wants to get their hands on more than anything), have the internationally recognized legal right to decide what happens on our land.

In South Africa, we were able to protect 6,000 square miles of pristine marine ecosystems off the Wild Coast, saving dolphins and whales from deafening seismic blasts on the ocean floor while also protecting local communities and our planet’s climate from the threat of ramped-up offshore drilling. And on the other side of the world, in Ecuador, we leveraged our internationally recognized rights to protect some of the biodiverse rainforest in the Amazon, jamming the Ecuadorian Government’s plans to drill across millions of acres of Indigenous territories.

But the law alone isn’t enough. To move courts and politicians—and to create legal exposure and reputational risk to companies—we need global community support to keep going.

That means getting financial resources to the frontlines, so that we can protect our leaders, organize our communities, and secure our rights. Only a fraction of 1% of all climate funding currently makes it to Indigenous communities on the frontlines of the climate battle. We need to change that.

It also means sharing our stories and shining a spotlight on our struggles, so that local courts and politicians know that the world is watching. Public solidarity not only prevents corruption and back-room deals, but it also energizes our grassroots campaigns.

We need to continue to pressure governments around the world to finally adopt our internationally recognized right to decide what happens in our lands in their national laws and constitutions. Our peoples have been putting our bodies on the line in the battle to protect Mother Earth for centuries. It’s not only a moral imperative that global governments finally recognize and respect our right to self-determination, but it is also one of the most urgent and effective climate strategies—it’s no coincidence that we are the guardians of over 80% of our planet’s biodiversity. In the Amazon rainforest, half of the remaining standing forest is in our territories. Without us and without our territories, there is no climate solution.

To have a fighting chance of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, we can’t afford to be opening up new oil fields in the lungs of the earth. We need to keep our forests standing. We need to transition to renewable energy.

We are writing this because we see that world leaders, businesses, and NGOs are only making slow, incremental progress on climate despite the urgent existential threat we face. Instead of getting frustrated, we’re doubling down on sharing our formula with other Indigenous guardians on the ground.

We know that time is not on our side—but our spirituality and our rights are. So here’s one idea from two Indigenous women leaders that beat the oil industry, and protected our oceans and our forests: Listen to us for a change.

[always-rolling-my-eyes]

I hate being that person, but here I am. My dad works in the plastic industry as an engineer. He literally develops new formulas for various uses. I collect vinyls, so it's one of those things we talk about. Vinyls, just are not good for the environment. Period. It doesn't matter the number of variants. It doesn't matter if it's recycled (that's a whole other conversation as well), they are not good for the environment.

If she's that worried about sustainability/pollution, don't sell vinyl period. Oh, like that anniversary edition that literally just got advertised to me???? Cause guess what, my dad knows everything about making vinyls, but I know quality sound. And you know what's famous for being low quality for sound? Picture disks. And yet that's what is being sold right now on her website.

Thank you for your insight! I’m very curious to how much of an impact this would actually have. Like, obviously no one should go out of their way to harm the environment, but if artists were to stop making vinyls would it really make a significant difference? Shouldn’t it be the billion-dollar corporations that people are pressuring because they’re the ones actually doing the real, serious damage to the planet?

Putting the responsibility of solving climate change on specific individuals is not only ridiculous, it’s asinine. And tbh, anyone who does so makes me think they’re not doing it because they care about the environment but because they want to publicly attack that individual in an ‘acceptable’ way because they feel it would get them minimal backlash.

Billie is arrogant and pretentious. She is extremely successful and she thinks that makes her better than or above other people and that somehow makes what she does or says right and what other people do is wrong. The girl needs to grow up.

[denimbex1986]

'In the autumn of 2021, Christopher Nolan knew just where to find Cillian Murphy. The director flew to Ireland with a document in his hand luggage, Hollywood’s equivalent of the nuclear football. It was a script for his top-secret new film, printed, apparently, on red paper. “Which is supposedly photocopy-proof,” Murphy explained. He wasn’t surprised by the in-person visit. The two had worked together on five previous films, and every Nolan script, Murphy said, had been dropped off by Nolan or one of his family members. “So, like, it’s been his mum who’s delivered the script to me before. Or his brother; he’ll go away and come back in three hours. Part of it has to do with keeping the story secret before it goes out. But part of it has to do with tradition. They’ve always done it this way, so why stop now? It does add a ritual to it, which I really appreciate. It suits me.”

Murphy met Nolan at his Dublin hotel room – and Nolan left him to read. He read and read and read. All 197 pages; the rarest kind of script, written in the first-person point of view of the film’s protagonist, J Robert Oppenheimer. All action, all incidence, swirling around this character – a big-brained, psychologically complex giant of world history. Murphy had never played a lead in a Nolan film before, but had committed to this role as soon as Nolan told him about it, before he’d even seen a page of the script. “He’d already called me and said he wanted me to play the part. And I had said yes, because I always say yes to him.” The afternoon ran out. “And he doesn’t have a phone or anything,” Murphy said. “But he knew instinctively when to come back.” Nolan in command of time, as ever. They spent the rest of the evening together, and then Murphy took the DART train home, and got to work.

The result was one of the most watched and most acclaimed films of 2023 – a nearly billion-dollar blockbuster about a tormented genius (and, yes, the father of the atomic bomb). The performance affirmed for many what has been quietly known for some time: that Cillian Murphy is, or at least was, one of the most underrated actors in all of Hollywood. In small potent roles in those other Nolan movies. As a shapeshifting bit player and lead in dozens of films and plays over the past three decades. And, of course, across 10 years and six seasons of Peaky Blinders – the hit series that made him truly known globally. “Some years ago,” Christopher Nolan said, “I made what was probably a mistake in some moment of drunken sincerity of telling him he’s the best actor of his generation. And so now he gets to show that to the rest of the world so everybody can realise that.”

Part of the reason that Murphy still felt like something of a secret until recently is that he lives, breathes and resides at a remove from the noise. This is by design. In 2015, Murphy returned home to Ireland from London, already some distance from Hollywood proper, to a quiet hamlet on the Irish Sea – not exactly off the grid, but one ring further outside the blast radius of his industry.

One evening this winter, I took the DART down the coast from Dublin city centre to Monkstown to have dinner with Murphy. We met at a restaurant where, he told me, “I have a usual table, would you believe it?” He sat there comfortably for most of the night, bouncing, leaning forwards, his floppy rocker-dad hair swept casually across his forehead, his famously light eyes drawing in passersby like two pockets of quicksand.

Murphy and his wife of 20 years, artist Yvonne McGuinness, live by the sea with their two teenage sons. In Ireland, the abundance of their creative existence is all around them. The art galleries all seem to be filled with work by his family members. The music on the radio is curated by friends – or Murphy himself. There are occasional pints with his elder Irish actor idols, Brendan Gleeson and Stephen Rea.

Life here for Murphy is filled with, well, life. His boys are approaching exit velocity. There are exams. Chores. Errands. He and his youngest were flying out in the morning to attend a football match in Liverpool. “I would’ve taken you elsewhere for some Guinness,” Murphy said, “except I have to drive to drop my boy off at a party tonight.” The brand of busyness felt quite far from the bubbles that typically cocoon the leading men in the film industry.

“I have a couple of friends who are actors, but a majority of them are not,” Murphy said. “The majority of my buddies are not in the business. I also love not working. And I think for me a lot of research as an actor is just fucking living, and, you know, having a normal life doing regular things and just being able to observe, and be, in that sort of lovely flow of humanity. If you can’t do that because you’re going from film festival to movie set to promotions… I mean that’s The Bubble. I’m not saying that makes you any better or less as an actor, but it’s just a world that I couldn’t exist in. I find it would be very limiting on what you can experience as a human being, you know?”

Cillian Murphy, at least on that weekend last winter, seemed to me to have something so deeply figured out that I spent the month after our time together unable to shake the experience of being in the presence of someone living so much the way that so many other actors – so many artists, so many people – claim to want to live. Away from it all, but in highest demand. Delivering Oscar-worthy performances while also seeming convincingly content to disappear for a long while, at any point, no questions. The stabilising forces at home seemed to work as an anchor point from which Murphy could go off and wander as an artist. “He has this rare blend of humility with this supercharge of creativity,” Emily Blunt said. “He’s just a lovely, sane person. He’s so, so sane. And yet he’s got such wildness in him in the parts that he’s able to play.”

He was the first of his friends to have kids, and thus will be the first with an empty nest. More time for films. (Maybe.) More time for music. (Certainly.) More time to go on runs at night, when the lights streaking by make him feel like he’s going faster. Even more time for sleep: “I sleep a lot. I do 10-hour sleeps.” He seemed immune to the need to be in the mix – of fame, of fashion, of free dinners, the titillating offerings of a scene. A lot of actors age out of that compulsion, but the thing is, Murphy’s not old. Forty-seven. At the height of his powers, entering his prime. Not exiting the industry, but just floating lightly beside it until called upon, which he often is, and will be more now than ever.

He tries to do one movie a year, preferably not in the summer, when he likes to spend most of his time on the west coast of Ireland, doing nothing much but finding new music for his radio programme on BBC Radio 6 Music or walking his black Lab, Scout. He is perfectly happy to be “unemployed” while he waits for the right new film to come his way. “There could’ve been a situation when Chris called me up that I was doing something else,” he said. “And that would’ve been the worst of all scenarios.”

In this way, Murphy seems to adhere to his version of Michael Pollan’s adage about healthy eating: “Make movies. Not too many. Mostly with Christopher Nolan.” Imagine the discipline, the confidence, the peace of mind, to not worry about missing an opportunity, a lunch, a party, a fork in the road back in one of the frothier Hollywood hubs, but rather to stroll along emerald shores, as the days stretch out until 10pm, knowing that they know you – and that, ultimately, they know where to find you.

In Monkstown. Probably at his table. Looking present. Clear-eyed. Like any local, but with more moisture in his skin. At dinner, he asked me just once not to put something in the piece: a nuanced take he shared on a local establishment. Nothing so dangerous as an unwelcome opinion in a small town. No truer sign of someone “just fucking living” there. The dream.

Nolan had first seen Murphy in 2003, in a promotional image for 28 Days Later that had run in the San Francisco Chronicle. “I was looking to cast Batman, looking for some actors to screen test, and I was just very struck by his eyes, his appearance, everything about him – wanted to find out more,” Nolan told me. “When I met him, he didn’t strike me as necessarily right for Batman. But there was just a vibe – there are people you meet in your life who you just want to stay connected with, work with; you try to find ways to create together.” So Nolan put him on camera just to see what happened. “He first performed as Bruce Wayne, and I saw the crew stop and pay attention in a way that I had never seen before, and really have never seen since. And it was this electricity just coming off the guy, it was an incredible energy. And so I called some executives, and they were impressed enough with him that they let me cast him as Scarecrow. Those Batman villains at the time had only ever been played by huge stars – Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger. So it’s just a testament to his raw talent.”

Batman Begins was the first of his smaller roles in Nolan’s three Batman movies, Inception, and Dunkirk. “I hope he won’t mind me saying, but when I first worked with him, he was all pure instinct, and the technical side of acting wasn’t something that had registered as important with him. We would literally put a mark down and he would just walk right over it,” Nolan said, laughing. But over two decades, ��as I saw him develop his technical facility, it did not in any way distract or diminish the instinctive nature of his performance.”

For the lead in Oppenheimer, Murphy prepared at home for six months, focusing first on the voice and the silhouette (in other words, shedding weight to reflect the skin and bones of a world-renowned physicist who subsisted primarily on martinis and cigarettes during his years developing the bomb). On set, as the days of filming wore on in the New Mexico desert, the significance of what Murphy was up to started to spread across the set among the cast and crew “like a rumour,” Nolan said. “I remember the same thing with Heath Ledger on The Dark Knight.”

Blunt, who plays Oppenheimer’s beleaguered wife, Kitty, first got to know Murphy well on A Quiet Place Part II. “Cillian’s really kidnapping to be in a scene with. He pulls you into this vibrational vortex,” she told me. “He loves a party. But when he’s working, he’s intensely focused, and won’t socialise very much at all. Certainly not on Oppenheimer; I mean, he didn’t have anything left in the tank to say one word to someone at the end of the day.”

Matt Damon told me that when they were shooting out in the middle of New Mexico, he and Blunt and the rest of the cast would go down and eat at this one little café. “It was like a mess tent,” he said. “And Cillian was invited every night, but never made it once.”

Murphy was back in his room, preserving his energy, prepping for the next day, minding the Oppenheimer silhouette.

“OK, he’s losing weight, he can’t eat at night, you know he’s miserable,” Damon said. “But you know he’s doing what’s best for the movie that you all want to be as good as possible, and so you’re cheering him on. But at dinner you’re sitting there and you’re all shaking your heads, going, ‘Man, this is brutal.’

“The one thing that he would allow himself, his one luxury, is that he would take a bath at night. I mean he would allow himself literally a few almonds or something. And then sit in his bath with his script and just work. By himself, every night.”

The performance is so big, but so much of it is invisible to the audience, in the concentrated intensity of the interpretation. The nucleus towards which so many elements subtly draw us, closer to his character. Just one example: if it were period-accurate, Murphy said, everyone would be smoking and wearing hats, but he’s the only one doing either: “It’s emphatic, but subliminally so.” The author Kai Bird, who co-wrote American Prometheus, the monumental biography of Oppenheimer on which the film is based, spent a day at the Los Alamos set, watching Murphy play the scene where Oppenheimer talks to his team of scientists about the bomb while someone drops marbles into a fishbowl and a brandy glass. “At one point during a break, he approached wearing his baggy brown suit and turquoise belt, and I raised my arms and shouted, ‘Dr Oppenheimer, Dr Oppenheimer, I’ve been waiting decades to meet you!’ ” Bird said. “He especially captured the voice and Oppie’s intensity.” (At one point during our conversation, Bird asked me to confirm: “Those are his blue eyes, right? Or is he wearing lenses?”)

The film was released on Barbenheimer weekend, just after the SAG-AFTRA strike began, and despite enjoying some lighter time with Blunt, Damon and the cast, Murphy was relieved to cut short the promotion of the film. “I think it’s a broken model,” he said of red carpet interviews and junkets. Outdated and a drag for actors. “The model is – everybody is so bored.” Look what happened when they went on strike, he said. It all stopped. But the fact that the film was good, and Barbie was good, two at the same time, with people going crazy – it just shows you don’t need it. “Same was the case with Peaky Blinders. The first three seasons, there was no advertising, a tiny show on BBC Two. It just caught fire because people talked to each other about it.”

Murphy’s reticence in many interviews is palpable. “It’s like Joanne Woodward said,” he told me. “ ‘Acting is like sex – do it, don’t talk about it.’ ” Although I wouldn’t characterise his disposition on, say, late-night TV as gruff, he’s basically just incapable of going full phoney. He is, in other words, reacting the same way you might to being asked the same question for the hundredth time in a week. I’m curious to watch him suffer through his first Oscar campaign, where answering the same questions about his performance is essentially the point, for several months.

“People always used to say to me, ‘He has reservations’ or ‘He’s a difficult interviewee,’ ” Murphy said. “Not really! I love talking about work, about art. What I struggle with, and find unnecessary and unhelpful about what I want to do, is: ‘Tell me about yourself…’ ”

Nonetheless: He grew up in Cork. Went to a Catholic school better suited for a certain kind of athletic boy than an artistic soul. “I always fucking hated team sports. I like watching them. But I was terrible at them,” he said. That classic system for schooling was not good for him, “emotionally and psychologically,” he said. “But at least it gave me something to push against.”

Murphy played in a successful band with his brother, half-heartedly entered the local university as a law student. While at school in Cork, he stumbled into a performance of A Clockwork Orange and fell in with the stage scene there. He hadn’t trained in any way, but he got the first role he ever auditioned for, in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs, which travelled around the UK, Europe and Canada, and transformed his life. “It all happened to me in one month, in August ’96: we got offered a record deal, I failed my law exams, I got the part in Disco Pigs, and I met my wife,” he said. “I now look back and go, Oh, shit, I didn’t know then how important all these things were – the sort of domino effect that they would have on my life.” I asked Murphy, who has said in the past that he identifies as an atheist, if such a confluence ever made him wonder if there was indeed a higher power organising all of this. “Ohhh,” he said. “I love the chaos and the randomness. I love the beauty of the unexpected.”

That winter weekend, while walking around Dublin on a bit of a Joycean ramble, we passed a bookshop. “This was my favourite bookshop when I first moved up to Dublin. I didn’t have any money and I was living with my mother-in-law. And I would come in here and get a coffee for 50p, but then they would, like, refill it, you know? So, I’d sit in there all day and just read plays and then put them back on the shelves, and then go home and my mother-in-law would feed me dinner,” he said. “Just to educate myself. To catch up. ’Cause I didn’t go to drama school, so I’d read all the plays I should’ve read if I went to drama school. I’d ask all these writers and directors to tell me all the plays that I must read.”

“Theatre is the key to Cillian,” director Danny Boyle told me. “Weirdly, given that he is such an extraordinary film actor.” It’s the ability, from the theatre, to travel the great distance of an extreme character arc. “Everybody talks about his dreamy Paul Newman eyes. And all that’s to his advantage, of course, because behind is this capacity, this reach that he has into volcanic energy.” (The other key to Cillian, Boyle said, is that he’s a bloody Irishman: “He’s one of the great, great exports, and the homeland clearly nourishes him constantly.”) Boyle cast Murphy in 2002’s 28 Days Later, the first film of Murphy’s that made him known. It led, in its way, to the Nolan partnership, as well to working with Boyle again on 2007’s Sunshine. “When we did 28 Days Later, he was really just starting off,” Boyle said. “By the time he came back for Sunshine, he was a seriously accomplished actor.”

In the noughties, Murphy was working frequently. Some of the movies were better than others. “Many of my films I haven’t seen,” he said. “I know that Johnny Depp would always say that, but it’s actually true. Generally the ones I haven’t seen are the ones I hear are not good.”

I asked him if he’d seen Oppenheimer.

“Yes, I’ve seen Oppenheimer…” he said, rolling his eyes.

When Nolan finished the film, Murphy, his wife and his younger son flew to Los Angeles to watch it for the first time in Nolan’s private screening room. “It’s pretty nice…” Murphy said, trying to balance obvious enthusiasm with not giving too much away. “You know, he shows film prints there. The sound is extraordinary.” How many seats? “Uh, I’d say maybe 50?” So, Murphy did see this film of his – in perhaps the most dialled-in home cinema known to man.

In the summer of 2005, just a couple of months after Batman Begins came out, Murphy was back in cinemas with Wes Craven’s Red Eye. It was villain season. And the two roles, in close quarters, seemed to coalesce around a feeling: that guy creeps me out. When casually canvassing people about what they think of when they think of Murphy, I was shocked by the imprint that Red Eye had on an American of a certain age.

“Oh, I know, it’s crazy!” Murphy said. “I think it’s the duality of it. It’s why I wanted to play it. That two thing. The nice guy and the bad guy in one. The only reason it appealed to me is you could do that –” he snapped his fingers “– that turn, you know?”

“They say the nicest people sometimes make the best villains,” Rachel McAdams said, recalling her time with Murphy on the cramped aeroplane set of Red Eye. “We’d listen to music and gab away while doing the crossword puzzle, which he brought every day and would graciously let me chime in on... I think the number one question I got about Cillian way back then was whether or not he wore contact lenses.”

“I love Rachel McAdams and we had fun making it,” Murphy said. “But I don’t think it’s a good movie. It’s a good B movie.”

During that same stretch, Murphy starred in Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley, one of the best films he’s made, and one that Murphy is uniquely proud of. It’s a period epic that tells the story of a crew of Irish friends who find themselves fighting first the British, in the Irish War of Independence, and then one another in the Irish Civil War. The film is lush, harrowing, relentless and transporting. Murphy has a face that sits cosily at home in any decade of the 20th century. He is at his most vital in the ’20s, the ’30s, the ’40s – and that’s one of the factors that works so convincingly in Oppenheimer. Matt Damon, for better or worse, looks like Matt Damon. Emily Blunt, again for better or worse, looks like Emily Blunt. Whereas Cillian Murphy looks like a scientist from 1945.

Murphy and his filmmakers have run this play several ways in recent years. In Anthropoid (2016), as a Czechoslovakian resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied Prague. In Free Fire (2016), as an IRA member caught up in an arms deal gone horribly wrong. In Dunkirk (2017), as a British “shivering soldier” suffering from PTSD. And, of course, in Peaky Blinders (2013–2022), as a First World War hero turned gangster in 1920s Birmingham. With that face, he can play every side of the die of the embroiled conflicts of pre- and post-war Europe. “Cillian’s always laughing about how he’s perpetually playing people who are traumatised,” Blunt said. “There must be something about his face that sort of entices those kinds of offers.”

In the first frame of Anthropoid that Murphy appears in, a moonbeam strikes his cheekbone like it’s a plane of alabaster, and the question immediately pops to mind: are you a Nazi or the resistance? Are you the good guy or the bad guy – or both, that “two thing”? The stable and the wild. The duality. The pull within.

In Dublin, we found ourselves walking through busy streets, beneath abundant winter sunshine and caustic seagulls. We were approached by fans at a shocking clip – but also by sisters of friends.

“I’m not a stalker…” one said, politely.

“Oh, hi, Oona!”

I asked him if he’d sensed that his life had palpably changed in any way since last summer, given that a billion pounds’ worth of people saw him in practically every frame of one of the biggest films of all time. “To me, it always seems to go in waves,” he said. “When Peaky was at its kind of apex, you’d feel a different energy around, walking around, a little bit like I do now – but then it settles down again. It kind of comes in waves. And then you don’t have something in the cinema for ages, and people forget about it. So. It seems to be like that, and you sort of ride that, and then things go back to normal.”

With all due respect to the Peaky hive, this film did seem to go especially wide.

“Yes,” he said, laughing. “But you’d be surprised. Peaky is still the thing I get asked most about in the world.”

As if on cue, Murphy was approached by a fan on the street, who asked for a photo.

“Oh, I don’t do photos,” he said to the disappointed lad, who nonetheless got 20 seconds of Murphy’s time to chat.

“Once I started doing that,” he said, “it changed my life. I just think it’s better to say hello, and have a little conversation. I tell that to a lot of people, you know, actor friends of mine, and they’re just like, I feel so bad. But you don’t need a photo record of everywhere you’ve been in a day.”

“There is a culty, effervescent kind of wonder about Cillian,” said Blunt. “I think for someone as interior as he is, this level of kinetic fame is, like, horrifying for him. If anyone is not built for fame, it’s Cillian.”

To make it up to that fan, I asked Murphy what the status is of a potential Peaky Blinders film. “There is no status, as of now,” he says. “So I have no update. But I’ve always said I’m open to it if there’s more story. I do love how the show ended. And I love the ambiguity of it. And I’m really proud of what we did. But I’m always open to a good script.”

We passed some young people in dark dresses and heels, absolutely the worse for wear. “Look at these guys, out from the night before,” Murphy said, smiling. I asked him if he had his days of partying in Dublin, in London. “I mean, I did, but it was with my friends. I was never part of any scene – or went to, like, acting clubs. I would never go to the premiere... The idea of going to a premiere that isn’t your own, seems to me like…”

We passed Trinity College, an occasion to discuss the breakout Irish series Normal People and its breakout Irish star Paul Mescal. “He is the real deal. He is like a true movie star. They don’t come along that often. But,” Murphy said, serving the lightest and rarest touch of pride and swagger, “luckily, they seem mostly to come from Ireland.

“It’s a good time,” he added, “to be an Irish actor, it seems.”

We stopped in at the Kerlin Gallery to see the show of his sister-in-law, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain. She and Murphy’s wife were friends in graduate school in London, and Murphy’s brother met her while visiting Cillian there. This is his scene. He walked around admiring the pieces, which he’d heard about at family functions but not yet seen in person.

“Now this work immediately appeals to me,” he said, “because you can feel it’s pushing at big, big themes, and to me, that’s what I’ve always loved. I don’t really go for pure entertainment. I love when it makes you feel a little bit fucked up. Not in a horror-genre way, but in a psychological, existential way. That’s what I love in all the work that I enjoy and the work that I try to make.”

Murphy executive-produced the last three seasons of Peaky Blinders, but had been looking for a first film to produce. He secured the rights to Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, a Booker Prize finalist, and one night on the set of Oppenheimer, while they were just sitting there in the desert, Damon told him about Damon and Ben Affleck’s then unannounced new company, Artists Equity, whose novel financial model is based on profit sharing with the crew. Murphy sent them the book and Artists Equity ultimately financed the film. “Normally, you’re trying to put together all these different entities, and then you have all these points of view on the edit,” Murphy said. “This was just those guys.”

Small Things Like These centres on an average man about Murphy’s age in a small town in County Wexford, who, one Christmas, stumbles upon a horrifying secret in the local convent – the Magdalene Laundries, which from the 18th century to the 1990s held thousands of girls and women prisoner in Church workhouses. I asked Murphy if, with his new power, it was important to him to tell Irish stories. Not especially, he said. The only criterion was: what’s the best story for right now? “Still,” he said, “it’s a good time to be looking at that story, because we have distance from what happened with the Church and everything. But yet I don’t think we’ve still fully addressed it. So, if you can make something that’s entertaining and moving, but also asks a few questions about who we are as a nation, and who we were as a nation, and how far we’ve come – then that’s great. But, again, they should happen after you’ve gone and had a reasonably entertaining evening at the cinema.”

Murphy joked at one point that he spent the actors’ strike at home “eating cheese,” but what he really did was spend the strike editing Small Things and overseeing “all the lovely stuff that we actors never get a look in on.” (His production company, Big Things Films, would’ve been called Small Things Films, he said, except that Small Things suggests “a lack of ambition, perhaps.”) Small Things will premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival this month.

One film a year, control, restraint, a hand firmly on the wheel.

Murphy has a natural propensity to an analogue lifestyle that works well with Nolan, who doesn’t use email or have a smartphone. “I aspire to that life,” Murphy said. “I was just clearing stuff off my phone, but have to keep the apps for music and music discovery.

“I still have all my CDs and DVDs and Blu-Rays,” he went on. “I cannot get rid of them. I did get rid of my VHS, though. I just left them on the street because nobody wanted them. I went and brought them to a library and was like, Look at this pretentious collection of art films! and they were like, No thanks, man…”

I asked him if he saw the viral TikTok of Nolan showing a zoomer how best to project Oppenheimer. He started laughing. “My son showed me that. A clash of cultures.”

Working with Nolan can feel like a much-desired retrenchment from modern life. “When I’m on a Chris set, it does feel a little bit like a private, intimate laboratory,” Murphy said. “Even though he works at a tremendous pace, there’s always room for curiosity and finding things out, and that’s what making art should be about, you know? There’s no phones – but also no announcement: everybody just knows. And there’s no chairs. Because he doesn’t sit down. Sometimes a film set can be like a picnic. Everyone’s got their chairs and their snacks and everyone’s texting and showing each other fucking, you know, emojis or whatever, memes – which I do know,” he said, referring obliquely to the meme of Cillian Murphy not knowing what a meme is. “But why?”

Do you know what Nolan is doing next? I asked him.

“Nooo. But, like, I didn’t know that he was writing Oppenheimer. We don’t stay in touch that way.”

It’s like Mission: Impossible. Do the hard thing together, then sever communication. “Chris is the smartest person I’ve ever met,” added Murphy. “Not just the director stuff, but everything else.”

Nolan had told me that he’d wanted to give Murphy the role that he would be dogged by forever – that he would spend the rest of his career trying to crawl out from under. “And,” he said, “I think I’ve done it.”

When I put it to Murphy, he took a beat: “There’s a big, big body of work that I think people that know know.” I think it was his modest way of saying: I’ve got a few others too.

Murphy told me he’d heard that “one of the Sydneys” – Lumet or Pollack – once said that it takes 30 years to make an actor. He believed that. “I’m 27 years,” he said. “So I’m close.”

After Nolan hand-delivered the Oppenheimer script to Murphy and left him to read in that Dublin hotel room, he made his way to the Hugh Lane Gallery, and, more specifically, to the Francis Bacon studio there, a perfect preservation of the impossibly messy London studio where the Irish-born painter had lived and worked for much of his life. Murphy and Nolan share a love of Bacon – a towering figure of the 20th century, born in its first decade, dead in its last. Besides the reassembled studio, the museum has several paintings by Bacon – some finished, some unfinished. In all instances, though, the portraits of people – ghoulishly distorted figures – are rendered unsparingly. Never perfect representations. Never straight impressions. But rather an artist’s interpretation of another being, reconfigured into a stark image. You can see what might appeal to both a director of a biopic and his leading man.

That winter weekend, I made the same journey across the River Liffey that Nolan did, past a poster for Oppenheimer in a Tower Records window, past the Garden of Remembrance (for all who gave their lives for Irish freedom), and met Murphy at the museum. He had on a black puffer jacket, a black hoodie, and a pair of black Ray-Bans with that starburst that movie-star lenses do when subjected to a flash on a red carpet. He removed them inside and took the well-worn path back to the Bacons. “Most people don’t know about this place,” he said. “It’s kind of like a little secret. But I just come here when I have time to spare in town.”

We looked at Bacons. Bacons everywhere. We talked about the Bacon biography that came out in 2021. “I love the work,” Murphy said, “but just the life. That kind of unique relentlessness that he had as an artist.” I asked if he read actor biographies. “When I was starting out,” he said. “I always worry, though, reading them – because I can’t remember what I did last week... I often wonder about the self-mythologising.”

We peered in on the studio itself, every cigarette butt and crate of champagne archived and put in its place. “Chaos for me breeds images,” Bacon had said.

Do you have a room in your house that looks like this? I asked.

Murphy laughed. “No, I do have a man room, a man cave. But it’s incredibly tidy.”

In another room of the museum, we sat before a looped TV special on Bacon from 1985, an hour-long interview with presenter Melvyn Bragg, where the great painter spits off charisma and wisdom in pithy responses to the biggest questions an artist can be asked, all while wearing a perfect black leather jacket. We sat there quietly together, until Murphy interjected: “It’s kind of mesmerising, isn’t it?”

Before I’d arrived in Dublin, Nolan had told me that Murphy’s career tends to make sense if you think of him more as an artist than an actor – as you would a painter or a musician. That his filmography isn’t a line going up or down so much as filled with distinct periods of development. It helps explain the approach to the work. How patient and restrained. How clear the point of view. An act of accretion rather than explosiveness and volatility. So unshaken by the things that rock the boat for so many actors. It’s the clarity. The authenticity. The answer to the question: when you’re tested again and again, what is there? Who is there? Here is a man – a 47-year-old who could play 27 with the right light and 67 with the right make-up – who is probably going to win the Oscar for best actor, but whose mind couldn’t be farther from the chatter of his industry and the noise, the noise. At one point, I asked him if he feels like he’s uniquely well-positioned to play roles of middle age – if Oppenheimer feels like the first film of what could be the strongest stretch of his career.

“I really don’t know,” he said. “I really haven’t thought about it.”

Here, then, was another thing Murphy had seemingly figured out – consciously or not. Almost all religions, coaches, gurus, and enlightened friends tend to offer the same advice: don’t lose yourself in the past, don’t fixate on the future, but focus six inches in front of your nose, and on the Now that you can control. “I really am kind of like, pathologically unsentimental about things,” Murphy said. “I just move forward very quickly.” The past wasn’t a problem because he couldn’t remember it – or wouldn’t romanticise it. The future wasn’t a concern because he didn’t like to plan too far out. And so: the one film on the horizon; the one song on the radio or the one painting on the wall. He was, in this way, an authentic presentist. Or, less abstractly, just a good listener, a good seer, a good scene partner, a good person to have dinner with.

There, in the museum, we sat and we sat, watching the Bacon interview as though there was nowhere else to be (because there really wasn’t) and nothing else to think about (what more was there than how an artist’s life might be lived?).

Murphy broke the silence. “Did you ever hear this theory that [Brian] Eno has? About the farmers and the cowboys? There’s two types of artist – there’s the farmers and the cowboys. The farmers, like in his studio for example,” he said, gesturing to Bacon on the screen. “He’s mostly kind of doing the same thing, refining and refining and refining the same thing. And the cowboys, who go off, they’re like prospectors, that go off and do mad work. Eno puts himself in the second bracket, ’cause he’s such an innovator, with the music and the production and all of that. Or somebody like Bowie, constantly reinventing. Neither one is better, it’s just a different way of making work.”

Which do you fall into? I asked.

“Definitely the cowboy, I think. But there are actors that just play similar parts, versions of themselves all the time. Again, I don’t think either one is better.”

Do you think that sometimes an actor falls into the other category by accident, when their public persona intersects with – or eclipses – the work? I asked.

“Perhaps. Yeah. I’m sure that’s the case. Yeah.”

He sat back and sank into the film again, giggling at some of the things that Bacon said and did. “There’s a few things he says that I always think apply to our work,” he said. “ ‘The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.’ ” Provocative movies. Provocative performances. No easy answers – but perhaps a few new questions.

Don’t give it all away. Don’t even give most of it away. Retrench. Be clear. With yourself, but not necessarily with others. Let the fame wave pass. Live by the sea.

He said it again: “Deepen the mystery. That’s it, isn’t it?”'

[robertreich]

How the Corporate Takeover of American Politics Began

The corporate takeover of American politics started with a man and a memo you've probably never heard of.

In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, to draft a memo on the state of the country.

Powell’s memo argued that the American economic system was “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.

In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of the Second World War. They wanted to ensure corporations were responsive to all their stakeholders — workers, consumers, and the environment — not just their shareholders.

But Powell and the Chamber saw it differently. In his memo, Powell urged businesses to mobilize for political combat, and stressed that the critical ingredients for success were joint organizing and funding.

The Chamber distributed the memo to leading CEOs, large businesses, and trade associations — hoping to persuade them that Big Business could dominate American politics in ways not seen since the Gilded Age.

It worked.

The Chamber’s call for a business crusade birthed a new corporate-political industry practically overnight. Tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists and political operatives descended on Washington and state capitals across the country.

I should know — I saw it happen with my own eyes.

In 1976, I worked at the Federal Trade Commission. Jimmy Carter had appointed consumer advocates to battle big corporations that for years had been deluding or injuring consumers.

Yet almost everything we initiated at the FTC was met by unexpectedly fierce political resistance from Congress. At one point, when we began examining advertising directed at children, Congress stopped funding the agency altogether, shutting it down for weeks.

I was dumbfounded. What had happened?

In three words, The Powell Memo.

Lobbyists and their allies in Congress, and eventually the Reagan administration, worked to defang agencies like the FTC — and to staff them with officials who would overlook corporate misbehavior.

Their influence led the FTC to stop seriously enforcing antitrust laws — among other things — allowing massive corporations to merge and concentrate their power even further.

Washington was transformed from a sleepy government town into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, and five-star hotels.

Meanwhile, Justice Lewis Powell used the Court to chip away at restrictions on corporate power in politics. His opinions in the 1970s and 80s laid the foundation for corporations to claim free speech rights in the form of financial contributions to political campaigns.

Put another way — without Lewis Powell, there would probably be no Citizens United — the case that threw out limits on corporate campaign spending as a violation of the “free speech” of corporations.

These actions have transformed our political system. Corporate money supports platoons of lawyers, often outgunning any state or federal attorneys who dare to stand in their way. Lobbying has become a $3.7 billion dollar industry.

Corporations regularly outspend labor unions and public interest groups during election years. And too many politicians in Washington represent the interests of corporations — not their constituents. As a result, corporate taxes have been cut, loopholes widened, and regulations gutted.

Corporate consolidation has also given companies unprecedented market power, allowing them to raise prices on everything from baby formula to gasoline. Their profits have jumped into the stratosphere — the highest in 70 years.

But despite the success of the Powell Memo, Big Business has not yet won. The people are beginning to fight back.

First, antitrust is making a comeback. Both at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department we’re seeing a new willingness to take on corporate power.

Second, working people are standing up. Across the country workers are unionizing at a faster rate than we’ve seen in decades — including at some of the biggest corporations in the world — and they’re winning.

Third, campaign finance reform is within reach. Millions of Americans are intent on limiting corporate money in politics – and politicians are starting to listen.

All of these tell me that now is our best opportunity in decades to take on corporate power — at the ballot box, in the workplace, and in Washington.

Let’s get it done.

[mightyflamethrower]

Senate Sodomite in Capitol Sex Tape Is the Latest Attempt by Biden to 'Bring Back Decency'

Once upon a time, a president whom I shall call "Slick Willy," using a form of sorcery unbeknownst to modern man, transformed a starry-eyed intern into a consensual humidor in the Oval Office.

Ta-DA!

Some believe the real magic was that he kept his job, but, as a Democrat, that was the easy part. And it was just the beginning.

Today, Joe Biden and his myrmidons in the Democrat Party are using their useful idiots to tear down every stitch of decency in American politics. They are doing this on purpose — as per the 45 goals of Communism — and are employing their most broken malcontents to carry out the mission.

FACT-O-RAMA! LOOK AT THESE THREE GOALS OF COMMUNISM;  6. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and press. 7.  Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in the media. 8.  Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, and healthy.” 

I do not recall celebrating the 12th day of Christmas when my true love sent to me 10 drag queens a-twerkin'.

As reported earlier, a couple of barebackin', raw doggin' lads brilliantly filmed their foray into amateur porn in a Senate room, allegedly reserved under the name of Sen. Ben Cardin.

           RELATED:  Democratic Senate Staffer Filmed Gay Sex Tape in a Senate Hearing Room

FACT-O-RAMA! Amateur porn is a multi-billion-dollar industry. It is driven by people too unattractive to make "real" porn, but too damaged to stop trying. Kind of like how 90% of the nation's" burlesque" dancers are too fat to be strippers but too emotionally crippled to keep their clothes on.

Understand this: the left, especially the hardline "Gaystapo" kids hate you, this country, and everything decent. They believe they are victims of "genocide" and "right-wing bigotry."

I personally do not care what people "do in their bedrooms" but attention-starved men, becaked in glitter and lacking daddy's love, have made it their mission to humiliate themselves in an effort to "stick it to those conservatives." That's you and me.

Thus far, the Biden administration has given us a luggage-swiping bald man in a dress and cheap lipstick, a transamabob who took his shirt off at a White House picnic to show us his "moobs," and now a couple of dudes "building back better" in a Senate chamber.

BREAKING REPORT: Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the staffer for Dem. Senator Ben Cardin who purportedly made a GAY SEX TAPE in the Senate Hearing Room has been terminated.. Unconfirmed reports are now emerging that the room may have been reserved under the name of Dem. Senator Ben… pic.twitter.com/Bf1KlKNFAR— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) December 16, 2023

Woah, a couple of dudes playing "Brokeback Mountain" in the Capitol. You jolly ranchers really showed us!

So a cat named Aidan Maese-Czeropski, who worked for Maryland Democrat Sen. Ben Cardin has been sperminated terminated for taking the back road in a Senate room. It's not his fault. He is a victim who is being "targeted" for "who he loves."

So the gay man taking traffic in the exit-only lane believes he is being punished for "who he loves." Dude, did you not get the memo? NO ONE CARES you're gay. Maybe refrain from getting tagged by "who you love" on a table where our legislators meet. We ask so little.  

FACT-O-RAMA! Never mind those devils at "Urban Dictionary." First and foremost, cornhole is a drinking game, popular in the midwest, that involves throwing bean bags at a hole in a piece of invertedwood. This is the hill I will die on. I shall fight for this until I am out of Carling Black Label beer, and my enemies will have to bull the bean bag from my cold, dead fingers.

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If "LGBT genocide" means asking Democrat staffers not to bring their bat boys into Senate chambers for a game of wrecktum, call me a monster.

"Now hold on a minute KDJ, you do NOT strike us as a puritanical type."

This is true. I may have plowed a field or two in a public setting, but never have I gone to a place of reverence, nor have I videotaped my wayward son in action just to "piss off those stupid Conservatives."

Keep it classy, commies. The more you show your hand — and anything else — the more people will pull away from your party and start voting for real Americans.

Let's see if our marginalized and unemployed friend Mr. Maese-Czeropsk dares to put his resume on Monster.com

[tugoslovenka]

I think people like you are what is prompting studios like Larian to go into big business and selling their souls. Trying to appease a crowd of people like yourself, who constantly tries to find criticism about something no AAA studio would be able to produce. They are an INDIE studio producing a masterpiece like BG3 and you are going to complain about how they didn't give you act 4? I mean this in the nicest way possible, you need to stop being on tumblr.

well i was going to respond respectfully, but you are an absolute cunt and coward for hiding under anon so i'm going to say it - eat shit.

let's kick it off with: me and my random tumblr blog that posted something with what, 800 notes? is going to be downfall of larian? if that's the case, i demand a trial by combat on nestle next, maybe i can use my powers for good.

larian is an indie studio definitionally in that it's independent from major studios, but we all understand that "indie" refers to smaller scale studios so trying to slot them in there as though they don't have millions in revenue and the time to do games for as long as they want is appalling. even still, indie studios deserve to get criticism for an unfinished product. not addresing obvious issues with their games in an effort to place them on a pedastal bc they're not EA does nothing in service of the industry. you will not get a paycheck from larian by sucking dick any chance you can get.

bg3 is a game that is in partnership with WOTC, getting material that has existed for decades. it's not like they're starting from scratch when it comes to the content either, so let's not pretend this was larian's doing. it's dnd in video game form. using rules and mechanics that have existed for a long time.

i'm going to complain about whatever i fucking want when act 3 is a giant mess that has been broken since august. i am going to complain when i get an epilogue 4 months after release. i am going to complain when the game almost breaks my pc bc it's horribly optimized. i am going to complain when something doesn't work. i am going to complain about the ppl trying to defend a multimillion dollar studio like they're the second coming of video game jesus just because they're not abusing employees, sexually harrassing devs and making lackluster products. that's the literal bare minimum.

the only reason i came back to tumblr is bc i felt a strong love for the game and i love the community that's attached to it. there's some fantastic art, fanfiction and discussions/disourse that happens on the daily that i want to be a part of bc the game is fantastic. phenomenal even. but to pretend as if it doesn't have obvious drawbacks, issues is stupid. to defend larian is even stupider. a corporation that size should not be given freebies, no matter how "indie" they are. tenchent has a 30% stake in larian studios, a company with over 400 BILLION in revenue. spare me the cries of how their lazy patches and hotfixes should be celebrated when the game was not released in full. i will not grant any studio that grace. especially one that has already done this before.

fuck off.

[usafphantom2]

U.S. Department of Defense will ensure the availability of parts to maintain the F-16 for Ukraine 🇺🇦

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 11/20/2023 - 17:30 in Military, War Zones

F-16 fighter fly over Romania. (Photo: Radoslaw Jozwiak/AFP/Getty Images)

The U.S. Department of Defense is already participating in providing training to help Ukrainian pilots fly the F-16 aircraft. The U.S. also hopes to be ready to ensure the availability of spare parts for these aircraft.

Earlier this year, the U.S. State Department indicated its willingness to approve the transfer of third-party U.S.-made F-16 aircraft to Ukraine. The Netherlands, Denmark and Norway announced intentions to do just that by removing aircraft from their own fleets.

To ensure that Ukrainians succeed with the F-16, Ukrainian pilots have been trained in the US and Europe in both flight and maintenance operations.

However, when these F-16s are in the hands of the Ukrainians, the support will not stop. It will be necessary to have spare parts to ensure that they can be sustained and continue flying. The U.S. is also prepared to do this, said William A. LaPlante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and support, during a discussion on November 14 with the news organization Politico, from Washington, D.C.

LaPlante said that with everything that is sent to the Ukrainians - and the U.S. has committed 44.2 billion dollars in hardware and ammunition since February 2022 - it is also important that spare parts are made available to maintain this equipment.

“Everything we deliver to the Ukrainians, we will provide 90 days of spare parts, please, please, that's the rule – 90 days of spare parts,” he said.

LaPlante said that the F-16 aircraft that Ukraine will receive, worth almost a billion dollars, are no exception to this policy. These aircraft will need the right spare parts and in the right quantity.

"That's what we're going through now... to make sure this happens," he said. “They'll have enough when they get there. We want... this to be sustained. And it's often what's forgotten."

Without spare parts, he said that the F-16s that Ukrainians fly could be grounded in just a few months.

"We're not going to let that happen," he said. "And just because other countries provide their planes, we have to ensure that, if they do not provide the spare parts, we will find them and provide them."

The department is not alone in its efforts to ensure that Ukrainians will be able to keep their F-16s flying after taking them into custody or in concerns about Ukraine's long-term defense capability. The US and partners, especially through the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, are working together to ensure that Ukraine has what it needs and is also able to support itself in the long term.

“We are working hard with the U.S. industry and, in fact, with Europeans and other countries around the world to start coordinating these days of industry with the Ukrainians,” LaPlante said, referring to the full-day meetings where industry and military representatives meet to discuss procurement issues. "I think what we will see is this pivot for American companies and companies around the world to help Ukrainians rebuild what they have."

Tags: Military AviationF-16 Fighting FalconUkrainian Air Force

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has work published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. Uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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