Andy Best

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The image is a meme featuring a scene from the game show "Jeopardy!" 1. Top Text: "Good afternoon comrades..." 2. Image Content: - The host is standing next to a game board. - The board displays the text: "Something you can describe in detail that almost everyone agrees with, until you say its name." 3. Contestant: - A contestant is shown smiling, wearing a maroon MIT hoodie. 4. Bottom Text: "Socialism"

Ads coming to the trash APPs imminently. They're going up the stages of enshittification before they even have a product that works.

Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source Software, Researchers Argue ‘If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?’

A good example to understand the whole LLM enterprise. Capitalists exploiting and degrading human collaboration for rent-seeking.

Remembering the time I watched The Grey for Liam Neeson vs. wolves, and it turned out to be a bleak, existential piece with formidable symbolic depth.

Train Dreams is obviously excellent, and focused on time, but a good comparison piece would be John Sayles' Matewan, which also looks at rural labor in 1920's America, and the lives therein. It's as relevant as ever.

White Heathcliff is outside of all that. White Heathcliff is overt and blatant, like White Jesus.

Between the releases of Wuthering Heights and The Odyssey, social media this year promises to be a titanic showdown between world-class insufferable pedants.

Same impostor syndrome moment #2572: opened WIP with dread, convinced the new chapter had strayed from the tone, and that the WIP was all embarrassing - reads back over everything - oh, this is really good and I'm too in my own head.

Even as a hormone driven, susceptible teenage boy I was like, jfc John Norman, come on bro

This tells you everything you need to know about the Gor series. I read the first few as a teen in the 80s. I was attracted to the pulp style and covers but soon was like, oh, the author is one of those Plato loving crypto fascists.

From a review of the film:

... reasons I could sit through the boredom that was this movie. First I had read Tarnsman of Gor which is a decent book even if the author goes into a psychotic misogynistic breakdown after the first 3 books in the series ...

Of course there's a 1987 Canon film of John Norman's Gor books, which is also a PG release. Canon be normal challenge, difficulty level Deity.

Saw The Housemaid. Yet again, got baited by a top-tier cast and crew into watching a glossy, wildly tonally inconsistent/inappropriate Lifetime movie. Seemed caught between several approaches without committing either way.

Bari Weiss is like if Philomena Cunk wasn’t just a bit

About to finish up Gate Of Ivrel (Cherryh) and then on to today's writing session.

I really liked the functionality and style of Cohost, I would prefer us all to use Diaspora over FB too, but the fact of the matter is that most people, despite what they proclaim, still want to be king of the playground.

Zuck has so much money that they opened a new holding co. rebranded as Meta and funded a team to create the Metaverse, all just to get away from the fallout from Cambridge Analytica et al. And they still claim it's a real thing and hold demos.

Irresponsible thing to post considering we are living in the WEB3 revolution where all sites and functionality have moved to the blockchain because ... wait ...

do y’all remember how NFTs were going to revolutionize games and print money for every studio forever

anyway no idea why I’m thinking about that today

Our most famous graduate is Lauren Cohan who plays Maggie on The Walking Dead.

Funnily, as we existed at a normal university and not an academy setting, our course was described as 'named pathway.' To indicate we didn't have majors, minors or chocie of courses etc.

Personally I believe the method of electives, choice and building credits to be better educational practice, but I wouldn't change a thing about my own experience.

It was great, I was the second to last intake year while University was paid for by the state (course fees, UK) and my personal tutor was Peter Sykes a documentarian and director who among other things director two of Hammer's final features.

Overall we had scheduled stuff Mon-Fri 9-5, had to take it all, and at each year end needed to pass the exams and have >85% attendance or be completely booted out ...

So one one hand we had year-end written exams and a thesis, and on the other we sometimes did a two month long practical and nothing else during that time.

One the other we had training in theatre and film from industry pros, for example non-linear digital editing (in the 90s).

On one hand we did modern and post-modern theory, writing essays, reading critical theory and sitting exams ...

I can't join in the '5 classes you took' post, but the reason why not might be interesting in itself. Technically I did BA Drama, but it was a hybrid course that mixed Drama School/Film School/Conservatory with academic. So ...