[O]n Aug. 7... WarnerMedia abruptly eliminated the jobs of hundreds of employees, emptying the executive suite at the once-great studio that built Hollywood.... In a series of brisk video calls, executives who imagined they were studio eminences were reminded that they work — or used to work — at the video division of a phone company. The chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment, Bob Greenblatt, learned that he’d been fired the morning of the day the news broke.... Jeffrey Schlesinger, a 37-year company veteran who ran the lucrative international licensing business, complained to friends that he had less than an hour’s notice....WarnerMedia includes HBO, which has its new streaming service, HBO Max. The executive in charge of it is Casey Bloys, who is, we're told, "a great programmer, not a power player or politician of the old model. "
The new WarnerMedia chief executive, Jason Kilar, spent the formative years of his career as the senior vice president of worldwide application software at Amazon, known for its grim corporate culture.... Many of the new leaders are admirers of the culture at Netflix, which is hardheaded and unsentimental....
He has, he said in a telephone interview, told his new team that he wants programming on the streaming service that will complement the buzzy, complex adult shows like “Watchmen” and “Succession” that HBO is best known for. He is pointed [sic] to straightforwardly fun titles that appeal to younger audiences like “Green Lantern” and “Gossip Girl" as models for broadening out the service....HBO Max isn't doing very well, but I have the service. I have it only because I've kept my AT&T U-Verse cable service for years and years. I used to watch "buzzy, complex adult shows," but I don't watch any of it anymore. I don't even know what “Watchmen” and “Succession” are. I don't put in the time to try to get into complicated TV dramas, but it's fine with me if other people like them. As for "fun titles"... of course, executives nudging me to feel "fun" doesn't seem at all fun, but maybe those "younger audiences" are still susceptible.
And yet, I was just reading "People Aren’t Reading or Watching Movies. They’re Gaming. During the pandemic, digital three-dimensional environments are where much of life is taking place" (NYT).
Even before the pandemic and the lockdowns, digital games were fast emerging as one of the world’s favorite pastimes. But when live entertainment came to a halt, the virtual kind just took off. Since April, every week has ended with U.S. box office receipts down at least 97 percent and gaming revenue up by more than 50 percent, compared with the same week the year before. Driven by widening bandwidths that make digital games fun to play on mobile phones, global gaming revenues have risen steeply from under $20 billion in 2010 and are on track to hit $160 billion this year — more than books, music or movies....
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113 comments:
Movies: Wokeness about what you should be.
Games: Freedom to choose who you want to be.
When video games start censoring certain forms of game play as "hateful", they too will be over.
As a wise man once said, LOLGF.
Hollywood is a creepy place with a creepy system that chews up 'talent,' so why not executives as well?
Do some web searches (or maybe not) about pedophilia in Hollywood...it deserves to die. If it helps to move the operation to Seattle (soon to be elsewhere) then so be it.
I used to watch "buzzy, complex adult shows," but I don't watch any of it anymore
...but you and I probably would watch if there was content that looked appealing. It used to be good strategy to have most of your programming appeal to the younger demographic since that's who the majority of your advertisers wanted to reach. But why do it when you're a subscription service and the advertisements are gone?
I'm watching Newsradio on DVD. A very funny series from the 90s.
We ran through the old HBO series and 90s sitcoms fairly early the lockdown. Now it's mostly swing and a miss with most of the new virtue signaling crap.
Ted Lasso and that animated central park show on apple, mandalorian on disney...that's about all we've come up with...
Netflix has been so slow the spouse won't watch it anymore. He gets into those complicated dramas usually. Yeah I don't gaf about them either, but like to see him happy.
I wonder if gamers in the neighborhood are clogging the wireless? Or just streaming generally?
Everyone in Ant-America Hollywood can fuck off and die. I'm only sorry they're not ALL being fired.
Wow, 3 blog posts this morning about New York Fucking Times articles, and not one of them moves me to give two shits about the subject.
Boo fuckin hoo. Hollywood execs getting shit canned by TimeWarnerMedia? Welcome to the party assholes.
The one exec whines about only getting an hour’s notice of his dismissal. What do you think the rest of us get? And unlike us, you’re bound to have a big fat cushy landing from the C-Suite. Regular schmos will get virtually nothing (they were probably already furloughed months ago).
Fuck off. Fuck right off.
"grim corporate culture"
. . . that is taking over the world. Methinks (sorry) it's not so grim on the inside.
Not mentioned, at least in the part you excerpted, is that the massacre reaches all the way down into the print world at DC Comics. Supposedly the word is "you have one more chance to produce comics fans want to read, if not, we shut down and license out the characters".
Does he mean “week” as written or ”weak”?
They seem nice. *opens YouTube and watches another restoration video, or a discussion of the vagaries of Critical Theory, or maybe that series on the collapse of stone age civilization*
Once, I only watched news and sports on television. Now, I don't watch television at all.
Mrs. Mezz likes her mysteries, so we keep the cable. How's that newspaper business doing these days?
at the video division of a phone company. The chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment,
That made me wonder if WarnerMedia was a phone company, so I looked it up (they're not), but they do claim to be anti-black racists who need to be held accountable and want to share their racism with you.
So you probably shouldn't watch any of their crappy programs.
I don't even know what “Watchmen” and “Succession” are.
Watchmen is a series based on a novel based on a graphic novel, that is, a comic book. I haven't seen it, but all the reviews I have seen say its crap. On rotten tomatoes its got a 95% critic rating and 55% audience score, so you know its woke. I had never heard of Succession either but a quick intertubes search reveals its a soap opera similar to Dallas and Dynasty but with a media empire. If you want to watch something interesting I can't recommend Ozark on Netflix hard enough. The premise is an accountant's partner was skimming money from a drug cartel they were laundering money for and in order to save his life (and his wife and kids lives) he makes a deal to launder the cartel's money in the Ozarks because of reasons. It interesting because he has to do increasingly dark things to stay alive and his forced to deal with the local criminal element who are not too keen on someone muscling in on their territory. Politicians are bribed, cops are bought off or intimidated, etc.
we shut down and license out the characters
50% of the buzzy, complex adult shows they mentioned are based on comic books, as are 50% of their straightforwardly fun titles that appeal to younger audiences.
"of course, executives nudging me to feel "fun" doesn't seem at all fun, but maybe those "younger audiences" are still susceptible."
Pssst. They aren't nudging you, me, or most of the rest of the Althouse commentariat. It's time to accept we're not on anybody's radar for anything anymore - possibly excepting your vote every few years. The torch has passed to the younger generations.
Many of the new leaders are admirers of the culture at Netflix, which is hardheaded and unsentimental....
Does that mean Obama can't turn his work in late?
we shut down and license out the characters
50% of the buzzy, complex adult shows they mentioned are based on comic books, as are 50% of their straightforwardly fun titles that appeal to younger audiences.
True, but that says nothing about needing to maintain an in-house comic book division. They could still use the characters for their own media for free, and licensing them out for print would be a guaranteed revenue stream rather than hit or miss.
I'm not arguing for this, in fact I hope it doesn't happen, but I can see the attraction.
Hi. I write software. Been in the game industry twice. It's been bigger than movies and TV combined for years. But if the legacy media is finally cottoning to the fact... good, I guess?
The guy at the top of the hill at Fortnite developer Epic Games is a multibillionaire. He likes to buy up thousands of acres of forest lands here in North Carolina and donate them to the Department of the Interior.
rcocean: "Everyone in Ant-America Hollywood can fuck off and die. I'm only sorry they're not ALL being fired."
All these fired hollywood execs and their pals should just pack up and go to China since that's who they have been working for all these years anyway.
I recall Rob Reiner giving an interview just a few years ago where one of the Fox evening hosts (Hannity? Tucker?) had him on and Reiner was going on and on about the russia hoax like it was real and then when China and its influence over Hollywood was brought up...well. Reiner dint know nuffin about it.
At all.
It was all news to him!
LOL
“ Movies: Wokeness about what you should be.
Games: Freedom to choose who you want to be.
When video games start censoring certain forms of game play as "hateful", they too will be over.”
Already in progress...
I'd tell them that they should learn to code but I don't want any of these people near anything that needs to work automatically.
Learn to complain about learning to code. Oh wait...
“I don't put in the time to try to get into complicated TV dramas, but it's fine with me if other people like them.”
That’s very generous of you.
"Betting there will be more coverage of this than there was of the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII. "
Betting there will be more coverage of this than there was of the historic middle-east peace pact.
Whenever I see “Original production of streaming service X” I know it’s going to end up a wokescold sermon. I will stick with anything made prior to 9-11.
We have HBO through our cable and I guess I have whatever HBO Max is, but I don't understand its purpose. HBO's Watchmen series was great.
We're currently watching Killing Eve from BBC America via Hulu.
Kevin said...
Movies: Wokeness about what you should be.
Games: Freedom to choose who you want to be.
When video games start censoring certain forms of game play as "hateful", they too will be over.
google:
Gamer gate. from 2014. The controversy has been described as a manifestation of a culture war over cultural diversification, artistic recognition, and social criticism in video games, and over the social identity of gamers. Many supporters of Gamergate oppose what they view as the increasing influence of feminism on video game culture; as a result, Gamergate is often viewed as a right-wing backlash against progressivism.
Sad Puppies. from 2015. they sought to counteract what they saw as a focus on giving awards based on the race, ethnicity, or gender of the author or characters rather than quality, and bemoaning the increasing prominence of what they described as 'message' fiction with fewer traditional "zap gun" science-fictional trappings.
ATT bought Time-Warner, Ferdinande. Ma Bell owns CNN et al now.
"It's time to accept we're not on anybody's radar for anything anymore”
I read once that it’s not so much that they don’t want the older. demographic, it’s just that it’s very easy to get, just run a documentary on WWII or a cooking show, and the younger demographics on the other had are extremely hard to nail down, so whoever does that is raking it in.
Corporate culture is pretty much always "grim, hardheaded and unsentimental". They have stock prices to manage and quarterly earnings to report, y'know.
Such tenderfoot reporters over there at Variety.
There is upside here, even if grim corporatization is rather grim. The entertainment industry is a cesspool. The kind of shit that goes down across the entertainment industry, from TV news to film and television production, is disgustingly creepy. The rest of the corporate world, from glamorous financial services to tech, has largely cleaned up its act with respect to imposing reasonable standards of sexual behavior, at least in the office. Entertainment is the last bastion of the old way. Clean it the fuck up.
It may be a shitty time to be an entertainment executive, but it's probably the absolute best time in history for "creatives:" because of the explosion of streaming services and the need for content, anybody who's ever worked on a TV show is signing production deals. It can't last, but this is a golden age, however brief, for creative talent.
I don't even know what "gaming" is. You push buttons on your phone and your "character" does stuff?
"Watchmen is a series based on a novel"
Make that based on a movie.
"...but you and I probably would watch if there was content that looked appealing. It used to be good strategy to have most of your programming appeal to the younger demographic since that's who the majority of your advertisers wanted to reach. But why do it when you're a subscription service and the advertisements are gone?"
It might be rational to work on bringing new people in and actively competing with the other streaming services. They're like the swing voters. I'm in the base — one of the people who've subscribed to premium cable for many years. I've had HBO since the 80s, and I'm just letting them take my money every month, and maybe they even know that I'm a subscriber who doesn't watch any of the shows. All I do is record Bill Maher's show to my DVR, which is a silly machine, and maybe they know I only watch a couple minutes and scroll through, rejecting everything.
HBO hurts itself most by having so many lefty political shows. Nothing even in the center.
Those executives should pledge to fight the NRA.
Watch “Dark” on Netflix. Extremely complex time travel sci-fi from Germany. 100% free of some influence, just straightforward time travel weirdness. Think a German Twin Peaks but with writers that diligent about where the story is going.
Fernandinande: That made me wonder if WarnerMedia was a phone company, so I looked it up (they're not)…
WarnerMedia is owned by AT&T. WarnerMedia is the "video division" of AT&T, the "phone company."
Succession is good but some of the characters are cringe worthy.
It’s a the story of an aging media conglomerate patriarch trying to figure out which of his children, four dysfunctional (each in their own way) rich spoiled brats, should take over the empire.
As with all tv/movies YMMV.
I think it’s where I picked up my increased use of “fuck off”. Each character says it multiple times. In fact you can google “succession Fuck off” and it should pull up some funny meme vids smashing together all the clips of someone saying “fuck off”
Let me know when those "hardheaded and unsentimental" executives are ready to produce content that the non-insane half of their audience is interested in seeing.
Until then, my money and time are going elsewhere
Drago said... I recall Rob Reiner giving an interview just a few years ago where one of the Fox evening hosts (Hannity? Tucker?) had him on and Reiner was going on and on about the russia hoax like it was real and then when China and its influence over Hollywood was brought up...well. Reiner dint know nuffin about it.
At all.
It was all news to him!
Meatheads gonna Meathead!
The writing was on the wall for Warner after AT&T’s purchase and DOJ approval of it. I had a wonderful 45 year career at AT&T, the last 6 years spent leading a team testing and implementing Software Defined Network in the layer one infrastructure, with the debt taken on for the purchase of Warner Media, cost-cutting throughout the corporation was a reality.
About the only things I watch are sports and the "Murder Channel" which is ID. Last Wednesday they did a special on Charlottesville so that ruined one evening. Not that I watched, of course. Wed is usually their shows on CCTV which are good.
In old broadcast tv, you had to have something important happen every segment lest the viewer bail during the commercial break. With streaming, something important needs to happen just once at the end of every episode so that you allow it to jump to the next episode.
Some of these series are complex, but most just drag. How many sit and watch as opposed to having it on while multitasking?
Conservachusetts said...
Watch “Dark” on Netflix. Extremely complex time travel sci-fi from Germany. 100% free of some influence, just straightforward time travel weirdness. Think a German Twin Peaks but with writers that diligent about where the story is going.
8/17/20, 9:58 AM
If you can stand long-drawn out series. This is one of the better ones (but still can't get through it), but a lot of series drag out a single premise over 26 episodes where the whole thing could be done in 6. Ain't no one got time for 'dat!
Blogger Jeff Brokaw said...
Corporate culture is pretty much always "grim, hardheaded and unsentimental". ...
8/17/20, 9:40 AM
That was exactly my thought.
"That made me wonder if WarnerMedia was a phone company"
Warner is a subsidiary of AT&T.
It's in the article but I edited it out of my quote.
Mrs. NorthOfTheOneOhOne and I have been burning our way through 'The Sopranos'. Probably start on 'Band of Brothers' next.
I am that gamer.
Does the article mention that when we game we talk with many online friends and share the experience? Gaming is very social, as opposed to watching a show alone with just the people in your house. Or maybe we're watching someone else game via twitch and chatting live with others on the stream. I doubt the NYT understands the appeal.
Also, gamergate was yrs ago, as someone mentioned, and the SJWs lost that argument. Gaming is the last frontier of LOLGF.
" If you want to watch something interesting I can't recommend Ozark on Netflix hard enough."
I don't have Netflix. I don't want to pay a monthly fee to another thing I don't watch.
"The premise is an accountant's partner was skimming money from a drug cartel they were laundering money for and in order to save his life (and his wife and kids lives) he makes a deal to launder the cartel's money in the Ozarks because of reasons. It interesting because he has to do increasingly dark things to stay alive and his forced to deal with the local criminal element who are not too keen on someone muscling in on their territory. Politicians are bribed, cops are bought off or intimidated, etc."
That sounds like a lot of work to understand. I find the subject of finance really dull. I'm not interested in complicated crimes. You'd have to pay me to work to understand the facts. Not my thing at all.
And yet, I was just reading "People Aren’t Reading or Watching Movies. They’re Gaming. During the pandemic, digital three-dimensional environments are where much of life is taking place" (NYT).
I'm doing more reading, writing, and movie watching than I have in years, and LOVING IT! And I completely forgot that I have a Playstation sitting in our media cabinet, untouched for so very long. I guess it's a generational thing?
Oh yes. I suppose I need to throw in some work, now and again.
If you are not generating a consistent revenue stream for the Company you work for, your job will always be in peril. You also have to keep abreast of the direction your company is going towards. Too bad for the executives who were asleep at the switch. If they're prudent, they've been saving up a lot of money from their salaries.
"We have HBO through our cable and I guess I have whatever HBO Max is, but I don't understand its purpose."
For me, it means I can stream things on my iPad, so I don't have to be around the TV to watch, say, an old episode of "The Comeback" or "Flight of the Conchords."
Conservachusetts: Watch “Dark” on Netflix. Extremely complex time travel sci-fi from Germany. 100% free of some influence, just straightforward time travel weirdness. Think a German Twin Peaks but with writers that diligent about where the story is going.
First season of "Dark" was great. Second season was good. Third season was mediocre, at best - far too repetitive and drawn out.
And I disagree that the writers were any kind of diligent about where they were going. I don't believe the events of the third season were planned from the beginning, at all.
"alone with just the people in your house"
there's a phrase!
"I have it only because I've kept my AT&T U-Verse cable service for years and years."
Please keep your AT&T U-Verse cable service. You're helping to pay my lucrative AT&T common stock dividends.
I don't have a TV myself, but I visit people who have various flavors of cable. It's remarkable to watch someone sit fifteen feet from a huge screen, point the remote at it, and click mindlessly through the channels, lingering but a second (if that) to see if the current selection is worth watching.
In 1962, Newton Minnow called commercial television, with maybe seven channels in a major metropolitan center, a "vast wasteland". Other than the annoyance of commercials, it was free. Now it's 500 channels, and nuthin's on. Now you pay and pay and pay, and get commercials anyway.
Life keeps passing you by and you people remain so proud like it's an accomplishment.
Don't let your wife see that.
Or husband... as the case may be.
"AT&T, the last 6 years spent leading a team testing and implementing Software Defined Network in the layer one infrastructure”
Isn’t that kind of the software version of playing with steam shovels and earth movers?
"I don't even know what "gaming" is. You push buttons on your phone and your "character" does stuff?"
It's like masturbating, only you don't come.
One of the reasons I almost never watch HBO or other of the like, even though I have subscriptions to all of them, is that you get 15 seconds of DNC propaganda inserted whether you asked for it or not in the form of clips from their late night talk shows. Same reason I don’t watch TBS, even though there are some good sitcoms on there. Who needs to have Samantha Bee show up in your living room for a drive by 15 second hate? It’s hard to avoid even with a DVR.
"the younger demographics on the other had are extremely hard to nail down, so whoever does that is raking it in."
What they want are unsophisticated viewers who can be easily persuaded to buy advertised products or talk up a show on social media. Such people used to be known as marks, rubes, or hayseeds. Now they're called the younger demographic, with some vague implication that hearing the F-word 30 times per hour confers sophistication to them.
NBC has run for more than a decade charging premium rates for its Thursday schedule of shows that few people have ever seen, and whose tiny audiences can best be described as "too stupid to look up for themselves what movies are opening tomorrow."
"Life keeps passing you by and you people remain so proud like it's an accomplishment.”
Howard tries so hard to pretend he is one of the cool kids. Why should you care what a bunch of know-nothing overgrown children think of you unless you are trying to get laid by one of them, I guess. I prefer women of my own generation, so I don’t have to try to hard to be hip and have no requirement to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
my DVR, which is a silly machine
Its going to be an increasingly unnecessary machine as everything goes to on demand streaming and the idea of a scheduled time for shows to be "aired" goes the way of the buggy whip.
PUBG Mobile is a popular first person shooter you can play on any device. It's been downloaded more than 500,000,000 times and it's played daily by 50 million people. Of course China owns it. The download is free but you can buy cosmetic upgrades in game. They've made several billion off of it so far. Why watch TV when you can interact with friends in a virtual world? I can remember when my grandparents didn't own a TV. Times change.
I'm an old school gamer and I dislike most of the modern games. The most popular modern video games more or less fall into 2 categories: competitive online multiplayer and single player open world/"sandbox" style games. Examples of the former are Fortnite, DOTA2, League of Legends, Rocket League, COD, and Overwatch. Examples of the later are the Red Dead Redemption series, the Grand Theft Auto series, the Witcher series, and the Dark Souls series.
I dislike the competitive online multiplayer games because I hate playing with and against people I don't know in games where your poor performance drags down your whole team.
And I dislike the big open world games because they feel too much like weird amusement parks to me. The artiface of open world games is just too apparent for me to suspend disbelief and just enjoy it. All the tasks, the fetch quests and such, all feel a little too scripted.
But these genres are where most of the development effort and money go to, so I'm out of luck in terms of stuff I'd actually want to play.
Howard said...
Life keeps passing you by and you people remain so proud like it's an accomplishment.
Um, no Howard.
Paying attention to the drivel coming out of Hollywood and other Woke centers would be letting "life pass us by".
Instead, we do functional things, while you give tounge baths to vapid "celebrities" for spouting things you like
Watchmen was one of the greatest graphic novels ever written. It was a revolution in its genre and was absolutely engrossing when I read it back in the '80s. There was nothing like it, ever. It had an army of passionate fans and eventually was turned into an okay movie.
Alan Moore didn't want it to become a movie even though that was faithful to the original. He certainly would never have wanted someone to make a spinoff TV series.
Sad Puppies. from 2015. they sought to counteract what they saw as a focus on giving awards based on the race, ethnicity, or gender of the author or characters rather than quality, and bemoaning the increasing prominence of what they described as 'message' fiction with fewer traditional "zap gun" science-fictional trappings.
8/17/20, 9:37 AM
Lensman movies/series or GTFO
I'm not at all surprised that Hollywood is being devastated by the lockdowns. There is no way to produce new content, and the little bit that is coming out is so progressively woke that it draws a niche audience. Even my favorite YouTubers are slowing content delivery.
I do agree that gaming and VR is an escape. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's release of Microsoft's Flight Simulator, the first update of the franchise since 2007. However, it is only temporary. Gaming and virtual experience simply doesn't release the endorphins like the real world does. I've spent fortunes trying to simulate the home experience of a large choral experience like you would get at a live concert. It just isn't the same. And ask any hiker or jogger if they prefer a treadmill to a trail? Peloton is just a substitute for rainy days and covid, but it isn't a bike ride.
Myself, I'm picking up flying lessons. The sky is less crowded, lots of instructors, and no Karens around to enforce mask requirements. It may become the best way to travel, but it gets me out and about for now.
I played Fortnight twice, put down the controller and walked slowly away, because a third hit of that would have left me addicted. I haven’t played games since they cost a quarter a play at the student union.
"and no Karens around to enforce mask requirements”
Oh the indignities you have suffered. There should be a monument to you guys I call “Hector” because you are always hectoring us about how you have no responsibilities for the health of others and besides, you know better anyway because some right wing blogger assured you that you do.
You guys and your unasked mentions of “Karen” are like the way Obama supporters were for so many years. Somehow he came up in every conversation from liberals no matter the subject.
Faster please.
Good of them to commit suicide. I won't miss them.
"Betting there will be more coverage of this than there was of the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII. "
Betting there will be more coverage of this than there was of the historic middle-east peace pact.
---------------------
Touché.
For the people who say that the health of others is not their responsibility, would you shit in the town well if it was more convenient for you than a toilet? If not? Why not? If it’s “not the same thing” who appointed you arbiters of matters of public health?
tim in vermont said...
"and no Karens around to enforce mask requirements”
Oh the indignities you have suffered. There should be a monument to you guys I call “Hector” because you are always hectoring us about how you have no responsibilities for the health of others
Here's my rule, Tim, it's hard, fast, and applies everywhere:
I don't value anything about or for you that you yourself do not value.
So, do you value your vote enough to put in a little effort to make it happen? No? Then I don't value your vote, either. (See photoID)
Do you value your health enough to wear mask and goggle when you're out in public? Do you put everything that comes into your house into a three day quarantine (or else wash it off before using it)? Do you take off and bag your clothes as soon as you get in the door, then take a shower, when coming in after going out in public?
No?
Then don't whine to me abotu your health. Because if you're not willing to put in that minimal effort to save your life, I can't see why I should do anything to save your life
And yes, I do all those things, because my wife is high risk. We got a small fridge / freezer to put things in for their quarantine period. If you can't do that, you can bag things before you put them in your fridge / freezer.
Take responsibility for yourself
Destroying the economy kills a LOT more people than Covid does. Being unemployed is bad for your health. But you had no problem inflicting that on millions of Americans, didn't you, Tim?
Then, of course, there's teh whole question as to whether or not make actually do any good:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30352-0/fulltext
Coincidently, while searching for something completely unrelated, I came across a few articles about Warner/HBO Max rebooting Looney Tunes this summer, but Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam would no longer have guns. Perhaps that is a bigger sign of the "old days" passing.
Would it be impolite to giggle and snorf? Can I say "Learn to code" without angry pitchfork mobs showing up at my house?
Probably better to read about movies than watch them. Here's some really good books:
Moving Pictures:Memories of a Hollywood Prince by Budd Schulberg. Schulberg senior was one of the most important producers of the teens through 30s and head of Paramount Pictures.
An Empire of their own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood" by Neal Gabler about the early years of movies and how Hollywood came into being
Since we are talking about HBO-Time-Warner, "The Brothers Warner" by Cass Warner Sperling, Harry Warner's granddaughter.
Elia Kazan's bio is pretty good too.
Blogger Nonapod said...
I'm an old school gamer and I dislike most of the modern games.
How old school? Do you play the text only version of Zork?
Or, Adventure on a DG Eclipse?
John Henry
Probably better to read about movies than watch them. Here's some really good books:
I have been reading Jeanine Bassinger's books about the classic era of movies.
This is an especially good one.
@Althouse
"That sounds like a lot of work to understand. I find the subject of finance really dull. I'm not interested in complicated crimes. You'd have to pay me to work to understand the facts. Not my thing at all."
It's one of the best things on that I've seen in a while. I can barely balance a checkbook and I can follow it. It's not about the money really. Besides, you're a college professor and everything! I think you'll figure it out : )
Btw, my son bought me a year of Netflix for my birthday otherwise I wouldn't watch it.
Other btw, we just got a new router and figured we could now hook up our DirecTV box to the internet for on-demand shows. But now we get ads that play whenever we pause the show we're watching (we watch almost nothing live)...WTF!
At this rate, cords will be cut...
I still don’t understand how asking people to wear masks in places where people are forced by the need to keep body and soul together to go is shutting down the economy. I don’t give a flying fuck what people do in restaurants or movie theaters or whatever. But we keep hearing fake concern for the vulnerable when being asked to do the tiniest thing oneself to protect them is just too much work.
I will read your link, we will see if it changes my mind.
Funny to see Bassinger referenced here. She was the most popular prof in college, and is a big reason there’s a “Wesleyan mafia” in Hollywood, as she is the film program.
Tim in Vermont asks... Isn’t that kind of the software version of playing with steam shovels and earth movers?
LOL... yeah ... kinda... virtualizing the backbone optical network that carries/transmits all network traffic at some point.
If you have an interest: https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/att-claims-open-roadm-success-validates-interoperability-work/2019/03/
Oh wow, the Lancet study linked agrees with me almost exactly.
Public health measures to implement facemask use will be more crucial in settings with higher baseline risk for transmission. There is evidence of beneficial effects in medical mask studies, and such effects might also exist for optimally designed cloth masks, although the direct evidence is currently limited to observational and droplet studies. WHO advises several populations to wear facemasks, including people with symptoms and vulnerable populations. Even if additional studies show that facemasks have small relative effects or no effect when used broadly, framing the precautionary principles when baseline risk is high might suggest that facemasks use in community settings with reduced physical distancing might be justified.
It’s basically ethically impossible to do a double blind study on masks during a pandemic when you have observational evidence that it works. Did you know that we have no double blind studies on how long it takes to asphyxiate a human being. All we have are case studies, but we are pretty confident. Focusing on that one aspect is a kind of motivated reasoning, as it is irrelevant.
"How old school? Do you play the text only version of Zork?"
BASIC Hammurabi and Moon Lander via teletype-paper tape terminal on a DEC PDP-8
I forgot to bold this for the dim:
here is evidence of beneficial effects in medical mask studies, and such effects might also exist for optimally designed cloth masks, although the direct evidence is currently limited to observational and droplet studies.
Lack of double blind studies is the same argument Inga uses against HCQ, even though we have ample observational evidence that it works.
Kinda odd that this "programmer" cited Watchman, Gossip Girl and Green Lantern. Not exactly bowling over every body in ratings? If these ratings don't improve this "programmer" may be next for the axe.
I watch fishing shows and golf.
Kubb on youtube.
The rest of it can fuck off. Including the people who make it.
I thought the sam wasson book about chinatown would be better, they do briefly reference the source material as carey mcwilliams, but they don't focus on how gittes is much more a dashell hammett type, more downscale than chandler's usual cast of characters,
Hollywood died? You couldn't pay me enough to notice.
Or care.
I would still pay to see a science fiction movie on the big screen.
Dark started off well, but then it became a chore to watch. It's like a German car. Great at first, but then you have start paying for maintenance.
Mrs. Scott and I am not part of the desired demographics anymore based on our ages, so these media companies don’t care about us to produce something that we care to watch. We just got Amazon Prime and have started watching “Man in the High Castle”. It has us intrigued enough to keep watching. The kids watch shows on Netflix. Plus we are reading more, which is a good thing. The networks will have very little content this fall due to Covid so it is a good time to explore our entertainment options.
Nightly we scroll through Netflix and Amazon Prime and Britbox and Acorn andStarz and HBO. The lot. It is astonishing the amount of time and energy and money that has gone into making this crap, these hundreds of truly stupid movies. Do the makers and actors really think these offerings are going to be big winners or do they just burn the investor money as fast as possible. It is a mystery.
The English produce good mysteries so Britbox often delivers
Other than the annoyance of commercials, it was free. Now it's 500 channels, and nuthin's on. Now you pay and pay and pay, and get commercials anyway.
The original enticement to cable-tv was ad-free, but once it reached critical mass, the commercials came. Now many of the channels you get are nothing but infomercials. The streaming services started out the same, watch your shows ad-free and you binge watch whole seasons in less time because of it. Now they have commercials embedded between episodes, and you can bet that's just a start. Then there is the absurdity of product placement in storylines...
I cancelled all my streaming services except Amazon Prime, which is free with the pre-paid shipping. If Amazon splits that out, it will be cancelled as well.
Since Netflix got rid of reviews, my watching Netflix has decreased.
I only keep it now due to my daughter.
The evidence doesn't mean much until you do a study where masks are used as they actually are:
1) only covering the mouth,
2) not being new or clean,
3) worn just for the 20 seconds it takes to get from the car to your table,
4) not being worn at all at social gathering were no one is enforcing,
5) being worn in crowds of thousands while screaming in people's faces during protests.
We were wearing masks when the cases were going up and also when they were going down and wearing them even more when cases went back up, so what specific effect did they have and when?
It's a lot like global warming. Solutions that will never really be adopted anywhere near the level where they make a difference is just wasteful talk distracting us from the solutions that could actually work.
South Dakota under Governor Kristi Noem never went into shut down nor required masks and they had hugely attended celebrations for Independence day and others. They just had the Sturgis rally with hundreds of thousands, and the video I saw showed no masks on anyone. We will see if the Sturgis rally leads to extra Covid deaths, but the celebrations in early summer did not, and the state has a per capita Covid mortality 11 times lower than New York's, which has been locked down all summer - that's per capita 11 times better. Is that evidence?
Did your mask study show an 11 fold improvement with masks? Did they use the same masks day after day like people actually do?
I am a big TV addict who doesn't watch much actual TV anymore. I watch mostly videos on Youtube, that teach me something. I know how to do about twice as many things as I did 5 years ago because of it. Seriously, if you want discount surgery, I'm your guy. Anything from a dog who swallowed your Titleist to your brain tumor, I've done the homework on that.
There is "Mason" on HBO. Good acting and cinematography. The premise is how Perry Mason got started after the first world war. We watch MHZ TV. All foreign language TV and movies. My wife like the French detective dramas and I watched the original "Walander".
The Criterion Channel is my go-to channel for movies. They have all the art house stuff, French New Wave, etc. Lots of content. I am currently working through their Australian New Wave collection. The one I watched Saturday was a delight : Don's Party, directed by Bruce Beresford. Kind of an Australian Sideways. Its quite a treat -these days- to watch a good movie made by adults, for adults.
Unrelated tout : I read C S Forrestor's The Good Shepherd in two sittings- 99 cents on Amazon.An interesting WWII page turner for sure. And then took up trial version of Apple TV to watch movie version of the book : Greyhound, with a barely recognizable Tom Hanks. Good war movie, but definitely enhanced by reading the book as the technical aspects of fighting off a U-boat wolf pack from a 37 convoy with two destroyers and two corvettes were fascinating, but required some detailed understanding of the limitations of 1940's sonar, radar, weaponry, etc. Things which only the book could put across.
I was responding to the Lancet study, which actually claims that masks do some good. I have never argued that masks should be worn outside or that they provide perfect protection. There is a evidence that sunshine kills airborne virus. I don’t give a flying fuck what people do in restaurants, it’s the indoor locations that “vulnerable people” you guys pretend to care about can’t avoid like supermarkets, since they have to eat, that concern me. I have a heart condition, I won’t be going inside a restaurant any time soon, but I don’t think that that means you shouldn’t be able to. You can make up all the reasons you like and pretend that they haven’t been addressed and you won’t wear a mask until some perfect study has been done, whatever. I would think that you would have some tiny bit of concern for the people who work the checkout line at the supermarket or wherever, but i would be wrong.
There are studies that show that mask mandates reduce the spread of the virus, regardless of the nose peekers, the non compliant, those who are so emotional about it that they refuse to wear one, whatever. Just raising the level of people wearing masks lowers the spread. Only children expect perfection.
For the folks who sidetracked this thread on to covid masks, you should go watch the YouTube video of Dr. Ted Noel demonstrating their inefectiveness. He inhales from a vaping device, tries on a variety of masks, then exhales. It's pretty obvious they don't contain much that comes out of his mouth.
As long as people are recommending shows, I will pop in to concur with those who liked Dark. Of course, I love time travel movies and fiction so I was predisposed to liking it. My son recommended it but said the dubbing was terrible so, like him, I'm watching it in German with subtitles. I was talking with someone about at the bar Friday night and they said they'd started it but gave up because the dubbing was so bad. I convinced them to try again with subtitles. It's one of the only time travel stories I can think of where future, current, and past selves interact. I also like Ozark a lot. And Netflix or Amazon has an Australian series called Rake about a dissolute lawyer that is mostly hilarious (it runs out of steam in the last season).
tim in vermont said...
I still don’t understand how asking people to wear masks in places where people are forced by the need to keep body and soul together to go is shutting down the economy.
And you're still not willing to even respond to the point that you can take care of yourself without demanding anything of the rest of us
But you refuse to do that
Because your refusal is "principled", it's just everyone else who's a selfish bastard.
"I was responding to the Lancet study, which actually claims that masks do some good."
"Some" good. not "a lot" of good. not "this will stop transmission if every just does it", but "hey, this will slightly cut transmission rate."
So get off your high horse and stop whining. Act like a responsible adult, protect yourself, and leave the rest of us alone.
Because we're tired of listening to "experts" who are full of shit
I find the subject of finance really dull.
Pshaw! Pay no attention to CNBC or Fox Business or investment or business news. Finance at its core is a compact between the generations. Mostly older people, having accumulated capital and needing income, provide young people, who have big ideas and big dreams and big eyes but lack a pot to piss in, the capital they lack. It is more central to civilization and more organic a part of it, more important, than any of the political nonsense we mostly like to dish about here. And it is way more interesting, even in its technicalities, where you can still make out the shape of that multigenerational agreement in so much of its machinations today. You don't need to find derivatives fascinating to appreciate finance, although they are, but more as a way of telling us the probabilities our "smart money" assigns to various possible outcomes. And Succession is a great show, which while not as explicitly about finance as the Ozarks is, gets at the core of the drama inherent in our financial system. It's old against young, and young vs. old.
There's no such thing as a boring subject.
Tim, your motte and bailey bullshit is why so many are refusing to wear masks.
Are they an obvious public health benefit, to the order of "don't shit in the well"? Yes? Then claim that, and reject the "masks do some good". Because "don't shit in the well" does a hell of a lot more than "some good".
Are they a minor public health benefit, like the Lancet article claims? Then stop over selling them.
But pick one, and stick to it
"How old school? Do you play the text only version of Zork?"
Space Quest, Kings Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. I wonder if there are enough people around that reviving the Sierra games brand would be worthwhile, if you could even figure out which spin-off Cendant gave it too, if any.
Oh, well, Activition Blizzard owns it, so forget that.
Blogger tim in vermont said...8/17/20, 8:00 PM "There are studies that Masks do some good...?"
Sorry "time in vermont.." just because there are studies and "The Lancet" agrees does not mean it is true. After the last kerfuffle from "The Lancet" it's editors have damaged 'The Lancet's' reputation beyond repair. That's what happens when editors get political. BTW, those studies you claim have been debunked. Below is an article on Masks. There are about 20 + studies. Plus the author links his "White Paper" with 100s more studies, including the few who state that Masks help.
https://www.rcreader.com/commentary/masks-dont-work-covid-a-review-of-science-relevant-to-covide-19-social-policy
There are 1,000s of studies which show that Masks, including N95, don't stop viruses. I'm wondering where Dr. Fauci got the science to mandate this and almost kill an economy.
Even a layman can understand, the literature says there are over 1 million viruses, and mankind has only come up with 2 cures - smallpox for humans and rinderpest for cows. Such a hit ratio is very small and downright scary. Viruses are the bane of mankind!
So tim for vermont science is not on your side and your wishfull comment, while I want to also wish with you, unfortunately is not correct.
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