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Tron Ares

 I went to see the new Tron film today, in an empty auditorium - the first time this has happened to me with any film if memory serves. To be fair, it was a Tuesday afternoon on a work week and it was a 3D showing, whereas the 2D showing the next day showed that more of the seats had been filled, according to the Vue's website. This probably says as much about the state of 3D films as it does about the state of the Tron franchise. The film wasn't bad. Word of mouth around the internet has pegged it as one of the worst films of the year, which, in my opinion, is a little unfair. The visuals were great, the soundtrack was fantastic, it moved along at a fair old pace and it was perfectly diverting for the couple of hours that it was on. My main gripe would be that the film was incredibly loud; I was forced to move backwards a couple of rows and put in ear plugs in order not to be deafened by the volume of the music and sound effects. This did make following the dialogue rather dif...
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Blind panic

When a problem arises, the trick is to avoid making it worse. For example, when there is no hot water or heating in the house, the trick is to avoid turning it into "no hot water or heating in the house, plus water all over the bathroom floor plus getting to work late plus scalding myself
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D & P

I watched Deadpool and Wolverine  for the second time last night, and enjoyed it, but didn't think it was the MCU-saver that Kevin Feige probably wanted it to be. It's just as messy in execution as all the recent Marvel multiverse projects have been, and, as with Multiverse of Madness , I didn't know exactly which version of anyone I was looking at in any given moment. Johnny Storm is in the film, but is he the same Johnny Storm from the Tim Storey Fantastic Four  films or an identical alternate version?
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AI will devour itself

Day 1: The image repository of the internet is made up of 100% people-generated images. Stablediffusion scrapes that repository to create new images. Day 2: The image repository of the internet is made up of 99% people-generated images, and 1% Stablediffusion-generated images. Stablediffusion scrapes that repository to create new images, but it is now using a small percentage of existing Stablediffusion content in that process. Day 3: The image repository of the internet is made up of 50% people-generated images and 50% Stablediffusion-generated images. All images created by Stablediffusion are now significantly made up of recycled Stablediffusion images. Day 4: The balance has shifted. The image repository of the internet is made up of 1% human-generated images and 99% Stablediffusion-generated images. Every image produced by Stablediffusion is a regurgitation of material previously vomited up by Stablediffusion and then re-consumed. Nothing looks real.
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Eroding boundaries

 Before streaming happened, there was a sharp dividing line between mainstream entertainment and lower quality products of the sort that would be dumped directly on to video or be shown on telly as TV movie of the week. The former would feature A list actors and would be made by big name directors, while the latter would be made by the likes of Albert Pyun and Uwe Boll and star a cast of unknowns. Post-streaming, that dividing line has disappeared and now we're getting films and shows based on huge and lucrative IPs - Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones and Star Wars to name a few - but made by and starring the kind of talent who, in a bygone era, would have graced the lower shelves in one's local video store. Lord of the Rings has become Rings of Power, which is, essentially, Tommy Wiseau's Lord of the Rings.
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Facepalmbook addendum

 The other reason I don't post on Facebook is because of lack of response, aside from the characters mentioned in my previous post. For a while I got in a huff every time I posted a comment or a picture and got blowing tumbleweeds as a result. However, then I questioned how much I was responding to other people's posts and realised that I wasn't; nothing in my news feed on Facebook or Instagram was stirring me to "like", comment, or any other reaction to what anyone else was saying. This made me feel like a hypocrite for moaning about my lack of reaction from others.
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Disney's crime

Disney don't ruin the IPs that they inherit from other companies. Most of what they buy has been ruined already: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Predator, Alien Covenant, X-Men Dark Phoenix and the Star Wars prequels were all low points for their respective series. What Disney did was follow all of these up with additions that were no better. Disney's crime is that, given the opportunity to reinvigorate all of those IPs with fresh creative teams and visions, they instead carried on making them to the previous low standard.
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