Blender Artists is a website for blender users to discuss and share blender-related things. Blender is a program to model 3D models and do various other graphics related things. The program is very good and I like it. But the Blender Artists website is the kind of awful place where I don't want to be. Until recently I had an account there but I requested multiple times to delete it ( since the settings do not have this option ). The moderators were fighting with me over deleting of my stuff. They claim if I delete my posts I will ruin the "flow of things" or whatever the hell. So it turned out to be a very complex manual process to delete everything myself. The funny thing is, it all started because they were the once deleting my stuff without me wanting it to be deleted. And now they are fighting to keep me on the platform. What the actual fuck?
This article will be strangely related to something I had experienced just recently. And quite frankly somewhat related to the Moria's Race project. I will talk about means, or in this particular case, a mean, that governments sometimes use to push people into doing what the governments like people to do.
D'une manière ou d'une autre, je ne connaissais pas le film de Luc Besson 2010 Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec. Excusez mon français. I will continue in English now. I just had a pleasure of listening to people speak French for 2 hours straight, because I just learned about the existence of a movie that for some reason passed my radar. As you know I'm a big enough Luc Besson fan that sometimes I take his personal life blunders personally. I knew about his more obscure Arthur films. And I am anticipating his upcoming 2 films, that nobody seem to know nothing about. But somehow only now I heard about the 2010 Luc Besson film The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec.
There are 3 types of laws: Freedom laws; Power laws and Paternalism laws. Freedom laws are those laws we actually like. Free Speech and things like that are all freedom laws. Some freedom laws are less obvious than others. But if the law makes your freedom stronger, it is a freedom law. Power laws are similar. Some people confuse power laws with freedom laws. Power laws are those that give people power. Most obvious examples are laws about censorship. Or laws that state that you can't criticize the government, some countries have that. Those give power to the government over the people. Power laws are any laws that give anybody power. Taking away somebodies else freedom in the process. But then there are paternalism laws.
Is it freedom to be rebellious? Or is it just an uncontrollable reaction? There is this concept called Reverse Psychology which suggests that sometimes to obtain a wanted result from somebody it's better to push that somebody in the opposite direction. But reverse psychology doesn't work always. Only when the person feels like his or her freedom is at stake. For example when a parent doesn't allow a teenager to engage in a particular activity. The parent might not be an inherently evil person. He might not desire to exercise any kind of power. He maybe just really wants to protect the teenager. But the teenager feels like his or her freedom is being betrayed and taken away. So they rebel. Is it freedom to be rebellious, though? Or is it just an uncontrollable reaction? Is there freedom at all? Or is it just a big paradox?
With all the progress that has been done with liberating the digital space there is a sense of self defeating, depression. A kind of defense mechanism of sorts. As if the people settled for something and gave up trying to do anything else. Which in itself causing lack of morale, lack of vision, and with it lack of actual movement.
In the recent "lie detector test" video of the legendary Fanning sisters, it was revealed that Elle Fanning was indeed jealous of her sister Dakota Fanning, when Tom Cruise gifted her a fancy mobile phone back in 2005. Why would Tom Cruise gift anything to a ( then ) 10 year old girl? Well Tom and Dakota were the two leads of the 2005 science fiction horror film by Steven Spielberg called War of the Worlds.
On GNU's website under "Malware", the page lists 19 types of malware. Each in one way or another hinders freedom of the user. Only one of those is "Surveillance". Yet the vast majority of Free Software advocacy focuses only and primarily just on Surveillance. It seems like we are losing our goal.
In my article about Corruption of the audience I observed the talent of Luca Guadagnino in this regard. I was mostly talking about his film Bones and All where he managed to humanize cannibalism. But I think with his 2025 picture After the Hunt he is finally attempting the hardest challenge yet.
People are free to speak not because it is useful, but because they are free to make sounds with their mouths. People are free to write not because it is useful, but because they are free to move their hands around, or use tools, some of which make lines on pieces of paper.
The first shot of the 2025 thriller directed by Mel Gibson called Flight Risk is an establishing shot of a location you might see on television, which already says a lot about the movie. But that's not all of it. The shot is also very much computer-generated. I wouldn't say it's Ai ( but anything's possible ). It looks more like a 2D composition using various elements. A modern matte-painting of sorts. It's hard to point out specifically what's wrong with it, but it looks obviously fake. And obviously put together on a computer. And then the rest of the film doesn't really shake off this fakeness.
How hard is it to make a spiritual successor to one for one the most iconic stories in cinema history? One thing is certain, once the image is formed of what that franchise is about, it is difficult to divert from it. Rodan tries the difficult task of both appeasing the general audience, who want a movie about giant monsters wrecking the city and not to retell the same exact story, while keeping it in line with viewer expectations. The truth is told in this tad bit ambitious review of RODAN.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods is another David F. Sandberg film that has an issue with it's opening. I just reviewed his film Until Dawn and if you can survive the not so good dialogue of the first couple of scenes, you are in for a very good movie. This film has a similar issue.
An exploitation film is a film that exploits some talked about fear or trend in culture in order to sell tickets to a movie that is probably not very good. Exploitation films are usually low budget, badly made B-movies, with a certain charm to them, if you like Tommy Wiseau's work. 2010's Robert Rodriguez film Machete is, somewhat of an intentional attempt at recreating the exploitation film phenomenon. Which exploits US politics of 2025, somehow. ( Rodriguez must have a time machine somewhere in his studio ).
It was nice to take a short break from the grind of trying to make CGI stuff all day long and watch a movie. And who could be a better film-maker to casually enjoy, but Luc Besson, who after all these reviews I did of his films, I start to feel like I understand, similarly to how a therapist might understand his client? His 2025 low budget film June and John is undeniably Luc Besson, even if the fact that the film was largely shot on a smartphone makes it look kind of weird and slightly amateurish.