DreamyDolphin

The Marseillaise scene is an excellent choice - a lot of the actors in that scene were actual refugees from the Nazis, so their emotions were genuine and powerful.

The bank heist opening of The Dark Knight is perfectly structured and paced.

Helpful tip: if, hypothetically, you come across a prolific poster who seems to only thrive on bitter negativity, you can go to their profile and click the “block” option next to the “follow” one near the top of the page and they’ll never turn up in your browsing again. Good for peace of mind.

My obscure nostalgia moment from the N64 was the game Blast Corps, where you had to destroy buildings with a range of vehicles to clear a path for a nuclear missile on a truck. Getting the side-swiper to skid just right was so satisfying.

And of course Banjo-Kazooie, as much for the immersive soundtrack as the colourful worlds.

I remember that one, Gato’s Song was such a strong theme for a literally one-scene character, their riffing on him and his original dialog was brilliant.

That’s a good question, and probably too early to know for sure given all the shifts and changes currently happening. I’d say the platform could go either way, and probably will oscillate between the centralised/decentralised extremes over time.

On the one hand, the idea of it is obviously focused on decentralising and letting everyone have their own instances; on the other hand, people tend to cluster, we like to see and be seen, there’s a thrill of pride in having people acknowledge and react to your words and a converse feeling of emptiness when you make a brilliant observation and no one is there to notice it. It’s that desire to be part of a larger group that will inevitably lead to some centralised nodes in the fediverse and a bunch of ghost-instances floating around with one or two dedicated/lost individuals posting into the void. Within those busy nodes is where the same cycle of push-pull between “everyone gets a say no matter how unhinged” vs. “I’m in charge here so I decide who gets to speak” will play out.

Eternal September? At this time of day, at this time of year, localised entirely within the fediverse?!

Absolutely, power has been agglomerating in larger and more consolidated bodies over the past few decades in the western world (notably right-wing parties fuelled by rage and the tech behemoths fuelled by cash), so it’s a question of whether there’ll be grass-roots energy pushing back to claim more power for people or whether it will end in a more forceful consolidation of power, either by oligarchy or would-be king (though the latter seems unlikely, as there’s no one both charismatic enough and driven enough to claim the crown, but who knows).

Fingers crossed that the end result brings us a better world.

There’s no solution in the same way that there’s no “solution” to winning rock-paper-scissors. The cycle is endless because the desire to be in control is a key part of human nature, whether that be an authoritarian “I want everyone to do what I say” or a more oligarchic “I accept that there’s others at my level, so we can cooperate so that everyone else does what we say”, and any attempt to change those systems requires an equivalent amount of force that can all too easily lead one into side-tangents of trying to keep said force focused.

As a side note, Machiavelli identified the cycle in politics in his “Discourse on Livy” - a powerful and strong-willed individual takes power (e.g. Caesar or Napoleon), his descendants wield power with less and less efficiency until in time the aristocracy seize the reins, and they get more and more corrupt and out of touch until finally the people rise up and enforce some level of democratic sway. Unfortunately, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, which is exhausting, and so over time things run down until some powerful and strong-willed individual takes power and it all starts again. It’s not purely linear - an aristocracy can be subsumed into a strong individual leadership (e.g. the popes in the 19th century grabbing power back from the cardinals) and a king can be overthrown by a democratic uprising (e.g. Louis XVI of France - though technically it did go through a brief aristocratic moment, as he re-convened the parliament to try and get around the nobility who wouldn’t fund his wars, indicating his powers had weakened). But in general we oscillate between these three modes of social organisation because of the difficulty in centralising power and in then keeping it from being corrupted (i.e. using it for selfish purposes) once it is centralised.

People will come, it’s just a matter of time and having the patience to cultivate organic communities rather than trying to simply will them into existence all at once a la GooglePlus (or whatever their attempt at a social network was called)

The 3rd party apps are closing at the end of this month, which means there’ll be somewhere around a week or so of people realising just how bad the official app is, plus decreased quality content as the actually-motivated people who post things continue their gradual migration away from reddit and driving redditors to seek other places to gather.

I’m on the fence about it. On the one hand, the memes (at least the ones I’ve seen) were heavily influenced by the article in The Atlantic a week ago about orcas attacking yachts, tapping into the justified vein of resentment against out-of-touch billionaires - a label which can apply to three of those on board the Titan. The fact that these people paid $250,000 each to go down and sit near a shipwreck that they couldn’t see (portholes would be a dangerous pressure-point) instead of using that money to actually benefit humanity in a time of widespread hardship is questionable at best - and what does the company they gave this money to spend those millions of dollars on? Obviously not quality-controlled safety tests.

On the other hand, there is the human dimension of the teenage son who was terrified about the trip and only went as a Father’s Day bonding experience with his rich dad, or the French naval expert who was genuinely knowledgeable about the Titanic and had recovered many artifacts from the wreck over his life, which represents a genuine loss of expertise.

So I smile when I see the pic of orcas banging pans and saying “billionaires, it’s safe to dive now!” But I don’t go out of my way to find those memes or exult over the deaths.

Paul Ekman demonstrated back in the 1960s that, when showing photos of expressions to previously-uncontacted tribes in Papua New Guinea, these people who had no access to other media recognised and could name the feelings described. Also, blind children who have not been told what “a smile” is, will display the facial expression automatically. This research finding was one of the nails in the coffin of the Behaviourist school of psychology (with rats pulling levers) that said everything was learned by rewards/punishments.

Ekman identified 6 “basic” emotions: happy, sad, disgusted, angry, scared, and surprised (which, except for the last one, were the characters in Pixar’s “Inside Out”). Later researchers have proposed a seventh emotion of “pride”, which has the posture of puffed-out chest and smug half-smile, which again is displayed by blind athletes on winning competitions.

They think it would be a good idea because they aren’t interested in actual debate so much as performance and sound-bites to drive advertising revenue - to quote Sartre’s point that increasingly applies in so many situations these days:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

True - it might be argued that he’s not responsible if he didn’t know exactly what the crystalline entity would do, but it’s pretty obvious that he had a good idea what would happen, so yeah, he’s the key causal factor.

Technically Lore didn’t do it himself, he summoned the crystalline entity which killed everyone.

I’d estimate that the next wave will be sooner, at the end of the month when the 3rd party apps shut down and a lot of people suddenly realise they have to use the official app and go “oh wait, is this what that protest thingy was all about?” It probably won’t be the critical-mass point (at a guess that would happen around the time old.reddit is closed), but it will likely make some big waves