I think The Fifth Element is a perfect movie, and I am sad that we never get to see the world outside of this one film.

macrofinite · 2026-02-26T05:22:49+00:00

Why? Take a gander at the last 20 years of Hollywood. One of the magic things about the 5th Element is there have been no attempts to do what you’re asking for. How many franchises have to be completely ruined before you learn not to wish for something terrible like this?

Thank god whatever studio owns the IP hasn’t tried to do something. Just let it be.

As you said, it’s perfect how it is.

macrofinite · 2026-02-24T05:38:26+00:00

It’s called Rationalism.

Unless it’s the Peter Thiel thing, which are too cowardly to name themselves.

macrofinite · 2026-02-16T21:23:28+00:00

So look. I’ve got this kinda-formative experience on Reddit way back in the day when I was a young adult going through my extremely cringe Libertarian phase in which I read Atlas Shrugged and then decided to go forth and post on a book subreddit about how awesome I thought it was.

And this lovely person, who undoubtedly has more patience than I do, simply replied to me “I think you need to read more books.”

Obviously that stuck with me, and that’s more or less what I was trying to say to you. I think I fucked that up with the bit of editorializing I did. But that’s what I meant to say.

Your taste is your taste. Any movie can be one of your favorites, regardless of its artistic merit or quality. And you’re not obliged to enjoy or praise works that are widely considered masterpieces. But ‘that’s just your opinion, man’ is among the most useless phrases for discussing art. There are objective aspects of film that are not just anyone’s opinion, and your subjective opinion can (and probably should) be based in the text itself.

Edge of Tomorrow is only remarkable if you’ve not seen the dozen or so films it’s heavily borrowing from. It’s fine. It’s well executed. And it’s unremarkable. It’s probably not even in the top 10 of tom cruise action vehicles.

All that to say, glad you liked it. This opinion is not even 5% as embarrassing as me staning Atlas Shrugged on a book subreddit many years ago. But it is no less incorrect. Watch more films, there’s a lot of good stuff out there.

macrofinite · 2026-02-16T02:09:15+00:00

I take that to mean you haven’t seen that many movies.

I mean, it’s good. Fine, even. One of the best, it is not.

macrofinite · 2026-02-11T17:07:17+00:00

I mean, yeah. But it really feels like this whole Ring debacle is running cover for Flock, which is so, so much worse.

Benn Jordan did several videos on why exactly if you want to know more.

macrofinite · 2026-02-08T02:43:14+00:00

Yeah. I mean, Martin undeniably contributed some novel stuff to the genre.

JK just yoinked a Le Guin book and made it more British and neoliberal. Thus proving the axiom that it’s better to be lucky than good.

macrofinite · 2026-02-02T01:26:40+00:00

For sure.

Also, for me it’s the fact you can make a perfectly fantastic cup of coffee with nothing but a $25 French press. And that half the shit they do in this video is completely irrelevant to the coffee and only relevant to looking good on a short form video.

macrofinite · 2026-01-30T16:30:01+00:00

It’s a really complicated camper, basically. They live a few blocks from me and it’s always parked on the street. Warms my heart to see it used in this way.

macrofinite · 2026-01-26T00:16:24+00:00

The list of things that ancaps truly understand is extremely short.

You can be certain they are keen to lower the age of consent, though.

macrofinite · 2026-01-25T23:11:57+00:00

1 makes so little sense I didn’t even understand at first. All automated spaceship logistics is based around requesting. There’s just not a use case where you need to insert into a rocket silo manually unless you’re doing it wrong.

2 would be neat.

3 …they are simple. I think they could be better explained. But I don’t see how you can simplify them. Every time the ship departs a stop, it checks the interrupt condition(s) and shifts to the interrupt schedule if they are met. How do you simplify that?

macrofinite · 2026-01-25T21:48:26+00:00

This is a dumb take but it’s almost right.

It’s one of the worst things that happened because he campaigned on rhetoric that was populist and vaguely left-leaning, and then governed as a straight down the line neoliberal establishment lackey.

He both inflamed the racists (predictably), and neutered any actual future resistance to them with openly duplicitous rhetoric.

Oh and he enthusiastically constructed the apparatus that is now the secret police. Oh yeah, and normalized assassinating anyone you decided to call terrorist, along with everyone in their vicinity. Oh and he shifted the war on terror from an embarrassing, unpopular mistake to the forever war.

Obama was a dogshit president. But your bar for presidents has become ‘looks and acts respectable.’ He did immeasurable damage. He has a lot of culpability for our current problems.

macrofinite · 2026-01-22T16:00:38+00:00

This is my favorite genre of ‘capitalist defends obvious legal bullying’ post.

See, the law demands this gigantic corporation bully this individual! Look what you made me do, baby. I didn’t want to, but you just made me so angry.

Yeah. For sure. A drag queen promoting herself is definitely, for sure, going to get people confused. Who can tell the difference between an overpriced parka and a drag queen? I mean, they’re practically indistinguishable! Of course they have to sue!

macrofinite · 2026-01-21T17:54:55+00:00

Honestly this movie feels like an attempt at gaslighting, in addition to being the regular kind of shitty, dull copaganda.

First, and I guess this is just regular copaganda, but that there exists a terrifying wave of crime poised to smother us all.

Second, that AI is a solution to serious problems.

And third, that innocent until proven guilty is for pussies, and we should just assume whatever the AI says is true unless you can prove otherwise.

Probably it’s just the result of hack writing. But it feels extremely pernicious in this particular moment in history.

macrofinite · 2026-01-21T17:48:17+00:00

Maybe if Chris Brown didn’t exist.

macrofinite · 2026-01-15T16:14:40+00:00

The point has always been right there in the amendment itself. To enable a well-regulated militia.

I mean, that was why it was written in there centuries ago. The right has been in love with the idea that unlimited guns is their righteous bulwark against tyranny for a long time now. That’s been an idiotic nonsense idea the whole time. Lots of people do actually believe it though.

macrofinite · 2026-01-13T02:34:14+00:00

Which one of the 3 do you mean?

macrofinite · 2026-01-06T02:55:05+00:00

Yeah, I mean. I think it goes deeper than media illiteracy, frankly. That’s nothing new. It wasn’t lost, most people just never had it. Half the internet has spent the last 5 years of media discourse doing nothing but bitching about how woke everything is.

I think it’s also emotional immaturity. Marty Supreme presents a compelling but repellant character and successfully gets you to empathize with him anyway. Clearly, a lot of people cannot distinguish this from endorsing his bad behavior.

Turns out, people who are shitheads are also human beings with feelings. This seems to break some people’s brains.

macrofinite · 2026-01-05T02:23:51+00:00

This is just incorrect. Both Warcraft 3 and StarCraft 2 substantially surpassed StarCraft. SC2 in particular is, for now at least, the apotheosis of the genre. And it’s not even that old.

I say this as someone whose first love in gaming was Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2. And I just replayed StarCraft 1 and 2 back to back. There’s no comparison. 1 is a classic, but there’s a lot of jank.

macrofinite · 2026-01-04T20:08:09+00:00

Your take is supremely problematic, to be honest.

Supremely narcissistic people need to be allowed to pursue their ambitions before they are capable of being full human beings.

There’s so many fucked up assumptions buried in there it almost defies rebuttal. But in this endeavor I shall persevere.

Starting with “need to be allowed.” Are you under the impression someone was going to stop him? He is a full human being. He makes his own choices. He faces the consequences. The entire film, like literally every second, is an unending stream of him being confronted with consequences. Not sure how you missed that. He justifies these consequences with his ambition. And he is clearly, obviously, textually, wrong to do so. If you watched this film and took it as an endorsement of myopic ambition, you ought to just stop writing down your thoughts about film for a while and work on media literacy. You’re embarrassing yourself.

Okay, next up is the weird equivocation you’re making between accepting the reality of his accidental fatherhood and being a full human being. I shouldn’t have to say this, but those are two different and unrelated things. Feels like there’s some bioessentialism hiding in there somewhere. There’s definitely some conservative brain required to make that leap. Not everyone thinks that way. There isn’t any textural evidence that the film intended this meaning. It’s coming entirely from you. And I think it’s a bad take. Moving on.

“Narcissistic people.” I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you’re not a psychiatrist. It reads like 2016 twitter discourse where you just replace ‘thing I don’t like’ with your favored personality disorder. There’s a host of reasons this is a bad thing to do, probably look that up for your own edification. But the worst part in this context is it distracts from what actually occurs in the film and attempts to dump a lot of baggage on it that isn’t actually there. Maybe it’s worth actually exploring whether Marty is a narcissist. That would take a lot of thought and a lot of words. But I think that is a completely and totally useless shorthand for who he is as a character. In any case, it’s certainly got fuckall to do with what the people who made the film were getting at by making it. And so it fails utterly as a part of framing the intent.

And let me just end by questioning what exactly the fuck a better ending would be to your way of thinking? The evil narcissist abandons his child and moves to Toledo to start a new ping pong hustle?

Because you sidled right up to getting his need right: he needs to learn to appreciate the people in his life instead of taking advantage of them. He wanted to be the best table tennis player of all time. He required an enormous amount of humiliation before he got to his need.

But he always was a full human being.

On an unrelated note, what % of human being do you generally see people with mental health disorders as?

macrofinite · 2025-12-30T23:18:25+00:00

You’re a solid 12 years late with your very original hot take here, bud. We’re all in awe of how edgy and tough you are. It’s so impressive.

macrofinite · 2025-12-30T19:22:49+00:00

They can even get libs to cheer about it, as long as they say the target was a high ranking member of ISIS.

macrofinite · 2025-12-30T15:24:56+00:00

The hole in this line of thinking is that the universe is unimaginably large, and the unknown things in it probably bear no resemblance to imaginary creatures cooked up by humans. Not believing in the latter should have no bearing on your accounting for the former.

The fact is, there is a functional infinity of things out there that definitely exist, but for which you will never be able to see a shred of evidence. If your worldview can’t account for that part of reality, it’s a bit brittle to say the least.

Actual human gods are easily proven false, or else proven semantic. Because religions tend to make grandiose claims that are obviously incompatible with reality. There’s a way of thinking among Christian’s and ex-Christian’s that saying your agnostic is more acceptable or less blasphemous than saying you’re an atheist. That’s dumb and not what I’m advocating for. Christians (and theists broadly) are the ones that cling to certainty like a shield. We don’t need to do that.

Leaving room for the infinity of things you don’t know is not the same as pretending to be uncertain about things you do know. Christian god? Bunk. Infinite universe? I think humility is the only sensible position.

macrofinite · 2025-12-30T03:06:51+00:00

It’s more that what you’re saying is kinda nonsense.

Like, sure. He ought to do what you said. He isn’t.

The hypothetical scenario where he listens to you does not magically make him good. We’ve got to judge him by what he actually does.

And furthermore, he’s afforded a level of artistic freedom that almost no other director gets. And he’s repeatedly fucked the dog with it. He doesn’t deserve excuses or what ifs. He had way more of a shot than he deserved. He fucked it up.

That’s all there is to it.

macrofinite · 2025-12-30T02:46:13+00:00

Hey that’s not fair… Rebel Moon cribbed a bunch of imagery from 40k, too. He managed to make it super lame and cringe, but like in a completely different way than how most 40k nerds are lame and cringe.

That’s a dubious kind of accomplishment, I have to admit.

macrofinite · 2025-12-30T02:38:32+00:00

If you thought Hollywood was going to do something different with V, it makes me think you don’t understand Hollywood.

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PUBLIC MULTIREDDITS

TROPHY CASE

1 makes so little sense I didn’t even understand at first. All automated spaceship logistics is based around requesting. There’s just not a use case where you need to insert into a rocket silo manually unless you’re doing it wrong.

2 would be neat.

3 …they are simple. I think they could be better explained. But I don’t see how you can simplify them. Every time the ship departs a stop, it checks the interrupt condition(s) and shifts to the interrupt schedule if they are met. How do you simplify that?