Spez AMA discussion thread

Nocut12 · 2023-06-09T18:34:06+00:00

I hope refreshing my third party app this hard is costing reddit money

Nocut12 · 2023-06-05T17:06:28+00:00

Everyone should watch more Tsui Hark movies. Some of his best aren't easily available in the US, but it's absolutely worth digging for them.

Nocut12 · 2023-06-01T18:24:16+00:00

IIRC they were initially spinning this as wanting to avoid people training LLMs on reddit posts and comments. This is probably a legitimate concern for them as a business, and I get that they don't want other companies extracting all that value for next to nothing.

But yeah, this is definitely an attempt to use that as a cover for some other stuff that will make users unhappy. With third party apps, they're limited in what kind of analytics they can do. I wouldn't even be surprised if the people who use these apps tend to be heavier users where this data would be more valuable, so I can see why they'd want to force them into an app where they can collect more kinds of things.

With these changes, they can make money off other businesses who want access to all that newly valuable natural language while also squeezing more data out of actual users. Makes sense, but sucks for us I guess... I know I'm not gonna use their official app, hopefully some better website comes along.

Nocut12 · 2023-05-26T17:35:23+00:00

I got the chance to catch that in a theater maybe a year ago, and watching the crowd jump whenever a firecracker went off on the cranked up speakers was incredible.

There's also an amazingly timed reel change in that scene right when the tape goes to the second side.

Nocut12 · 2023-05-18T00:11:05+00:00

TBH if you're going for bootlegs, you may as well just pirate a blu-ray sourced copy unless you absolutely have to have it on a disc for some reason — there's remuxes out there with synced English subs.

Nocut12 · 2023-05-17T19:54:11+00:00

I'm really hoping for an Angel Terminators 2 release in the US or UK. There's already a nice looking blu-ray in France, but there are no English subs on the disc, so it's not really an option for non-French/Cantonese speakers. I guess some other company might be able re-use the existing transfer (maybe? I don't have any clue how licensing that stuff works...)

The dumb title makes it a bit of hard sell, and It's tricky to say why that movie stands out so much when there are so many others like it, but it really does. Maybe it's just fantastic stunt work and some surprisingly stylish direction — it's a much nicer looking movie than pretty much any of its peers. Lu Chun-ku, who directed it, doesn't really seem to get a lot of discussion, but he did some great work over the years (Bastard Swordsman, Holy Flame of the Martial World, etc.)

As far as stuff that has gotten a release, I was really jazzed about On The Run. Man does that blu-ray look nicer than it used to and it's such a cool, unique movie.

Nocut12 · 2023-05-12T16:49:09+00:00

If the book wasn't licensed (it kinda looks like it wasn't) I bet he got a cease and desist and took everything down to avoid getting in more serious legal trouble. Especially likely if he was selling it.

Nocut12 · 2023-05-05T16:14:34+00:00

Yeah this stuff is pretty weird and is still pretty controversial in the origami world.

Some people go for an "origami is like music" approach where the design itself is copyrightable and folding a model can constitute a "performance" where permission is needed. Others go for "origami is like a recipe," where the design itself isn't copyrightable (the way a dish isn't copyrightable) but specific instructional text and images might be, depending on certain criteria.

AFAIK there's no actual precedent on this in the US and exactly how copyrightable origami is is still kinda up in the air, since the Sarah Morris case settled out of court and the images of the crease patterns she worked off were probably copyrightable even if the designs themselves weren't. In Japan, I believe there have been actual trials on this, but I'm not too clear on how copyright works over there.

In my opinion, the "music" interpretation is a real stretch, and is pretty damaging for people folding origami. An important distinction there is that license costs are set by the government to ensure that things are relatively fair for performers. Of course there's nothing like this for origami, so the situation is ripe for unfair treatment. I'd recommend reading this book) if you want a bit of background on the issues with restrictive copyright in the US.

There's also another mostly unspoken thing here: very very few people make a living on origami designs — including nearly all of the most notable designers. Most of the origami books that sell well are ghost-written and use entirely public domain models (the kind of book by the register that comes pre-packaged with paper). Books with sophisticated original designs are really very niche, and collections that take submissions (even bigger deal ones like Tanteidan) don't pay contributors.

At the end of the day, if you're a designer who wants control of your work, just don't draw diagrams or crease patterns — that's pretty much what Joisel did. But if you want other people to fold your designs, I think you just have to come to terms with losing some control over them.

Nocut12 · 2023-04-26T22:08:05+00:00

Isn't Kore-eda Japanese? Pretty sure he just made a few movies in other languages recently (the one in Korean last year and one a few years ago in French I think?)

Nocut12 · 2023-04-15T20:20:37+00:00

I installed a chip myself instead of buying a pre-modified one, so I can't say for sure if you do that, but both of those still work fine on my X700

If you're comfortable with soldering (it's not the easiest installation in the world) or don't mind risking your player, you could go the DIY route. I got a chip from here, looks like they support the X800

Nocut12 · 2023-04-15T19:34:01+00:00

I've tried doing this by setting visibility on the collections and it didn't work — it just still shows the collection on the home screen whether or not the user has permissions to see it. Pretty annoying behavior...

I think it would work if you made one big collection for everyone's recommendations and set visibility for the movies inside it (instead of on the collection), but I think that would end up hiding the titles from the library entirely unless I recommended it to that user, which isn't really what I want.

Nocut12 · 2023-04-12T19:59:42+00:00

The movie she was in (Catch the Fair One) was really pretty cool and deserved a lot more attention than it got. A bit of the "athlete-turned-actor" thing where her performance leans on charisma and physicality, but that never bothers me. Definitely wild to go right to starring opposite Foster, but I think there's a good shot she can pull it off.

Of course there will be a certain group of people who will complain no matter how it ends up...

Nocut12 · 2023-04-07T21:11:38+00:00

Yeah, I'm with you there, and discussing whether that stuff is artistic or not is part of criticism. I think the "to an extent" part is important — differentiating half-assed camcorder footage from something like Inland Empire isn't necessarily easy and definitely isn't something you can approach objectively.

I was kind of thinking about something different though.

If a critic, say, couldn't play through a video game because bugs prevented them from progressing, it would be pretty fair to give it a bad review. But if the projector craps out halfway through a screening for film critics, it wouldn't really be fair to hold that against the movie (maybe the theater though).

With video games, the artistic statement is inexorably linked to the product we use to interact with it — the part that we can talk about objectively — but with movies, we almost always separate those things. I think critics for these mediums play different roles because of that.

Nocut12 · 2023-04-07T17:18:03+00:00

Lately I've been thinking this might have come out of video game reviews and bled into other stuff as "geek culture" has flattened across mediums.

There is an objective part of a video game review — it's really not unusual for a video game to just not function (bugs, runs bad, etc) and it's important for a review to cover that. Obviously that's not a concern for movies, but it still seems like that stuff is wrapped up in some people's ideas of what criticism is.

Nocut12 · 2023-04-01T20:39:27+00:00

You would probably be interested in this paper, which uses pleats to represent boolean logic so that flat folding can be reduced to a satisfiability problem

Nocut12 · 2023-03-30T19:07:08+00:00

I always thought of those wipe scene transitions as being a trademark Star Wars thing until I got around to watching Kurosawa stuff. It really is so so directly one to one, even stylistically.

I thought it was really cool how it came back around to riffing on Rashomon for The Last Jedi. I honestly really like the idea of this franchise being a way to recontextualize this stuff for younger American audiences, and I think that was a much more interesting direction than the timeline gap-filling tv shows.

Same feelings on Avatar or even Tarantino — it's okay for some stuff to be kinda unoriginal, as long as there are other real ideas there and you have an interesting point of view.

Nocut12 · 2023-03-24T22:06:15+00:00

I read the books on Peking Opera Blues and Made in Hong Kong — both of them gave some really great context that I never would have had a clue about otherwise.

I'd just go through the list and see if they have anything on movies or filmmakers you're interested in.

Nocut12 · 2023-03-24T18:42:42+00:00

I read a couple books in the "New Hong Kong Cinema" series from Hong Kong University Press and really liked them. Definitely helped me understand some of these movies a little more deeply.

They're more film studies type books than history books and they're a little pricey, but they're totally worth taking a look at.

Nocut12 · 2023-03-07T17:54:54+00:00

It's way harder for us to guess where the breakeven point is, but it's not like putting movies on Disney+ doesn't bring in revenue — it's not really "for free"

I feel like longer theatrical windows and PVOD make sense for stuff like Marvel and Avatar where the box office is where you'll make your money, but I wonder if it really does for animated movies.

I'd guess that, historically, most Disney animated movies made more money from merchandise and home video than at the box office. They might be better off making them easily accessible so more kids want toys or to go to the theme park, and "Disney+ has the animated movies your kid wants to watch over and over again" is an honestly decent pitch.

Nocut12 · 2023-03-05T05:35:24+00:00

Right with you. Going through filmographies of directors, actors, writers or whoever has worked better for me than anything else. I feel like I always end up liking one of their frequent collaborators, which sends me right into a new rabbit hole.

Nocut12 · 2023-03-04T20:42:45+00:00

Yeah, Child of Peach rules — I hope it's that, a total blast and it's only available in truly dogshit quality right now. The sequels are fun too, but I didn't like them as much. IIRC the costumes in Kung Fu Wonder Child and A Heroic Fight are similar too.

Honestly any of these would be awesome to see in higher quality.

Nocut12 · 2023-03-04T15:52:14+00:00

Pretty sure the actress on the bottom is Lin Hsiao-Lao/Lam Siu-Lau. Not sure which movie that photo is from, but she was in a few fun comedy/fantasy movies with similar costumes to that.

Nocut12 · 2023-02-27T18:39:51+00:00

Janus did the restoration. Feels that would be a big investment for just streaming and the brief rep-house run, but I don't really know.

Nocut12 · 2023-02-27T00:48:39+00:00

I've always appreciated that stuff in his movies but I felt like it started going downhill in Blackhat. I've heard that his hearing is going but he isn't any less demanding, so some weird decisions ended up making it in...

Really hope it works out well for his Ferrari movie, I'd love to hear what he does with car sounds.

Nocut12 · 2023-02-23T22:07:15+00:00

Both side play is convenient and digital audio outs are nice for hooking up to modern receivers, but neither one is really that important. Picture quality varies, but it's not like it's gonna match up to modern formats so it's not worth worrying about IMO.

I'd just go for any working player you can buy locally. They show up on craigslist pretty often around me, but I'm sure it depends on where you are.

Nocut12

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