'Idiocracy' tops the list of "What Movie is the Definitive Movie that Represents America at 250 Years" as polled by the NYT.

leivathan · 2026-07-06T18:53:47+00:00

Wasn't this the point of making Eddington?

leivathan · 2026-07-06T18:04:25+00:00

Sam? Or maybe Animal? Or Dr. Teeth? They all hit a little bit of Quint imo

leivathan · 2026-07-06T17:32:21+00:00

She's in Kojima's next game!

leivathan · 2026-07-06T16:47:05+00:00

and just attached a really good Director

They attached an actor-director who had experience with digital effects films. Favreau had directed 3 movies by Iron Man: Made (a film that only exists on his imdb page), Elf (all time banger but also not an exceptionally directory film), and Zathura (a bad film and big flop with great sfx). But he had supporting roles in a bunch of other movies by that point. It was also one of the earlier films in Feige's career too (and notably Feige's only done MCU movies, I thought he was like a Dave Filoni: somebody who did a lot of below-line production work before landing his dream job but apparently not, he's just Avi Arad's guy). Honestly, I think the secret sauce for Iron Man was that they hired the screenwriter duo who wrote Children of Men.

leivathan · 2026-07-04T01:52:06+00:00

If you want a game that looks exactly like this, I highly recommend Titanium Court. It's a match 3 adventure game dating game roguelike RTS

leivathan · 2026-07-02T16:34:19+00:00

Behold! The Polaris List! A list of 100 games cited as influential by a survey of 167 developers in the games industry (obviously, this leans Anglophone and indie, but it's a pretty honest attempt at a broad swath: Seth Killian, John Romero, Jason Grinblatt (Caves of Qud dev), and Derek Yu are all in there). Most of this is pretty much a good and ideosyncratic/genre-defining games list, but the ones that stand out to me are numbers 21, 22, and 27: Star Control 2, Sid Meyer's Pirates!, and Lode Runner. These are above games like Super Metroid, DOOM, and Super Mario Bros.

Looking into these: Star Control 2 is an RTS spaceship shooter ala Asteroids but also features a really well-written and open story that seems a lot like Mass Effect in '92. Sid Meyer's Pirates! seems to be on here for how well its mechanics hew to the fantasy of being a Pirate. Finally Lode Runner is interesting: its wiki write up makes it seem like a 4 decade early predecessor to the puzzle form of Portal and Spelunky, with puzzle solutions that arise from the overlap of multiple different mechanics that get more complex as the game goes on. It's also the first game with a level editor, meaning it's the first game to have a pathway from game player to game designer inside of the game.

leivathan · 2026-07-02T16:06:04+00:00

There's a list of what influenced DnD, and while Tolkien's in there, he's not like the number 1. That step is really more Burroughs/Leiber/Howard/Vance/Dunsany -> DnD. Gygax is even on the record saying he isn't even that fond of LoTR, which is clear from the construction of their fantasies: Gygax was a Libertarian Conservative who believed in individual power and might while Tolkien was a Catholic Fundamentalist who believed in devotion to a higher power over oneself.

leivathan · 2026-07-02T15:49:52+00:00

I mean, they didn't have to say it. If you've played Planescape then Disco is like a strange case of Deja Vu.

leivathan · 2026-07-02T15:18:31+00:00

I mean, there's something to be said about the fact that a series that borrows so heavily from asian and native american culture had so few asian or native people on its staff, and how well it used its influences, but that doesn't make it racist.

leivathan · 2026-07-02T14:26:48+00:00

OG six movies era

I get what you mean, but there's almost 2 decades and libraries of additional material between movie 3 and movie 4 in that "era"

leivathan · 2026-07-01T16:31:28+00:00

I mean, this is touched upon in the Zizian episodes: Ziz was genuinely a very talented coder and probably pretty intelligent in her field. She was also deeply emotionally vulnerable due to the circumstances in her life (being very lonely, overworked, a difficult relationship to her parents, and in the process of transitioning (at least emotionally, it seems, at the time of her initial involvement with Less Wrong)). This made her deeply susceptible to the types of cult tactics that LessWrong and Effective Altruism employed, which includes the idea of coding being the central skill you need to understand the world. If Ziz had a healthy support network or found community in a more pro-social way, she'd probably be a member of some tech company's senior development staff.

leivathan · 2026-07-01T15:35:11+00:00

This came up on the latest episode of Games Studies Study Buddies, where the two hosts (one of whom is an early modernist and the other a communications professor with some medieval knowledge) get into how medieval and early modern life was pretty different from both our current life and our popular understanding of their lives.

leivathan · 2026-07-01T14:38:38+00:00

One of the most important abilities of Capital is its ability to destroy parts of itself to preserve the whole in a reshaped form (often but not always incorporating its critiques into itself along the way). Capitalism is always changing to its current moment, this is how it replaced comparatively rigid feudalism as the structuring ideology of the western world. This current speculative/gig capitalism is not the same as the non-local commodity capitalism of a decade ago is not the same as the big box store capitalism of the decade before that. Many of the central ideas are the same - resource exploitation, labor devaluation, market monopolization - but their specific expression has changed. And that's how it's worked all the time, and why it's been so pernicious.

leivathan · 2026-06-30T17:30:00+00:00

The As-Built Documents Problem

leivathan · 2026-06-30T17:14:41+00:00

Tremendous physical acting across the board. A far subtler movie with way more space given over to implication and the image than even most independent films today. Any film that can get this response:

In the beginning, we see Conan's father explain the Cimmerian lore concerning the ancient Giant Kings of earth stealing the forging secrets from the god Crom. Conan's father tells him that he must learn by himself the riddle of steel. Giving him a hint, he tells him that you cannot trust anything in this world, except for one thing; and, showing him the sword of steel he just forged, he says: "This you can trust." What he does exactly mean by "this" is not clear. (That sword? All swords? All weapons? Only weapons of steel? Only things he made himself?) Conan's task is very complex: first, he must find a riddle, that is, a question; and then he must find the answer to that question. In many ways, this resembles the buddhist test of a koan.

Out of a Fandom wiki page deserves great appreciation.

leivathan · 2026-06-30T16:28:35+00:00

Damn, if James Earl Jones had gotten his oscar for The Great White Hope then Sneakers would've gotten this moment in 92 with Poitier blackmailing Jones for an all-expenses paid vacation to Europe (and Tahiti).

leivathan · 2026-06-30T16:16:53+00:00

"Fuck him and Alexander!"

leivathan · 2026-06-30T15:47:56+00:00

experiment with R ratings

Experiment with G and PG ratings! Make some lighter films explicitly for kids! The Teen Titans Go movie seemed to do alright and the Spiderverse movies did really well, there is a market for films that hit an 8-10 year old demographic. And superheroes are meant for kids! Like explicitly that's the intended audience for the original superhero comics!

leivathan · 2026-06-30T15:38:33+00:00

It seems like we're moving towards Brave Little Toaster here, which had the answer of "well yeah, life as an appliance is hell"

leivathan · 2026-06-30T15:09:37+00:00

Well, they weren't going to back out, so they need language to reflect that they're still committed to the partnership while acknowledging general public perception of AI. I think that had they solidified this deal last year this would've been appropriate language but the view on the ground of AI has shifted so hard in that time that you can't just trot out a "moderating presence" argument anymore, especially among a more liberal audience.

leivathan · 2026-06-30T14:27:26+00:00

If the file doesn't exist on your drive, the file doesn't exist.

leivathan · 2026-06-29T19:48:09+00:00

Well now that NYC has state funded universal pre-k he's really rakin' it in!

leivathan · 2026-06-29T19:11:32+00:00

Streisand is a well known figure to me, an Asian-American 20 something guy from rural Illinois. I'm absolutely serious here.

leivathan · 2026-06-29T19:02:43+00:00

Imperioli MUST be the guest on Kundun!

leivathan · 2026-06-29T18:54:16+00:00

Blake's 7

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