Taylor Swift fans are annoying. Maga inbreeds are obnoxious. If I had to choose though it would be the Swifties because at least they're not shitting where they eat.
No Swiftie has ever endangered my basic rights or the functioning of my country, or the survival of other democracies abroad. I'll take Swifties any day of the week.
Also, I've never actually heard Taylor Swift's music.
It's definitely some of the better music on the radio. If you're forced to listen to the radio, like at work, there's far more annoying songs than hers.
And I mean, not for nothing, but Swifties are just doing what fans are supposed to do. Spending shitloads of money on concert tickets, buying merch, and generally being moderately obsessive about the famous person that has their attention, for however long they're part of a fan community.
You know what they remind me of, actually? Obsessive metalheads, who love a specific metal band. Most of them are not fans because they're attracted to the people in the band. They actually listen to the music, as the music that they listen to. And then they start identifying with the whole thing, as a subculture.
Sure, metalheads have been vilified in their time. Ironically, old people called them devil-worshippers, just like some old people are literally calling Taylor Swift a devil-worshipper and/or illuminati blood-drinker (seriously).
But we all know that's insane nonsense, on both counts. For my two cents, being a fan of something on the level of "I really love this music and this musical artist" is a step above the groupie style fans, who just want to fuck their heartthrob singer/guitarist of choice. I'm not actually judging anyone for that behavior either, but I think that's just less interesting and more annoying to see.
MAGA motherfuckers, on the other hand...they're a fucking cult. They want to see their fucking leader take over the country and/or world, then proceed to smite and torture their (largely imaginary) enemies. That ain't fandom. Or, if it is fandom, it's the kind that's taken SO FAR OUT OF PROPORTION that it takes on a quality of horror all its own, and doesn't bear comparing to any normal variety of fandom.
I unironically love it. The fact that it has a big tribute to the Fleischer Superman cartoon The Mechanical Monsters helps. I had it on VHS when I was a kid.
"Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security."
Also the US was trying to get Egypt aligned with them for decades. They kinda gave up on that after a while. Then Israel offers the US Egyptian alignment on a silver platter at Camp David.
Everyone talks a lot about the Six Days war because it's one of the most effective military campaigns of all time. But the Yom Kippur war was the war that fundamentally changed Middle East diplomacy. And it changed in favour of the US.
But that's too boring, so people prefer antisemitic conspiracy theories straight out of Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
deer protect their young from predators, the young dear are in the center of the circle where the predator can't get to
a group of army ants, separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. This circle is commonly known as a "death spiral" because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion
I love the original, and I would 100% watch this. This would be the kind of show that is self aware enough to know not to take itself seriously and it would be fantastic because of it.
My favorite part in PeeWee's Playhouse is when Cowboy Curtis says "you think that's air you're breathing?" And then him and Peewee have a kung fu fight.
I watched all but the last episode before I just couldn't do it anymore. The show had its moments, but it just never quite came together. The acting for the main crew was pretty decent, Jet was phenomenally done. The changes they made for Vicious and Julia are pretty sacrilegious and hard to watch.
Same, except I did watch the last episode. Agreed on Jet (perfection), and Julia/Vicious (what the everloving fuck). Spike and Faye were fine. Even with the missteps, I was still willing to see where they were taking it, if given time for a few course corrections. But they hit that cancel button pretty much immediately.
I think it was just a poor choice for a live action adaptation in the end. It's a character driven show that thrives on nuance and atmosphere and a lot of that just doesn't translate. I would have been willing to see what they grew into, but I lost a lot of faith in the writing with how badly vicious and Julia were butchered. It was just so bad watching them turn Vicious into a bumbling, incompetent clown and Julia an abused housewife. Maybe if Watanabe was involved in the same way that Oda was for the One Piece adaptation it may have had a chance.
I think it could have worked if the people involved showed actual care for the show. Unfortunately, it seems most adaptations these days are written and directed by people that not only don't care about the original, but actually harbor resentment toward the original and want the adaptation to fail.
Time and again we see adaptation after adaptation seriously deviate from the original and are met with critical and financial ruin. It really makes you wonder why they insist on repeating the same choices that keep leading to failure.
I agree that I don't think the writing team were truly fans of the show or at the very least were receiving pressure and editing from those that were not. That was my overall impression as well.
I think it's important to keep in mind though that typically an adaptation isn't meant for people that are already a fan of the show. They are usually created with the intent of attracting new fans thatay have been put off by the previous medium.
I'd argue that if the show was written with the same level of love for the show that fans of the original have, then it will be successful both in keeping the original fans, and attracting the new people as well.
It is understandable that some changes are necessary when moving from anime to live action, everyone understands this. Anime lacks the detail of live action and therefore is exaggerated in order to convey feelings or thoughts of characters, where live action may only need a subtle gesture or body language to convey the same thing. But that doesn't mean characters or major plot elements need to be altered in any way.
A video game example of this is Elden Ring. FROMSOFTWARE did not make a game to appeal to the mass market. They made a game that fans of their previous works would love, that due to its difficult nature should have been opposite of what the mass market wants. And yet the game was successful at captivating both audiences and sold a huge amount of copies having passed 20 million copies as of February 2023. Compare this with anything that gets altered to "appeal to a wider audience." That phrase is literally a death sentence. Neither fans of the original or new people end up liking it. Yet people keep choosing that path, and keep wondering why everyone says their work is garbage.
Dude, it was shit. It was shit because it was another IP that some writers got ahold of who had contempt or at least no understanding of the source material.
I love the actors they chose for Spike, Jet, and Fey. But the writing and direction was awful.
This series reminded me of The Witcher, in the worst ways, and I'm a huge fanboy of both IPs
Frankly this catch phrase never made any sense to me, from a logical point of view.
It assumes that:
If buying = owning
then pirating* = stealing,
because you own it without buying.
And if buying =/= owning
then pirating =/= stealing,
because you can't own it otherwise.
But the justification in the second statement is completely irrelevant to the first statement. You still own it without buying. It's still stealing.
UNLESS - we examine what "stealing" is. This is where the arguments about being in a digital space vs. a physical space comes in. Where the question is raised: Is making an exact copy really "stealing"? Or, consider what is being "stolen"? The original item? The idea? We need to think about this more.
But it's here the argument should be made and here the debate should be. That's where "pirates" have a chance of winning. Let's get rid of this flawed, easily repeatable, but fundamentally incorrect catch phrase and come up with a better one already. One that makes sense.
*(Nevermind that most of you technically aren't even pirating, you're just downloading the fruits of someone else that pirated.)
Piracy technically isn't stealing, it's intellectual property reproduction license violation. Clever bastards those lawyers. You basically don't purchase the music, you purchase the right to reproduce it for non-commercial purposes.
Exactly. If I stole an item that belongs to you, I'm denying you the possession of that item, and you'll either have to acquire another one, steal it back, or just not have it at all. When someone commits an act of digital piracy, they aren't denying anyone the possession of it, therefore it isn't the same as stealing.
Calling it theft is, in my opinion, emotionally manipulative and prevents any serious discussion on the ethics of piracy.
Even the word piracy is a bit suspicious to me; original pirates robbed ships in international waters and were considered enemies of mankind, so calling a much lesser act piracy sounds very manipulative... I wonder where the word piracy was first used to describe copyright violations, can't seem to find anything about it.
Piracy was used as far back as the 1700s to refer to illegal copies of books or unauthorized publishing outside of publishing monopolies. In general, I get the feel of breaking monopolies, turning to less savory methods to get what is owed, and liberating goods from the hands of wealthy hoarders.
For a while, the U.S. publishing industry was based on pirating British books, many of which were previously pirated from France. The only significant difference between the usages is the freeing of information vs keeping goods for oneself.
The theft is monetary and the creator and distributor of what's being pirated are the victims, it's not theft in the sense that you're taking something from someone and they don't have access to it anymore, they can still sell copies, by not paying for it what you're stealing is the money that should have been transferred to them.
What I'm saying is that this isn't theft, I'm not saying there is no harm in piracy, but there is a clear difference. When you steal something from a store, they would need to acquire the merchandise again to restock, as well as being denied the money that item would have otherwise be sold for.
I'm not saying piracy is victimless, or that it is ethical, but it's clearly a different level of crime, so it should not be called theft.
By this logic wage theft isn't theft since the employee never had the money in their possession.
Let's exaggerate things. An indie dev sells a game for 5$ and when all things are split up they have 2$ going to them. They sell one copy but with the tracker they put into the game, they can tell that there's a million person that have played it. Their income for the work they put in is 2$, a million -1 people got to enjoy what they created through piracy. So you're telling me, no one has stolen anything from that creator?
Wage theft is different from piracy. When you work for an employer, you are giving them hours of labour in exchange for the compensation, I have a limited amount of labour hours to use in my lifetime, whereas copying a work can be done an infinite amount of times without requiring an additional labour time to recreate it.
I'm not saying that piracy is ethical, there are many cases where it is unethical, but it is not theft.
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