I think you've managed to hit the nail on the head.
Rather than accept the rather human nature of people writing in their own style and making mistakes, we'd prefer to filter it through a dispassionate void first.
It's rather embarrassing how quickly we're willing to toss away the human elements of writing.
Agreed. LLM writing style is disgustingly bland and "offensively inoffensive" like Corporate Memphis. Would rather have actual human style, mistakes and all.
I usually excuse typos, but when the post is literally about:
> Software used to also be substantially better written
I think he ends up tanking his own argument before he even started. Heck, there's a typo in the headline (which I guess is good bait, since I now clicked on and responded in this discussion...)
It's been well know that spelling and grammatical errors are a good steganography channel, however I don't think this is what going on in The Fudged Article here.
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
While the syphilis theory is plausible, I believe the congenital brain disease inherited from his father is the more widely accepted theory nowadays.
As for the horse story, apparently it comes from a tabloid paper that was never exactly known for their reputability. The "gossipy" undertones become very clear when you read the article for yourself.
My GF plays a ton of backgammon online. This isn't related to the post. Just sharing a project / software that is related in concept.
heroes.backgammonstudio.com
Whoever runs this project does a fantastic job. It feels like they really care about the game. There's some friction to signing up and rules that force you to finish games that results in a stable player base.
The author doesn't address that blockbuster movies have always found a "trendy look" and run with it. Is what she claims Netflix is doing any different than any other popular cycle in filmmaking?
"It's actually, specifically, about how movies these days look. That is, more flat, more fake, over-saturated, or else over-filtered, like an Instagram photo in 2012, but rendered in commercial-like high-def."
The "2012 Instagram filter" was pulled from the same playbook as the popular movies of the 2000-2010 era. However, the author isn't arguing that this trend has been taken too far; just stating that everything looks bland and the same. Of course, it does. Only some movies are original and try something new because audiences like familiar things. Successful visual storytelling methods are recycled just the same as scripts.
When comparing "When Harry Met Sally" and "Moonshot" the author says,
"... The latter is more polished and "perfect," but to what effect? It looks strange, surreal, both dim and bright at the same time. Everything is inexplicably blue or yellow, and glows like it's been FaceTuned. Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, meanwhile, are sitting in a downtown New York deli that actually exists. The image is a little grainy, the lighting falling somewhere in the normal daytime range, and they look like regular human beings. ..."
One is a science fiction film the other is set in a New York deli. So they both don't want to evoke the same feeling in the setting to the audience.
I had to stop reading when the author said,
"At the risk of using an anonymous Redditor as an expert, lol, I found a comment under a thread called "Why do movies look so weird now?" that captures a lot of these same complaints:"
Then she goes on quote the Reddit comment. LOL right? The Redditor's comment was a single paragraph and summed up the author's entire point of view. She just went on to write a longer post that failed to say anything additional. Read the Reddit comment she quoted and skip the article.
> The author doesn't address that blockbuster movies have always found a "trendy look" and run with it. Is what she claims Netflix is doing any different than any other popular cycle in filmmaking?
I think this is pretty clearly the author's thesis--movies now look a certain way and they used to look characteristically different. I think the main point is that the author (and apparently hundreds of people here) find the current visual style really lacking compared to past stylistic movements. They aren't refuting the historical existence of the trend as much as the current character of it.
"I've changed/am unhappy now, I don't know why, a deep introspective look into my life is difficult, therefore older movies are better and I'll find a way to justify that"
Did something similar when I was in college. I watched the IMDB Top 250 and AFI's Top 100 (lots of overlap at the time). I started aggressively, thinking I could watch one movie a day, and struggled to appreciate any of the movies I watched. I was watching movies to check them off my list. Watching "good" movies back to back made it hard for me to appreciate them; it made my baseline of "what a movie is" too high to enjoy. This made me slow down and add movies between the films on my list. I started watching poorly reviewed movies and found some of my favorite movies along the way.
I like your idea of "... and to understand more about what life was like by watching what they watched ..." That's something I didn't like about strictly sticking to an AFI list. To me, some movies contributed a ton to cinema and are a slog to get through. "Birth of a Nation", "Citizen Kane", and "Gone with the Wind" were more fun to read about than to watch. You can't avoid this with your list having some on there that I dread, but the goal of your list makes more sense to me.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane and getting to think about Netflix DVD subscriptions and my spreadsheets again. I'd like an update when you are done.
