#( Mainly because it is sort of impossible and inconceivable ).

[absensia-archived]

I’ll be working on refining and solidifying charlotte’s canon timeline when I come back as well as writing up her handful of verses!  As per usual,  her verses are very much meant to serve entirely different canons and narratives that simply cannot mesh with her canon lore and timeline,  and I don’t think I’ll be writing her in different parts of the timeline even once it’s set out,   ie.  having distinct verses for her within the established timeline and “writing backwards” in time,  so to speak.  plots and dynamics,  however,  can certainly have their roots in any part of the timeline, but mainly,  charlotte exists in a perpetually developing present,  as always.  

[chorusfm]

Applied Communications – “Oxytocin Drunk” (Song Premiere)

Today I’m excited to share with everyone the latest single from Applied Communications called “Oxytocin Drunk.” Applied Communications is the music alias of Max Wood, and he channels his love for slick production and powerful songwriting in a crowd-pleasing package. When speaking on the new single, Max shared that “Oxytocin Drunk” is “the first song I finished when I decided to make music again. It’s about the joy of being disappointed; realizing that means that you are capable of caring really deeply about the people, ideas, and experiences in your life. I tried to keep it relatively straightforward and poppy, though the yowling off-key chorus vocals and abrupt shifts will probably lose some folks.” If you’re enjoying the new single, please consider pre-ordering his upcoming EP here. I was also able to catch up with Max for a brief interview below. Applied Communications · Oxytocin Drunk Can you tell us more about the meaning behind this single? This will sound super emo, but it’s mainly about being nostalgic for the bad parts of youth: the broken hearts, unrelenting acne, existential dread, fear of being left out and left behind, etc. – all these things that matter because you care about yourself, your friends, and your future. I think it’s common to want to protect yourself from pain and awkwardness as you age, but I think there’s also a lot of joy you can unlock in making yourself vulnerable to it. Your new EP Applied Communications Has A Midlife Crisis drops later this month, what can we expect from the new project and is there anything you’d like to share ahead of the release? It’s five off-kilter pop songs featuring lots of casio, drum machines, and random electronic elements. My voice is a little hard for some people to tolerate and there are discordant melodies and key changes that probably straddle the line between “cool and experimental” and “wtf is this” – but I’m pretty proud of it. This is your first new full release since the early 2000s. How has your return to music been and do you find it to be different than when you were releasing stuff years ago? My experience has been great! I’ve been really lucky to find support from a bunch of young folks who carry the same kind of anxious angsty dread that motivated my music twenty years ago. Music writ large is so wildly different, though. I feel like there used to be a pretty low hard cap on how many bands or artists had any sort of relevance. This is an obvious point, but you had to actually manufacture CDs (then get them distributed and sold in stores). Then to be discovered by listeners, you had to somehow get coverage in a magazine and/or airplay on a college radio station. As a result, just spitballing, I’d guess that there were maybe 10,000 bands with a meaningful number of listeners at any point in time. But according to ChartMetric, even the one millionth most popular band in the world right now has something like a thousand active monthly listeners on Spotify. That’s so bananas! It’s amazing to me that the barriers to entry have become so small. And as a result, any random person can connect with art that speaks directly to them in a way that was basically inconceivable the last time I was really active. At the same time, it obviously remains pretty much impossible to make a reasonable living off of music – even if you’re one of the bands that would’ve had moderate success in the 90s. I’d guess that there are way more bands making some small amount of money (e.g., like $5 a month or something), but fewer bands making anything close to a living wage. One more thing: it’s truly wild that I can see, basically in real time, how many people are listening to my music. There was zero visibility into any of that the last time I did this. Just so wild! --- Please consider becoming a member so we can keep bringing you stories like this one. ◎ https://chorus.fm/features/applied-communications-oxytocin-drunk-song-premiere/

[wigwurq]

WIG REVIEW: THE HAPPIEST SEASON

You guys! I finally watched the lesbian holiday movie!! Though when I texted my mom to tell her I was finally watching this, she thought I was talking about The Prom and I laughed for a real long time about it (mainly because it will take me an even longer time to get around to hate watching that!) It already took about a month to get to this one. There is a lot to discuss here - and also one wig!

So this is the first (big budget) holiday lesbian movie, which I am very here for. However, most of the movie feels like a combination between My Best Friend’s Wedding, Meet the Parents, and The Family Stone but with lesbians. Those movies were made between 1997 and 2005 and this movie feels like it should exist somewhere in that time as well. The whole plot of the movie is basically that Kristen Stewart (Abby) has to pretend NOT to be Mackenzie Davis’s (Harper’s)  long-term girlfriend for the sake of Harper’s conservative family with local political aspirations while also spending 5 days with them during Christmas. It’s a conceit that exists solely in these brand of garbage holiday rom coms but definitely one that feels bizarrely antiquated as well. 

Anyway! There is only one wig in this movie which belongs to Davis, who had a vastly superior lesbian wig in that one episode of Black Mirror that made us all cry. We first see this under this hat where it should have hidden for the rest of the film! 

Sadly, the next scene involves the full emergence of this wig and truly: NO. This thing is dried out, bent, and disheveled in not a cool way (Stewart’s actual hair is disheveled in a cool way, though). The entire presence of this wig bothers me because: just have her have whatever hair she has? This is not a historical recreation (that I’m aware of?) and she is not playing a real person! This feels like when SNL cast members wear wigs in sketches for similarly non-existent reasons. However, SNL wigs are vastly superior to this mess!

So anyway, Harper invites Abby to have Christmas at her parents’ house in the heat of the moment during a very romantic (?) Pittsburgh Christmas lights tour which is apparently something that exists. Abby conveniently, and completely for the sake of this plot to work (?) does not like Christmas and also is an orphan, getting rid of any possible Christmas plan conflicts. And then literally on the way to visiting Harper’s family, she is all: by the way, they don’t know you’re my girlfriend or that I’m a lesbian and you have to go along with it for sake of this movie to exist even though this is absolutely a terrible thing to ask of anyone, periodt. But we are beginning to find out that Harper’s character is as full of garbage as her wig. 

So we meet the parents, who are Victor Garber, Mary Steenbergen, and also Mary Steenbergen’s iPad which vulture correctly identifies as the star of this movie AND IT IS. Especially during the end credits where we get to see all the pics the iPad takes! But I’m getting ahead of myself. The parents live in one of those cavernous houses that is definitely a mansion but tries to feel homey even though it probably has about 12 bedrooms and usually only exists in a Nancy Meyers movie. Despite its amount of bedrooms,  Abby has to sleep in a basement bunker which also doubles as a well organized rubbermaid storage unit. For the rest of the movie, Abby is treated like a subhuman trash person much in the way Ben Stiller is treated in Meet the Parents and Sarah Jessica Parker is treated in The Family Stone, except they don’t also have to pretend to not be in a relationship with the family member they arrived with. This conceit becomes so degrading that you honestly wonder why these people are still together!

Abby endures scene after scene of total nonsense and still looks better than the wig on her terrible girlfriend. Which starts actually looking better in a few of these scenes but still is very much a terrible and noticeable wig which is on par with Rachel McAdams’ wig in Mean Girls in that we are constantly told that these women are gorgeous and every single time I ask “YOU MEAN WITH THAT TERRIBLE WIG ON THEIR HEADS????” I suppose this wig was “necessary” because Harper’s two sisters also have long-ish brown hair so they were going for some sort of familial consistency except one daughter has a terrible wig and the other two have hair. Also one sister is Alison Brie, who plays a harpy so awful that she starts to make Harper look palatable and one sister is Mary Holland, who also cowrote the script, and definitely wrote herself the only character who I’d like to meet in real life. 

Along the way, we also meet Aubrey Plaza, who I usually hate because she is just one-note sullen, but here is actually great as Harper’s high school ex-girlfriend who Harper outted and allowed to be bullied and wow Harper - you have been terrible for decades!! Also compared to Harper, Aubrey has beautiful (real) hair, doesn’t lie to her entire family, and has actual chemistry with Abby. I very much wanted Abby to end up with Aubrey and I am not alone! Harper somehow avoids Abby for most of the time they are both staying in the same (albeit huge) house and there is even a dumb subplot about Abby being framed for shoplifting while trying to buy a gift for the parents’ very important white elephant gift exchange during their very important Christmas Eve party and I wonder if any of these people really knows what a white elephant gift is or how to exist in society? Meanwhile, as Harper reverts to being more falsely  heteronormative at her parents house, I started to wonder if her wig was trying to serve a larger purpose in showing how fake this character is but: no it’s just a bad wig. Also this movie really does the impossible: it makes me care about and feel bad for Kristen Stewart! 

Although I did find it highly questionable that though they are the stars of a romantic comedy, neither Kristen Stewart or Mackenzie Davis is funny AT ALL. Like not even a little! Which makes the “comedic” plight of Stewart all the more upsetting! All comedy is left to the one good daughter (Mary Holland) and also all gay men in the movie. This is mainly Abby’s bff and national (Canadian) treasure, Dan Levy and also Drag Race faves Jinxx Monsoon and Ben De-La-Creme in this one gay bar scene which is honestly truly inconceivable and except for further cementing the fact that Abby and Aubrey really should get together. 

In the end, Alison Brie finds out Harper’s TERRIBLE SECRET THAT NO ONE IN 2020 COULD POSSIBLY FATHOM (that she’s a lesbian) and they have a fight in the middle of the white elephant party which reveals that all the family has been competing for years for each other’s love which is really really messed up and now I kind of hate everyone in this family. And also Harper is outed to her entire terrible family and also Ana Gasteyer (and also a room full of other randos). And she denies her lesbian truth!  I recently watched Uncle Frank which is essentially everything Hillbilly Elegy wanted to be but is Shakespeare compared to that mess, and a similar scene occurs but that character bravely faces the truth - and in 1970s SOUTH CAROLINA!! I don’t know what time or space this movie thinks it exists in but it is baffling. Still, Dan Levy gives an emotional monologue about how no one can decide when anyone else is ready to come out of the closet so: FAIR. And then Harper does come out and the entire family kind gives absolutely no reaction to this until Victor Garber says it’s ok?? ABSOLUTELY AND TRULY BIZARRELY PATRIARCHAL. And then Harper and Abby get back together in the parking lot of a Love’s convenience store which is as cheesy and clunky as any garbage holiday rom com so I guess this is definitely a new holiday “classic” which I’ll probably watch 100 more times and hate Harper and her terrible wig each time about as much as I hate Laura Linney’s terrible life choices in Love, Actually. AS CONFOUNDING AS HARPER’S WIG OR THE CHOICE TO GIVE HER ONE AT ALL!

VERDICT: DOESN’T WURQ

[adambstingus]

5 Directors That Should’ve Stopped After One Movie

Some filmmakers are like marathon winners; they stay consistently strong and fast for an inconceivable amount of time, and when they finish, you are left inspired by their existence. And some directors have careers like my performance in my second grade’s three-legged race. I fell at the start, busted my nose open, and writhed on the ground for a while as my partner walked away from me. The following five directors did similar things in their own metaphorical three-legged races. What began as a burst of glorious potential devolved into something hideous and often embarrassing.

5

Zack Snyder With Dawn Of The Dead

Zack Snyder has always been the Mountain Dew Code Red to Christopher Nolan’s iced coffee. They both direct grand adventure movies, but while Nolan’s philosophy is that of the kid in the back of the freshman year writing class with the scarf, Snyder’s is frat bro existentialism. Snyder is pretty great at examining the darkness that lurks in the hearts of men, but only when those men are grunting at each other, “HOLD ME BACK BEFORE I LAY THIS MOTHERFUCKER OUT, DUDE”-style. In any other case, it’s a toss-up. For example, in Watchmen, he totally got the plight of radioactive superman Dr. Manhattan. But the only female on the team, Silk Spectre, was shot like she was in an impromptu Axe Body Spray commercial.

Read Next

5 Superhero Movies That Are Only Worth It For One Scene

The only movie that Snyder has done that’s consistent throughout is his first, the 2004 Dawn Of The Dead remake. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a bunch of people being eaten by zombies at the mall. It’s also fantastic in a way that few remakes actually are, mainly because it does not seek to replicate or expand upon the original. A lot of times in horror remakes, directors try to cram in “answers” to questions that they think viewers have, which totally robs the movies of their potency. We’re scared of the things we don’t know. When we say “Oh, man. He uses a chainsaw? What the hell?” we don’t want the director to respond with, “Well, he got his chainsaw from the old slaughterhouse he used to work at.” There’s nothing terrifying about learning where Freddy Krueger shops for his sweaters.

Instead of that route, Snyder actually chops off any of the rough edges of the source material. The original ends with a bunch of bikers attacking the mall that the heroes are in, which leads to a lot of cool gore effects, but bites the face off of the movie’s sense of pacing. It robs us of the intimate climax that Dawn Of The Dead could’ve built to. Snyder’s version doesn’t have that problem, as it’s a horror/action film from the very beginning. Sure, it’s not as satirical as the original, but it doesn’t need to be. Snyder is not interested in creating a horror film that’s also an allegory. The zombies don’t have to represent anything. They can get by when they’re just being spooky zombies. Constantly reminding me that “The real villain … is man” is the best way to get me to hate both zombies and English teachers.

Sadly, Zack Snyder’s next project would be 300, which had cool action scenes but was the movie equivalent of a guy whispering motivational quotes to himself in the mirror at the gym. And since then, all of his films have either been bloated epics or that thing about warrior owls. It’s a shame. Because when Snyder makes films that aren’t really about anything other than what’s on screen, he shines.

4

Terrence Malick With Badlands

Terrence Malick is the #1 “Well, I appreciate his work” director in the world. “Well, I appreciate his work” directors are a rare breed, as they’re usually either obsessively loved or “appreciated.” And by “appreciated,” I mean “I know a lot of time probably went into putting all of those pretty colors on screen, so I can’t hate this one too much.” I truly appreciate Terrence Malick, even though his films feel like staring matches with an old computer’s screen saver.

His first film, though, is a refreshing take on a genre that needs all of the fresh takes that it can get. Badlands is a serial killer movie, and the biggest problem with the serial killer subgenre is that very rarely do such films actually make us disgusted with a serial killer. Instead, we marvel as the killer says awesome quips and performs super sweet serial killer melee moves. Silence Of The Lambs is a great movie, but it’s hard to feel bad about a guy who eats other guys when he’s Jason Bourne-ing his way out of police custody. Yeah, the hero should be the person who hasn’t wantonly killed multiple innocent people, but I saw the killer do a double backflip off the diving board once, so my vote is set.

Badlands makes serial killing look really awful. Like, “Dude in front of you doesn’t know how to work the self-checkout lane” awful. It’s the story of a 15-year-old girl who becomes enamored of a 25-year-old man, and then gets swept up in a life of theft, violence, and cross-country travel when he decides to start murdering South Dakota. So we see the killer through her eyes, and as her opinion of him grows sour, any chance that we have of admiring Martin Sheen’s sweet bangs slowly evaporates too. Sheen is a shitty dude in this one. Like, “Friend who doesn’t put your Blu-ray back in its case and instead just lays it bottom-side-down on the floor” shitty.

3

Roland Emmerich With Universal Soldier

From the mid ’90s to the present, Roland Emmerich has been a constant source of the loud and mediocre (Independence Day, White House Down, Stargate), the loud and dull (Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), and the loud and very, very historically inaccurate (The Patriot, 10,000 BC, Anonymous, Stonewall). He is the “Hold my beer” to Michael Bay, and no matter what trends are popular in Hollywood or how financially successful his previous film was, we can always count on Emmerich to deliver something that somehow damages the intellectual standard of the explosion.

Emmerich started as a filmmaker in Germany, and most of the films that he made there are either impossible to find in America or were released years later and just on video. His first American film to receive a theatrical release was Universal Soldier, which features Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme as soldiers who get resurrected to become … universal soldiers? I’m not sure what the “universal” thing means, but I guess it’s because, now that they’ve been brought back to life, they’re not limited by the earthly definition of “kicking ass.” They can now kick all the ass in the universe. Side note: This theory is remarkably unconfirmed.

For Emmerich, Universal Soldier is amazingly subtle. And that’s not just because Van Damme is given the emotional range of a yam in this film. It’s mostly a big chase movie, and not just the typical Emmerich “Leave nothing in this major American metropolis un-fireballed” fare. Van Damme and his reporter girlfriend stop in a town, Lundgren catches up to them and shouts, Van Damme escapes, and Lundgren responds with more heavily accented shouting. Compared to Emmerich’s other stuff, Universal Soldier is Driving Miss Daisy.

I don’t know if “limiting the scale” is the key to fixing Emmerich, as he doesn’t have much luck in crafting personal tales. So maybe the key is Dolph Lundgren. Maybe Emmerich made a movie that was one big combustion, but Lundgren absorbed it all, and then released that energy by yelling. I’m no professor, but I think the science works out.

2

Seth MacFarlane With Ted

Seth MacFarlane is a comedy titan. Not satisfied with ruling Fox’s TV animation division, he’s also branched out into movies. And he’s made three so far: Ted, A Million Ways To Die In The West, and Ted 2. Guess how many of those were pretty solid? A hint is hidden in the title of this column.

Ted, the story of Mark Wahlberg and a talking stuffed bear, has some heart in it. There are plenty of movies about dude friends who have problems with each other whenever one of them gets in a serious relationship. They want to drink beer and fart out their dicks, but SHE likes organizing the apartment! Whatever will they do? Ted is still crass, but in centering the conflict around Wahlberg not wanting to abandon a literal stuffed bear, it truly nails home how infantile the whole “bros before respectable type-A females” struggle is. You can still have a fun life and chill with your bear, even if you’re married. And those who don’t understand that are the true dick-farters.

After Ted, MacFarlane made A Million Ways To Die In The West, which most closely resembles those Leslie Nielsen jokes-every-ten-seconds comedies, with the problem being that MacFarlane doesn’t have the warm presence of Nielsen. Nielsen was the comedy genre’s beloved uncle, while as an actor, MacFarlane is still its odd half-cousin. Ted 2 is about teddy bear rights, which expands a few jokes into a two-hour movie. It never ends up being as funny or likable as Ted, and feels like it was made not because MacFarlane wanted to make it, but because a Hollywood executive decided that Ted 2 was their only means of finally getting a third Jacuzzi installed.

1

Eli Roth With Cabin Fever

I’m always hesitant whenever a horror director says they’re making a homage to a certain era of horror films. This is usually because they let the homage aspects outweigh the actually-being-a-good-movie aspects. “But it’s a homage to ’80s slasher films! It’s not supposed to be a masterpiece!” Yeah, but it’s supposed to be competent and somewhat exciting, instead of a 90-minute declaration that you’ve seen Sleepaway Camp multiple times.

One of the only really good ’80s homages is Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, which is sort of styled after The Evil Dead, but mostly does its own thing. Now, Cabin Fever isn’t perfect. Eli Roth’s writing would actually peak with Hostel Part II, which is a statement that no man should be forced to make. But Cabin Fever feels less like a guy trying to remind you of how great 1983 was, and more like a guy who’s trying really, really hard to make a fun, gory horror flick. Plus, it manages to pull off some gross-out moments that are sincerely shocking. Even in the age of things like The Human Centipede trilogy, which is edgy middle-schooler humor brought to life, Cabin Fever can still make you feel weird.

Roth’s next film, Hostel, desperately wanted to be like one of the graphic Asian horror films that Roth is a fan of. The biggest difference is that stuff like Takashi Miike’s Audition and Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw The Devil manage to place interesting stories and dynamic characters around their torture setpieces. Roth’s characters are a couple of dumb guys, which is meant to say something about how young American adults kind of treat other countries like playgrounds that they can fuck in, but it mostly comes off as Roth needing characters who explicitly won’t grow or change, because an arc doesn’t really vibe with a drill to the chest.

Roth would later make The Green Inferno, a movie that I saw on opening day because I can’t be trusted with my own money or schedule, and his next movie is a Death Wish remake. Remember that series, the one about Charles Bronson putting bullets in crime and crime-related activities? I don’t know whose idea it was to give that movie to the guy whose most famous scene involves cutting someone’s Achilles tendons, but I feel like it might have been a bad call.

Daniel has a Twitter. Go to it. Enjoy yourself. Kick your boots off and stay for a while.

Watch Independence Day right here if you’re a true American, and get one of the cool aliens in adorable Funko form and pity Daniel Dockery for hating everything amazing in the world.

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Nightmarish villains with superhuman enhancements. An all-seeing social network that tracks your every move. A young woman from the trailer park and her very smelly cat. Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, a new novel about futuristic shit, by David Wong.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/5-directors-that-shouldve-stopped-after-one-movie/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/177815193117

[samanthasroberts]

5 Directors That Should’ve Stopped After One Movie

Some filmmakers are like marathon winners; they stay consistently strong and fast for an inconceivable amount of time, and when they finish, you are left inspired by their existence. And some directors have careers like my performance in my second grade’s three-legged race. I fell at the start, busted my nose open, and writhed on the ground for a while as my partner walked away from me. The following five directors did similar things in their own metaphorical three-legged races. What began as a burst of glorious potential devolved into something hideous and often embarrassing.

5

Zack Snyder With Dawn Of The Dead

Zack Snyder has always been the Mountain Dew Code Red to Christopher Nolan’s iced coffee. They both direct grand adventure movies, but while Nolan’s philosophy is that of the kid in the back of the freshman year writing class with the scarf, Snyder’s is frat bro existentialism. Snyder is pretty great at examining the darkness that lurks in the hearts of men, but only when those men are grunting at each other, “HOLD ME BACK BEFORE I LAY THIS MOTHERFUCKER OUT, DUDE”-style. In any other case, it’s a toss-up. For example, in Watchmen, he totally got the plight of radioactive superman Dr. Manhattan. But the only female on the team, Silk Spectre, was shot like she was in an impromptu Axe Body Spray commercial.

Read Next

5 Superhero Movies That Are Only Worth It For One Scene

The only movie that Snyder has done that’s consistent throughout is his first, the 2004 Dawn Of The Dead remake. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a bunch of people being eaten by zombies at the mall. It’s also fantastic in a way that few remakes actually are, mainly because it does not seek to replicate or expand upon the original. A lot of times in horror remakes, directors try to cram in “answers” to questions that they think viewers have, which totally robs the movies of their potency. We’re scared of the things we don’t know. When we say “Oh, man. He uses a chainsaw? What the hell?” we don’t want the director to respond with, “Well, he got his chainsaw from the old slaughterhouse he used to work at.” There’s nothing terrifying about learning where Freddy Krueger shops for his sweaters.

Instead of that route, Snyder actually chops off any of the rough edges of the source material. The original ends with a bunch of bikers attacking the mall that the heroes are in, which leads to a lot of cool gore effects, but bites the face off of the movie’s sense of pacing. It robs us of the intimate climax that Dawn Of The Dead could’ve built to. Snyder’s version doesn’t have that problem, as it’s a horror/action film from the very beginning. Sure, it’s not as satirical as the original, but it doesn’t need to be. Snyder is not interested in creating a horror film that’s also an allegory. The zombies don’t have to represent anything. They can get by when they’re just being spooky zombies. Constantly reminding me that “The real villain … is man” is the best way to get me to hate both zombies and English teachers.

Sadly, Zack Snyder’s next project would be 300, which had cool action scenes but was the movie equivalent of a guy whispering motivational quotes to himself in the mirror at the gym. And since then, all of his films have either been bloated epics or that thing about warrior owls. It’s a shame. Because when Snyder makes films that aren’t really about anything other than what’s on screen, he shines.

4

Terrence Malick With Badlands

Terrence Malick is the #1 “Well, I appreciate his work” director in the world. “Well, I appreciate his work” directors are a rare breed, as they’re usually either obsessively loved or “appreciated.” And by “appreciated,” I mean “I know a lot of time probably went into putting all of those pretty colors on screen, so I can’t hate this one too much.” I truly appreciate Terrence Malick, even though his films feel like staring matches with an old computer’s screen saver.

His first film, though, is a refreshing take on a genre that needs all of the fresh takes that it can get. Badlands is a serial killer movie, and the biggest problem with the serial killer subgenre is that very rarely do such films actually make us disgusted with a serial killer. Instead, we marvel as the killer says awesome quips and performs super sweet serial killer melee moves. Silence Of The Lambs is a great movie, but it’s hard to feel bad about a guy who eats other guys when he’s Jason Bourne-ing his way out of police custody. Yeah, the hero should be the person who hasn’t wantonly killed multiple innocent people, but I saw the killer do a double backflip off the diving board once, so my vote is set.

Badlands makes serial killing look really awful. Like, “Dude in front of you doesn’t know how to work the self-checkout lane” awful. It’s the story of a 15-year-old girl who becomes enamored of a 25-year-old man, and then gets swept up in a life of theft, violence, and cross-country travel when he decides to start murdering South Dakota. So we see the killer through her eyes, and as her opinion of him grows sour, any chance that we have of admiring Martin Sheen’s sweet bangs slowly evaporates too. Sheen is a shitty dude in this one. Like, “Friend who doesn’t put your Blu-ray back in its case and instead just lays it bottom-side-down on the floor” shitty.

3

Roland Emmerich With Universal Soldier

From the mid ’90s to the present, Roland Emmerich has been a constant source of the loud and mediocre (Independence Day, White House Down, Stargate), the loud and dull (Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), and the loud and very, very historically inaccurate (The Patriot, 10,000 BC, Anonymous, Stonewall). He is the “Hold my beer” to Michael Bay, and no matter what trends are popular in Hollywood or how financially successful his previous film was, we can always count on Emmerich to deliver something that somehow damages the intellectual standard of the explosion.

Emmerich started as a filmmaker in Germany, and most of the films that he made there are either impossible to find in America or were released years later and just on video. His first American film to receive a theatrical release was Universal Soldier, which features Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme as soldiers who get resurrected to become … universal soldiers? I’m not sure what the “universal” thing means, but I guess it’s because, now that they’ve been brought back to life, they’re not limited by the earthly definition of “kicking ass.” They can now kick all the ass in the universe. Side note: This theory is remarkably unconfirmed.

For Emmerich, Universal Soldier is amazingly subtle. And that’s not just because Van Damme is given the emotional range of a yam in this film. It’s mostly a big chase movie, and not just the typical Emmerich “Leave nothing in this major American metropolis un-fireballed” fare. Van Damme and his reporter girlfriend stop in a town, Lundgren catches up to them and shouts, Van Damme escapes, and Lundgren responds with more heavily accented shouting. Compared to Emmerich’s other stuff, Universal Soldier is Driving Miss Daisy.

I don’t know if “limiting the scale” is the key to fixing Emmerich, as he doesn’t have much luck in crafting personal tales. So maybe the key is Dolph Lundgren. Maybe Emmerich made a movie that was one big combustion, but Lundgren absorbed it all, and then released that energy by yelling. I’m no professor, but I think the science works out.

2

Seth MacFarlane With Ted

Seth MacFarlane is a comedy titan. Not satisfied with ruling Fox’s TV animation division, he’s also branched out into movies. And he’s made three so far: Ted, A Million Ways To Die In The West, and Ted 2. Guess how many of those were pretty solid? A hint is hidden in the title of this column.

Ted, the story of Mark Wahlberg and a talking stuffed bear, has some heart in it. There are plenty of movies about dude friends who have problems with each other whenever one of them gets in a serious relationship. They want to drink beer and fart out their dicks, but SHE likes organizing the apartment! Whatever will they do? Ted is still crass, but in centering the conflict around Wahlberg not wanting to abandon a literal stuffed bear, it truly nails home how infantile the whole “bros before respectable type-A females” struggle is. You can still have a fun life and chill with your bear, even if you’re married. And those who don’t understand that are the true dick-farters.

After Ted, MacFarlane made A Million Ways To Die In The West, which most closely resembles those Leslie Nielsen jokes-every-ten-seconds comedies, with the problem being that MacFarlane doesn’t have the warm presence of Nielsen. Nielsen was the comedy genre’s beloved uncle, while as an actor, MacFarlane is still its odd half-cousin. Ted 2 is about teddy bear rights, which expands a few jokes into a two-hour movie. It never ends up being as funny or likable as Ted, and feels like it was made not because MacFarlane wanted to make it, but because a Hollywood executive decided that Ted 2 was their only means of finally getting a third Jacuzzi installed.

1

Eli Roth With Cabin Fever

I’m always hesitant whenever a horror director says they’re making a homage to a certain era of horror films. This is usually because they let the homage aspects outweigh the actually-being-a-good-movie aspects. “But it’s a homage to ’80s slasher films! It’s not supposed to be a masterpiece!” Yeah, but it’s supposed to be competent and somewhat exciting, instead of a 90-minute declaration that you’ve seen Sleepaway Camp multiple times.

One of the only really good ’80s homages is Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, which is sort of styled after The Evil Dead, but mostly does its own thing. Now, Cabin Fever isn’t perfect. Eli Roth’s writing would actually peak with Hostel Part II, which is a statement that no man should be forced to make. But Cabin Fever feels less like a guy trying to remind you of how great 1983 was, and more like a guy who’s trying really, really hard to make a fun, gory horror flick. Plus, it manages to pull off some gross-out moments that are sincerely shocking. Even in the age of things like The Human Centipede trilogy, which is edgy middle-schooler humor brought to life, Cabin Fever can still make you feel weird.

Roth’s next film, Hostel, desperately wanted to be like one of the graphic Asian horror films that Roth is a fan of. The biggest difference is that stuff like Takashi Miike’s Audition and Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw The Devil manage to place interesting stories and dynamic characters around their torture setpieces. Roth’s characters are a couple of dumb guys, which is meant to say something about how young American adults kind of treat other countries like playgrounds that they can fuck in, but it mostly comes off as Roth needing characters who explicitly won’t grow or change, because an arc doesn’t really vibe with a drill to the chest.

Roth would later make The Green Inferno, a movie that I saw on opening day because I can’t be trusted with my own money or schedule, and his next movie is a Death Wish remake. Remember that series, the one about Charles Bronson putting bullets in crime and crime-related activities? I don’t know whose idea it was to give that movie to the guy whose most famous scene involves cutting someone’s Achilles tendons, but I feel like it might have been a bad call.

Daniel has a Twitter. Go to it. Enjoy yourself. Kick your boots off and stay for a while.

Watch Independence Day right here if you’re a true American, and get one of the cool aliens in adorable Funko form and pity Daniel Dockery for hating everything amazing in the world.

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Nightmarish villains with superhuman enhancements. An all-seeing social network that tracks your every move. A young woman from the trailer park and her very smelly cat. Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, a new novel about futuristic shit, by David Wong.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/5-directors-that-shouldve-stopped-after-one-movie/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/09/06/5-directors-that-shouldve-stopped-after-one-movie/

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Startup Business Loans

According to the National Association of Girls Business Owners (NAWBO), far more than 9.four million enterprises had been owned by ladies in 2015. If you contemplate oneself a startup, but have been in business for at least six months, there are startup business loan possibilities like merchant cash advance and bank statement financing that might be appropriate for you. Quickly Capital 360 has supplied brief-term loan options for tiny companies across the nation even when their borrowing history is not best. These lenders seldom can compete with standard banks in terms of APR. Lenders ordinarily report your account to the three main credit bureaus. This loan plan is different from other modest business loans simply because lenders are prepared to take into account other criteria, in addition to credit scores. Loans are offered by 1stcapitalsource's direct lending partners. With ,our bad credit business financing are a great match for these with significantly less than fantastic credit. - Loans ranging from $five,000-$300,000. Getting a firm to approve your business for additional capital when you have bad credit made use of to be nearly impossible. The lack of a credit history, collateral or the inability to secure a loan by means of a bank does not imply no one particular will lend to you. Like any government plan, Compact Business Administration (SBA) Loans sound excellent in theory (let's make sure small business owners can get dollars) but the execution of the plan is a total joke and a waste of everybody's time. And analysis has shown that little corporations that rely heavily on credit card financing ordinarily fail. But in the end, it isn't so considerably about finding business funding with bad credit as it is about having business funding that is just proper for you and your business. To get a loan with bad credit, you will have to have to show the bank your business's accounting records for the past 3 years. Business credit loans: These lines of credit are accessible to any business entity that meets the threshold requirements set by the lender. But in the meantime, you nevertheless will need financing to develop your business. If you're in need to have of more financing, it is feasible to acquire a bad credit business loan, regardless of having a low score. There's no doubt about it: It is time to discover how you can get modest business loans for women with bad credit from Sunwise Capital. A poor credit score does not make it inconceivable to safe your self business loans for poor credit. Money advance financing supplies income promptly when a business owner demands to complete a deal, pay an unexpected bill, or merely requires operating capital. The increasing availability of startup financing correlates with the development of startup businesses in the tech sector. You don't have to have a excellent credit score to be eligible for a tiny business loan, which is vital mainly because Compact Business Administration (SBA) loans come with far more desirable interest prices. While there is no particular sort of minority business loan, there are specific financing selections and even unique interest applications that may suit your business better than other individuals. Initial of all, it really is by no means a poor concept to at least apply for a traditional bank loan. The lender reports payment activity to the three credit bureaus, so paying off your loan on time will enable make your credit score. That's why I shake my head when I see applicants out there with no income, bad credit, and no collateral applying for loans on any and every single lending web page on the Net.

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How to Get a 3% Discount Genesis Mining Promo Code

The Internet is part of society and is formed by society. And until society is a crime-free zone, the Internet will not be a criminal offense-free zone.

So what's a cryptocurrency? A cryptocurrency is a decentralised payment system, which principally lets people send foreign money to each other over the online with out the need for a trusted third occasion similar to a financial institution or monetary institution. The transactions are low cost, and in lots of instances, they're free. And likewise, the funds are pseudo anonymous as effectively.

In addition to that, the main characteristic is that it's very decentralised, which implies that there isn't any single central point of authority or something like that. The implications of this is performed by everyone having a full copy of all the transactions that have ever occurred with Bitcoin. This creates an extremely resilient community, which means that nobody can change or reverse or police any of the transactions.

The high degree of anonymity in there signifies that it's very hard to hint transactions. It's not totally inconceivable, however it's impractical in most cases. So crime with cryptocurrency-- because you've got fast, borderless transactions, and you have got a excessive stage of anonymity, it in idea creates a system that's ripe for exploitation. So usually when it is a crime online with online fee systems, then they tend to go to the authorities and, say, we will hand over this fee information or we can stop these transactions and reverse them. And none of that may happen with Bitcoin, so it makes it ripe for criminals, in concept.

In light of this, plenty of different businesses are researching into Bitcoin and taking a look at Bitcoin and trying to grasp the way it works and what they can do to police it. It is also been within the media fairly a number of instances, and the media, being the media, like give attention to the dangerous aspect of it. So that they focus very closely on the crime with it. So if there is a theft or a rip-off or something like that, then they have a tendency to blame it on Bitcoin and Bitcoin users.

So probably the most notable is probably Silk Street, which received taken down just lately, and through their $1.2 billion worth of Bitcoins, went to pay for something from drugs to guns to hit males to these sorts of issues. And the media, again, very quickly to blame this on Bitcoins and say that it was the Bitcoin person's fault.

But there's really very little evidence of the scale of the issue of crime with cryptocurrencies. We do not know if there's so much or we do not know if there's a little bit. However despite this, people are very quick to model it as a felony thing, and they overlook the official uses, such as the fast and quick payment.

So a number of analysis questions I am taking a look at in this space is what does crime with Bitcoin appear like? So a lot of people will say that scams and thefts have been occurring for ages. However the means via which they happen changes with the expertise. So a Victorian road swindler would virtually be doing something very completely different to a 419 Nigerian prince scammer.

So the following query that I would prefer to analysis as well is wanting at the scale of the problem of crime with cryptocurrency. So by producing a log of recognized scams and thefts and things like that, we will then cross reference that with the general public transaction log of all transactions and see just how much of the transactions are literally unlawful and legal. So my last query would be, to what extent does the know-how itself actually facilitate crime? By looking again on the crime logs, we are able to see which particular sorts of crime happen, and whether it is really the know-how's fault, or is that this simply the same previous crimes that we've been looking at before. And as soon as we have take into account these items, we will start to consider potential solutions to the problem of crime with Bitcoin.

And we will think about that the one suitable resolution would be one that preserves the underlying values of the know-how itself, which would be privacy and decentralisation. A whole lot of focus from the media is to have a look at the legal points of it. And so they do not give sufficient worth to the reputable uses, because Bitcoin is a expertise that permits quick, fast payments, which is helpful to anybody that is ever paid for anything on the internet.

Crypto-what?

In case you've attempted to dive into this mysterious factor called blockchain, you'd be forgiven for recoiling in horror at the sheer opaqueness of the technical jargon that's often used to frame it. So earlier than we get into what a crytpocurrency is and the way blockchain technology might change the world, let's discuss what blockchain actually is.

In the simplest terms, a blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions, not unlike the ledgers we've got been using for lots of of years to document gross sales and purchases. The perform of this digital ledger is, in ethereum ICO truth, just about identical to a standard ledger in that it data debits and credit between people. That's the core concept behind blockchain; the difference is who holds the ledger and who verifies the transactions.

With traditional transactions, a fee from one particular person to another includes some form of middleman to facilitate the transaction. Let's say Rob wants to transfer ?20 to Melanie. He can both give her cash within the type of a ?20 note, or he can use some kind of banking app to transfer the money directly to her checking account. In both instances, a financial institution is the intermediary verifying the transaction: Rob's funds are verified when he takes the money out of a money machine, or they are verified by the app when he makes the digital switch. The bank decides if the transaction should go forward. The bank also holds the file of all transactions made by Rob, and is solely chargeable for updating it at any time when Rob pays somebody or receives cash into his account. In other words, the bank holds and controls the ledger, and every little thing flows by means of the financial institution.

That's a number of accountability, so it's important that Rob feels he can belief his bank otherwise he wouldn't risk his cash with them. He needs to feel confident that the bank will not defraud him, is not going to lose his cash, is not going to be robbed, and won't disappear in a single day. This want for belief has underpinned pretty much every main behaviour and facet of the monolithic finance industry, to the extent that even when it was discovered that banks had been being irresponsible with our money throughout the financial crisis of 2008, the government (another intermediary) selected to bail them out somewhat than threat destroying the final fragments of belief by letting them collapse.

Blockchains operate in another way in a single key respect: they are totally decentralised. There isn't any central clearing house like a bank, and there's no central ledger held by one entity. As a substitute, the ledger is distributed throughout an enormous network of computers, referred to as nodes, every of which holds a replica of the entire ledger on their respective exhausting drives. These nodes are connected to 1 one other via a chunk of software program referred to as a peer-to-peer (P2P) consumer, which synchronises information across the community of nodes and makes certain that everyone has the same model of the ledger at any given point in time.

When a brand new transaction is entered into a blockchain, it is first encrypted using state-of-the-art cryptographic technology. As soon as encrypted, the transaction is transformed to something known as a block, which is mainly the time period used for an encrypted group of recent transactions. That block is then sent (or broadcast) into the network of pc nodes, the place it's verified by the nodes and, once verified, passed on through the community in order that the block might be added to the top of the ledger on everyone's pc, under the record of all earlier blocks. This is called the chain, therefore the tech is referred to as a blockchain.

As soon as authorised and recorded into the ledger, the transaction may be completed. This is how cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin work.

Accountability and the elimination of belief

What are the benefits of this technique over a banking or central clearing system? Why would Rob use Bitcoin instead of normal forex?

The answer is trust. As talked about earlier than, with the banking system it's crucial that Rob trusts his financial institution to guard his cash and handle it properly. To ensure this happens, monumental regulatory methods exist to verify the actions of the banks and guarantee they are fit for objective. Governments then regulate the regulators, creating a sort of tiered system of checks whose sole goal is to help prevent errors and dangerous behaviour. In other words, organisations just like the Financial Companies Authority exist exactly as a result of banks cannot be trusted on their very own.

And banks frequently make mistakes and misbehave, as we have seen too many occasions. When you might have a single supply of authority, energy tends to get abused or misused. The trust relationship between individuals and banks is awkward and precarious: we do not actually trust them but we do not feel there is much various.

Blockchain methods, then again, do not want you to belief them at all. All transactions (or blocks) in a blockchain are verified by the nodes within the community before being added to the ledger, which suggests there isn't a single level of failure and no single approval channel. If a hacker wished to successfully tamper with the ledger on a blockchain, they must simultaneously hack tens of millions of computers, which is nearly impossible. A hacker would even be just about unable to carry a blockchain network down, as, again, they would wish to have the ability to shut down every single laptop in a network of computer systems distributed around the globe.

The encryption course of itself is also a key issue. Blockchains like the Bitcoin one use intentionally tough processes for his or her verification procedure. In the case of Bitcoin, blocks are verified by nodes performing a deliberately processor- and time-intensive series of calculations, usually in the form of puzzles or advanced mathematical issues, which mean that verification is neither prompt nor accessible. Nodes that do commit the resource to verification of blocks are rewarded with a transaction fee and a bounty of newly-minted Bitcoins.

This has the perform of both incentivising people to grow to be nodes (as a result of processing blocks like this requires fairly highly effective computers and a lot of electrical energy), while additionally handling the process of generating - or minting - models of the forex. This is known as mining, as a result of it includes a considerable quantity of effort (by a pc, in this case) to provide a brand new commodity. It also means that transactions are verified by essentially the most independent means attainable, extra unbiased than a authorities-regulated organisation just like the FSA.

This decentralised, democratic and extremely safe nature of blockchains signifies that they will perform without the necessity for regulation (they are self-regulating), government or other opaque middleman. They work as a result of individuals do not belief one another, reasonably than in spite of.

Let the importance of that sink in for some time and the excitement around blockchain starts to make sense.

Smart contracts

Where issues get really attention-grabbing is the applications of blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Given that one of the underlying rules of the blockchain system is the safe, impartial verification of a transaction, it's easy to imagine different methods by which any such process may be precious. Unsurprisingly, many such applications are already in use or development. Some of the finest ones are:

? Sensible contracts (Ethereum): most likely the most thrilling blockchain growth after Bitcoin, smart contracts are blocks that comprise code that have to be executed in order for the contract to be fulfilled. The code can be something, so long as a computer can execute it, however in simple terms it implies that you should utilize blockchain know-how (with its independent verification, trustless architecture and safety) to create a sort of escrow system for any kind of transaction. For instance, in the event you're a web designer you may create a contract that verifies if a new consumer's web site is launched or not, and then automatically release the funds to you once it's. No extra chasing or invoicing. Sensible contracts are also being used to show possession of an asset comparable to property or art. The potential for lowering fraud with this approach is gigantic.

? Cloud storage (Storj): cloud computing has revolutionised the online and brought in regards to the advent of Large Data which has, in flip, kick began the new AI revolution. But most cloud-based mostly techniques are run on servers saved in single-location server farms, owned by a single entity (Amazon, Rackspace, Google and so on). This presents all the identical problems because the banking system, in that you simply knowledge is managed by a single, opaque organisation which represents a single point of failure. Distributing information on a blockchain removes the belief issue entirely and in addition guarantees to extend reliability as it's so much harder to take a blockchain network down.

? Digital identification (ShoCard): two of the most important problems with our time are identify theft and information protection. With huge centralised services equivalent to Facebook holding so much information about us, and efforts by varied developed-world governments to store digital information about their residents in a central database, the potential for abuse of our private information is terrifying. Blockchain expertise affords a possible answer to this by wrapping your key knowledge up into an encrypted block that may be verified by the blockchain network whenever it's worthwhile to show your identification. The functions of this range from the obvious alternative of passports and I.D. cards to different areas such as replacing passwords. It might be enormous.

? Digital voting: highly topical in the wake of the investigation into Russia's affect on the latest U.S. election, digital voting has long been suspected of being both unreliable and highly susceptible to tampering. Blockchain expertise affords a method of verifying that a voter's vote was efficiently despatched while retaining their anonymity. It guarantees not solely to reduce fraud in elections but additionally to increase common voter turnout as people will have the ability to vote on their cell phones.