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hms-no-fun · 1 month ago

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Hi! I just read your post about your opinion on "AI" and I really liked it. If it's no bother, what's your opinion on people who use it for studying? Like writing essays, solving problems and stuff like that?

I haven't been a fan of AI from the beginning and I've heard that you shouldn't ask it for anything because then you help it develop. But I don't know how to explain that to friends and classmates or even if it's true anymore. Because I've seen some of the prompts it can come up with and they're not bad and I've heard people say that the summaries AI makes are really good and I just... I dunno. I'm at a loss

Sorry if this is a lot or something you simply don't want to reply to. You made really good points when talking about AI and I really liked it and this has been weighing on me for a while :)

on a base level, i don't really have a strongly articulated opinion on the subject because i don't use AI, and i'm 35 so i'm not in school anymore and i don't have a ton of college-aged friends either. i have little exposure to the people who use AI in this way nor to the people who have to deal with AI being used in this way, so my perspective here is totally hypothetical and unscientific.

what i was getting at in my original AI post was a general macroeconomic point about how all of the supposed efficiency gains of AI are an extension of the tech CEO's dislike of paying and/or giving credit to anyone they deem less skilled or intelligent than them. that it's conspicuous how AI conveniently falls into place after many decades of devaluing and deskilling creative/artistic labor industries. historically, for a lot of artists the most frequently available & highest paying gigs were in advertising. i can't speak to the specifics when it comes to visual art or written copy, but i *can* say that when i worked in the oklahoma film industry, the most coveted jobs were always the commercials. great pay for relatively less work, with none of the complications that often arise working on amateur productions. not to mention they were union gigs, a rare enough thing in a right to work state, so anyone trying to make a career out of film work wanting to bank their union hours to qualify for IATSE membership always had their ears to the ground for an opening. which didn't come often because, as you might expect, anyone who *got* one of those jobs aimed to keep it as long as possible. who could blame em, either? one person i met who managed to get consistent ad work said they could afford to work all of two or three months a year, so they could spend the rest of their time doing low-budget productions and (occasionally) student films.

there was a time when this was the standard for the film industry, even in LA; you expected to work 3 to 5 shows a year (exact number's hard to estimate because production schedules vary wildly between ads, films, and tv shows) for six to eight months if not less, so you'd have your bills well covered through the lean periods and be able to recover from what is an enormously taxing job both physically and emotionally. this was never true for EVERYONE, film work's always been a hustle and making a career of it is often a luck-based crapshoot, but generally that was the model and for a lot of folks it worked. it meant more time to practice their skills on the job, sustainably building expertise and domain knowledge that they could then pass down to future newcomers. anything that removes such opportunities decreases the amount of practice workers get, and any increased demand on their time makes them significantly more likely to burn out of the industry early. lower pay, shorter shoots, busier schedules, these aren't just bad for individual workers but for the entire industry, and that includes the robust and well-funded advertising industry.

well, anyway, this year's coca-cola christmas ad was made with AI. they had maybe one person on quality control using an adobe aftereffects mask to add in the coke branding. this is the ultimate intended use-case for AI. it required the expertise of zero unionized labor, and worst of all the end result is largely indistinguishable from the alternative. you'll often see folks despair at this verisimilitude, particularly when a study comes out that shows (for instance) people can't tell the difference between real poetry and chat gpt generated poetry. i despair as well, but for different reasons. i despair that production of ads is a better source of income and experience for film workers than traditional movies or television. i despair that this technology is fulfilling an age-old promise about the disposability of artistic labor. poetry is not particularly valued by our society, is rarely taught to people beyond a beginner's gloss on meter and rhyme. "my name is sarah zedig and i'm here to say, i'm sick of this AI in a major way" type shit. end a post with the line "i so just wish that it would go away and never come back again!" and then the haiku bot swoops in and says, oh, 5/7/5 you say? that is technically a haiku! and then you put a haiku-making minigame in your crowd-pleasing japanese nationalist open world chanbara simulator, because making a haiku is basically a matter of selecting one from 27 possible phrase combinations. wait, what do you mean the actual rules of haiku are more elastic and subjective than that? that's not what my english teacher said in sixth grade!

AI is able to slip in and surprise us with its ability to mimic human-produced art because we already treat most human-produced art like mechanical surplus of little to no value. ours is a culture of wikipedia-level knowledge, where you have every incentive to learn a lot of facts about something so that you can sufficiently pretend to have actually experienced it. but this is not to say that humans would be better able to tell the difference between human produced and AI produced poetry if they were more educated about poetry! the primary disconnect here is economic. Poets already couldn't make a fucking living making poetry, and now any old schmuck can plug a prompt into chatgpt and say they wrote a sonnet. even though they always had the ability to sit down and write a sonnet!

boosters love to make hay about "deskilling" and "democratizing" and "making accessible" these supposedly gatekept realms of supposedly bourgeois expression, but what they're really saying (whether they know it or not) is that skill and training have no value anymore. and they have been saying this since long before AI as we know it now existed! creative labor is the backbone of so much of our world, and yet it is commonly accepted as a poverty profession. i grew up reading books and watching movies based on books and hearing endless conversation about books and yet when i told my family "i want to be a writer" they said "that's a great way to die homeless." like, this is where the conversation about AI's impact starts. we already have a culture that simultaneously NEEDS the products of artistic labor, yet vilifies and denigrates the workers who perform that labor. folks see a comic panel or a corporate logo or a modern art piece and say "my kid could do that," because they don't perceive the decades of training, practice, networking, and experimentation that resulted in the finished product. these folks do not understand that just because the labor of art is often invisible doesn't mean it isn't work.

i think this entire conversation is backwards. in an ideal world, none of this matters. human labor should not be valued over machine labor because it inherently possesses an aura of human-ness. art made by humans isn't better than AI generated art on qualitative grounds. art is subjective. you're not wrong to find beauty in an AI image if the image is beautiful. to my mind, the value of human artistic labor comes down to the simple fact that the world is better when human beings make art. the world is better when we have the time and freedom to experiment, to play, to practice, to develop and refine our skills to no particular end except whatever arbitrary goal we set for ourselves. the world is better when people collaborate on a film set to solve problems that arise organically out of the conditions of shooting on a live location. what i see AI being used for is removing as many opportunities for human creativity as possible and replacing them with statistical averages of prior human creativity. this passes muster because art is a product that exists to turn a profit. because publicly traded companies have a legal responsibility to their shareholders to take every opportunity to turn a profit regardless of how obviously bad for people those opportunities might be.

that common sense says writing poetry, writing prose, writing anything is primarily about reaching the end of the line, about having written something, IS the problem. i've been going through the many unfinished novels i wrote in high school lately, literally hundreds of thousands of words that i shared with maybe a dozen people and probably never will again. what value do those words have? was writing them a waste of time since i never posted them, never finished them, never turned a profit off them? no! what i've learned going back through those old drafts is that i'm only the writer i am today BECAUSE i put so many hours into writing generic grimdark fantasy stories and bizarrely complicated werewolf mythologies.

you know i used to do open mics? we had a poetry group that met once a month at a local cafe in college. each night we'd start by asking five words from the audience, then inviting everyone to compose a poem using those words in 10 to 15 minutes. whoever wanted to could read their poem, and whoever got the most applause won a free drink from the cafe. then we'd spend the rest of the night having folks sign up to come and read whatever. sometimes you'd get heartfelt poems about personal experiences, sometimes you'd get ambitious soundcloud rappers, sometimes you'd get a frat guy taking the piss, sometimes you'd get a mousy autist just doing their best. i don't know that any of the poetry i wrote back then has particular value today, but i don't really care. the point of it was the experience in that moment. the experience of composing something on the fly, or having something you wrote a couple days ago, then standing up and reading it. the value was in the performance itself, in the momentary synthesis between me and the audience. i found out then that i was pretty good at making people cry, and i could not have had that experience in any other venue. i could not have felt it so viscerally had i just posted it online. and i cannot wrap up that experience and give it to you, because it only existed then.

i think more people would write poetry if they had more hours in a day to spare for frivolities, if there existed more spaces where small groups could organize open mics, if transit made those spaces more widely accessible, if everyone made enough money that they weren't burned the fuck out and not in the mood to go to an open mic tonight, if we saw poetry as a mode of personal reflection which was as much about the experience of having written it as anything else. this is the case for all the arts. right now, the only people who can afford to make a living doing art are already wealthy, because art doesn't pay well. this leads to brain drain and overall lowering quality standards, because the suburban petty bouge middle class largely do not experience the world as it materially exists for the rest of us. i often feel that many tech CEOs want to be remembered the way andy warhol is remembered. they want to be loved and worshipped not just for business acumen but for aesthetic value, they want to get the kind of credit that artists get-- because despite the fact that artists don't get paid shit, they also frequently get told by people "your work changed my life." how is it that a working class person with little to no education can write a story that isn't just liked but celebrated, that hundreds or thousands of people imprint on, that leaves a mark on culture you can't quantify or predict or recreate? this is AI's primary use-case, to "democratize" art in such a way that hacks no longer have to work as hard to pretend to be good at what they do. i mean, hell, i have to imagine every rich person with an autobiography in the works is absolutely THRILLED that they no longer have to pay a ghost writer!

so, circling back around to the meat of your question. as far as telling people not to use AI because "you're just helping to train it," that ship has long since sailed. getting mad at individuals for using AI right now is about as futile as getting mad at individuals for not masking-- yes, obviously they should wear a mask and write their own essays, but to say this is simply a matter of millions of individuals making the same bad but unrelated choice over and over is neoliberal hogwash. people stopped masking because they were told to stop masking by a government in league with corporate interests which had every incentive to break every avenue of solidarity that emerged in 2020. they politicized masks, calling them "the scarlet letter of [the] pandemic". biden himself insisted this was "a pandemic of the unvaccinated", helpfully communicating to the public that if you're vaccinated, you don't need to mask. all those high case numbers and death counts? those only happen to the bad people.

now you have CEOs and politicians and credulous media outlets and droves of grift-hungry influencers hard selling the benefits of AI in everything everywhere all the time. companies have bent over backwards to incorporate AI despite ethics and security worries because they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, and everyone with money is calling this the next big thing. in short, companies are following the money, because that's what companies do. they, in turn, are telling their customers what tools to use and how. so of course lots of people are using AI for things they probably shouldn't. why wouldn't they? "the high school/college essay" as such has been quantized and stripmined by an education system dominated by test scores over comprehension. it is SUPPOSED to be an exercise in articulating ideas, to teach the student how to argue persuasively. the final work has little to no value, because the point is the process. but when you've got a system that lives and dies by its grades, within which teachers are given increasingly more work to do, less time to do it in, and a much worse paycheck for their trouble, the essay increasingly becomes a simple pass/fail gauntlet to match the expected pace set by the simple, clean, readily gradable multiple choice quiz. in an education system where the stakes for students are higher than they've ever been, within which you are increasingly expected to do more work in less time with lower-quality guidance from your overworked teachers, there is every incentive to get chatgpt to write your essay for you.

do you see what i'm saying? we can argue all day about the shoulds here. of course i think it's better when people write their own essays, do their own research, personally read the assigned readings. but cheating has always been a problem. a lot of these same fears were aired over the rising popularity of cliffs notes in the 90s and 2000s! the real problem here is systemic. it's economic. i would have very little issue with the output of AI if existing conditions were not already so precarious. but then, if the conditions were different, AI as we know it likely would not exist. it emerges today as the last gasp of a tech industry that has been floundering for a reason to exist ever since the smart phone dominated the market. they tried crypto. they tried the metaverse. now they're going all-in on AI because it's a perfect storm of shareholder-friendly buzzwords and the unscientific technomythology that's been sold to laymen by credulous press sycophants for decades. It slots right into this niche where the last of our vestigial respect for "the artist" once existed. it is the ultimate expression of capitalist realism, finally at long last doing away with the notion that the suits at disney could never in their wildest dreams come up with something half as cool as the average queer fanfic writer. now they've got a program that can plagiarize that fanfic (along with a dozen others) for them, laundering the theft through a layer of transformation which perhaps mirrors how the tech industry often exploits open source software to the detriment of the open source community. the catastrophe of AI is that it's the fulfillment of a promise that certainly predates computers at the very least.

so, i don't really know what to tell someone who uses AI for their work. if i was talking to a student, i'd say that relying chatgpt is really gonna screw you over when it comes time take the SAT or ACT, and you have to write an essay from scratch by hand in a monitored environment-- but like, i also think the ACT and SAT and probably all the other standardized tests shouldn't exist? or at the very least ought to be severely devalued, since prep for those tests often sabotages the integrity of actual classroom education. although, i guess at this point the only way forward for education (that isn't getting on both knees and deep-throating big tech) is more real-time in-class monitored essay writing, which honestly might be better for all parties anyway. of course that does nothing to address research essays you can't write in a single class session. to someone who uses AI for research, i'd probably say the same thing as i would to someone who uses wikipedia: it's a fine enough place to start, but don't cite it. click through links, find sources, make sure what you're reading is real, don't rely on someone else's generalization. know that chatgpt is likely not pulling information from a discrete database of individual files that it compartmentalizes the way you might expect, but rather is a statistical average of a broad dataset about which it cannot have an opinion or interpretation. sometimes it will link you to real information, but just as often it will invent information from whole cloth. honestly, the more i talk it out, the more i realize all this advice is basically identical to the advice adults were giving me in the early 2000s.

which really does cement for me that the crisis AI is causing in education isn't new and did not come from nowhere. before chatgpt, students were hiring freelancers on fiverr. i already mentioned cliffs notes. i never used any of these in college, but i'll also freely admit that i rarely did all my assigned reading. i was the "always raises her hand" bitch, and every once in a while i'd get other students who were always dead silent in class asking me how i found the time to get the reading done. i'd tell them, i don't. i read the beginning, i read the ending, and then i skim the middle. whenever a word or phrase jumps out at me, i make a note of it. that way, when the professor asks a question in class, i have exactly enough specific pieces of information at hand to give the impression of having done the reading. and then i told them that i learned how to do this from the very same professor that was teaching that class. the thing is, it's not like i learned nothing from this process. i retained quite a lot of information from those readings! this is, broadly, a skill that emerges from years of writing and reading essays. but then you take a step back and remember that for most college students (who are not pursuing any kind of arts degree), this skillset is relevant to an astonishingly minimal proportion of their overall course load. college as it exists right now is treated as a jobs training program, within which "the essay" is a relic of an outdated institution that highly valued a generalist liberal education where today absolute specialization seems more the norm. so AI comes in as the coup de gras to that old institution. artists like myself may not have the constitution for the kind of work that colleges now exist to funnel you into, but those folks who've never put a day's thought into the work of making art can now have a computer generate something at least as good at a glance as basically anything i could make. as far as the market is concerned, that's all that matters. the contents of an artwork, what it means to its creator, the historic currents it emerges out of, these are all technicalities that the broad public has been well trained not to give a shit about most of the time. what matters is the commodity and the economic activity it exists to generate.

but i think at the end of the day, folks largely want to pay for art made by human beings. that it's so hard for a human being to make a living creating and selling art is a question far older than AI, and whose answer hasn't changed. pay workers more. drastically lower rents. build more affordable housing. make healthcare free. make education free. massively expand public transit. it is simply impossible to overstate how much these things alone would change the conversation about AI, because it would change the conversation about everything. SO MUCH of the dominance of capital in our lives comes down to our reliance on cars for transit (time to get a loan and pay for insurance), our reliance on jobs for health insurance (can't quit for moral reasons if it's paying for your insulin), etc etc etc. many of AI's uses are borne out of economic precarity and a ruling class desperate to vacuum up every loose penny they can find. all those billionaires running around making awful choices for the rest of us? they stole those billions. that is where our security went. that is why everything is falling apart, because the only option remaining to *every* institutional element of society is to go all-in on the profit motive. tax these motherfuckers and re-institute public arts funding. hey, did you know the us government used to give out grants to artists? did you know we used to have public broadcast networks where you could make programs that were shown to your local community? why the hell aren't there public youtube clones? why aren't there public transit apps? why aren't we CONSTANTLY talking about nationalizing these abusive fucking industries that are falling over themselves to integrate AI because their entire modus operandi is increasing profits regardless of product quality?

these are the questions i ask myself when i think about solutions to the AI problem. tech needs to be regulated, the monopolies need breaking up, but that's not enough. AI is a symptom of a much deeper illness whose treatment requires systemic solutions. and while i'm frustrated when i see people rely on AI for their work, or otherwise denigrate artists who feel AI has devalued their field, on some level i can't blame them. they are only doing what they've been told to do. all of which merely strengthens my belief in the necessity of an equitable socialist future (itself barely step zero in the long path towards a communist future, and even that would only be a few steps on the even longer path to a properly anarchist future). improve the material conditions and you weaken the dominance of capitalist realism, however minutely. and while there are plenty of reasons to despair at the likelihood of such a future given a second trump presidency, i always try to remember that socialist policies are very popular and a *lot* of that popularity emerged during the first trump administration. the only wrong answer here is to assume that losing an election is the same thing as losing a war, that our inability to put the genie back in its bottle means we can't see our own wishes granted.

i dunno if i answered your question but i sure did say a lot of stuff, didn't i?

#sarahposts #ai #ai art #chatgpt #llm #genai #capitalism #unions #labor #workers rights #capitalist realism #longpost

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iww-gnv · 1 year ago

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The New York Film and Television Union Coalition is praising a pair of identical bills pending in New York State that would “prohibit applicants to the Empire State film production credit from using artificial intelligence that would displace any natural person in their productions.” The coalition is made up of SAG-AGTRA, the WGA East, the Directors Guild of America, the Cinematographers Guild (IATSE Local 600), the Editors Guild (IATSE Local 700), United Scenic Artists (IATSE Local 829), IATSE Local 52, and Teamsters Local 817. The use of artificial intelligence in the production of film and TV shows is a key strike issue for both the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA, which have been on strike since May 2 and July 14, respectively. The DGA’s new contract, which was ratified in June, contains guardrails on its use, and IATSE, which will begin contract negotiations next year, has said that artificial intelligence “threatens to fundamentally alter employers’ business models and disrupt IATSE members’ livelihoods.”

[Read the rest]

#news #us news #new york news #sag aftra #sag-aftra #sag aftra strike #wga #wga strong #do the write thing #pay the writers #pay the actors #dga #iatse

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spockvarietyhour · 9 months ago

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#Fallout #Fallout Prime #Fallout TV

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owsalfa · 1 month ago

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I am doing a project on Watership Down, and I have been watching my way through all the adaptations. I started watching the 1999-2001 tv series, and I was very surprised when I got to season 3 as it is so dramatically different. So, why all the changes? Why were things changed but certain things weren't (eg art style, actors etc)? I can't find much online, and as the head of the WD archive project I was wondering if you may know anything more. Thank you!

Hmmm, I'm not really sure why, we can only guess.

The basic wikipedia page for the show says that the show was funded by "the Canadian Television Fund, the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit and the Ontario Film and Television Tax Credit from the Government of Ontario" but the sourced page doesn't say that? It may of changed over time, as its hosted on the wayback machine and theres only one page capture for it.

Maybe they commissioned a new series for their tv channels? ALLTime and Nepenthe did the animation for season 1 and 2, its not clear if they did season 3 or got another studio for it. So a whole studio change could be why the animation style is different. Seasons 1 and 2 had a lot of celebrity voice actors, and those are expensive, so it seems reasonable to assume they were dropped and replaced with cheaper/ other actors.

But we just don't know for sure! It would be so nice if someone who worked on the show would pop up online someday...

#watership down #ask #anon #the series

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tenebrare · 2 years ago

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Hellraiser - "Future Brain" (Kirsty and Elliot)

Sometimes two artists do get similar ideas at same time. Then the "dibs" go to the one, who posted it 1st. @angelqueen13art beat me to it, but said I should finish mine and post this anyway. Here goes. I am not as classy nor cute as angelqueen13art was though. Originally had Elly with all his pins and all, but changed my mind later on. However I have some serious questions about their relationship, like : In mornings, when Elly is shaving, does he like go like "pins on" like some super heroes say, "flames on" before he goes to work ? When they do renovations in their new home, do they need to buy the nails or are those free ? Do they use Lament Configuration as disco ball/lighting during house parties ? How much does it cost to fix the walls, when Elly accidentally uses chains indoors ? Does he like need to feed the chains like dogs and does he keep them in backyard ? When Elly gets drunk does he mistarget the chains... indoors... again? How do Spencers fill their tax forms ? Also does Elly work 9 to 5 or 5 to 9 ? Or is he on call like some sort of taxi from hell ? Does Kirsty pay the rent/bank loan since Ellys pay might be irregular depending from incoming calls ? Also very important - would Elly bring work home? Would there be dispute between the two about Elly bringing work home again? Does he use hell-"magic" at home to switch TV channels to annoy Kirsty, when she has the remote? So many questions, so little answers. However I know what car he drives to go to work - Range Rover! ----- While in my coming doodle project Kirsty appears only on film-references and "memory sequences", wanted to use her in a 'mood doodle' instead the original character I have in my story. "Future Brain" ... is a reference to a remix of song which would run on end credits if I'd make a Hellraiser film.

Also stole all the # tags from Angelqueen's work. :P Sorry (not sorry) . Hope you all have a nice week-end.

#hellraiser #pinsty #ellsty #pinhead #kirsty cotton #elliot spencer #horror #horror art #myart #hr sketch

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deadlinecom · 6 months ago

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news-buzz · 2 months ago

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Gov. Gavin Newsom to Seek to Bolster California Film Industry News Buzz

Gov. Gavin Newsom is set to announce a proposal on Sunday to bolster the struggling TV and film industry in California, his office said in a statement. Newsom is due to appear at a studio lot in Los Angeles to make the announcement, along with leaders from the entertainment industry and labor unions. California provides $330 million per year in tax credits to the industry, but that incentive…

#California Film and TV Tax Credit #Gavin Newsom

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rebeccalouisaferguson · 9 months ago

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SACRAMENTO – The California Film Commission today announced the addition of five big-budget projects and ten independent films into the state’s Film and TV Tax Credit Program 4.0. These fifteen productions, spanning a diverse range of budgets and narratives, are projected to bring close to $408 million into California’s economy through qualified in-state expenditures and will also generate a boost for local economies with an estimated 2,252 crew, 598 cast, and 16,800 background performers poised to work across a combined 579 filming days...

Other notable, non-independent recipients include “Untitled Disney Live Action,” “Untitled 20th Film,” and two Amazon MGM Studios projects “The Accountant 2” and “Mercy.”

“We are thrilled to be able to shoot in Los Angeles thanks to the tax credit,” said Academy Award nominated producer Charles Roven. “We get to work with terrific talent that lives here and utilize the wonderful locations. And almost everyone gets to go home to their own bed at the end of day!” Roven is set to produce the sci-fi film “Mercy” starring Chris Pratt.

#rebecca ferguson #chris pratt #annabelle wallis #kali reis #mercy #film

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polijakefim · 2 years ago

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Outside Magazine, November 2016 | Travis fimmel, Vikings actors, Happy play

Travis Fimmel’s Minimalist Broasis

Vikings star Travis Fimmel has exactly three possessions: his trailer, his pickup truck, and his horse

I’d been told to meet the Australian actor Travis Fimmel, best known for his role as Norse warrior Ragnar Lothbrok in the History channel’s Vikings series, at his ranch outside Los Angeles. Given the popularity of the show—four seasons, an Amazon Prime release, and season five in the works—I had assumed that Fimmel’s pad would be some secluded midcentury hideout with a well-stocked kitchen and a gym worthy of a broadsword slinger who’d also recently anchored a Warcraft film adaptation that made nearly half a billion dollars worldwide

But the address led to a dusty outdoor riding arena just off the highway, where Fimmel, barefoot in a pair of camo cargo shorts and a surf tee, greeted me from the back of his 15-year-old chestnut quarter horse, Wanker.

“I’m just getting him warmed up so he doesn’t buck you off,” says Fimmel, who is 37 and was raised on a dairy farm in Echuca, Australia. He grew up working in his family’s cherry orchards, camping and fishing with his two older brothers, and surfing behind dirt bikes in irrigation canals. He came to L.A. when he was 21, after being scouted by a modeling agency and dropping out of architecture school. Almost immediately, he was stopping traffic on billboards modeling Calvin Klein underwear

"Among a generation who’ve shunned material possessions, Fimmel has achieved an advanced state of stoic minimalism."

Still mounted, Fimmel led me in my rental car up to his broasis, which, it quickly became clear, was actually a dilapidated 18-foot beige and white Nomad travel trailer parked permanently in the shade of a pepper tree between a water tank and the tack shed.

“Got it real cheap, over in Phelan,” says Fimmel. “Towing it back, the side panels were flapping, and the back door fell off.” The ranch belongs to longtime stunt coordinator Walter Scott. Fimmel showed up in 2010 looking for riding lessons ahead of a big-screen remake of the 1960s TV show Big Valley. Most of the work around his family’s farm was performed on ATVs, so he was a novice horseman.

“Just ask me about when I first met him,” says Scott. “He says he knew about horses—everything he learned right here, on that horse. Roping and everything. Him and another guy came. He never left.”

The film went down in flames after the director was convicted of committing tax-credit fraud on a previous project, but Fimmel stuck around the stable and now squats there when he’s not traveling. “Out here it’s just good people. No industry,” Fimmel explains. “Just the stunt boys.”

Among a generation who’ve shunned material possessions as barriers to life experience, Fimmel has achieved an advanced state of stoic minimalism. According to him, his only worldly possessions are Wanker, the Craigslist trailer (which now has air-conditioning), and a red 1982 GMC stepside pickup with a ’73 bed (which does not). Before the trailer, he lived in an old Ford Econoline with a pop-up bed.

“It got taken off me,” he says. “It wasn’t road worthy.” Unlike the cool kids who gussy up Sprinter vans and Westfalias, Fimmel only recently upgraded from a flip phone to an iPhone 4, does no social media, and rarely checks his e-mail. “I’m always getting texts asking why I’m not responding on Instagram or Facebook, and I’m like, ‘It’s not me. You’re writing to some stranger.’ ”

Fimmel helped me into the saddle, and we headed out for a hack on a trail behind the property, him riding Scott’s horse Josey. It was hot, and Wanker wanted to stop in the shade. Fimmel’s ultimate goal is to save as much money as he can and end up back in Australia on a nice spread—“with three or four wives,” he jokes, though at the moment he says of the opposite sex, “They all hate me, although it’s not for lack of trying. When you do a lot of traveling, it’s hard.”

He eats what he wants, works out only when he’s forced to, and does his drinking at the local VFW hall. But for a guy who regrets his modeling days and says he wasn’t looking to get into acting—“Still not looking to, mate”—he’s stripped away everything else. If he could, he’d spend three months studying for each of his parts. “You get sucked into it, trying to be good at it,” he says. “I wish you could make money and people never saw what you did. Then you could relax and not care about how bad you are.”

It’s the proper amount of self-hatred for an action hero who’s actually good at his craft—more Viggo Mortensen than Chris Hemsworth. He starts shooting a blockbuster bank-heist film, Finding Steve McQueen, in September, starring alongside Kate Bosworth and Forest Whitaker.

Fimmel is extraordinarily soft-spoken—introverted, even—for a guy at risk of being typecast as a barbarian. At an interview with three of his Vikings castmates at Comic-Con in July, Fimmel managed to get through the entire Q&A saying exactly zero words. But he’s only now being tested in parts with more range, like his supporting role as a bearded-hipster pickle entrepreneur in the 2016 romantic comedy Maggie’s Plan and a loving, alcoholic father in an adaptation of the horse-racing novel Lean on Pete that was shot in Oregon and wrapped this summer. On that project, he ducked out for a few days to reel in his first steelhead with a friend at the mouth of the Chehalis River.

It was nearly 100 degrees on the trail. The Blue Cut Fire had just broken out in San Bernardino, and disaster-relief crews were a constant presence on the highway. Each of the past three summers, Fimmel has escaped this kind of heat, shooting Vikings in the cold mists of Ireland. The Ragnar role even landed him an endorsement deal as the face of high-end down-jacket company Canada Goose, which photographed him earlier this year among the icebergs of Newfoundland.

Here, though, it was just really hot. We put the horses up, Fimmel hosed Wanker down, and we went for a Bud Light at the VFW. If any of the vets and bikers recognized him, they didn’t show it. This time next year, it may not be so easy.

Lead Photo: Jeff Lipsky

#polijake_fim #travis fimmel #ragnarlothbrok #ragnar lothbrok

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lingyunxiang · 1 year ago

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California State Senator Ben Allen represents the 24th Senate District, covering the Westside, Hollywood, South Bay, and Santa Monica Mountains communities of Los Angeles County. Ben was first elected in 2014 and is now serving his third and final term in the State Senate.

Ben chairs the Senate's Environmental Quality Committee and co-chairs the Legislature's Environmental Caucus, is a member of the Legislative Jewish Caucus, chairs the Legislature's Joint Committee on the Arts, and the Senate Select Committee on Aerospace and Defense. He previously served as Chair of the Education Committee (2017-2019) and Chair of the Elections and Constitutional Amendments Committee (2015-2016).

Ben has thrown himself into the important work of state government, focusing on wise decision-making and pushing for reforms that address systemic inadequacies in our state. He has authored nearly 60 new laws in various areas, from environmental protection to electoral reform.

During his first two terms in the Senate, fighting the climate crisis and protecting our state's precious natural resources have been among Ben's top priorities. CalMatters recently recognized him as one of the Legislature's foremost leaders in the field of environmental protection. He authored SB 54, groundbreaking legislation to address plastic pollution, which Governor Newsom signed into law to international acclaim. The New York Times called SB 54 "the most sweeping restrictions on plastics in the nation" and suggested the legislation is "another route for curbing carbon emissions and trying to sidestep the worst consequences of global warming" after the Supreme Court gutted the federal government's power to regulate carbon emissions. As Chair of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee, Ben worked with his colleagues to pass a powerful climate package requiring the state to become carbon-neutral by 2045 and produce 90% of its electricity from clean sources by 2035, among other measures. A member of the Ocean Protection Council and Coastal Conservancy, he has led a successful effort to phase out a dangerous carcinogen in firefighting foam, crafted a compromise to phase out destructive trawling gear, and brokered a major compromise that lessened the environmental impact of off-highway vehicle use at state facilities. "If only Congress could work out such compromises," wrote the Sacramento Bee editorial board about the bill.

Among his efforts to reform California campaign finance and elections laws, Ben authored the landmark Voter's Choice Act of 2016 to implement more flexibility in how and where to vote, creating the vote center model used in the 2020 elections, which resulted in significantly increased voter turnout. Ben also has been a leader for campaign transparency, and was a leader in passing the Disclose Act and Petition Disclose Act and other transparency measures that have dramatically improved the disclosure of donors to political causes for the public. The California Clean Money Campaign has routinely ranked him top in the Legislature for his commitment to clean money political reform.

An advocate for the Golden State's continued leadership in arts and entertainment, Ben is a member of the California Film Commission. He was part of a legislative effort to extend the Film & TV Tax Credit Program to further support and invest in California’s unrivaled film industry. Ben also authored the law that reinstated teaching credentials for theatre and dance educators, and he continues to fight for expanded access to the arts in schools and underserved communities. Ben has been a champion for science and was a joint author of the state's groundbreaking law that increased vaccination rates among school children.

Prior to his election to the Senate, Ben served as President of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Board of Education, lecturer at UCLA Law School, and worked as an attorney at the law firms of Bryan Cave LLP and Richardson & Patel and at the nonprofit Spark Program. While at law school, Ben served as the voting student member of the University of California Board of Regents and was a summer judicial clerk with the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Prior to law school, Ben worked in Washington DC for the Latin American team of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), and then as Communications Director for Congressman Jose Serrano (D-NY).

Ben grew up in the 24th Senate District and attended public schools, graduating from Santa Monica High School in 1996. His father, Michael, spent his career on the English Department faculty at UCLA and mother, Elena, was a public school teacher and artist who served as Chair of the Santa Monica Arts Commission. Ben has a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in History from Harvard University; a Master's degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge; and a Juris Doctor degree from UC Berkeley. Fluent in Spanish, Ben is a Senior Fellow with the international human rights organization Humanity in Action, an Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellow, a Truman National Security Project Fellow, and a graduate of the Jewish Federation's New Leaders Project. He and his wife Melanie, an attorney, have a little son, Ezra.

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