#also I know we’re allowed to engage with movies as a viewers but the strike has me kinda sour on new stuff

[cloama]

I want to talk about Barbie (2023) but not really in conversation with anyone so I think it’ll be a trickle of thoughts about my theatre experience.

For instance, while the theatre was packed with mothers and daughters, I was seated next to a tween boy who was not excited for the movie. He damn near passed out laughing during several scenes. He didn’t finish any of his snacks. He didn’t go to the bathroom.

None of the children in the theater went to the bathroom, which you’ll know if the true testament of a a movie’s success. Nobody moved, honey.

The monologue has been critiqued as baby’s first feminism but I don’t know what y’all wanted from a megacorp. I’m still surprised it even got in there. One of the moms in the theater stood the up and clapped bc apparently she needed some of that second wave feminism. Everyone’s politics isn’t where yours is. It always starts somewhere. Again do not know why people are complaining. This is nothing compared to Marvel’s not infamous girl power moment where they all just stood there. Also the speech while very Plan but heartfelt, coming from America Ferrara just carries a couple extra layers for me personally as she was one of the first actresses of my generation who was a chubby teen girl who was allowed to be a real person.

Also it’s not just the monologue. It’s wishing it was as easy as pulling your fellow people into the back of the van and reprogramming them with facts. In a world where facts literally don’t matter anymore, it felt like science fiction. I don’t know y’all, I just got a lot out of that script. Like if your gonna do a giant advertisement movie, this is about as good as it gets. And it didn’t feel icky like a dove ad. Similar to the mist recent Dungeons and Dragons, it felt like playing.

The Ken stuff was fun but we have to discuss the MASTERFUL use of Matchbox 20’s Push, which is about the rare disempowered man who wishes to get a leg up on his female partner who appears to be emotionally hurting him in their relationship. I need time. Bc Greta? Noah? They were crazy for that one. Absolutely mad. Ken comparing his struggle with Barbie’s boundaries to a man whose actually being hurt bc Ken is a doll and that’s about as far as his understanding goes [see: horses]. Reader, I died laughing. I think I was the only one in the theater that this bit really worked for. It was a stroke of genius and seems to be going unnoticed.

The acafans have been surprisingly quiet about this movie, all the merch and the orchestrated resurgence of Barbie. Make no mistake, this is fandom. Star Wars fans were allowed to buy their books, dolls, and bumper stickers in peace but the idea that a movie will make some people want to buy a 20 dollar doll or some pink pants is stressing people out. Would love everyone to step back and breathe. They’re always going to try to sell us something. They’re selling us something most of y’all have been buying.

I think I am less bothered by the capitalistic effects because for once I didn’t totally hate the experience of being sold something. Probably because I’m not buying anything and while I live a pink life, I’m not actually a Barbie girl. What I am is an early educator and dolls, dramatic play are a huge part of development.

What I also am, apparently, is a Barbie movie script defender because above all else, that script was tight as fresh box braids. A hilarious straight forward comedy. It should be a celebration of putting money behind talent but it’s a reminder of why writers need to be fairly compensated. This movie marks the end of summer, representing so many things. It’s complicated. Pink and complicated.

[rantshemlock]

It: Chapter 2

It: Chapter 2 is an almost three hour movie in which just about nothing of value happens

this review contains implied spoilers for the movie! if that bothers you, don’t read ahead.

It (2017) had some incredible setpieces with brilliant monster designs and fantastic practical effects, bolstered by a couple of excellent performances from the show-stealing Finn Wolfhard and Jack Dylan Grazer, along with an outstanding performance by Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise. this, and the simplicity of the plot, make up for the fact that the character writing was often shallow and the dialogue laden with exposition.

It: Chapter 2 has almost all of those qualities, but also one major flaw: it's a bad movie.

there’s a lot to unpack when it comes to why exactly It 2 is such an extreme drop in quality to the first movie; the biggest is the story, which is a mish-mash of new footage of the child actors and the characters as adults, and is probably the biggest pisstake in film history in terms how much of an extreme waste of time it is. for a film to so thoroughly enforce the idea that the characters’ actions are pointless and serve nothing is unbelievable. as a movie that should be a triumphant ending to the saga, we’re given what is explicitly told to us to be pointless.

It 2′s sin is that it doesn’t build up to anything. not storybeats, not relationships, often not even scares. things are laughably obviously telegraphed, even more so than It 2017′s often heavy-handed exposition. the movie wants us to care about the characters because of their past together, but rather than building off the first film’s two hours of story it instead patches in new settings and scenes that no viewer has any attachment to.

“remember the club house? you love the club house!” the film says, showing us to a set we’ve never seen before and have no reason to care about other than it dictates we have to now care about it. the first movie was incredibly well received and is now beloved, it has more than enough emotional moments to build off of, but the film rejects all that in favour of bringing up new ideas, new concepts that hardly get built upon. it demands you care, but doesn’t earn that compassion or attention.

unresolved issues is the name of the game in this movie; characters are constantly shown to have problems, huge, serious problems. Beverly is being abused by her husband, something we’re shown in overly graphic detail. Mike is suffering from untold trauma from standing vigil over Derry for years. Bill is fucking up his movie and his relationship with his wife. Richie is living a lie, deep within the closet. what’s most egregious is not just that these issues don’t get resolved, but that they never get addressed.

we are meant to believe that these characters care about each other, care deeply, have a connection that would drive them to die for each other, but no one notices that Bev is covered with bruises and is desperately avoiding home. no one questions Mike’s erratic, terrified behaviour. Bill forgets his wife exists. as i watched the movie i found myself asking, if Ben loves Beverly so much, why can’t he see her pain?

in the first movie, the characters’ issues were deeply entrenched in their psyche, were part of what Pennywise used to manipulate and attack them. in this movie, they haven’t moved on from their childhood issues and their adult issues are merely tacked on, lip service to the idea that they have grown up but a refusal to actually spend time examining what their issues as adults are. all the characters are suffering in some way, but they never share these things. for all their love and trust, they never developed past their childhood and they never learned how to be adults. their arcs from the first movie are reset completely; their development in that film never happened. for how little that film ties into this one and how much this one wants to retell history with new content, it might as well not have existed at all.

if It: Chapter 2 lacks anything, it’s tact. it’s carelessly violent and shallow, throwing around horrifying concepts and spending no time to flesh them out. while the idea in the book that Pennywise’s presence leads to more violence, abuse and bigotry deserves criticism, this film manages to do an even worse job. what in the book might be questionable and in need of updating becomes uncomfortable and thoughtless in the movie. the gay hate crime at the film is one of the most prominent examples; always a horrifying thing to read in the movie it serves even less purpose, exposes even less about the town, adds nothing, means nothing. goes nowhere.

let’s talk about being gay. let’s talk about Richie.

here’s a fun fact; discounting Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (as painful as it is for me to say this, as someone who fucking adores that movie) It: Chapter 2 is the first horror movie in a big franchise to have a gay hero, unless there’s some information i really badly need to be updated on. making Richie gay was a good move, and i think Richie was the perfect character to pick for it. he’s by far one of the two most likeable characters in the film, the most memorable, gets the best moments and the best lines.

but the conclusion the film gives him, combined with the hate crime earlier in the movie, after he spends the entire film in the closet letting no one know he is suffering, is that he will never be happy. he can’t open up to anyone about what he’s feeling; he never tells any of the others, even Eddie, the character strongly implied to be the love of his life. while Ben and Beverly are given one of the best and most visually striking setpieces of the film to reunite in, there is no such moment for Eddie and Richie. there is no catharsis for either of them.

while making Richie gay was an excellent idea, to try and throw a bone to us starving gays to have someone to cling to, but the ending of the movie left me feeling completely hollow. i did not want my takeaway from his character to be that he is traumatised beyond the point of any healing.

the politics of gay representation in this movie are bad, and so is race.

Stephen King is a writer with a dirty reputation for his habit of using “native americans” as shorthand for something magic and not understandable, and this film manages to not only dig up the few traces of this from the book but also make it worse, turning the ritual of chud (something that the book implied only worked because the characters believed in it and had no tie to native americans) into the act of ignorant, misinformed indigenous people who get not a single line to explain or defend themselves but are only allowed to be set dressing to later be ridiculed and demonised.

Mike, the sole black character of the movie, is served horribly in this film. while in  the novel he was one of the most important characters, a thoughtful librarian and historian carefully gathering the history of Derry to research the truth of It’s influence, he was given no screen time in the first movie and in this one is the detested outsider of the group. he is pushed into the position of mentor and guide, rather than friend, and comes across almost like the old stereotype of the magical black character, someone who is only there to provide guidance to the white leads through insight he mysteriously and magically possesses. the film stripped away his position as historian and researcher from the first movie and now scrambles to make up for that, leaving him without the history and characterisation to allow us to understand who and why he is.

on top of this, despite the enormity of his sacrifice to stay in Derry and the clear mental strain it’s put him through -- Isaiah Mustafa gives Mike more depth and thought than anyone else did and brings in his performance layers of subtlety this film doesn’t deserve -- the other characters are mocking and derisive of his attempts, don’t trust him and accuse him repeatedly of lying to and betraying them. these moments go nowhere, also. he is always immediately ‘forgiven’ without any thought as to his own suffering or the continual selflessness of his actions. he’s the thoughtless punchbag to a film in which the character continually martyrs himself for the comfort of others.

he isn’t even given the dignity of being called the leader of the group, despite doing everything for them and coming up with every idea. for some reason, the leader is nominated as Bill, despite James McAvoy’s performance being lackluster to the point of fading into the background entirely and the character of Bill doing next to nothing in the film at all.

but again -- the characters in It are not allowed to care about each other’s pain and suffering outside of a few moments. they come with their mental turmoil and they are either completely cured of it or allowed to remain in it, unmentioned again.

there’s not a bad actor in this -- James Ransone is astonishingly good, pitch-perfectly recreating Jack Dylan Grazer’s every mannerism, Bill Hader is both funny and heart-rendering when needed, Isaiah Mustafa moves mountains to make the script give him some depth, and Bill Skarsgard is again incredible as Pennywise -- but there’s also not an actor who isn’t horribly, horribly maligned by the script. Jessica Chastain, an actress of tremendous power and presence, is given next to nothing to do or say. more thought and care is given to Stephen King’s cameo as a shop owner than the role of Henry Bowers.

the film has its moments. Richie and Eddie are a delight, and the monster design and practical effects are again top of the line. it’s just a painful shame that so much talent and craft, the skills of the incredible artists and designers, the hard work of the enthusiastic and engaged cast and the intricacy of the sets are wasted on a movie that has no direction, no idea where it’s going and no point to make about anything.

also, it’s pretty fucking galling for a movie to continually make jokes about how despised a writer’s endings are only for it to take the far better ending of the book and discard it for something so ridiculous it was a strain not to laugh in the theatre.

It: Chapter 2 has no reason to be as bad as it is, but all the goodwill in the world can’t save a story this fragile, this pointless, and that refuses to engage with any of the subject it brings up to this degree. It wants us to take it very seriously indeed, but there’s nothing here to latch onto; this movie is someone screaming ‘oh the horror’ in a beautiful room filled with set dressings that crumble to ash.

[bharatiyamedia-blog]

NTWRK strikes into dwell IRL occasions – TechCrunch

http://tinyurl.com/yxac967d NTWRK, is an enchanting experiment in dwell video purchasing for the iPhone set. It’s been described as a mix of QVC and Twitter and Twitch they usually simply received a brand new slice of cash from traders like Drake and Stay Nation to increase into bodily occasions. There’s been a bunch of makes an attempt at this sort of hybrid occasion buying expertise, however none of them have fairly hit a house run but. NTWRK was a fairly compelling expertise even at launch final yr. The core expertise is a dwell present introduced solely in NTWRK’s app, the place company can speak about merchandise which turn out to be out there within the app because the present airs. There was a inbuilt alternative to supply restricted availability streetwear and sneakers, and an viewers that founder Aaron Levant knew very effectively from his time operating ComplexCon and Agenda, two massive streetwear and advertising exhibits. One of many first exhibits starred Ben Baller and Jeff Staple, and featured a drop of a brand new colorway of Staple’s iconic Pigeon Dunk from Nike . I tuned in and located the expertise to be compelling in its personal method. The dwell present supplied context for the product and the interface allow you to buy in a pair faucets of a button (the sneakers bought out instantly and the app inevitably crashed from the push of hype beasts). The stream and app have gotten extra steady since then. For the reason that launch, NTWRK has experimented with varied product areas and promotions. The newest funding is enabling growth again into bodily occasions and a few new angles on the NTWRK mannequin. After getting kicked out of highschool in 10th grade, Levant (who had a ardour for graffiti) went on to work in graphic design, gross sales and advertising for an LA streetwear model. That led to commerce present attending and finally to Levant founding his personal present, Agenda in 2003. Agenda received larger over the following 10 years, changing into one of many greatest motion sports activities, streetwear and life-style tradeshows on the planet. He bought a majority of Agenda to ReeedPOP, which owns Comedian Con and stayed on in a improvement position. Finally, he developed different exhibits together with ComplexCon, a smash hit tradition and sneaker present in partnership with Complicated. Final yr, Levant left to discovered NTWRK. “That transition actually occurred by means of a dialog that I had with Jimmy Iovine in September of 2017,” Levant informed me in an interview final yr. “I received launched to him by a pal. He expressed his curiosity in a brand new firm for him and his son, and we had comparable pursuits and concepts round that. That evening that I met him, I went dwelling, stayed up all evening to 4:00 within the morning and wrote your complete marketing strategy for NTWRK.” Iovine ended up as an investor by way of the MSA Enterprises car, together with Warner Bros. Digital Networks, LeBron James, Maverick Carter and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jimmy’s son Jamie is a co-founder and Head of Fandom at NTWRK. Considered one of Levant’s massive takeaways from his time with ComplexCon and Agenda was that the bodily audiences have been worthwhile however a digital viewers is constructed to foster by means of earned media and user-generated content material round these life-style occasions. “There’s 50,00zero individuals within the room however I believe there’s in all probability 1,000,000 individuals on-line who need to interact with these merchandise and that content material,” mentioned Levant. “Possibly I felt somewhat bit like I used to be utilizing my ability set and I wasn’t extracting the total worth out of it as a result of I wasn’t within the e-com or digital media enterprise previously. I believe that was a key unlock for me, how do I do this higher with a part two of my profession?” The previous few months have seen a collection of excessive profile launches and collaborations with sneaker and streetwear individuals. And now, the Stay Nation and Drake tie up will result in artist-driven collections bought on NTWRK’s app, distinctive ticket entry, promo bundles developed by NTWKR and, sure, a brand new dwell occasion known as NTWRK Presents that can launch in This autumn. In current months, Drake bought a few of his tour merch solely on NTWRK. They’ve additionally been operating auctions for uncommon resell market objects like Supreme guitars and sneakers. The idea of buying as leisure is much from new. There’s a cause that the straightforward buzzphrase individuals connect to NTWRK is ‘QVC for millennials’. However there has but to be a platform that has managed to pin collectively the precise tradition with the precise supply mechanism on the proper time. NTWRK has an opportunity to do that I imagine as a result of Levant has the style for it, but additionally as a result of he’s backing into this from a spot of understanding in relation to tradition. Too many instances we see the expertise of the platform take middle stage — a intelligent supply mechanism or good design. However, essentially, most tech firms are completely crap at tradition. They’re too homogenic — they don’t enable for and encourage the affect of the areas that they’re catering to. Black Twitter made Twitter. Creators of colour made Vine. Asian and Indian customers dominate Whatsapp. However when there’s an try to interact even area of interest cultures in commerce or monetization the shortage of inclusivity and understanding causes them to simply screw up time and again. Having began with dwell occasions that existed primarily as a framework for tradition to create its personal moments, Levant and NTWRK are in a greater place to determine this out. For those who’ve ever been to an Agenda or ComplexCon what I imply. There’s this pungent melange of tradition, music, cash, uncommon items and ephemeral second creation taking place. The problem is to make that work in a digital context, after all, after which to kind of ‘re-export’ that again into occasion codecs. “I believe that, as I’ve mentioned numerous instances, bodily occasions have an enormous natural digital ripple, however we would have liked the digital platform to already be established and scalable earlier than we carried out the bodily occasions, to impact the bigger digital platform,” Levant says about transferring NTWRK into an IRL context. “In my earlier roles, I spent 15 years actually specializing in the bodily experiential occasions and in direction of the tip of my profession doing that I got here to the belief I used to be doing it backwards.” I don’t essentially suppose that this mannequin’s going to work for everyone. I believe Levant and co have a novel ability of bringing individuals collectively and I believe the movie star factor is a robust total angle – proper right down to the traders. “Clearly Drake is an icon that has huge affect over all of popular culture and I believe there are few individuals in that class of him that may seize client’s creativeness,” says Levant. “I couldn’t consider somebody higher than him to be concerned with our firm.” There are different angles too, although, that also have the identical factor on the core. NTWRK is creating this engaged viewers they usually’re giving them worth after which providing them a really on-the-face, trustworthy transaction: “Look, right here’s this factor. For those who purchase it, we profit. Thanks, peace.” That type of interplay mannequin is overseas to media due to this concept that promoting is the one acquire and the one strategy to construct that financial relationship. I believe persons are going to begin to get smart to that however they nonetheless are very resistant. “We have been on the market, speaking to each model and each company on the planet and it’s actually fascinating to observe who will get it and who’s completely confused,” mentioned Levant after we spoke concerning the launch. “It’s actually enjoyable to have these conversations as a result of persons are identical to, ‘Wait, what are you doing?’ They’ve a extremely exhausting time greedy it they usually don’t know who we should always discuss to. Ought to we be speaking to the media shopping for group? Ought to we be speaking to the wholesale group? Ought to we discuss to the PR group? I’m like, ‘No, we’re speaking to everyone.”” “Firms are likely to divide their enterprise up into these silos, these enterprise models and these inner classes they usually normally don’t collaborate and play effectively collectively and while you get these massive, international organizations, their head’s spinning as a result of they don’t know who we should always discuss to as a result of nobody’s performed this one-to-one but.” Proper now as I write this I’m watching Bobby Lots of discuss dwell about his memoir That is Not A T-Shirt — whereas promoting a bundle that features the e-book and, sure, a t-shirt. Lots of (Bobby Kim), built a streetwear brand when it was positively not a factor to construct a streetwear model. The bundle runs $50. I’m serious about shopping for it. Source link

[theconservativebrief]

Since Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws first ushered in the era of the summer blockbuster 41 years ago, sharks have been among summer cinema’s favorite perennial villains. They rank right up there with the alien from Alien and Sadako from The Ring in terms of habitually recurring evil forces with a single-minded purpose: to destroy everything in their path.

There’s something so elemental and irresistible about the shark movie that over the course of the past few decades, it has become one of Hollywood’s most well-trodden paths to terror. The genre now spans a wide range of films, from classics like Jaws and Deep Blue Sea (yes, Deep Blue Sea is a classic) to serious indie projects like The Reef to sillier D-movie affairs like the Sharknado, Mega Shark, and Shark Attack franchises. And if you’re among its many fans, you know that the only thing that can cure shark movie fever is more shark movies.

A friendly shark chomp from The Last Shark (1981).

Lucky for you, there’s always another shark movie on the way. The genre’s newest man-eating — or in this case, Jason Statham-eating — entry swims into movie theaters this weekend, with the opening of the tongue-in-cheek mega-shark movie The Meg — just days before the sixth and final installment in the Sharknado franchise arrives with Sharknado 6: It’s About Time.

The poster for Shark Exorcist (2015), in which a Satan-worshiping nun summons a demon to inhabit the body of a great white.

But why sharks? Ordinarily, the prospect of watching Statham try to survive an oceanic disaster scenario would be only a so-so draw for moviegoers. But if you throw in a battle to the death against a giant megalodon — the huge prehistoric shark which has, in recent years, outsized the great white shark in terms of appeal — then obviously, we’re hooked.

In real life, sharks are mainly non-aggressive creatures who barely resemble the evil killing machines they morph into onscreen. They’re anything but an unstoppable force — humans kill a staggering 100 million sharks each year, or 11,000 sharks every single hour, a jaw-dropping statistic that mainly results from the high demand for shark fin soup in some parts of the world. You’re statistically more likely to die from a lightning strike or a toppling vending machine than from a shark attack.

So why are we so fascinated by shark movies, even though they barely represent reality and their plots tend to be incredibly repetitive?

Oh, there are so many reasons.

This scene from Shark Attack 3: Megalodon (2002) has become an internet-meme mainstay.

You may believe sharks are limited to the sea, but you are wrong.

Thanks to the magic of cinema and the relative ease with which a shark fin can be CGI’d to pop out of something and move ominously toward the viewer, we don’t just have sea sharks. We also have sand sharks. Avalanche sharks. Sharks in a sharknado! Sharks in a sharkcano. (That one really happened.) Sharks in a blizzardnado! Sharks on land! Sharks in shark lake. Sharks in swamps. Sharks in the bayou. Sharks in apartments! Sharks at Sea World! Sharks on the Jersey Shore. Sharks at the Golden Gate Bridge! Sharks at the supermarket! Sharks in Japan. Sharks in bathtubs and puddles. Even sharks in the sky.

Just your routine apartment shark, as seen in My Super-Ex Girlfriend (2006).

Megalodon takes out the Golden Gate Bridge in Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009). A shark takes to the skies in Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

Much like the 2006 Samuel L. Jackson film Snakes on a Plane relied on the surprise factor of slithering reptiles wreaking havoc at 30,000 feet, a crucial component of shark movies is sharks’ seemingly inherent knack for appearing where and when you least expect them: Just where are the sharks going to be lurking today?

Spoiler alert: They are everywhere.

If you don’t think your average shark is a super genius hell-bent on avenging the atrocities perpetuated against its species by the human race, you’ve never watched Jaws 3-D (mama shark seeks revenge against SeaWorld for killing her baby), Jaws 4: The Revenge (shark seeks revenge against Lorraine Gary’s character Ellen Brody, ostensibly for killing its shark family but more broadly for the sad and rapid demise of the entire Jaws franchise), Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus (shark seeks revenge on Jaleel White for Jaleel White’s entire acting career), or Deep Blue Sea (shark seeks revenge against scientists for experimenting on it).

To wit: Please enjoy the following GIF from Deep Blue Sea, in which a shark holds a stretcher-bound Stellan Skarsgård captive underwater so that it can throw him against an underwater window in order to spite his grieving girlfriend:

Deep Blue Sea (1999). Yep. That happened.

I mean, come on, who among us hasn’t wanted to throw Stellan Skarsgård against a window? Bring on the shark uprising!

The shark can do what no other villainous horror movie creature really can: In addition to engaging in epic bite-offs against other creatures, it can combine with those other creatures to create animalia supervillains. Sure, Hollywood will invent a demonic vampire here and there, but you can’t really give a demonic vampire tentacles. That’s simply not the case with a shark. In the world of shark movies, if you create an undead demon sharktopus, that’s just the first act.

Would you like your shark with one head or two? How about three? Would you like an actual prehistoric mega shark? How about a giant robot shark?

Spidey-shark concept illustration by Calene Luczo

Few, if any, animals have enjoyed such creative big-screen depictions as the noble shark. There are demonic sharks! Sharks with tentacles! Zombie sharks! This shark-horse! Ghost sharks! A shark that walks on land! And coming later in 2017, there will be flying sharks controlled by Nazi zombies!

In other words, if part of the fun of any shark movie is rooted in the nervous anticipation of where and when a dangerous shark might appear, a significant number of shark movies up the ante by combining their shark threats with other things. Not only does this approach allow the sharks to travel farther and kill harder, it ensures an endless supply of shark movies, because Hollywood will never run out of shark-based combination hazards. Killer koala shark from Down Under? Done.

Shark movies can be as minimalist or as full-scale as you want or need them to be.

As Blake Lively illustrated in 2016’s The Shallows, shark movies can be a one-woman-versus-one-shark show where the shark is a threatening but largely implied presence. They can involve just two people facing off against a small but deadly herd of sharks (47 Meters Down, Open Water), a tiny ensemble of stranded swimmers trying to avoid getting picked off one by one (The Reef), or a full-scale cast with big-budget shark action like Shark Night 3-D or Dark Tide.

The giant shark from last year’s The Shallows wasn’t even huge by shark movie comparisons. Javier Zarracina

And one of the best things about shark films, regardless of their scope, is that shark size has no correlation to shark excellence — as anyone who actually saw Shark Night 3-D or Dark Tide can attest. The bigger shark doesn’t always have the better bite. In fact, films like Open Water and The Reef can succeed without showing any sharks at all. Believing they’re there is all that matters.

On the other end of the spectrum, the first appearance of a shark — it’s always bigger than you were expecting, no matter the film — never gets old:

Jaws (1975).

This is a pretty obvious reason, but it remains the most compelling of all. Stories pitting man against the terrors of the deep have always been a mainstay of human folklore, from the biblical fable of Jonah and the whale to nautical tales of the great kraken, from Moby Dick to The Old Man and the Sea to Lovecraft’s tentacle monster Cthulhu to Disney’s Pinocchio.

Super Shark (2011).

Each of these narratives involves great sea creatures that provide opportunities for heroes to face their fears, come to terms with their humanity, and, you know, be manly men who fish and hunt and conquer the wilderness.

But as formidable opponents, many of these sea creatures lack a significant, shall we say, bite. Giant squid generally stay too far below the surface to really pose a viable threat to humans. Even a big swordfish is no match for a skilled modern fisherman — and the swordfish wouldn’t want to eat you anyway. As for whales, the bigger they are, the more peaceful and harmless they seem to be. Even the ones with teeth are passive and don’t really want to hurt you (unless they’ve been subjected to lifelong animal cruelty).

Sharks, by contrast, are big. They have teeth — sometimes really big, really sharp teeth! They come into the shallow parts of the ocean where humans like to swim and play. Because they are drawn to loud noises and activity in the water, it’s possible, if not probable, that they could be lurking in the water where your loved ones are splashing around. They’re durable and intimidating, and even though in real life sharks are almost never aggressive toward humans, the biggest ones have the power and the potential to chomp you in two.

The Last Shark.

In sum: Like all man-versus-nature tropes, man-versus-shark movies — and man-versus-sharks-versus-other-creatures movies — can reveal important truths about human nature and serve as fascinating, in-depth character studies. Unlike most other man-versus-nature tropes, they do it with a side of terrifying, razor-sharp teeth.

Sharks combine mankind’s desire to conquer nature with its fear of and fascination with the mysteries of the ocean. Even in this modern age, when we’ve been able to plumb the depths of the seas, we still know surprisingly little about sharks. Jaws’ famous description of a shark’s “cold, dead eyes, like a doll’s eyes” in the film’s USS Indianapolis monologue (which was based on the real sinking of a US World War II Navy ship and subsequent shark attacks on its sailors) is still a testament to how unknowable they are.

In essence, in fiction if not in real life, sharks are the perfect scary force of nature: an ever-present threat waiting to happen, in a deep blue setting that humans are still learning to navigate.

But when all is said and done? As with all great horror movie villains, ultimately we’re always rooting for the shark.

Original Source -> Why we love shark movies

via The Conservative Brief

[cryptoga-blog]

7 Tokens Investors Are Talking About

http://www.cryptoga.com/news/7-tokens-investors-are-talking-about/

7 Tokens Investors Are Talking About

Disclaimer: This post need to not be taken as, and is not meant to present, financial commitment tips.

What separates a true-offer token from a rip-off?

A new wave of tech lovers is asking that query as tokens rack up massive gains and consider in excess of current market discussions. And it’s undoubtedly not just one with an simple reply – even for extended-time current market observers.

That mentioned, massive-title traders are trying to make feeling of the current market, wanting to separate the wheat from the chaff to discover assignments they can fund that can supply true-world worth.

Amidst this sea adjust in the crypto place, CoinDesk spoke to Raise VC, Compound VC and Pantera Capital to get a sense for what tokens they’re investing in, or at least, organizing to.

To get started, for several traders in the place, like Compound’s Joshua Nussbaum, decentralizing traditionally centralized devices has big charm.

Nussbaum told CoinDesk:

“Offered the nascency of blockchain technology right now, I am most enthusiastic about assignments resolving open complications impeding self-sovereign decentralized purposes.”

In truth, just one detail that separates “serious” assignments is their aim of performing as fundamental infrastructure that other apps will be built on (what Union Sq. Ventures has referred to as “unwanted fat protocols”).

But though all of the assignments below have piqued the curiosity of large-profile traders, it’s vital to take note the fruits of their labor and the cash raised in ICOs could nonetheless be a extended way off.

Brayton Williams of Raise VC mentioned:

“Decentralizing the web will deliver a significant increase in decentralized apps, but we are yrs and yrs away from the fundamental infrastructure remaining completely ready.”

The subsequent assignments ended up each individual introduced up various times in conversations (outlined in rough order of ICO launch):

Quantstamp – “The protocol for securing smart contracts”

For all cryptocurrency’s guarantee, traders have observed thousands and thousands of pounds shed and jeopardized by coding problems.

As these, the business has named for reform, and it would seem some of that may arrive in the sort of an additional cryptocurrency token, Quantstamp, using on a protocol for enabling the automation of protection audits on smart contracts.

In shorter, the crew is making a established of code that can verify smart contracts (the number of smart contracts on ethereum went into the thousands and thousands this year), and that makes it possible for builders to farm out auditing to a crew of hackers and verifiers on the network who will be rewarded for getting bugs.

Quantstamp CEO Richard Mar told CoinDesk:

“I was a really early trader in ethereum, since I am a programmer, and the thought of a programmable forex really appealed to me, and I actually invested all my ether into the DAO in 2016. For a interval, I actually shed all my ether though they ended up debating what to do about it, so that was really the beginning of Quantstamp.”

Mar ongoing, indicating with the venture “we are really supporting other assignments.”

Quantstamp’s token sale launched Nov. 17 and will operate by way of Dec. 16, until it hits its $30 million cap on investments faster.

Bloom – “Say hi there to inclusive credit score” 

The past couple yrs of knowledge breaches have illustrated how dangerous centralizing people’s personal knowledge can be, culminating substantially with the Equifax breach.

The crew at Bloom made a decision the ideal way to hold very similar losses from happening once again was to build a decentralized credit score rating method, which incorporates identity, threat evaluation and credit score scoring.

“What we’re in a position to set up is this option to make improvements to the way this knowledge is aggregated,” Daniel Maren, from Bloom’s crew, told CoinDesk.

According to Bloom’s white paper, decentralization and the company’s privateness model will place personal loan recipients at the center of all transactions, in an effort to reduce the threat of publicity. This need to not only deliver some substantially-essential opposition to the monopolistic credit score company business, but also aid additional consumer lending across borders and into communities that have a complicated time setting up credit score.

Bloom’s token – which will provide as a staking mechanism, a payment method and as a governance resource – is previously accessible to traders as a element of the presale. The public sale opened on Nov. 30 and will previous for a month, until its $50 million challenging cap is strike previously.

Fold – “A privateness layer for ethereum” 

Fold’s ICO arrived out of the company’s curiosity in getting a way to store personal facts (specially, gift card knowledge) on a public blockchain.

But then, “we realized that the privateness remedy we ended up making was additional important than the trade we ended up making,” Matt Luongo, founder of Fold, told CoinDesk.

That privateness remedy, named Preserve, is a privateness layer for ethereum that uses secure multiparty computation to keep knowledge in several locations in these a way that smart contracts can nonetheless use it. None of the locations know exactly where the other pieces are, and nonetheless they nonetheless have the skill to operate the necessary computations with the parts they have.

Luongo stated:

“What zero-understanding proofs do for customers, secure multiparty computation does that for contracts.”

Whilst the people who operate nodes will want to stake them with the Preserve tokens, payments to use the network and to the nodes themselves will all be accomplished in ether.

“I am sort of philosophically opposed to payments in utility tokens,” Luongo mentioned.

Across its presale and public sale, Fold has a $20 million challenging cap. At the stop of the public sale, which will get started in January and will probable operate for only two months, the enterprise will debut its staking customer, with the initial merchandise remaining an auditable random number generator.

NuCypher – “KMS is HTTP for dapps”

A different protection-centered token to open its public sale shortly (probable in early 2018) is NuCypher.

The company has previously commercialized proxy re-encryption whereby a user can encrypt their keys but then delegate access to people keys to other people in additional common verticals. Now, it desires to adapt that merchandise to smart contracts.

For illustration, a user on a support would proceed to be granted access to a pool of knowledge so extended as particular conditions ended up satisfied, and the smart contract could rescind access if a user failed to satisfy particular conditions.

“The vital piece is you can do that delegate re-encryption with no owning to decrypt in the middle,” said MacLane Wilkison, co-founder and CEO of NuCypher.

It is a way of controlling big swimming pools of knowledge as it moves on and off-web site.

Whilst broader specifics of NuCypher’s blockchain rollout have not been announced, in order to operate its decentralized providers, it will want to set up a network of nodes to operate encryptions. The token will allow for people nodes to stake themselves as element of NuCypher’s network.

“By staking our token, we have a mechanism exactly where if you’re misbehaving as a node you can be challenged and forfeit your stake,” Wilkison concluded.

Stream – “An economic spine for decentralizing streaming”

Morningstar estimates that YouTube earned $12 billion in 2016, nonetheless stress between the web site and the content creators who created it a multi-billion greenback enterprise have gotten heated currently.

Ben Yo, CEO of Stream, mentioned:

“Material creators and platforms are at fundamental economic war with each individual other, since each individual of them are functioning to consider as substantially cash as probable.”

And in flip, Stream desires to basically change the incentive structure for user-created online video, decentralizing the course of action from get started to stop by way of the use of blockchain.

For now, Stream sits beneath YouTube and Facebook, enabling videomakers to receive resources both from advertisements or direct viewer assistance, the latter a new earnings resource for most videomakers. Later, the enterprise will offer a Chrome extension that sits beneath movies and permits direct donations to videomakers who’ve joined the Stream network.

But for all this to function, Stream wants a cryptocurrency token to monetize its platform. And it will be controlling the deflation of that token in an effort to much better push engagement on the platform.

For instance, as Stream’s current market capitalization rises, it will emit new tokens and split them up between present token holders and creators.

“We are in a position to capture the worth that is accrued as the current market worth grows in excess of time, and distribute that in the emission of a new token,” Yu mentioned.

Stream’s presale is working now, but it has not disclosed its public sale dates, whilst Yu mentioned it was probable to kick off in January. The token sale is capped at $33 million.

Origin – “The sharing economic system with no intermediaries”

The “sharing economic system” is a lot less about sharing and additional about lease-seeking by market middlemen having a significant lower, or at least which is how the crew at origin sees it.

Origin desires to adjust that, hoping to decentralize the sharing economic system with ethereum by developing a peer-to-peer network for transacting directly for just about just about anything.

In order to show it is effective, the crew anticipates it will probably have to develop just one of people verticals by itself, but it hopes in performing so it will entice other business owners to develop additional.

In reality, co-founder Matthew Liu acknowledges ethereum is probably not completely ready to deal with a large-transaction current market, like sharing properties or bikes. The crew is at present contemplating about making a merchandise all-around providing qualified function, these as style and design or coding.

“I assume the additional intricate situations like an Uber are not going to be the kinds that arise at the beginning,” Liu mentioned. “We’ll probably be stunned.”

In fact, he anticipates substantially scaled-down scale sharing assignments (these as neighborhood tool sharing) will shake out, kinds that would be too expensive to develop with no the money return need to business owners have to develop people marketplaces from scratch.

The enterprise has not finalized its token giving designs, but it’s token, which serves as a staking and incentive mechanism, will probable be accessible in 2018, just after it has finished a fundamental, useful merchandise.

In certain, Liu is optimistic about employing tokens to reward early adopters, perhaps in the sort of a money-again plan, exactly where early customers would get some tokens again just after productively completing a transaction.

He told CoinDesk:

“We believe that in the much better-than-free of charge business enterprise model.”

Orchid – “Welcome to a world exactly where customers very own the online” 

And previous, but not least, specially for crypto lovers who care deeply about decreasing surveillance and censorship, Orchid claims to be an enabler of surveillance-free of charge online.

It’s merchandise, the crew thinks, will allow web customers to route all-around spying and censorship with a additional strong network of nodes than The Tor Undertaking network, since it will pay people for sharing unused bandwidth. By giving people a explanation to place their computer systems on the network when they aren’t in use, the theory is it can get so several nodes on its network that surveillance would develop into all but extremely hard.

“I assume just one of the most important issues that other people who have tried using to decentralize the online is they’ve failed to have incentives to do it,” Brian Fox, just one of the venture co-founders, told CoinDesk.

Orchid has previously raised $4.7 million in enterprise funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Blockchain Funds, Compound VC, Crunchfund and Danhua, along with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, MetaStable, Polychain Funds, Sequoia and Struck Funds.

And though ICO tokens have been principally employed as a fundraising mechanism, Fox mentioned Orchid’s token is a “utility token,” that means that it will present owners of the token with a use on the platform.

“When our protocol is 100 per cent completely ready for intake, so will our token. And we anticipate to see that happening someday in the subsequent six months,” Fox mentioned.

Lightbulbs graphic by way of Shutterstock.

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Disclaimer: This post need to not be taken as, and is not meant to present, financial commitment tips. Please conduct your very own extensive analysis ahead of investing in any cryptocurrency.