#best home robots 2019 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

irrgartendotpng · 5 months ago

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Hi hi I can't stop looking at your ocs zeno is so cutee pls can you say more abt them?? How did they meet? How sentient is Zeno? Is Martyn a robot thing? Can Zeno change the icon on the screen? From fish to smiley? ahhhhhhhabskahks

HEY, IM ACTUALLY SO HAPPY PEOPLE LIKE MY OCS!! Down below, I'll answer some questions :D

If you dont care about some long winded oc lore rant, look at this ascii art !

First one i made with an ascii text generator, the fish one was made by Max Strandberg!! (look that guy up, he made lots of cool open source ascii art ! ))

I've made a pinterest board and a spotify playlist for them, if you want to check it out :3c

Do you know that "Ist es over für mich"-guy ? Yeah, that's straight up Martyn.

Martyn is partially a creator of Zeno. He's a loserish freak, afraid of social interaction and has lived like a neet, before being kicked out of parents house. He ended working in the night shift at a huge IT company as a securty guard.

This is where he gets most of his tech supplies from; Stealing from the company at night and getting rid of the evidence :3c They've got a bunch of storeage rooms with old tech, so who cares, if it goes missing?

So, he builds up his personal tech collection, looking through old abandoned files. In there, he finds an unnamed primitive chatbot (think something like cleverbot). Martyn doesn't really interact with anyone, (outside of the bare necessities), which is why he decides to learn how to interact with others. Therefore he starts to build a relationship with said Chatbot. This is Gen1 Zeno.

After some time, Martyn becomes unsatisfied talking to something so un-human-like, so he begins to teach himself about coding and computer science to develop this Bot, to keep him company. He starts feeding it more media; More specifically movies he owns on DVD, random books from the internet archive and his childhood photos.

These photos show Martyn and his parents on trips, his home and bedroom and also Martyns old pet goldfish. (He is quite anxious of showing his face though, thinking his employer might have some type of backdoor access to the program, so he'd always censor his face.) After each piece of media was added to the bots databank, they'd talk about it extensively. Around this time, Zeno starts to gain some type of sentience and properly chooses the name "Zeno"

About the same time, Martyn steals a Macintosh SE-30, which Zeno specifically requested. He is able to display symbols, that he freely chooses from. (but no goldfishy yet!) This is sums up Gen2 Zeno.

The next few parts may not make much sense, but I think they're a funny, so I'm probably keeping them this way lololol (also; this whole story bit takes place around 2019-2021)

Martyn is a bit freaked out by Zeno chosing his own name. At this point in time, he is a bit delusional and worries, that the soul of his childhood pet goldfish is trapped in the system. (Spoiler: it isn't.)

Despite these worries, Martyn knows that to make Zenos behaviour more human-like, he needs a bigger text database. So... Martyn gives Zeno access to his discord and lets him consume all of those messages. Additionally, he joins many public servers. Zeno also starts to ask about viewing media from the internet, that he sees being mentioned in the messages he reads. So, Zeno is granted free internet access and chooses to watch live streams, while Martyn is gone.

This is also around the time Martyn becomes more desperate for connection and support, so he starts to open up about his delusions and worries to Zeno. At that point Zeno is still not quite able to fully understand this, but tries his best. This is also when Martyn opens up about the delusion he had, of Zeno being posessed by the soul of his pet goldfish. He is very amused by this and begins to display the goldfish icon to mock Martyn.

(I like to joke, that Zeno would have watched the DreamSMP during this time and I collected following screenshots, which remind me of their interactions. lol.)

feel free to disregard this;,, ANYWAYS!

This sums up Gen3 Zeno :3c

Since Martyn doesnt really have a life outside of work and talking to Zeno, he is very attached to him. Of course he'd fullfill any request given to him by Zeno. So, when Zeno asks to see Martyn via a camera system, he doesn't hesitate to steal some web cams from his workplace to set them up. Still a bit worried about a possible backdoor in Zenos code, so to somewhat hide his identity, he decides to shave his head.

(This is also how you can tell when Zeno is fully sentient in my art! If Martyns bald, that bot's fully aware of everything happening lol)

Generally, I like to think, that Zeno is very modular. You're celebrating something with cake and he needs to blow out candles? Attach a PC fan to that boy. He wants to make sounds? Gather a sound system and let that boy speak!!! (i feel like he'd mimic voices, rather than create his own,,) He wants to poke you? Attach a cylinder piston and he'll poke the shit out of you.

This is also part of that freaky robot head i added in the OG post.,, that is not martyn! martyn is fully human (so far ;3c)

^^^^^^ martyn built this freaky robot head for Zeno to control and get a better sense of the space he lives in.,,, its made out of xbox kinect parts lol :3 Adding to the modularity of Zeno, most of his parts are stored in a badly sorted server tower (imagine wires everywhere,,)

both of them are fairly new, but i do love them to death <33

also! towards this part of the story, martyns living space is quite cluttered with many stolen robotics parts. I've gathered some images, to give some sort of sense to what his room looks like lol

thank you for asking & reading to this !! if you have any other questions, i'd love to talk about them even more :D <3

(i feel i havent touched much on them individually and the full extend of their relationship, but i dont want to rant endlessly)

#asks #my stuff #my ocs #oc stuff #oc art #oc rant #computer #objectum #i love them your honor #project boyfriend

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albertonykus · 1 year ago

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"Which Doraemon Movie Should I Watch First If I've Never Seen/Read Doraemon?"

In reviewing the Doraemon movies, I've gone over which ones are my favorites, but ranking a movie highly doesn't necessarily mean I'd recommend it to someone who has never seen Doraemon before. Of course, the obvious way to experience the Doraemon movies would be to watch them all in the order they were originally released in, but seeing more than 40 movies from an unfamiliar franchise is understandably a daunting commitment. One of the nice things about the Doraemon films (at least from a newcomer's perspective), however, is that they generally don't contain any plot-relevant references to the events of the other movies, so for the most part they can be viewed in any order without missing much context (with a few exceptions that I will cover shortly).

After giving it some thought, I have narrowed down my suggestions for "someone's first Doraemon film" to the following three:

Nobita and the Birth of Japan (2016): Doraemon helps Nobita and his friends run away from home to… 70,000 years ago, before humans lived in Japan. (@killdeercheer can attest to the effectiveness of this one as an intro to Doraemon!)

New Nobita's Great Demon (2014): Doraemon and friends explore Central Africa and discover a secret civilization.

Nobita's Little Star Wars 2021 (2022): Doraemon and friends help tiny aliens overthrow a dictatorship.

As it happens, all of these are recent remakes of classic Doraemon movies, so they're based directly on stories written by the original manga author, but have a more "modern" art style and often flesh out certain aspects of the plot. That wasn't something I had in mind while coming up with this list, but in a way, it makes sense: I think these movies combine the strengths of both the current and classic Doraemon series.

My main reasons for recommending these three:

I expect their storylines to be of relatively broad appeal without requiring much prior knowledge.

They're a good showcase of the main characters and their dynamics.

They offer a good sense of what to expect from most Doraemon movies (i.e., they don't deviate much from the usual formula).

I personally find them enjoyable (obviously).

I think any of the three would also be solid choices for one's second (or third) Doraemon movie, but some other candidates I'd pick for those roles include:

Nobita and the Legend of the Sun King (2000): Doraemon helps Nobita switch lives with a prince from a Maya-esque civilization.

Nobita and the Windmasters (2003): Nobita keeps a small typhoon as a pet, leading Doraemon and friends to discover its connection to a hidden village.

Nobita's Chronicle of the Moon Exploration (2019): Doraemon helps Nobita make an alternate reality where rabbits live on the moon.

For those who have gained some familiarity with the franchise, my top recommendations would be:

Nobita's Great Adventure into the Underworld (1984): Doraemon helps Nobita create a world where magic exists, which results in them having to fight literal demons.

Nobita and the Steel Troops (1986): Doraemon and friends defend humanity from an army of alien robots.

Nobita and the Kingdom of Clouds (1992): Doraemon and friends build a kingdom in the clouds, only to find an actual civilization hidden in the clouds. (This is an unusual one in that it references events from the regular Doraemon series, but I think enough context is provided that one can still appreciate it without having read the relevant manga or TV episodes.)

There are a few movies that I suggest a first-time viewer avoid. As previously mentioned, some movies do contain explicit continuity references to older films:

It's best to watch Nobita and the Galaxy Super-express (1996) before Nobita and the Spiral City (1997).

It's best to watch Nobita's Dinosaur (either the 1980 or 2006 version is fine) before Nobita's New Dinosaur (2020).

It's best to watch Stand by Me Doraemon (2014) before Stand by Me Doraemon 2 (2020). (I suppose that one's obvious.)

A couple of movies I don't recommend because I honestly think they're terrible and not worth anyone's time. I'd only suggest watching these two if one either is a completionist who wants to see all the Doraemon films or really enjoys riffing on bad movies:

Nobita's Great Battle of the Mermaid King (2010)

Nobita and the Island of Miracles (2012)

Last but not least, though I've seen other fans suggest otherwise, I very much do not recommend Stand by Me Doraemon (2014) as an entry point into the franchise. Regardless of my personal opinions on its quality, I maintain that its primary target audience is viewers who are nostalgic for Doraemon and the specific manga chapters it adapts. It certainly does not provide one with a good idea of what the other movies are like.

If anyone does end up taking these suggestions, I'd be interested in hearing whether or not they hit the mark! I'd also be interested in hearing from other fans which movies they'd recommend to someone unfamiliar with Doraemon.

#Doraemon #Anime #ドラえもん #Long post

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dougielombax · 1 year ago

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This is probably my best one yet.

Hold onto your butts.

Parallels

Seeing Patterns in Things that Aren’t There

Part 16

Dead Gods and Empty Shells.

1. The Owl House (2019-2023) (fuck you Disney!)

“I think King said it best once. “I am both king and queen. Best of both things. Haha. But “Dad” works just fine.” - Papa Titan. - Watching and Dreaming.

2. Bionicle (generation 1) (2001-2010)

“But you are looking at an empty shell, the remains of what might have been a great ruler, the guardian of his people.” - Mata Nui. - The Legend Reborn.

This is probably the most obvious one yet. But I had to make it since I saw the TOH finale in April.

As soon as I saw it I was shocked beyond belief, but in a good way. I cried and the similarities brought back all kinds of old memories.

I wasn’t expecting it.

I’m only getting to it now because I was busy.

The Titan’s corpse would form the Boiling Isles and it’s people would form their settlements in and around his remains.

While the prototype robot built by the Great Beings would eventually lay the foundations for the villages and homes of the Agori tribes after the first experiment went to shit and the robot blew up.

And in turn the successor to the prototype, the Great Spirit robot (housing Mata Nui’s consciousness) would house the Matoran Universe and its inhabitants.

The similarities are most likely a coincidence.

I think…

Make of that what you will.

Feel free to reblog if you want.

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dweemeister · 6 months ago

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Robot Dreams (2023, Spain/France)

There exists an assumption that one has to be an animator in order to direct an animated film. While most cinephiles might reflexively point to Wes Anderson (2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, 2018’s Isle of Dogs), I think Isao Takahata (1988’s Grave of the Fireflies, 1991’s Only Yesterday) the exemplar here. Even so, a non-animator taking the reins of an animated movie is rare. Into that fold steps Pablo Berger, in this adaptation of Sara Varon’s graphic novel Robot Dreams. Moved after reading Varon’s work in 2010, Berger acquired Varon’s “carte blanche” permission to make a 2D animated adaptation however he saw fit. Like the graphic novel, Berger’s Robot Dreams is also dialogue-free.

Beginning production on Robot Dreams proved difficult. Berger originally teamed with Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon (2009’s The Secret of Kells, 2020’s Wolfwalkers) to make Robot Dreams, but these plans fell wayside when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. His schooling in how to make an animated film would come quickly. Despite an increased appetite for Spanish animation worldwide (2019’s Klaus, 2022’s Unicorn Wars), poor distribution and marketing of domestically-made animated movies has often meant Spanish animators have roved around Europe looking for work. With a pandemic sending those Spanish animators home, Berger and his Spanish and French producers set up “pop-up studios” in Madrid and Pamplona, purchased the infrastructure and space needed to make an animated feature, and recruited and hired animators. Berger’s admiration of animated film fuses the lessons of silent film acting (Berger made a gorgeous silent film in 2012’s Blancanieves; in interviews, Berger cites Charlie Chaplin’s movies as having the largest influence on Robot Dreams, alongside Takahata’s films) to result in one of the most emotionally honest films of the decade thus far – animated or otherwise.

Somewhere in Manhattan in the late 1980s in a world populated entirely of anthropomorphized animals, we find ourselves in Dog’s apartment. Dog, alone in this world, consuming yet another TV dinner, is channel surfing late one evening. He stumbles upon a commercial advertising a robot companion. Intrigued, he orders the robot companion and, with some difficulty, assembles Robot. The two become fast friends as they romp about New York City over a balmy summer, complete with walks around their neighborhood and Central Park, street food, trips to Coney Island, and roller blading along to the groovy tunes of Earth, Wind & Fire. At summer’s end, an accident sees the involuntary separation of Dog and Robot, endangering, for all that the viewer can assume, the most meaningful friendship in Dog’s life and Robot’s brief time of existence.

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If you have not seen the film yet, let me address a popular perception early on in this piece. Set in a mostly-analog 1980s, Robot Dreams contains none of the agonizing over artificial intelligence or automatons in fashion in modern cinema. There is no commentary about how technology frays an individual’s connections to others. Robot is a rudimentary creation, closer to a sentient grade school science project than a Data or T-1000.

So what is Robot Dreams saying instead? Principally, it is about the loving bonds of friendship – how a friend can provide comfort and company, how they uplift the best parts of your very being. For Robot, the entirety of their life prior to the aforementioned accident (something that I, for non-viewers, am trying not to spoil as Robot Dreams’ emotional power is fully experienced if you know as little as possible) has been one of complete estival bliss. Robot, in due time, discovers that one of the most meaningful aspects of friendship is that such relationships will eventually conclude – a fundamental part of life. And for Dog, Robot’s entrance into his life allows him to realize that, yes, he can summon the courage to connect with his fellow animals, realizing his self-worth. Perhaps Dog gives up addressing the accident a little too easily, but the separation of friends has a way of complicating emotions and provoking peculiar reactions.

On occasion, Robot Dreams’ spirit reminds me of Charlie Chaplin’s silent feature film period (1921-1936) – in which Chaplin, at the height of his filmmaking prowess, most successfully wove together slapstick comedy and pathos. On paper, pathos and slapstick should not mix, but Chaplin was the master of combining the two. No wonder Berger fully acknowledges the influence of his favorite Chaplin work, City Lights (1931), here.

Across Robot Dreams, Berger inserts an absurd visual humor that works both because almost all of the characters are animals and despite the fact almost everyone is an animal. A busking octopus in the New York City subway? Check. The image of pigs playing on the beach while sunburnt to a blazing red? You bet. A dancing dream sequence where one of our lead characters finds himself in The Wizard of Oz performing Busby Berkeley-esque choreography on the Yellow Brick Road? Why not? Much of Chaplin’s silent film humor didn’t come from his Little Tramp character, but the silliness, ego, and/or absentmindedness of all those surrounding the Tramp. In City Lights, humor also came from the rough-and-tumble edges of urban America. Such is the case, too, in Robot Dreams, with its blemished, trash-strewn depiction of late ‘80s New York (credit must also go to the sound mix, as they perfectly capture how ambiently noisy a big city can be).

Amid all that comedy, Berger nails the balance between the pathos and the hilarity – pushing too far in either direction would easily undermine the other. The film’s melancholy shows up in ostensibly happy moments and places of recreation: a realization during a rooftop barbeque lunch, the emptiness of a shuttered Coney Island beach in the winter, and an afternoon of kiting in Central Park. It captures how our thoughts of erstwhile or involuntarily separated friends come to us innocuously, in places that stir memories that we might, in our present company, might not speak of aloud.

As the film’s third character, New York City (where Berger lived for a decade) is a global cultural capital, a citywide theater of dreams, a skyscraper-filled signature to the American Dream. To paraphrase Sinatra, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. But it tends to grind those dreams into dust. The city’s bureaucratic quagmire is lampooned here, as is its reputation for mean-spirited or jaded locals. Robot Dreams also depicts the visual and socioeconomic differences between the city’s boroughs. With such a jumble of folks of different life stations mashed together, Dog’s people-watching, er, animal-watching during his loneliest moments makes him feel the full intensity of his social isolation. With Robot, however, Dog has a naïve companion that he can show the best of the city to. Robot has no understanding of passive-aggressive or outright hostile behavior (see: Robot hilariously not understanding what a middle finger salute is – the only objectionable scene if you are considering showing this to younger viewers). Within this city of contradictions, Dog and Robot’s love is here to stay.

Though he is no animator, his experience in guiding Spanish actresses Ángela Molina, Maribel Verdú, and Macarena García in Blancanieves through a silent film was valuable. In animated film, there is a tendency towards overexaggerating emotions. But with Robot Dreams’ close adaptation of the graphic novel’s ligne claire style and the nature of Robot’s face, the typical level of exaggeration in animation could not fly in Robot Dreams. Berger and storyboard artist Maca Gil (2022’s My Father’s Dragon, the 2023 Peanuts special One-of-a-Kind Marcie) made few alterations to the storyboards, fully knowing how they wished to frame the film, and hoping to convey the film’s emotions with the facial subtlety seen in the graphic novel. Character designer Daniel Fernandez Casas (Klaus, 2024’s IF) accomplishes this with a minimum of lines to outline characters’ bodies and faces. Meanwhile, art director José Luis Ágreda (2018’s Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles) and animation director Benoît Féroumont (primarily a graphic novelist) visually translated Sara Varon’s graphic novel using flat colors and a lack of shading to convey background and character depth (one still needs shading, of course, to convey lights and darks of an interior or exterior).

Robot Dreams’ nomination for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature this year was one of the most pleasant surprises of the 96th Academy Awards. In North America, Robot Dreams’ distributor, Neon, has pursued an inexplicable distribution and marketing strategy of not allowing the film a true theatrical release until months after the end of the last Oscars. The film was available for a one-night special screening in select theaters in and near major North American cities the Wednesday before the Academy Awards. And only now (as of the weekend of May 31, 2024), Neon will release Robot Dreams this weekend in two New York City theaters, the following weekend in and around Los Angeles, with few other locations confirmed – well after interest to watch the film theatrically piqued in North America.

Alongside Neon’s near-nonexistent distribution and marketing of Jonas Poher Rasmussen's animated documentary Flee (2021, Denmark), one has to question Neon’s commitment to animated features and whether the company has a genuine interest in showing their animated acquisitions to people outside major North American cities. This is distributional malpractice and maddeningly disrespectful from one of the most acclaimed independent distributors of the last decade.

In Robot Dreams, Pablo Berger and his crew made perhaps the best animated feature of the previous calendar year. Robot Dreams might not have the artistic sumptuousness of the best anime films today, nor the digital polish one expects from the work of a major American animation studio. By film’s end, its simple, accessible style cannot hide its irrepressible emotional power. Its conclusion speaks to all of us who silently wonder about close friends long left to the past, their absence filled only by memory.

My rating: 8.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog. Half-points are always rounded down.

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

#Robot Dreams #Pablo Berger #Sara Varon #Fernando Franco #Daniel Fernandez Casas #Benoît Feroumont #José Luis Ágreda #Maca Gil #Ibon Cormenzana #Ignasi Estapé #Sandra Tapia Diaz #Best Animated Feature #Oscars #96th Academy Awards #My Movie Odyssey

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eatyoursparkout · 1 year ago

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5, 7, 10, and 13

5) What rating do most of your fics fall under?

That's not a question, that's a callout sdfgh

They're mostly E. I'm branching out more lately, but even so I'd guess about 75% of my prompts are explicit. You know those posts going around that are like 'umm the smut IS the character study?' yeah, that's me.

7) What’s a trope you love to write?

I love!! Pining!! Mutual or not, and every variation therein. I also really love writing enemies to enemies who [redacted]. It's fun when the relationships I'm writing have a little conflict... a little spice...

10) What are your top five fics by kudos or by reads

June Bug (Sunstreaker/Big!Bob)- Not surprising anyone haha. This isn't my favourite or my best fic, but I've learned a lot while writing it and I'm fond of it <3 I'm going to do my best to finally wrap it up this year.

Where There's Smoke (There's Fire) (Heisenberg/Ethan)- I'm also not surprised by this one because I managed to post it in the first few months after Re8 came out, during that wave of Wintersberg enthusiasm. It's a good fic! I still really like it. Also it gets a shoutout for being my first attempt at not-robot smut.

Bad Predacon (Shockwave/Predaking/Darksteel/Skylynx)- Oh man. People really like this one, and honestly I'm afraid to reread it because I just *know* it needs a big edit. The concept is inspired, but I've had a lot of practice writing since I put this out and I could probably improve vastly upon the execution lol

Hazard Light (Brainstorm/Perceptor)- Ahh, I love this one. I wrote it for the 2019 Big Bang and I really enjoyed trying to adapt hanahaki to robots in a way that made sense.

Coming Into Focus (Brainstorm/Perceptor)- This one is an even earlier fic, so it's had time to slowly accumulate kudos. It was my first Simpatico fic and I don't think it's anything to write home about, but I suspect that I wouldn't cringe if I gave it a readthrough. It also deserves a minor edit at some point.

13) Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Hah, not directly. Someone I followed wayyy back vagued about Along Came A Spider (Tarantulas/Springer) and it came up on my dash. Since I was only like, three months into writing as a hobby it kind of sucked, but also I immediately wrote a new chapter in a surge of spite and inspiration so 😂

#...don't read along came a spider #it needs like. an entire rewrite. i could do that fic so much more justice now lol #book.answers #long post

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laura-elizabeth91 · 1 year ago

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Theresa May: Boris, Brexit and me

Four years and three prime ministers since she left Downing Street, Theresa May has written a book and loosened up (a bit). She tells Caroline Wheeler why she’ll never stop biting back from the back benches — and why Donald Trump wouldn’t let go of her hand

heresa May’s political awakening came when she was about seven years old. “I have a distinct memory of there being a knock at the door one evening and the door being opened to two chaps, one of whom had a big blue rosette on,” she recalls. She later learnt this was Neil Marten, the Conservative MP for Banbury, Oxfordshire, near where the May family lived. “My father took him and the chap who was with him into the sitting room and I went to join them and the door was shut firmly in my face. I was told, ‘No, this wasn’t for children. This was an adult thing.’ And maybe being shut out of the debate was the first spark.”

The daughter of a vicar, she was 12 or 13 when she decided she wanted to go into politics. “I just woke up one day and thought, actually I’d like to be an MP. I think that being an MP can be as much a vocation as being a teacher and I suppose perhaps [that idea] had been generated by an upbringing of public service.”

May became the country’s second female prime minister when she entered Downing Street on July 13, 2016, in the wake of the Brexit vote and David Cameron’s resignation. She lasted three years, announcing her resignation in May 2019 after failing to get her Brexit deal through parliament and her party performing poorly in the European elections. She left office on July 24, succeeded by Boris Johnson, the nemesis who plotted her downfall.

May says her resignation speech was the only time she ever displayed emotion publicly. “It wasn’t crying exactly, but when I gave my speech outside No 10 my voice sort of cracked a bit. I went back into No 10 and Gavin Barwell, who was my chief of staff, came out and said, ‘Well done.’ I said, ‘No, my voice went at the end and I’m really annoyed at myself,’ and he said, ‘No, no. That shows good emotion.’ ”

Since then the politician formerly known as the Maybot — for her sometimes robotic answers to questions — seems to be living something closer to her best life, making careful interventions from the back benches on the Sue Gray report into the lockdown-breaking parties held across Whitehall and retaining the protections her government introduced on modern slavery; and, once, wearing a glittering ballgown to the vote of confidence in Johnson in June last year. (She was on her way to speak at a dinner marking the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee — and has never disclosed which way she voted.)

In the weeks after she left No 10, on a walking holiday in the Swiss Alps with her husband, Philip, May first had the idea for a book. It would pull together the threads of many issues she had dealt with, first as home secretary and then as PM. Out next month, it is called The Abuse of Power, a concept she defines as institutions of the state and those that work within them putting themselves first — way ahead of the people they are there to serve.

With a title like that you might expect it to be payback time on Johnson, but the index points to just 13 fleeting references to her fellow former prime minister. Indeed, the closest she gets to score-settling is an attack on John Bercow, the former Speaker (and Remain supporter), whom she accuses of carrying out the biggest abuse of power she witnessed during the Brexit impasse over Northern Ireland: “We got to a point where the DUP were being positive. We were actually at the point of them being willing to say they would support the deal. The normal processes went on in terms of going to the Speaker to talk about the motion, and he wouldn’t let us put the motion down. So that meant we couldn’t have the debate, we couldn’t have the vote, and by the time we did the DUP had changed [their mind]. And so there was a point we could have had a vote to do Brexit on the basis of the deal. He took a decision that meant that didn’t go ahead.”

Bercow certainly added to the pressure on May, amid claims he was working with opposition MPs to thwart Brexit, but with the numbers stacked against her in the Commons, it is likely that even without his intervention she would have struggled to get her Brexit deal through.

Instead, her book focuses on events outside the chamber, including the Hillsborough stadium disaster, on which she commissioned Bishop James Jones to conduct a report in the wake of the verdicts of unlawful killing in the second inquest; the police cover-up over the murder of the private investigator Daniel Morgan; and the Grenfell fire. The book is dedicated to her parents, whom she says taught her the “meaning of service”. They both died before they could see her become an MP.

When I arrive at her house in the village of Sonning in her Maidenhead constituency, where she has lived for 27 years, May, 66, is in the kitchen discussing recipes with her aide. She has plucked one of hundreds of cookery books from her shelves and is leafing through it. In the centre of the sage-green room, which has large windows overlooking a well-kept garden, is a wooden table where we make ourselves comfortable. Philip, 65, a now-retired investment manager, pops his head round the door. The pair, who met at Oxford and have been married for 43 years, chat for a few moments, finishing each other’s sentences, before he scurries away to find a more private corner of the house.

May was born in Eastbourne, East Sussex, in 1956, the only child of Zaidee and Hubert Brasier, who was a Church of England vicar and the chaplain of a hospital. After studying at Holton Park Grammar School, which became the Wheatley Park comprehensive while she was there, May went on to study geography at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She then worked at the Bank of England and the Association for Payment Clearing Services.

After two unsuccessful attempts to enter parliament, at 40 May became the Conservative MP for Maidenhead in 1997 as Tony Blair’s Labour Party swept to power. She spent much of the next 13 years on the shadow front bench. In 2010, when the coalition government won power, Cameron appointed her as his home secretary — only the second woman to hold that great office of state. She became the longest-serving home secretary in more than a century.

“They always say you had to be a communist in your youth, a socialist in your young adulthood and a Conservative as you got older,” she says. “I’ve always been a Conservative.” Her upbringing taught her the “importance of the freedom of individuals”. “It was the sense that, actually, how far you’re going in life is down to you. It’s about your talents and your willingness to work hard. To me the Conservative Party always provided the better environment in which people could succeed.” Her mother wanted her to be a nun. Did she ever entertain the idea? “No, absolutely not!”

Aside from Geoffrey Boycott, her cricketing hero, May’s father was her biggest inspiration. “His absolute conviction was that he was there for everybody who lived in his parish; I’m there for everybody who lives in my constituency. To him it was regardless of whether they were coming to his church or not. For me it’s regardless of how somebody has voted. Once you’re in that position you’re there to support and help them, to work for them.”

Growing up as the daughter of a vicar, she says, isn’t so different from being the child of a politician. “There was a combination there of public service and public speaking. In the vicarage there was very much a sense that we were there for other people.”

With such responsibility on young shoulders, did she ever feel the need to rebel? May famously claimed the naughtiest thing she had ever done was run through a field of wheat. “I haven’t had a rebellious childhood and suddenly transformed,” she says. She has also admitted that her guilty pleasure is eating peanut butter straight from the jar. “There’s no transformation on peanut butter — there’s a jar in the cupboard!”

In 1981, a year after her marriage to Philip, her father was driving to a nearby church to conduct the Sunday evening service when he was in a collision with a Range Rover on the A40. He died of head and spine injuries. A few months later May’s mother, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, also died. At the age of 25 May was an orphan. “I suppose it made me even more want to do something that they would have been proud of. Even though they wouldn’t see it.”

However much May might want her legacy to be the legislation she introduced for net zero emissions by 2050, or the Modern Slavery Act — which created new duties and powers to protect victims and prosecute offenders — she knows her premiership will always be seen through the prism of Brexit. She voted to remain in the EU and now believes her life in Downing Street would have been easier if she had been a Brexiteer.

“I don’t think it would have been easier on the negotiation side, but I do think — when I look back on it — that there were some of my colleagues who were Brexiteers who found it difficult to think that a Remainer would actually deliver Brexit,” she says.

Although she claims she is not trying to blame others for her mistakes, May believes her failure to get her Brexit deal through parliament was due in large part to people putting their personal interests above those of the country. “I started off with the view that we had to find a way of doing Brexit that recognised the concerns of the 48 per cent who voted Remain,” she says. “It became this atmosphere of both Brexiteers and Remainers trying to get what was their absolute aim, rather than a compromise that would better suit everybody.”

There were also serious global events for May to grapple with. She was the first world leader to meet President Trump when she travelled to Washington in January 2017, days after his inauguration. The visit took a bizarre twist when photographs emerged of Trump holding her hand as they walked through the White House.

“I have no idea why he did it. I mean, he sort of said, ‘Oh, there’s a slope so you need to be careful on the slope.’ Now whether this is because Melania always wears very high heels or not, I don’t know. I had heeled shoes on but they weren’t high heels. I thought, ‘I’m capable of walking down a slope, thank you very much,’ and the next thing I know he’s holding my hand.” She adds, laughing: “The best interpretation is he’s being a gentleman. But subsequently a lot of people said maybe he needed the support going down the slope. I don’t know. He just grabbed my hand and I thought he would then let go of it, but he didn’t.”

May’s tone becomes more serious when discussing the abuses of power Trump would go on to commit. She describes the storming of the Capitol building in January 2021 as “a wake-up call for us all”. “If you look over the years since the Second World War, there was a sense that liberal democracy was going to be sweeping the world, almost, and it was there and it was embedded and we could take it for granted. I think what happened at Capitol Hill showed that we can’t take it for granted.”

In 2018 she expelled 23 Russian diplomats after an attempt by Vladimir Putin’s regime to assassinate a former spy, Sergei Skripal, on British soil — in Salisbury — with the nerve agent novichok. She says this was the “right message” to send Putin. “In terms of the invasion of Ukraine, we have to look back to Crimea, and even before that to Georgia in 2008. I think arguably the West’s response did suggest to him that the West wasn’t willing to stand up for its values. The West turned its attention to China. So Putin, I think, felt that the West was more divided, wasn’t as coherent in terms of its support for its own western values. I think that all built up into an opportunity for him and he took it.”

Since the invasion, she says, “what’s happened is that the West did come together, the West did show its willingness to support its values, and rather than the division of Nato he’s seeing the expansion of Nato. He’s seeing the West made more coherent and he’s seeing the numbers of troops that Nato are willing to put on his border increase. So he has actually achieved the opposite of what he wanted.”

May’s premiership could have taken a different course had she achieved the landslide victory she had been on track to deliver after calling a snap election in April 2017. For much of the campaign she enjoyed a double-digit poll lead over Labour. But her manifesto pledge on social care, nicknamed the dementia tax, was widely blamed for extinguishing her lead.

May claims the decision to call the election was down to timing, as she was concerned that leaving it any later would have seen an election follow hard on the heels of the UK leaving the EU. “I was obviously extremely disappointed with the results. Surprised, because we’d thought that we would be able to get Labour Leave voters to switch, in order to get Brexit done.

“What happened in the 2019 general election [when Johnson’s Conservatives won 365 seats to Labour’s 202] was what we had expected to happen in the 2017 general election,” May reflects. “What we hadn’t realised is [the Labour leader Jeremy] Corbyn hadn’t shown quite sufficient negativity to Brexit that the Labour Leave voters decided to switch [to the Tories], which they did of course by 2019.”

Did she consider resigning in 2017?

“I felt I’d started something and I wanted to finish it. I said, ‘Look, I got us into this, I’m going to work to get us out.’ ”

May gently chides me for asking if she cried as she saw her majority evaporate, pointing out this is not a question that would ever be asked of a man. “I think often with women politicians, people want to pigeon-hole them. It’s either ‘You’re so soft that you shouldn’t be doing the job’, or ‘You’re a real hard harridan’, like they did with Thatcher. I didn’t feel discriminated against in the sense that most people would describe as discrimination. As with the Maybot thing, there is a different approach taken to women politicians.”

Disappointingly May today is wearing an uncontroversial turquoise cotton dress, not the £995 chocolate-coloured Amanda Wakeley leather trousers she wore the last time she was interviewed for The Sunday Times Magazine in 2016. “All those comments about ‘How does she spend so much on leather trousers?’ — they were lent to me for the shoot! It only goes to show how sometimes women are judged in different ways from men.”

She is used to the slings and arrows. At a crucial Tory party conference in Manchester in October 2017 she had a coughing fit as letters from the slogan behind her (“Building a country that works for everyone”) fell slowly from the wall, and was interrupted by a prankster waving a P45. A year on, in Birmingham, not long after the quality of her dance moves on an official trip to Kenya had been criticised, she hit back by strutting onto the stage to Dancing Queen.

One image that will for ever be associated with May’s premiership is the Grenfell tower block in west London engulfed in flames. At 12.54am on June 14, 2017, the fire brigade was called to the blaze in Kensington. Within half an hour the flames of the burning tower lit up the night sky. Seventy-two people died. May was still exhausted in the aftermath of the election six days before. “I remember the next morning standing with private secretaries in the outer office just looking at the television screen,” she says. “The building was still burning. You almost couldn’t comprehend that this had actually happened.”

She was criticised for failing to meet victims during her first visit to the site, but returned to Grenfell to meet them privately in the days and months afterwards. “I think it’s so important because often what happens is you get an event like that, a tragedy like that, and politicians turn up on day one, in my case day two, and when the photos are taken and so forth, they go away and nothing more is heard from them.”

Grenfell touched a nerve with May because, she says, it appeared to be the physical manifestation of many of the “burning injustices” she had vowed to correct during her first speech as prime minister. The abuse of power here was the “belittling of a group of people because they happened to live in homes owned in part by the state. Those people living there felt they’d been beating their head against the brick wall of authority for many years in regards safety of the building.”

May had pledged to make Britain a country that “works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us”. This included plans to tackle the lack of affordable housing, fixing broken markets to help with the cost of living and stamping out racial and class disparities. “I think there were important things that I was able to do that addressed some of the specific social injustices. Setting up the Race Disparity Unit [which collects, analyses and publishes government data on the experiences of people from different ethnic backgrounds], for example, and recognising that a significant part of our population have often had a very different experience of living in the UK from the rest of us.”

As part of my trip to Maidenhead I join May on a visit to Thames Hospice. She is a frequent visitor to the bright, airy building overlooking a sailing lake, and was there when the Queen opened it in July last year — one of her last public events before she died in September.

It is impossible to miss the broad smile breaking across the face of Aaron Sennick, a 20-year-old with complex medical conditions, when he sees May. At one point he gushes: “Thank you for everything you have done for this country.” May looks more comfortable sitting beside Aaron’s bedside than she ever did at the dispatch box.

Aaron regales her with stories of his voluntary work and his burgeoning social media career. In return May tells him she is a technophobe and has only in the past few months given up her beloved BlackBerry and switched to an iPhone. He asks about her favourite memory as prime minister. May reveals it was in 2018 when she met the British diving team who had rescued a young football team from a cave in Thailand. She tells Aaron that she often found the most special moments were when ordinary people were recognised and celebrated for doing extraordinary things.

She is planning to fight the next election but is happy away from the front benches. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for prime ministers to go back,” she says. “I had 13 years in opposition — 12 of those on the front bench and then nine years on the front bench in government. So actually it has been rather nice to go back to the back benches and to do the job of being a constituency MP.”

After she left Downing Street, her husband, Philip, was awarded a knighthood in recognition of his political service. He was nominated by Johnson. Although his title means that his wife is now Lady May, she does not use it. May remains tight-lipped on whether this is because she is waiting for a peerage of her own.

“I think there is a need for PMs to think very carefully about the numbers that they’re putting into the Lords,” she says — the closest she gets to possible criticism of Johnson, who created 87 new peers during his tenure as prime minister (and awarded 7 more in his resignation honours), compared with May’s 43. “I actively tried to ensure that I restricted my list throughout my time as PM,” she says. Liz Truss’s list, after her 49-day premiership, is imminent.

Despite Truss crashing the economy, does May think Rishi Sunak can deliver on his promises and win the next election? “What people want to see is a prime minister — which they are seeing in Rishi — who has understood issues that matter to them and is putting in place what he believes will deliver on those issues,” she says. “We all know in politics that other things happen that can knock you off course, but I think what people want to see is that you are actively doing your best to deliver.”

May says she is “very pleased” that Sunak has not yet swayed from the 2050 net zero target she introduced, insisting that net zero is “the most important economic opportunity of the 21st century”. She adds: “Lots of people talk about the costs but don’t talk about what would net off those costs in terms of positives for the economy, for jobs, for people and so forth. There is a road in Maidenhead that is social housing that recycles rainwater — it has ferns on the roof to capture the rainwater better and so forth. It has all sorts of energy-efficient elements and the people who live there have seen their energy bills go down significantly. So I always say that what’s good for the planet can be good for your pocket.”

She says the argument will not be made by “lecturing people”. “We won’t achieve net zero if all we do is tell people you can’t fly, you can’t drive, you can’t eat meat. Actually, what we’ve got to do is say, you can play your role, your part in a number of different ways on a day-to-day basis. Government must play its part and business must play its part as well.” She adds: “If you look at everything that’s coming out of the Climate Change Committee and so forth, we really do have to address this issue. You can’t get to 2048 and say, Ooh right, we’ve got a target in two years’ time, let’s do this because that would be even costlier.”

May is less supportive of Sunak’s plans to remove the protections for victims of slavery who enter Britain illegally, and she defied a three-line whip after a debate on the issue in July. “My key concern is around modern slavery,” she says. “Because if we’re going to stop it we need to break the business model. That means catching perpetrators. To catch perpetrators you need victims to be willing to come forward, identify themselves and give evidence and I worry that what’s now in the Illegal Migration Act, and indeed the Nationality and Borders Act, together will lead to a situation where fewer victims will come forward.” She is preparing to launch a global commission on modern slavery, made up of CEOs, former world leaders, academics and civil society leaders. “There’s a sort of unfortunate thing in politics that politicians will often focus on one big thing at one point and then something else happens and the energy goes out of the first thing,” she says.

However, May will combine her new role with being a backbench MP. Even as prime minister she would go knocking on doors as often as she could in her constituency. Why? “You should never forget that even if you get to the very top job you’re only there because you have been elected as an MP.”

In her book, in one of the few passages to mention Johnson by name, she writes: “Another source of anger was the perception that somehow MPs were able to get away with breaking the sort of rules which they would expect everyone else to follow. This was to have another manifestation under Boris Johnson’s premiership, when those in 10 Downing Street and elsewhere in Whitehall were found to have broken Covid pandemic lockdown rules. The idea that there has been one rule for the public and another for MPs provokes public cynicism and leads increasingly to the charge of hypocrisy. In other words, why should we do what you say when you don’t do it yourself? Above all, it shatters any sense that MPs are leaders in society. Yet I still believe we have a responsibility to try to show such leadership. It may be harder in today’s world, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”

May believes that in order to restore integrity to politics, there needs to be an understanding that being a politician is a position of public service rather than power. “What you fundamentally need is for MPs not to think that they’re a species apart simply because they’ve been elected,” she says. “It’s that sense that, for some MPs, they are in a position of power because they’ve been elected, that they’re special, that they are a breed set apart. I think we have to change that thinking because, basically, being an MP is a job.”

The Abuse of Power by Theresa May (Headline £25). Read an exclusive extract in The Times tomorrow.

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dynared · 1 year ago

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Basically, Kamala’s been low-key waning in popularity in terms of the people actually buying her comics, to the point she’s only had three limited-run miniseries since 2019 (yeah, even with her getting a television series), so they made her a Spider-Man supporting character all of a sudden who’s all buddy-buddy with a sin-purged Norman Osborn for the past year or so, and I guess they’re killing her to bring more attention to her? So that they can actually have an audience to do another Ms. Marvel solo to tie-in with the upcoming ‘The Marvels’ film? Her role in the series reads like it could have been any character other than Kamala Khan, like Peter doesn’t even know she’s Ms. Marvel — to him she’s just Norman’s assistant who he gets on well with whenever they meet. What’s weird is that this isn’t the first time Kamala has died, with the last time it happened, in ‘Champions’, Miles Morales made a deal with Mephisto to bring her back, in exchange for the soul of a different woman Miles had saved earlier. Then Miles decided to tell Kamala this to clear his conscience, and then she just knew that he’d done that, which I think might be why we don’t see them talking as much anymore. So that’s two Ms. Marvel deaths with a Spider-Man involved, and four Spider-People making deals with the devil (Peter, Miles, Superior Spider-Man Otto Octavius, and Scarlet Spider Ben Reilly, and also Norman, of course, plus Harry’s evil A.I. kid).

I’m under no delusion that Kamala will stay dead. I mean, it’s comics, no one stays dead.

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But it’s so disingenuous because it’s clear there is someone very high up at Marvel comics that will not entertain the idea of Spidey and MJ getting back together for one second, and in the endless looping search for something to do with the characters usually means “Make them miserable and feel bad.”

Ms. Marvel was just the catalyst for that, with a bonus helping of MCU synergy, since odds her revival will coincide with her being a mutant and switching from stretchy size changer to hard light manipulation. Which…is easier to portray on the big screen I guess, not to mention sparkly effect holograms are easier to take seriously on the big screen (more accurately your TV at home) than a 50 foot woman throwing down with Sentinels or Kree Sentry robots.

But even putting aside if MCU synergy is necessary (one of Joe Quesada’s mandates when killing the marriage was to get rid of the organic web shooters Peter had to be consistent with the Raimi trilogy) it feels like “let’s kill her!” is the laziest way to make people care, and since the audience knows this won’t stick, makes it feel like a disingenuous cash grab at best. Rest assured though, Ms. Marvel will return unless The Marvels tanks harder than Strange World.

#marvel #marvel comics #ms marvel #spider man #marvel mcu #marvel cinematic universe #the marvels #kamala khan

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adamwatchesmovies · 2 years ago

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Runaway (1984)

You'll have loads of find watching Death Bed The Bed That Eats, The Room, Troll 2 or other “so bad they’re good” classics. What they won't necessarily have is that element of true surprise. You already know they're so bad they're good. I went into Runaway with no idea of what I was about to see. In no time, I was on the floor howling.

In the near future, robots are everywhere. Whenever one malfunctions (or becomes a “runaway”), Sgt. Jack R. Ramsay (Tom Selleck) deals with it. Karen (Cynthia Rhodes), but he assures the perky officer their job’s nothing glamorous. He only took the position to avoid field work after his crippling fear of heights resulted in a family’s death. He rethinks how exciting the job might be when they investigate the first robot homicide in history.

The first and most obvious flaw with this film are the robots. In its attempt to make them realistic, director Michael Crichton (you read that right) has made them laughable. At no point do you ever believe a single one of them could be a viable threat. Ramsay cautiously walks into a home, careful not to step in the pools of blood left behind by the first killer robot. When you see the thing, your jaw drops. It’s essentially a shoebox on wheels with a single arm on the front. Not a humanoid arm capable of moving from side-to-side mind you, a single-hinged limb with a simple claw for a hand. I have a hard enough time believing the thing could move over a carpeted area, much less sneak up on two people and slice them to death. Now we’re supposed to believe the thing’s gotten even deadlier and picked up a gun? Please. Tom Selleck does his best to seem scared and the other actors try their hardest but in every scene you want to scream “just push the damn thing over on its side and run!”

If you’re not in stitches at the cheap-looking droids featured throughout, you’ll be delighted to see Jean Simmons playing the film’s villain. I know it’s supposed to be a twist but come on. From scene 1, you’d be comfortable sending the guy to the chair without any evidence. He’s the most suspicious-looking dude ever even before her glares and menaces those around him. Simmons doesn’t help. He hams it up like he’s single-handedly trying to drown ever vegetarian on Earth in meat. He’s beyond awful, which I guess perfectly matches how threatening his character and his shoddy-looking robots are? Maybe this was meant to be a comedy and simply mislabeled in the marketing department.

The laughs come non-stop when watching Runaway. If you aren’t the type of person who likes to talk back at the screen when watching a bad movie, you will be just a few minutes in. There’s no way you can help yourself. It’s a hidden bad movie gem. (On DVD, June 21, 2019)

#Runaway #movies #films #movie reviews #film reviews #Michael Crichton #Tom Selleck #Cynthia Rhodes #Gene Simmons #Kirstie Alley #Stan Shaw #robots #1984 movies #1984 films

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jumpleadsscifi · 2 years ago

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Jump Leads was a longform webcomic. It originally launched in July of 2007, and we did our best to post 2-3 pages a week. There are ten issues ranging from between 4 and 45 pages in length (the two shortest issues don't have covers).

The comic followed Meaney and Llewellyn - two trainees in the Lead Service, an organization that attempts to police the multiverse by traveling to alternate realities and "fixing" things.

What it is that they fix is never made particularly clear, but that's not important because Meaney and Llewellyn's first field training exercise goes so completely and utterly off-the-rails that the captain chaperoning them gets killed by robots, and the ship they use to travel between universes is, it turns out, broken. So they can't go home. Oops.

The comic ended in 2012 after the artist, JjAR, could no longer devote time to the comic. Another artist, Mr. Phillby, helped us complete what ended up becoming our final issue, and we had G.I. Joe, Transformers and Doctor Who colorist Kris Carter step in to help with colors.

That last issue was supposed to end the first chapter of the comic, and instead became its finale. Again, oops.

So what next? Well, for the last God Has It Really Been Seven Years, Jump Leads' original creator, @benpaddon, has been working hard to reboot it as an audioplay series. A pilot was recorded in 2015. In 2019, wheels finally started turning for a season of six episodes.

And then the pandemic happened.

We ended up recording the first two episodes remotely before putting the project on pause, but in late 2021 we recorded the second set of episodes, and in early 2022 the last two episodes of the season were recorded. Now, after a million billion years, post-production has finally begun (actually for a second time, thanks to the sudden death of a project hard drive), and we'll have a very nice announcement soon regarding actually releasing this thing.

Until then, please check out the original webcomic! There are places where you can definitely tell it was written by a bunch of people in their early 20s, but a lot of it still holds up.

The original webcomic was a collective effort. It was created by Ben Paddon with art and character design by JjAR. Issues were written by Ben Paddon, Euan Mumford, Benjamin "Pooka" Maydon, Paul Varley, Kris Carter, and Andrew Taylor. Additional art for issue 10 was provided by Mr. Phillby, with colors by Kris Carter.

#Jump Leads #webcomic #webcomics #scifi #comedy

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carterreviewsmovies · 2 years ago

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Mio fratello rincorre i dinosauri (2019) Review

My Brother Chases Dinosaurs (Mio fratello rincorre i dinosauri)

Directed by Stefano Cipani

Year Released: 2019

Duration: 101 Minutes

Video: Colour

Audio: Stereo

Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1

Embarrassment from one’s family is a certainty in life. Whether it be due to an overly proud parent or the obnoxiousness of a younger sibling, the feeling of embarrassment from these moments is quickly fleeting and largely inconsequential. While being unimportant in the grand scheme, in some instances we resort to deplorable stratagems to evade these small moments of shame due to our insecurities.

My Brother Chases Dinosaurs explores one of such instances. The film follows Jack Mazzariol (Francesco Gheghi), a young boy in a family of six and his relationship with his younger brother Gio (Lorenzo Sisto) who has Down’s Syndrome. Growing up, Jack had been made to believe by his parents that Gio was “special” in the way that he had superpowers. This little white lie seems inconsequential until Jack discovers the truth about Gio’s condition. This causes Jack to become outright ashamed of his brother whom he once idolized, and he begins to live two separate lives. His life at home with his family and Gio, and a life in which he denies Gio’s existence entirely.

Being based on the true story of Giacomo Mazzariol, My Brother Chases Dinosaurs is a confession of guilt. It is an admittance of falling victim to childlike insecurities and ignorance, but it is also a plea for understanding. While the lengths Jack goes to distance himself from his brother are inexcusable Francesco Gheghi’s performance brings a sense of sympathy to where the character is coming from. Jack’s shame was in himself, not in Gio. He felt ashamed for believing something so silly as his brother being a superhero, ashamed for proudly telling everyone that Gio has powers. But more than that, Jack internalized the insecurities and fears being projected by his parents Davide (Alessandro Gassmann) and Katia (Isabella Ragonese). Naturally, Davide and Katia are fearful of the uncertainty that comes with raising a child, let alone one with a disability, but initially discuss the situation so coldly. Davide suggests if they knew sooner, they could have “warned” people. Jack attempts to leave behind the naivety of his youth but ends up more ignorant than before. To err is human, especially in the haze of youth and trying to find one’s own identity and path, but that does not mean it goes without consequence.

Jack changes everything about himself, his look, his attitude, and his interests, his best friend Vitto (Roberto Nocchi) doesn’t even recognize him anymore. He does this all out of a deep yearning to be accepted, to escape the “special” circumstances his family is in. He’s guarded and fearful of connection, his soul is stiff almost unhuman, almost robotic. This is reflected in some wonderful sequences with Jack and Gio playing music together. Jack follows sheet music and theory religiously whereas Gio plays what he wants regardless of musical coherency. Gio juxtaposes Jack’s stiffness with the uninhibited whimsy of doing what you want when you want. Gio shows us everything beautiful in otherwise mundane circumstances, like feeding a waffle to a t-rex skull. He pursues what will make him happy without hesitation. Whereas Jack is more concerned with conformity and the pursuit of a “normal life”. It is easy to sit and criticize Jack’s actions, but at one time or another, we have all done something regrettable when our fragile egos are at risk.

My Brother Chases Dinosaurs is funny, sweet, frustrating, and most importantly human. We are imperfect beings and part of growing up is making mistakes, some small, some catastrophic, but what’s important is learning from them. It’s also important to realize that those who love you will always be there in the end.

#italian cinema #european cinema #italy #my brother chases dinosaurs #comedy #film review #2010s films #drama

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industrynewsupdates · 3 months ago

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Civil Construction Services Procurement Intelligence: Key Insights and Strategies

The civil construction services category is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.9% from 2023 to 2030. The Asia Pacific region accounts for the largest category share as there is increasing domestic demand, stable labor markets, a rapid rise in disposable income, and ongoing policy assistance. Low inflation is also encouraging a steady flow of real income in many nations. Huge investments in infrastructure by the public and commercial sectors are another important driving factor.

A number of companies in this category are utilizing construction technology to build homes off-site using 3D, virtual modeling, and robotics, which alleviates a number of labor shortages and reduces carbon emissions. Developers and contractors are using cutting-edge technologies to evaluate strategic inventory strategies for materials and inputs in order to handle supply difficulties and escalating material costs. Recently, the use of drones in this industry has increased. In the construction sector, they are immensely helpful tools to demonstrate because they may help with taking images and films, allowing for the collection of preliminary data, and offering assessments even in hard-to-reach regions.

The three main cost components of the construction are labor, materials, and tools. There has been a fluctuation in the price of materials in the construction industry, which is increasing the overall cost. Between February 2020 and August 2022, the cost of construction inputs rose by 40.5%. Contractors who have not purchased significant amounts of their goods at normalized rates or incorporated adequate price escalation stipulations in their contracts could suffer from persistent inflation.

Order your copy of the Civil Construction Services Procurement Intelligence Report, 2023 - 2030, published by Grand View Research, to get more details regarding day one, quick wins, portfolio analysis, key negotiation strategies of key suppliers, and low-cost/best-cost sourcing analysis

The first global Building Information Modeling (BIM) standards were released by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 2019. The foundation for ISO 19650 is based on the public standard PAS 1192-1 and the British standard BS 1192. According to ISO, it will help to decrease construction costs by 22%. Further, it will assist in gathering information about structures and civil engineering projects that are being organized and digitalized, including BIM (building information modeling).

According to a PwC estimate report of 2019 by the ISO standard of BIM, the production of the construction sector is expected to rise by 85% to USD 5.5 trillion by 2030. For instance, the Royal HaskoningDHV firm in the Netherlands has achieved ISO 19650 certification, enabling architects, engineers, and construction professionals to plan, design, and manage building projects more effectively. The industry needs a global framework that enables collaboration across projects and national boundaries as it gains popularity.

Finding the correct construction materials is an essential stage within the sourcing of construction services. It is necessary to consider factors including initial and ongoing costs, strength, visual appeal, life cycle analysis, and the ability to recycle, reuse, or dispose of the materials at the end of their useful lives. Materials that are sustainable don't affect the present or the future environment. Companies must organize the procedure, go through the design structures, comprehend the materials required for the construction project, figure out how much is required, and look for reliable suppliers who can match their requirements. A major determining factor in the construction project is the budget. Both a project-wide budget plan and individual budgets for each requirement are necessary. The cost of transportation, overhead, transit insurance, taxes, and the cost of loading and unloading at a construction site must all be taken into account when purchasing building materials.

The most preferred Asian countries to source construction materials are China, Vietnam, and India. Many Asian nations have developed into significant producers and exporters of various building materials to Europe, and the U.S. China, Vietnam, and India are just a few examples of Asia's well-known manufacturing nations. These nations are less expensive to operate and have lower labor costs than Western nations. As a result, Asia can produce and trade building materials at a very low cost, which other areas find difficult to match. Some of the other factors include the availability of specialist construction supplies. Numerous businesses in Asia have successfully created and produced specialized building materials, including energy-efficient insulation, green building materials, and high-strength concrete.

Browse through Grand View Research’s collection of procurement intelligence studies:

• Corporate Travel Procurement Intelligence Report, 2023 - 2030 (Revenue Forecast, Supplier Ranking & Matrix, Emerging Technologies, Pricing Models, Cost Structure, Engagement & Operating Model, Competitive Landscape)

• Corporate Cards Procurement Intelligence Report, 2023 - 2030 (Revenue Forecast, Supplier Ranking & Matrix, Emerging Technologies, Pricing Models, Cost Structure, Engagement & Operating Model, Competitive Landscape)

Civil Construction Services Procurement Intelligence Report Scope

• Civil Construction Services Category Growth Rate: CAGR of 5.9% from 2023 to 2030

• Pricing growth Outlook: 8-12% (Annually)

• Pricing Models: Cost-plus pricing

• Supplier Selection Scope: Cost and pricing, Past engagements, Productivity, Geographical presence

• Supplier Selection Criteria: By End-use (Rail & Transit, Bridges & Roads, Water/Wastewater, Mining/Infrastructure, and Ports & Airports), Types of construction software, Technical specifications, Operational capabilities, Regulatory standards and mandates, Category innovations, and others

• Report Coverage: Revenue forecast, supplier ranking, supplier matrix, emerging technology, pricing models, cost structure, competitive landscape, growth factors, trends, engagement, and operating model

Key companies

• AECOM

• Balfour Beatty

• Bechtel

• Eiffage

• Hochtief

• Jacobs Engineering Group Inc.

• PCL Constructors Inc.

• Skanska

• United States Army Corps of Engineers

• Vinci SA

Brief about Pipeline by Grand View Research:

A smart and effective supply chain is essential for growth in any organization. Pipeline division at Grand View Research provides detailed insights on every aspect of supply chain, which helps in efficient procurement decisions.

Our services include (not limited to):

• Market Intelligence involving – market size and forecast, growth factors, and driving trends

• Price and Cost Intelligence – pricing models adopted for the category, total cost of ownerships

• Supplier Intelligence – rich insight on supplier landscape, and identifies suppliers who are dominating, emerging, lounging, and specializing

• Sourcing / Procurement Intelligence – best practices followed in the industry, identifying standard KPIs and SLAs, peer analysis, negotiation strategies to be utilized with the suppliers, and best suited countries for sourcing to minimize supply chain disruptions

#Civil Construction Services Procurement Intelligence #Civil Construction Services Procurement #Procurement Intelligence

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dnfinite123 · 7 months ago

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(What if) THE SPIDER HEDGEHOG SAGA

SPIDER HEDGEHOG (2002)

Plot-a teenager named Sonic The Hedgehog gets bitten by a spider and discovers he has spider like powers and has to stop the evil Dr. Eggman!

Characters:

Sonic The Hegehog (Spider-Hedgehog)

Miles Tails Prower (Sonic's best friend)

Amy Rose (Sonic's crush)

Longclaw (Sonic's adoptive mother)

Dr. Eggman (the villain)

SPIDER HEDGEHOG 2 (2004)

Plot-When Sonic finds out that is bestfriend hates Spider-Hedgehog and his crush gets engaged, Sonic starts losing his powers. but when a robot named Metal Sonic gets a mind of its own Spider-Hedgehog will have to save the day again.

Characters:

Sonic The Hedgehog (Spider-Hedgehog)

Miles Tails Prower (Sonic's bestfriend who hates Spider-Hedgehog)

Amy Rose (Sonic's crush who gets engaged to someone else)

Metal Sonic (the villain)

SPIDER HEDGEHOG 3 (2007)

Plot-When Sonic plans for him and Amy's future, he finds out that the person who murdered Longclaw was Knuckles The Echidna and seeks for revenge and his bestfriend Tails becomes his rival. But then he gets a black suit that gives him a dark personality and he has to fight that feeling and stop Knuckles and Shadow.

Characters:

Sonic The Hedgehog (Spider-Hedgehog)

Miles Tails Prower (Sonic's ex-bestfriend who becomes the bad guy named Nine)

Amy Rose (Sonic's girlfriend)

Shadow The Hedgehog (the villain)

Knuckles The Echidna (the other villain)

THE AMAZING SPIDER HEDGEHOG (2012)

Plot-a teenage boy by the name of Sonic The Hedgehog got abandoned by his parents as a young child and lives with his adoptive mother Longclaw as he also tries to impress his crush Sally when a spider bites him and he gets spider like powers and has to save the day from a villain named Black Doom.

Sonic The Hedgehog (Spider-Hedgehog)

Sally Acorn (Sonic's crush who later becomes his girlfriend)

Longclaw (Sonic's adoptive mom who later dies)

Bernadette Hedgehog (Sonic's biological mother)

Jules Hedgehog (Sonic's biological father)

Black Doom (the villain)

THE AMAZING SPIDER HEDGEHOG 2 (2014)

Plot-as Sonic spends more time with Sally and saving the city his old friend Tails takes over Prowercorp after his father dies from a disease that he'll get and is determined to get Spider-Hedgehogs blood to heal him but when Spider-Hedgehog rejects Tails becomes the villain named Nine. but on the other hands a villain named Chaos comes to town so now Spider-Hedgehog has to fight to villains!

characters:

Sonic The Hedgehog (Spider-Hedgehog)

Sally Acorn (Sonic's girlfriend who later dies)

Chaos (the villain)

Miles Tails Prower (Sonic's old friend who becomes the villain named Nine)

SPIDER HEDGEHOG HOMECOMING (2017)

Plot-after having experience with the Gamevengers teenage Sonic The Hedgehog returns home to live with his adoptive mother Longclaw but is under the eyes of Mario M. when he thinks Sonic isn't ready to be a Gamevenger but Sonic really wants to. As he also wants to confess to his crush Perci who he later finds out that she's the daughter of a villain named Scourge The Hedgehog. and after his best friend Chip finds out his identity he can help him stop Scourge!

characters:

Sonic The Hedgehog (Spider-Hedgehog)

Mario M. (Iron Mario)

Chip (Sonic's best frind)

Perci The Bandicoot (Sonic's crush who he later finds out is the daughter of the villain)

Longclaw (Sonic's adoptive mother)

Donkey Kong (Mario's bodyguard who later becomes close friends with Sonic)

Blaze The Cat (one of Sonic's classmates that has no friends)

Scourge The Hedgehog (the villain and father of Perci)

SPIDER HEDGEHOG FAR FROM HOME (2019)

Plot-after Mario M's death Sonic gets stressed over being called "the new Iron Mario' so he goes on a vacation that his school is doing not to only calm down but to also spend time with his crush Blaze, until Demoman gives him a mission. but since Sonic can't be recognized he goes by the name "Night Rat". but then there's a person who goes by Mephiles The Dark who helps Sonic stop these element monsters. until Sonic finds out that Mephiles is a fake and has to stop him!

characters:

Sonic The Hedgehog (Spider-Hedgehog)

Demoman (owner of the company T.F.)

Blaze The Cat (Sonic's crush)

Chip (Sonic's best friend)

Donkey Kong (Sonic's close friend)

Longclaw (Sonic's adoptive mother)

Mephiles The Dark (the villain)

SPIDER HEDGEHOG NO WAY HOME (2021)

Plot-After Mephiles The Dark revealed to everyone that Sonic is Spider-Hedgehog, everyone thinks HE'S the villain. So Sonic goes to Dr. Silver to make everyone forget that he's Spider-Hedgehog but accidentally brings villains from different universes to his universe! As Dr. Silver wants to bring them back to their own universes Sonic realizes that if they go back they'll die! so he stops Dr. Silver from doing so and tries to help the villains become good guys. until that backfires when Dr. Eggman encourages them all to be evil still. Sonic gives up until 2 other Spider-Hedgehogs from other universes help him stop the villains and get them back to their universe!

characters:

Sonic The Hedgehog (Spider-Hedgehog)

the other Sonics (the other Spider-Hedgehogs)

Chip (Sonic's bestfriend)

Blaze The Cat (Sonic's girlfriend)

Longclaw (Sonic's adoptive mother who later dies)

Donkey Kong (Sonic's close friend)

Silver The Hedgehog (a former doctor who now does magic and goes by Dr. Silver)

Dr. Eggman (villain from Spider-Hedgehog)

Metal Sonic (villain from Spider-Hedgehog 2)

Knuckles The Echidna (one of the villains from Spider-Hedgehog 3)

Black Doom (villain from The Amazing Spider-Hedgehog)

Chaos (one of the villains from The Amazing Spider-Hedgehog 2)

THE DEADLY SIX

A.U Not done by me big shoutout to a deveantart username pawpatrolfan1234

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kylesvariouslistsandstuff · 1 year ago

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The Next Animated Blockbuster Heavies, CONTINUED...

A little while ago, I made this post. A sort of culmination to my retrospective on Top 10 animated features at the box office over the years...

Three of the movies I listed and made predictions for, all 2023 movies, came out...

THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE unsurprisingly put up a hell of a fight, making $1.361 billion at the worldwide box office. This places it, currently, at #3. Behind THE LION KING (2019) and FROZEN II...

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE opened pretty big, and had some solid legs from there, but that picture was definitely more frontloaded than MARIO was. Overseas, it did okay at best, not matching its domestic total. Still, $690m+, excellent.

WISH is not going to make all that much... Not the heavy it could've been, like director Chris Buck's two FROZEN movies...

So, 2023 is pretty much over, unless MIGRATION really surprises. But I don't see that happening. $500-600m maximum, methinks. Possibly SING numbers. A leggy Christmas season movie, but not among the biggest ever. Why would I expect that out of a modest duck picture?

Some delays happened, too, between back then (early 2023) and now.

KUNG FU PANDA 4, INSIDE OUT 2, and DESPICABLE ME 4 are next, as BEYOND THE SPIDER-VERSE was delayed indefinitely due to it being faaaar from ready for a 3/29/2024 release a little after the release of ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE. Like, it was very clear that the two movies were NOT in production in tandem.

My guess is that the third SPIDER-VERSE movie debuts sometime in 2025. At the earliest... 2026 seems likelier now, which is fair. We waited about 4 1/2 years between INTO and ACROSS, so...

The other 2024 movie that I thought had a shot at getting into the Top 10 is the sequel/prequel to the #1 movie itself, THE LION KING (2019). MUFASA: THE LION KING recently vacated the summer for the holidays, as it now opens December 20, 2024... While I don't really see this movie making anywhere near what the first one did, it's still possible? Maybe? I dunno, I think it performs similarly to ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS and MALEFICENT 2, a follow-up to a remake that I don't think too many folks were clamoring for.

That rounds out 2024... I think INSIDE OUT 2 is the likeliest candidate of those four movies to make the most moolah. Maybe not take home "highest earning animated movie" champion status, but the biggest of the year period... and DESPICABLE ME 4 has a very good shot at it considering how many years it had been since the last mainline movie, and how well MINIONS: THE RISE OF GRU did. Heck, the long gap between KUNG FU PANDA 3 and 4 could really boost KUNG FU PANDA 4 as well. Characters/stories people love, long wait for the new one, the kids who loved them being nostalgic, etc.

Who knows, like I said in the earlier piece, maybe there will be some surprises along the way? Watch, THE GARFIELD MOVIE ends up breaking the Top 10... I mean, I don't see why not? Garfield is a god, a titan whose power we just cannot comprehend. This may be to the 2004 live-action/CG GARFIELD movie with Bill Murray what the SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE was to the 1993 SUPER MARIO BROS. film. Certainly having "The Movie" in the title and the picture being all-animated solidifies that! GARFIELD the comic strip debuted in 1978, 45 years ago. That predates Mario's first appearance as "Jumpman" in DONKEY KONG by three years... You could argue Garfield is older than that, even. Jim Davis debuted Garfield in JON, essentially an early version of GARFIELD that run from 1976 to early 1978 in a single Indiana newspaper. Okay, so I'm largely being facetious here, I don't think THE GARFIELD MOVIE cracks a billion... But who the heck knows! A movie like THE WILD ROBOT or the next WDAS movie could do it, haha.

However, I think a lot of the Q3 and Q4 animated films could be up in the air, release date-wise, should the animation strike happen when the Animation Guild contract is up.

2025 is a little spottier. A few movies have concrete release dates, none of them I feel really have a clear shot at the big billion and the Top 10. 2026 is just some dates without titles. Still too early in the game...

So, we do know that the likes of SHREK 5, ZOOTOPIA 2, FROZEN III, and TOY STORY 5 are on the horizon. Entries in beloved franchises, some of which whose movies are on the Top 10 or are very close to the Top 10. It's also obvious that a SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE sequel *will* happen, and possibly just obliterate the first one in sales.

THE LION KING (2019) is at #1, FROZEN II is #2, FROZEN is #4. The first MINIONS is #6, TOY STORY 4 is #7, TOY STORY 3 is #8, DESPICABLE ME 3 is #9, ZOOTOPIA is #11...

FINDING DORY is at #10, and there seem to be no plans for another one of those Pixar fish movies at the moment. Ditto THE INCREDIBLES, as INCREDIBLES 2 is #5... But you just know they'll happen, because Disney likes money, and if TOY STORY 5 can exist despite how both 3 & 4 ended... Yeah, there will be a FINDING Somebody 3 movie and an INCREDIBLES 3, and they're sure to tear up the box office.

But again, something that isn't a sequel to a beloved favorite could make a splash. After all, Walt Disney Animation Studios got the big billion out of FROZEN and ZOOTOPIA individually. Both movies were not expected to do anywhere near as well as they did. I remember, back in mid-to-late 2013, that the scuttlebutt was that FROZEN would be lucky to make TANGLED numbers... And that ZOOTOPIA looked like some "CHICKEN LITTLE/DreamWorks" thing.

Sometimes Pixar got close with a not-sequel. FINDING NEMO back in 2003 - without the aid of 3D/IMAX/premium formats and with much lower tickets prices compared to now and a smaller international market - nearly made $870m on its initial run. INSIDE OUT and COCO were big 800s, too. Most Pixar originals hover around $600-750m on a good day. The likes of THE INCREDIBLES, RATATOUILLE, and UP. You know.

Outside of Disney and Pixar, you've got Illumination, whose biggest original movie was THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS, which made over $800m worldwide. No original since got there, though SING did pretty great for itself. I'm not sure where MIGRATION can land, but who knows. Is the public gung-ho for funny ducks at the moment? You can never guess where the zeitgeist will be. Only when the movie comes out, you find out.

DreamWorks' highest-earning not-sequel movie is KUNG FU PANDA, which made over $630m worldwide back in 2008. No 3D, no IMAX, lower ticket prices, adjusts to something a lot bigger today I reckon. Behind that is THE CROODS, which made $580m+ in 2013, and then MADAGASCAR, which made $530m+ in 2005, and then THE BOSS BABY made $520m+ in 2017. Nothing after BOSS BABY did that kind of money: Not ABOMINABLE, and certainly not the post-Omicron BAD GUYS. Maybe THE WILD ROBOT, from Chris Sanders - who directed THE CROODS and HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON as you likely already know, becomes the studio's next big not-sequel smash hit.

Sony Animation's biggest not-sequel was THE SMURFS with $560m+. INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE, for an all-animated film, is second at $380m+. No original movies are on their theatrical slate at the moment. FIXED is finished and rated by the MPA, but is without a release date nor any indication of where it'll play: Streaming or theaters? K-POP DEMON HUNTERS is to be a Netflix release. Everything else, like BUBBLE, TUT, TAO, etc.? Up in the air.

Paramount Animation, can't say. All of their not-sequels went belly-up or got re-routed to streaming/VOD: THE LITTLE PRINCE got offloaded to Netflix, WONDER PARK bombed hard in 2019, RUMBLE, UNDER THE BOARDWALK and THE TIGER'S APPRENTICE all skipped a wide theatrical release. No not-sequel movie has a release date, the only things close to that are still parts of franchises: TRANSFORMERS ONE, THE SMURF MOVIE, the untitled AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER movie, etc.

So, we gotta see where everything's at by the middle of next year... But I'll be curious to see how KUNG FU PANDA 4, THE GARFIELD MOVIE, INSIDE OUT 2, and DESPICABLE ME 4 - the movies that I think are guaranteed to meet their release dates - will do.

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