I mean I get it, cause it was their movie and it had a literal gremlin in it, and hell if we don't know director's love their easter eggs, but yeah, that's a, capital-C, choice right there.

I haven't seen it yet, despite it being the only movie playing where I'm living now, but someone I saw on twitter mentioned the idea of 'looking forward to seeing what sort of midnight showing, Rocky Horror-esque, audience interaction's will emerge from this thing', and I've been thinking about it all day.

My bets are giant dildos and bottles of milk being hurled at the screen when Derulo screams "MIIILLLLLLLLLK", if my Twitter feed has been anything to go by today.

I adulted SO HARD this week you guys.

Not Pictured: The chorus of terrified screaming currently echoing around BDA's brain.

Sir, I believe this mic is yours. You seem to have dropped it.

I'm gonna throw this video in here. It's not explicitly talking about the subject at hand, it's more about how algorithm's have shaped, are shaping and will continue to shape the internet and discourse (Which is that S0mething E|se you keep referring to bgi. Although Tom does talk a fair bit about authoritative voices and the truth which ties into some of what you were talking about), but Tom makes a point towards the end about the "centralization of the internet" that I both agree with and echoes my thoughts on the subject at hand. (Also Tom's a fucking excellent speaker and everyone that uses the internet should watch this).

I think the single biggest factor as to why the internet feels smaller than it used to, which I /think/ is what you're trying to get at with this thread, is that in a lot of ways it is. When I was growing up the internet was this multi faceted buckshot of small sites that you had to know about already or you told your friends about, and usually went to directly. Search engines were /there/ but most of the time turned up garbage, or you had to do some serious digging to find what you looking for. But at the same time, it felt like there was so much more because it was all these micro sites each tailored to a specific thing run by individual people or small groups that were weird and unique little boutique experiences. And that's where people congregated on forums and irc and rinky dink little chat rooms where it was just you and the other people that stumbled on your little island in the big wide web. (And yes, I do love the poetry of us having this conversation in one of the last bastions of that old style web) I have distinct memories of a site that used to exist when I was in late middle school/early high school-ish (So 8-10 years ago) called StumbleUpon, where you clicked a button and it would take you to some random site. It might be a photography blog, or a flash game site or cooking or home decorating or some really bizarre experimental art project or whatever. It felt like there was millions of em, I could spends hours upon hours just randomly discovering cool shit and literally "exploring" the internet.

But if you look at the internet now, for the most part, everything happens on these massive global sites, facebook, twitter, reddit, youtube, tumblr, etc. Where people can set-up little collectives for themselves, kinda, but at the end of the day they are still living on the same platform as a couple million other people, being governed by the same rules, and design, and algorithmic changes as everyone else. And every day more and more people are shifting to these mega social media platforms because "that's where the people are", and those little islands of unique weirdness as spaces for community are going away. Everything is becoming centralized.

I think a big part of that is obviously advertising. The big companies have the audience, the big companies can make the deals with advertisers, and as their user base gets bigger they can get more advertisers and the cycle loops on itself, snowballing until you have facebook, reddit, youtube, twitter, amazon, etc as these All-Sites, and the internet at large shrinks.

But personally, I don't think all is lost. It's definitely gonna take a lot of work and some shifting of how the everyday person sees and uses the internet, but the seeds are already planted and starting to sprout. You look at the massive surge of kickstarter and Patreon over the past few years as these incredible forces for independent creators to interface directly with their audience to, whether it's filmmakers, or podcasters or authors or game designers or artists or scientists or whatever to fund their own "insert thing here" completely devoid of advertisers and the big All-Sites. I think as that ball continues to roll and people see that it is possible to carve out a piece of the internet as a place to exist and make things, that side of the internet will start to break away and become more boutique and scattered.

The community side is more of a foggy haze to me though. I think, unless something drastic happens the current platforms will continue their slow deaths off the back of greed and an unwillingness to self monitor. The winds of public perception are already starting to swing pretty hard on that front; but I don't know what comes in to replace it if it does manage to completely fail in the next 10-15 years. Part of me thinks that once everything is said and done a lot of people are going to want to go back to the small islands of self funded community, where they can control their experience in a more direct way and not have to worry about russia coming in to mess with thier elections and google having mapped your entire nueral network from browsing data to sell the perfect ad for you. But on the other hand, I don't know if the majority of normal people would be interested in an internet without that global centralized place to exist, where they can message their mom and their celebrity crush with equal ease.

Either way, at the end of the day, the internet as a tool and a space for global discourse and everything that comes with that has radically changed from 5, 10, 20 years ago, and whatever comes next it's going to have to be something that can both connect us the world while protecting us from the world; and I have /no/ clue what that looks like.

Or Google takes over the world with their army of Big Dog's and we devolve into a true cyberpunk dystopia in which case we won't have to worry about it.

re: Retconning Rey's parents... if JJ doesn't pull some bullshit around bringing back Sidious' whole manipulating midichlorians to produce miracle force babies to bring balance back to the force'-thing as the twist, I'll be amazed.

Nature is frickin' /weird/ y'all.

It suffers the same crap as the rest of the Disney remakes, too saturated, and the everything in frame is so digital it hurts, but otherwise, considering I had never even heard of this remake until about 5 minutes ago, I'm pleasantly surprised. Making it a fantasy adventure movie about the enigmatic and eccentric explorer Dr. Doolittle is 100% the right way to go for a remake. If they had tried to redo the Eddie Murphy version with a modern day take, it would have crashed and burned before it even hit the pavement.

But I'm curious... we'll see if they tone down the visuals before release, but I doubt it, but it might be worth a Netfli- ...Dinsey plus-ing.

Cheers man!

The music is a track the director found called 'Gunslinger (A Ballad for Adult Westerns)' by Katie Lee.