It feels strange to watch Call Me By Your Name post the revelations about Armie Hammer. I know why this movie was so acclaimed. The cinematography is magnificent. The setting, idyllic. I spent much of my time while watching this movie fantasizing about a world where you summer in a gorgeous Italian countryside home within a fruit orchard, swimming, riding your bike into town, reading, and playing music, without, of course, the internet.

I was drawn to a few scenes in particular. In our opening, as Oliver (Hammer) pulls up to the villa, he’s exhausted from jet lag and travel and collapses into bed in the late afternoon only to emerge the following morning. I found myself wistful for international travel, knowing that loopy feeling of a long flight with little sleep, walking out into a time that feels all wrong, in a brand new place that feels as foreign as it is. There’s something special about that tired first 24 hours in a new country. It’s a feeling I’ve missed in this long pandemic year.

When Elio (Timothée Chalamet) reveals his feelings to Oliver around a World War I memorial, the camera work is perfect. Looking up and down just like an unsure teenager’s head would bob around as they fearfully reveal a deep truth. Elio and Oliver are set across from each other, far apart as confessions are made, with the camera following their circling of the monument, allowing the monument to obscure them both just as they are out of sight with each other.

Overall, this movie is just too long. It’s well-paced, but it’s beauty cannot overcome the fact that I don’t feel the fear, or the heartbreak, or even the elation of the young love. I saw it, but I didn’t feel it, and so Call Me By Your Name was beautiful, but flat.

I wish there were more movies like this one, but I didn’t like this one very much.

Look, testing this year is likely to be a disaster. The option to wait until the fall is an especially good one. But anyone who doubts there’s value in any testing happening should look to everyone who says that schools will be “overfunded” with the latest round of ESSER/ARP money.

They will be “overfunded” only in the sense that they have an actual increase in money to spend. A generation of students whose schooling has been interrupted and/or disrupted are going to need extra supports to get back on track, and that is going to take extra resources. Without the achievement data that shows this, the (largely right wing) commentariat are out in force to say that schools have too much money that they will surely waste.

Forget about extra expenses related to COVID-19 that have already occurred. There are new needed supports that require resources to make sure a generation of students get the education they deserve. Frankly, we weren’t doing that great on that measure before the pandemic.

News of the end of Indie.vc didn’t really surprise me. I thought, “Yes, this is a great example of trying to have all the advantages of the VC label and the Indie label and it’s going to match no one’s pattern and may not even make sense.” But this week, with more of the results and challenges revealed, I have swapped to the same disappointment others have expressed.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned working at a start up, it’s that our capital markets are an irrational mess, and successful more by chance than strategy.

As I shared this frustration with a friend and LP, they replied “you’re playing a value hand in a growth game”. They were absolutely right. The way the startup game is played, even compelling fundamentals take a distant back seat to how much money companies are raising, at what valuation they are raising it, and which top-tier firm is leading the raise. This is not a knock; rather, an acknowledgment that those are the rules. I tried to play by a different set of rules and got burned.

I’m sorry– this is should be a knock. We’d have a better, richer world ¹ if we could get the capital markets to play a value hand rather than the illusory growth hand every single time. The growth hand only works for a small number of investors with a small number of companies focused narrowly on a particular type of problem and solution.

If you’re using the Bigfoot plug-in on Micro.blog, I recommend reinstalling. I added two options last night.

First, you can now choose if your footnotes are numbered or just get ….

Second, I added the ability to specify what CSS selector your posts are separated by. This allows you to have numbering reset by post on index pages and anywhere multiple posts are seen. Before, if you had two posts with footnotes on the front page, your second post might start with footnote 5 (if the first post had four footnotes).

We sure do have a lot of crumbling infrastructure in the US. But I can’t help but to think a lot of the infrastructure gap comes from past policies subsidizing unsustainable development of rural areas and the suburbs. Imagine if instead of building highways to empty land to develop single-family suburban detached homes, we built trains to new village centers that were mixed use, mixed income, and mixed form housing.

America fetishizes community, until that community because pluralist and mixed-race. Then we began to fetishize individualism instead, just in time to lock up centuries of advantage. We glorify the frontier. We exalt the family homestead. We command dominion over all lands. And so, America has large suburban pastures stretched well beyond the municipal limits with sewers, roads, bridges, power lines, copper, and fiber. We borrowed long term debt for systems that would last decades and road population growth driven by immigration (but not those immigrants, and no longer) and cheap energy that borrowed from the future’s climate to pay down these huge initial investments. Through government subsidies and programs, we created a new homeowner class, handing wealth to whites in the form of a tangible asset. Those assets depreciate, but slowly, so slowly that it would take more than a lifetime to notice.

Once established in our new homes and new suburbs and new cars, segregated and building familial wealth, it was easy to ignore the maintenance. New stuff rarely breaks. America builds best. It’s easy enough to fix things once they need to be fixed. Maintenance investment is not sexy. On the other side of those projects, things work as expected. There’s nothing new to show off. No accomplishments to put your name on. Our predecessors built this, what have I got to show for my time? And so, we ignore the slow rot that stretches across our infrastructure. We built unsustainably, and every social, political, and cultural incentive line up to add more, even less sustainable infrastructure.

It doesn’t help that America built itself up during the Cold War. Communism, our mortal enemy, sought to plan. America’s muscular capitalism would never make that mistake.

And then came the greed. The America of the 80s inherited the investments of the first half of the 20th century and everything “worked” splendidly, if you were the kind of person who had resources already. Government spending and investment was not seen as the supporting platform on top of which our wealth was generated, but instead was stealing from the deserving winners in our so-called meritocracy. The spiral of disinvestment was solidified right as the ratio of benefits to current costs on our infrastructure hit its peak.

It is no wonder why so many parts of America crumbles, forgotten. Rot is everywhere, often unseen. It’s fueled by white flight. It’s fueled by individualism. It’s fueled by neo-frontierism, and Manifest Destiny. It’s fueled by power and privilege.

The solutions will take decades, if not centuries. Some places do not work in America. Truthfully, they never have, not in any long term way. More and more cities and towns will die, as they often have throughout history on the far reaches of human occupation. Illusory wealth created will fade, and individuals and their families will be hurt by no fault of their own. We will have to build new forms, make a different set of investments that slowly reshapes our country. We will have to do so with an eye toward sustainability, for the planet and for future inhabitants of our communities.

Or we won’t, and the problems will continue, and we will decline, fighting instead to slow the fall and avoid collapse, giving up on a great future because it requires change.

Cherry was almost certainly a better book than a movie. It’s told in parts, including an epilogue, and it feels rushed in film. Do all the essential notes of a complex story of young love, war, poverty and PTSD, self-destruction, and reemergence get hit? Yes. But it ends up feeling like many movies I’ve seen before put together in one place, each executed well, but with the whole just coming up feeling a bit dull.

There’s nothing dull about Tom Holland or Ciara Bravo, who are electrifying together and apart. At the start of the movie, I felt like their love and the point of view of Cherry (Tom Holland) was too obsessed with the male gaze and a fucked up version of masculinity that I’m just over with. But I came to really enjoy their relationship, for all its toxicity, and was wrapped up in their life and their struggle. It was a bit hard for me to believe everything about them, adorable as it was, prior to Cherry going off to war, but once he returns, their relationship becomes the most real thing in the film.

I’m glad to see Tom Holland in a different light, but I already liked him. Ciara Bravo is new to me, and I hope I will see her for a long time. She seamlessly transitioned from an adept, if tired, manic pixie dream girl to trying to be supportive wife to full on heroin addict. Each transition is only one scene, and if it weren’t executed with her considerable skill, it would have broken the film.

An undeniable cast. The best use of fan service and callbacks of just about any “late sequel” I’ve seen. Does Coming 2 America capture the magic of the original? This is no classic. But did I enjoy it all throughout? Yes.

Each time the movie felt like it dragged a bit, it provided a moment that rewarded those of us who have seen the original a hundred times.

Perhaps the greatest flaw in Coming 2 America is it focus on Lavelle Junson (Jermain Fowler) over the more interesting daughters of Akeem (Eddie Murphy). Princess Meeka (KiKi Layne) was a far richer and more interesting character than her half-brother; so was Mirembe (Nomzamo Mbatha). And in spite of the inspired casting of Leslie Jones as Mary Junson, the talented women who stole every one of their scenes are under utilized.

Nearly all notable members of the original cast returns, which I found more delightful than tired. A quiet scene in McDowell’s of Zumunda with Cleo (John Amos) is one of the film’s best, and a surprise cameo by Fresh Peaches and Sugar Cube (the beat boxing twins from the club in the original’s dating montage) is a highlight.

Will I watch this again? Probably not. But was I glad to spend a Friday night with these characters? Absolutely.

As an elder millenial, I am now in that perfect age to see:

1. How much the world has changed in just the last 15 years;
2. How much I have changed in the last 15 years;
3. How little all the areas I have chosen to engage in any form of activism have changed in the last 15 years.

I now am forced to wonder if we’ll make any progress on the problems I care about, or if instead, my only real hope is new problems eclipse them in importance.

It’s not like nothing gets better by any stretch, but there’s so much stagnation. So many battles are fought on an inter-generational timescale.

It’s easy to see how more committed activists burn out, and even easier to see why some despair so hugely at a single loss. Sometimes losing a single battle ends any hope that they will live to see the change they fight for in this world.

A good friend of mine for decades has long identified as conservative. In a recent conversation, we discussed his support for single-payer health insurance, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants (in part to get national ID laws that are fair and free), and more.

When they expressed their support for lower taxes and limited government, I asked “what does lower mean?”

He answered, “as low as possible.”

I said, “As low as possible to support what the government needs to be run successfully, yes?"

“Yes.”

“Ok, so then when you say limited government, you mean limited to what? What’s something the government does today that you don’t think it should be doing?”

They admitted, “That’s a good question.” They had no specific examples, and when we dug into a couple of ideas (transit was one), it was relatively easy to convince him that it’s very possible the government should be doing this work.

In the end, their conservatism largely came down to a statement I let go by, unready and unwilling to engage with it at the moment. They off-handedly said, “Well I’ll never be a democrat, because I don’t believe an 8 year old should be able to declare their gender.”

Honestly, I wasn’t ready to address the casual transphobia that I know was informed by beliefs they were taught in their church. The conversation was primarily focused on the mess that is the current GOP around voting.

But it’s bothered me for days since that I didn’t confront them about their casual transphobia. In fact, the whole conversation was about how liberals shut down conservatives by having clear moral lines when, in fact, they could and should convince more conservatives that their policies are good. And within that context, it felt like a really tough thing to dig into their beliefs on social issues.

Yet, causal transphobia being left unchallenged will spread.

What I wish I had said, even if it was just briefly at the end was this. “Before you dismiss the experience of trans people entirely, I think you should have a conversation with someone who is trans. Learn about their experiences. I wonder if after that, you could find it in your heart to have a lot more kindness and compassion to accept them as people.”

Go into In and Of Itself cold. Watch it with the lights out. That’s all I want to say about it.

My new Mac mini is coming this week. This will be my first new computer in almost 5 years, so I’m pretty excited. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I have decided I will not use Migration Assistant. This will be the first time in at least 5 Macs that I’m going fresh. This will also be the longest I’ve gone without a new Mac ¹.

Taking stock of software is going to be hard, but my first step to prepare for this new computer is actually related to I/O. I currently have a 2016 retina MacBook Pro with Four Thunderbolt ports. Every port, including the headphone port, is in use. The new Mac mini has only two Thunderbolt ports, but also comes with some additional ports.

On the left side, I have an Ethernet to Thunderbolt adapter, my microphone (Audio-Technica ATR2100 mini USB-A to USB-C), and a 3.5mm to RCA cable that goes into my powered speakers (Kanto YU-5s). On the right side, I have a Thunderbolt cable that goes into the LG 5K Ultrafine monitor, providing power, display, and acting as a USB-C hub, and a USB-C cable going to a Samsung SSD I mount under my desk which is my primary Time Machine drive.

I am also using all of the ports on the back of my display. There, I have the connection to my laptop, a USB-C cable to a 4-port USB-A hub (where I keep my Logitech mouse universal reciever thing plugged in and otherwise just have it available for hot swaps), a USB-C to USB-A micro cable (which I use to plug in a Blu-ray drive or my Fujitsu Scansnap scanner when needed, but often is just “danging”, and my keyboard.

I truly went all in on the USB-C lifestyle, primarily though the use of new cables.

The Mac mini, however, has one ethernet port, one headphone jack, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and two USB-A ports.

Here’s how I think I’ll re-arrange my cables. The monitor and SSD will remain directly plugged in via Thunderbolt 4/USB-C. The ethernet adapter can go away for direct use of the ethernet port. The microphone will move to being plugged into the monitor by using the slot vacated by my keyboard which I will plug directly into one of the USB-A ports on the Mac mini. I will also move the mouse to being directly plugged in via USB-A rather than using the four port USB-A adapter. At that point, I think I could actually remove the USB-A hub entirely– I use it very rarely, I already have one USB-A micro cable dangling and ready, and I’d have an additional USB-C port freed up behind my monitor. I keep several USB-something to USB-C cables on a pegboard above my desk and have 3 USB-A to C adapters there as well (of which I only really need to keep one).

Was I originally nervous about moving from four, versatile, fast Thunderbolt ports to two? Absolutely. But once I went through how I actually use all cables attached to my computer, I quickly realized that I would be in great shape. One thing this setup will not allow for is easy hot swapping back to my laptop at my desk. If I had kept the keyboard and mouse attached to the monitor, then I could move one cable and reasonably be back at work on my other computer. I decided that this is a non-goal. In truth, it’ll probably just delay me from doing a good job of fully migrating from my laptop to my new desktop.

A good overview on important work in school finance. The flat-to-regressive financing of schools nationwide represents a failure of state finance systems to overcome the inequities introduced by having local-based funding and control of schools.

The core purpose of state funding (and federal funding) is to take advantage of better funded, larger jurisdictions to do redistributive policy that counteracts the unequal opportunity caused by local funding. Our national failure to drive enough dollars through states through sufficiently progressive mechanisms results in a failure to equalize opportunity.

This is the real reason why zip codes define the destiny of children. It is not about district effectiveness or efficiency, but instead about district starvation of resources to meet the challenges they face, while others are awash in the money they need.

When we say we favor local control of education, we are advocating for maintaining a tiered system of access to resources and school quality. We are saying the rent or mortgage parents can afford and/or the distance they can travel for work defines the opportunity for their children.

Layering on our history of housing segregation and the drawing of school district and municipal boundaries to explicitly create white and not white, have and have not schools and communities, school finance fairness serves as a quantified keyhole through which we observe a state-supported caste system in the US.

Chef is a movie for anyone who loves food and loves cooking. No surprises there. But if you like watching competent people in the kitchen make food that looks incredible, I’m not sure any other movie competes.

The cast is fantastic. Favreau and Leguizamo are great, but every role, big or small received the same careful attention. Oliver Platt, Amy Sedaris, and Bobby Cannavale are stand outs.

Despite the call outs to Vine, the idea that Twitter is novel and hard to understand, or the skepticism of food trucks that firmly place Chef in its time, the movie hardly feels dated. It’s a classic story— middle-aged man who has lost his way and neglected his family rediscovering himself and rebuilding his relationship with his son along the way.

But here’s the thing— if you make a movie that has beautiful cooking and shows off Cubanos, beignets, and brisket from Franklin’s? I’m going to show up. And in this year, when I haven’t been able to travel to these places that I went every year to eat the food that makes those places special… damn that hits.

For a while, I visited home roughly every 8-10 weeks after I moved away. My uncle would invariably have some article that was in the paper just that week he wanted to share with me when I got there.

I never thought about how this was a way to make sure we stopped to have a conversation. He worked strange hours, often overnight, and so overlapping wasn’t always easy.

I still miss him.

He and I would have had a lot discuss these last few weeks, with the Georgia runoff, insurrection at the Capitol, and now swearing in of President Biden and Vice President Harris.

This last year would have infuriated him and saddened him, and my grandmother. I can hear the way they would have sounded as they cheered during the swearing in. I know they would have called me.

It’s strange the times we remember those we have loved and now lost. But although I am sad thinking of them, I like to sit in these melancholy moments, because they are the times that my memories are most vivid and complete.

Two great leads, too smart, too quick, waxing philosophic in the nadir of their relationship as they are stuck cohabitating until the end of London’s first lockdown. Is Locked Down about the haphazard heist in its third act? No, of course not. It’s almost a silly bit of Harrod’s advertisement tacked on to a timely one-location film about discovery and romance during pandemic times.

Zoom and Skype have quickly become a part of television and film produced in the last year, and Locked Down uses these devices well, with strong appearances by Dulé Hill, Sir Ben Kingsley, Ben Stiller, and Mindy Kaling. I do wonder if all these stories produced now, about now will have staying power.

But Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anne Hathway are both magnificent as a couple whose relationship has died with much left to say to each other and learn about themselves.

For some people, Locked Down will read as overly dramatic, with dialog that is overly sophisticated and clunky even as it’s rendered with ease by two phenomenal actors. For others, it will read as literary or theatrical and quotable. For me, it’s too well acted, well made, and well paced to fall entirely flat, although I find myself wishing it had the conviction to have a far smaller third act. Having a daring, wild project where our leads work together ensure their rekindling and reconciliation feels great. Having that be an almost ridiculous set of circumstances leading to a diamond heist was maybe not the right wild project for my tastes.

One of the most interesting solutions presented for reducing the downsides of high frequency trading was discretizing time for trades— everyone works on a 1 second interval.

This has wormed itself into my brain. I’m not sure what the idea actually is, but I keep wondering if the internet would be better if we made communication tools run discretized time.

What would happen if comments, posts, tweets, chats, likes, reposts, and all manner of other internet communication always only clicked forward on a 60 second interval?

The Midnight Sky is about the end of the world. It’s about a man who is dying. It is about saving the last of humanity, at least for one more generation.

There are two stories taking places in this film, both in the harshest environments. We follow Augustine (George Clooney) in the North Pole and Sully (Felicity Jones) and the crew of the Aether on return from a fictional moon of Jupiter that can support human life on its surface. I was surprised at how much time The Midnight Sky spent in space— I thought I was watching a movie about George Clooney versus the elements, his terminal illness, and his loneliness. But this movie was also about the crew of the Aether, their battle against the elements and their loneliness (and uncertainty, with all contact from Earth suddenly ceasing). They serve as coequal story arcs, with an unsurprising connection.

I think The Midnight Sky is weakest when it resorts to trite story elements, like an early sequence where Sully is terrified by events that turn out to be a dream. There are flashbacks to Augustine’s early career (mercifully casting a different actor for the role rather than using de-aging effects) that feel unnecessary.

But although this movie moves through well-trodden ground, it does so adeptly and beautifully. Pacing, acting, and visual effects are superb. What it lacks is that extra bit of emotional resonance that would have made it feel marvelous, even if it used some old tricks.

This is why I will endlessly critique what I view as entirely too mild and too muddied critiques of Trumpism from like 3 members of the Republican delegation:

The question you should ask is who the right kind of person would be to make a particular criticism for a particular audience, at that particular time.

— Adam Gurri, Stop Putting Money in Andy Ngo’s Pocket

These are the people to be making clear the total unacceptability of Trumpism. They are the ones that need to draw the clear line, and show how the current GOP movement crosses over to fascism. Romney has come closest to fulfilling that role. Hell, even Paul Ryan came out of nowhere and did a slightly better job. But for the most part, the people I know who are center-right are not doing a good job. Many of them will say the right thing, but they’ll also overly shower praise on tepid statements from moderates that fall far short of the repudiation that’s required. They won’t hold their own best standard bearers to account for not going far enough.

It means next to nothing for me to say words like fascism and sedition. Anyone who is listening to me, anyone who trusts me, they know we crossed a line a long time ago. The weakness of institutional republicans is a key element to Trump’s ascendency and maintenance of power and influence. And the truth is, that weakness comes from being built on a rotten foundation. Without any kind of old institutional power, the GOP is no longer grand, nor old, but instead, a new party taken over from within. The GOP is dead, long live the GOP.

The center right needs to accept this reality, defect, and build actual standard bearers with a real chance of challenging Trumpism and the left (if, in fact, their beliefs are still counter to the American left).

In The Vast of Night, 16-year old evening telephone operator Fay Crocker and radio DJ Everett Sloan stumble across a strange sound in the telephone lines and radio airways. What is this whirring sound, almost like a windmill, but less natural, with a distinct atonal voice coming through.

There’s a featurette showing an impressive long tracking shot that last about 4 minutes in The Vast of Night. It is impressive and well-conceived. But the best trick in The Vast of Night comes in the scene directly following this shot. Everett patches the sound Fay heard through to the radio and asks, “Has anyone ever heard such a thing?“ That’s when caller Billy is introduced. As Billy tells his story of strange events during his service in the air force, the screen goes black for long stretches of time. Billy is a voice on the radio, and we get to experience him entirely as a voice on the radio. There’s no cut to Billy. Nothing visual establishes him. His story is told to us as the characters in the film experiences it, with an occasional flash of our protagonists reacting in to something important that he says. We listen, and the movie deftly gives us cues on how to react by showing us Everett and Fay just every so often.

From there, the chase is on, first to another town denizen with stories of people in the sky and finally to look at what it is that’s in the sky, as reported by those few people who are not at the high school basketball game.

At times, The Vast of Night is a bit too cute. We open to a Twilight Zone-like TV show on an old tube set that’s meant to tell us we are watching a similar television program. There are several shots throughout that swap the dark, grainy almost Instagram-like tones of the majority of the movie to a faded, cyan-heavy, tube-TV look to remind us, “This is all a show.” It’s not just visually unappealing, but it served to take me out of the film and lower the stakes. We’re in early 50s, small town rural America at night where the streets are dark with a masterful soundtrack and rich diegetic sound that raise the stakes and intensity. It’s dark, there’s naturalistic dialog with mumbling and extreme crosstalk. And then we’re forced to become all too aware of the hand of the director, ripping us to a television screen, as if to say, “Don’t be scared. Don’t feel anxious. This is just a story.”

The Vast of Night joins a rich tradition of smaller, less expensive films that uses its budget well to tell a science fiction story that feels real and personal. But the filmmakers need to communicate that this modern film was just a piece of 50s pulp television ultimately undermines its successful world building instead of enhancing it. If they only had the conviction to let the audience live in Cayuga, New Mexico…

Each time you write something to post on social media, think, “Actually, should this go on my blog?”. ¹

Each time you write something to post on your blog, think, “Actually, should this go in my journal/diary?”

Each time you write something to save in your journal, think, “Actually, does this need to be written down at all?”

Sometimes the right thing to do is to sit and feel what you’re feeling, think what you’re thinking, and then let those feelings and thoughts dissipate.

Brought to you by a tweet draft I pasted into MarsEdit to make a blog post that I then pasted into Day One instead.

This review contains spoilers.

Movies like Greenland have certain beats they have to hit.

Start with a normal life that is revealed to already be imperfect or broken in some way, usually between two lovers. Underestimate a coming threat. Rapid realization that things are about to get dangerous fast, showing lots of fear and uncertainty. Take action to survive. Show the world falling a part and have otherwise “normal” seeming people act in ways that under normal circumstances are completely immoral. Let the audience question what happens to morality under these new conditions. Race to survival through trial and tribulation. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die, but you always resolve that initial conflict shown from the Before Times.

Did I just describe Greenland? Yes, and plenty of other films/stories like it. But just because there is a formula, it doesn’t mean the formula is bad. Greenland executes this race to survival very well. I felt the rush of adrenaline and anxiety throughout this movie. I felt genuine fear. I felt genuinely uncertain if they would make it.

There’s real horror when a message flashes on the television at a birthday party that makes it clear that only one family in this suburban neighborhood was being chosen to evacuate. I was already anxious as Gerard Butler didn’t immediately and quietly throw his family in the car when he got home from the grocery store where he received his first warning. And I felt the crushing claustrophobia of the crowds at the military air base trying to squeeze in to be allowed on the planes leaving for Greenland. I was nearly crushed by the child abduction and felt genuine relief when our main family is united at grandpa’s farm house.

If there’s anything that detracts from this movie, I think it’s the happy ending. I’m not sure there was any need for the shots of destruction around the Earth. I don’t think there was a need for showing the bunker doors opening and the return of wildlife. In fact, I think the movie plays fast and loose with the audience only once, and that’s when it shows the “flashes”, telegraphed repeatedly as what you see before dying, prior to the films unnecessary coda. This should have been a signal they did not survive. There’s no reason not to end the movie there. I don’t think Greenland is ruined by its happy ending, but I think just a few choices in how it’s presented were just a bit inelegant compared to the rest of the film. I also didn’t like how a character literally has to say, “You were chosen because you’re a structural engineer who builds buildings.” This should have been clear to the audience and characters without being spelled out.

Overall, this is a story that’s been told, but it’s told competently with great acting performances and some stunning visuals that are well deployed. The ending is a little bit creaky compared to an otherwise extremely competent execution.

Punditry can tend to focus too much on decorum and terminology, like the overachieving students so many of us once were, conflating the ridiculous with the unserious. The incoherence and the incompetence of the attempt do not change its nature, however, nor do those traits allow us to dismiss it or ignore it until it finally fails on account of its incompetence.

– Xeynep Tufekci on Trump’s autogolpe

As someone who generally wants the web to move away from a monolithic culture who is somewhat tech, I will often run into pitches for the decentrtalized web. But I think this is a solid post that explains why a decentralized technology is not a solution to cultural decentralization. Instead, they may create culturally centralized spaces that cannot be meaningfully constrained.