Leraje

“This is a lesson in propaganda.”

Well, at least you’re honest up-front.

Capitalist democracies all over the Westernised world are transforming. I don’t say collapsing, but transforming. We’ve all been force fed a steady diet of fake freedoms, culture wars and bullshit nationalism pretty much since the end of WW2 to spread uncertainty and fear. It’s all coming to a head now because populations are panicking (by design) and turning to fascist ‘strong man’ populist leaders like Trump, Farage, Meloni, Orban etc who are all financed and propped up by our next set of leaders - the billionaire’s who will operate a worldwide network of oligarchical fascism, whilst the herd are all distracted by manufactured outrage at trans people existing and what an actors politics are and how the immigrants are simultaneously taking all the jobs and draining us dry on the dole.

Strange 2 would’ve been better if they left Sam Raimi alone to make it a proper horror movie. He clearly wanted to and with those 2 characters it could’ve been epic. But thats what I mean about marvel constantly making ‘franchise’ movies - everything has to ‘lead in’ to the next movie. I’d really like for them to make an actual movie thats good without the need to keep it PG and keep it focused on the wider arc. The MCU has become more and more like an increasingly predictable soap opera.

EDIT: when we left the cinema after Thunderbolts people were talking about the post credit scenes and F4 which kind of illustrates what I’m saying - shouldn’t they be talking about the movie they just watched?

Superman is, IMO, a better movie because the story is a lot stronger but its not a truly great movie to me. The pacing felt really weird. But some of the shots of Supes flying in particular were really great and looked like a comic book come to life. I guess it was a promising start but flawed.

Haven’t seen F4. Thunderbolts was OK but a typical Marvel feeder movie where the story feels less important than setting up the sequel/next team up. Superman was a more interesting story but needed more room to breathe. It needed better editing and to slow down a bit.

I mean, they’re superhero movies, so the bar is low. No ones expecting a deep experience and maybe I’m experiencing superhero fatigue but as an old fart, my bar is the Donner Superman movies and the Nolan Batman movies. Maybe I need to go into them with less expectations.

The ones where I have filterable control over what I see and who I interact with and who aren’t pushing ragebait at me or tracking me. So, fediverse services basically.

The threadiverse tech is better (Lemmy/Piefed/MBin etc) and it is a great feeling to know I’m not getting tracked and profiled by big tech or inundated by ads, or force fed ragebait via an algorithm I neither want nor need. The users are better, mostly, although I have noticed an uptick over the last 3 or 4 months of reddit-style dickheads being dickheads - but I can just block them.

Niche content will come I think. If the threadiverse can resist the self-defeating drive to ‘grow at all costs’ and just let it organically grow, more people will come but a lot more slowly. But of course that will bring a change in the user culture too. Its quite nice being somewhere with low to no tolerance for right-wing shit.

As for Reddit, I don’t have an account any more. My main of almost Digg migration antiquity was deleted when Spez shit the bed over the API thing but I’d been on Lemmy prior to that anyway off an on. My alt got deleted about 6 months ago when I realised I hadn’t used it for months. If I absolutely have to visit a sub I use a front end.

We have to.